The Female Student on Trial, 1910–1915: Dorothy M. Gladish versus University College Nottingham versus Oscar Wilde

This article examines the student career of Dorothy M. Gladish at University College Nottingham from 1910–1915. By drawing on little-studied archives, a range of narratives about Gladish's multiple embodiments of the female student are analysed. In particular, these narratives are situated within the representational contexts of the Gong student magazine, which are marked by re-writings of Victorian literary texts that re-invent the contemporary female student. In the case of Gladish, the symbolic and literal ‘trial’ was also a feature of her student career. A ‘Mock Trial’ of Gladish is read alongside accounts of the college council’s examination of Professor R. G. F. Dolley, following a complaint by the Gladish family, and their responses to the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895, contained in a hitherto restricted archive. Consideration is given to how this case study extends our knowledge about women’s roles in civic universities at this period.     

Looking for Lela Simone: Singin’ in the Rain and microhistories of women’s sound work behind the scenes and below-the-line in Classical Hollywood Cinema

ABSTRACT

Despite her contribution to some of classical Hollywood’s most renowned musicals, the largely unknown Lela Simone exemplifies one of Hollywood’s ‘anonymous movie workers’ (Leo Rosten) working in the shadows of film history. As music co-ordinator for MGM’s Arthur Freed Unit (1944–1957), Simone’s exacting technical supervision of sound and music recording and post-production ensured films such as The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Gigi (1958) achieved perfect synchronisation and polished production values. Drawing on archival sources this article engages with the methodological and conceptual challenges of making visible the labour of women, like Simone, working below-the-line in technical roles. Taking Simone’s work on sound and music in the iconic ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ number as a case study, the article illustrates how a micro-historical focus can bring a previously invisible realm of women’s labour, and agency, into view.     

Chrystal Macmillan,Scottish campaigner for women’s equality through law reform

ABSTRACT

This article will explore the work of Chrystal Macmillan, who used her knowledge of the law to further the cause of women’s equality through her committee work with several voluntary organisations, and her presentations to the British Government, the League of Nations, and the International Labour Office. Using archival material, both from committee minutes and family anecdotes, we will show the substantial amount of voluntary work undertaken by Chrystal Macmillan both before and after she became a practising lawyer in 1924. The article will also try to capture something of the woman’s character through the comments of her friends and colleagues.     

‘Belles from Bristol and Bournville in New Surroundings’: female confectionery workers as transnational agents, 1918–1928

ABSTRACT

In existing histories of the development of multinational business, women are usually absent. Yet when the British confectionery companies of Cadbury, Fry and Pascall took the bold step to build an entirely new factory in Tasmania in the early 1920s, women workers were important, and mobile, actors. This article draws on business history archives and genealogical material, from both Britain and Australia, to explore how a select group of British women became the ‘pioneers’ of the Cadbury-Fry-Pascall company. It examines why women were key to the formation of an Australian subsidiary, how they influenced, and sometimes challenged, the creation of workplace culture and practice, and the consequences of this mode of female labour migration.     

Thwarted ambitions: the biography of Auvergne Doherty,an aspiring female barrister

ABSTRACT

Auvergne Doherty was the first woman from the Commonwealth to be admitted and called to the Bar of England and Wales.?In the first part of this article, Doherty's family background, education, legal training, and post-Bar experiences are set out. The second part analyses her profile compared with the other women called to the Bar in 1922 and considers why Doherty may not have gone on to practise as a barrister. This article argues that Doherty’s biography is important because it evidences how vital it was to have the necessary financial means and networks to be able to forget a career at the Bar. It was precisely the lack of these factors that impeded Doherty to fulfil her career as a barrister.     

Capricious Intentions in Stevie Smith’s Poems and Drawings

Abstract

There is a contradiction in how Stevie Smith saw the relationship between her poems and drawings. On the one hand, she looked at her doodles as vital to her poetry and backed with a great deal of intentionality. She painstakingly cut and pasted them into her drafts and left detailed notes to her publishers when those placements were not to her exact specifications. On the other hand, though, she talked about her doodles as if they were ephemeral and backed only by caprice. This essay argues that Smith’s doodles play at the intersection of intentionality and caprice; in doing so, they become deliberately detachable objects that signify both placed with and when displaced from her poetry. Decisions, whether by Smith or by her editors, to move or remove an image have both subtle and dramatic changes for readers’ experiencing of her poems. This paper relies on archival and published sources to provide readings of several of Smith’s poems including ‘Do Take Muriel Out,’ ‘The Rehearsal,’ ‘The After-Thought,’ and ‘Not Waving but Drowning.’ In their continual ability to be removed and reattached to her poetry, Smith’s doodles destabilize the texts that they supposedly compliment, while at the same time also revitalizing them by allowing them to remain open to new interpretations.     

Doris Arnold: the making of a radio star, 1926–1939

ABSTRACT

Doris Arnold (1904–1967) was a BBC radio personality and the UK’s first female ‘Disc Jockey’. She produced and presented the gramophone record programme These you have Loved from 1938. Despite her fame, Arnold is oddly absent from broadcasting histories and little is known about her today. Hers was one of the best known ‘rags to riches’ narratives of the early BBC: a typist whose musical talent propelled her to stardom. This article explores Arnold’s rise to fame through a detailed evaluation of her personal staff files which expose a complexity of gendered issues including status, clothing and pay.     

Eileen Power's Asian journey, 1920-21: history,narrative, and subjectivity

Abstract

This article analyses the travel writings of the British medieval historian, Eileen Power (1889-1940), during her year-long journey around the world in 1920-21 as the first and only female awarded a travel fellowship administered by the Trustees of the University of London in the years following the First World War. Drawing upon a comparative reading of her official Report to the Trustees and her private diary record of her ‘Tour du Monde’, we examine the various dimensions of subjectivity and identity evident in her narrative of the journey, interrogating the difference which gender makes in the relationship of European travellers to empire. In addition, we examine how the narrative of her journey and subsequent historical narratives were part of those Orientalist forces/discourses which produced and were produced by the West's relationship to the East in the first half of the twentieth century.     

Slide-writing as Site-writing: A Performative Reading of the Women’s Art Library Slides

Abstract

The artist’s 35?mm slide consists of a photographic image framed by a slide mount she inscribes with writing and symbols that direct the slide’s future use. In this article, I consider how these artists’ writings that are held, suspended, in the WAL slide collection are a vibrant reading material that performs the slides as a feminist text. In my joint role as curator and researcher, I explore how I used photography to initiate a performative reading of the slide collection that politicizes the work of image reproductions.     

Fashionable ‘Formation’: Reclaiming the Sartorial Politics of Josephine Baker

ABSTRACT

This article historicises Josephine Baker’s use of fashion in terms of contemporary black stage performers, particularly Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s evolving black feminist politics. It examines Beyoncé’s references to Baker as an inspiration for her own black feminist art and argues that they offer an opportunity to re-examine Baker’s legacy in our own contemporary moment. Using Beyoncé’s arguments about Baker as a starting point, the article examines Baker’s fashions and costumes and argues that she used them to manipulate her relationship to the models of white supremacy that attempted to structure her identity and relationship to the public sphere. Using contemporary black feminist criticisms of respectability politics, it argues that Baker’s fashions produced a politics of disrespectability, where clothing and body worked together to carve out space for black feminist experimentation. By constantly changing the terms through which her audiences and the public read her, Baker carved out a subjective space where she could become in relation to her clothes without restraining herself to the identity categories normatively allotted to black women.     

Sexuality and citizenship: the state and girls' leisure provision in England, 1939-45

ABSTRACT

The main feminist conceptualisation of women's close relationships from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century characterises these as ‘romantic friendships’ and argues that a stereotype of ‘the lesbian’ was invented by sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and applied to these relationships in order to condemn them. A number of pieces of primary research are presented which suggest that this approach is highly problematic. In the case of Emily Wilding Davison's close relationship with Mary Leigh there is simply too little historical evidence to be able to draw any conclusions as to its character or its meaning for the women concerned. In addition, Edith Lees Ellis has been seen as a woman whose romantic friendships were ‘morbidified’ as lesbianism by her husband Havelock Ellis, although in this case archival evidence clearly shows that she certainly saw herself as a ‘invert’. And relatedly, the same archival source also shows that some women experienced their sexuality in ‘mannish’ terms in the absence of any evidence of an influence on them of the pejorative writings of sexologists. Rather than premature theoretical generalisation, what is needed is more primary research on particular women's close relationships and the social context in which these were located.

     

Jean Rhys,William Orpen and the Frames of Modernist Representation

The female body as artist’s model and its exchange value—both the woman and her painted image—are deployed by Caribbean modernist Jean Rhys to question representational structures as they exist in the modernist art context. This article considers the relation between literary modernism and the visual arts, between text and image, in her unpublished novel Triple Sec and short story ‘Tea With an Artist’. Using the fleeting relationship between Rhys and English painter Sir William Orpen, for whom she posed nude aged twenty-three, as my basis, I examine Rhys’s presentation of the power politics that constrain the female model in the contemporary art world. Her allusions to artists, models and artworks in her texts widen out to issues of frames and framing, where narratives of framed pictures, or the female model’s body within a picture’s frame, speak of social acts of framing, containment and objectification within modernist representational structures.     

The autobiographical you: letters in the gendered politics of the labour movement

In this article, I consider the importance of epistolary narratives in the interface of autobiography and politics. In doing this, I read the letters of Fannia Mary Cohn, a Jewish immigrant worker, trade union activist and ardent labour organizer in the garment industry in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century. Cohn was a prolific writer and political activist and left a rich body of labour literature, but never wrote an autobiography or a diary or journal. It is in her letters to her comrades and friends in the labour movement that short autobiographical stories erupt and it is on such stories across her correspondence that this article focuses. The analysis is informed by Hannah Arendt's theorization of narratives in their interrelation with politics and history. Drawing on a rich body of feminist literature around the relational self, what I argue is that an Arendtian reading of epistolary narratives is a useful analytical tool in understanding gendered politics in the diverse histories of the labour movement.     

Effeminate Edmund Burke and the masculine voice of Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the gendered and nationalist rhetorical strategies Mary Wollstonecraft used in her work The Vindication of the Rights of Man which was written as an open letter of response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France . While a number of scholars note Wollstonecraft’s adoption of a masculine voice in her systematic feminizing of Burke, this article also pays attention to the ways in which Wollstonecraft impugns Burke with the taints of being crypto-Catholic, Irish, and quasi-French. We notice how Wollstonecraft’s masculine voice is rational, combative, righteously passionate, middle-class, patriotically English and critically Protestant. We compare the fashioning of Wollstonecraft’s voice with contemporary political caricatures of John Bull and the cartoon depictions of Edmund Burke that appeared as Wollstonecraft was composing her VRM. Wollstonecraft’s VRM gained her considered attention and her critique of Burke’s character, (and what this article claims is her misreading of his aesthetic treatise), have been remarkably influential even to the present day. The characteristics of the distinct voice created in Wollstonecraft’s first Vindication are also evident in her second and more famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman. However, the rhetorical commitments entailed in Wollstonecraft’s public voice created challenges for her arguments in the second Vindication that demand careful attention.     

Constance Maynard's Languages of Love

This article chronicles my almost twenty-year academic journey through the archives at Queen Mary University of London UK (QMUL) for the purpose of researching the life of Constance Maynard (1849–1935). Maynard helped to found Westfield College (now QMUL) as a Christian-based college providing women with new university degrees, and she was Mistress of it for thirty-one years. This article begins by reviewing the scholarly literature behind my queer-gender-sex framework for interpreting Maynard's often contradictory narratives in her diaries and autobiography. I then illustrate how these records are disclosures of her tribulations as an educational leader whose atonement theology shaped her life. This study of Maynard's records of her life experiences, especially her religious-secularist language(s) of love, contributes to reinterpretations of gender-sex-power binaries, when most Victorian women were supposed to be sexually pure, subservient, and confined to the home.     

Ethel Bright Ashford: more and less than a role model

ABSTRACT

There is a tendency to position the first women lawyers as role models for today’s young women. This article argues, through an exploration of the life and career of Ethel Bright Ashford, that these women are better recognised as pioneers or foremothers than promoted as role models. Ashford was one of the first women barristers, a long-serving borough councillor, and tireless activist for civic causes. Nonetheless, aspects of her career and politics pose problems for purely celebratory accounts. Yet there is real value in considering her biography: she offers both an alternative definition of a successful professional life and the reassurance that imperfection is not equivalent to failure. Ashford therefore illustrates the vital importance of a more nuanced and historically situated consideration of the first women lawyers.     

Articulating the threatened suffragette body: suffragette embroidered cloths worked in Holloway Prison, 1911–1912

ABSTRACT

In public archives there are a number of hand-embroidered cloths worked by suffragettes incarcerated in Holloway Prison between 1911 and 1912. Denied political status, some of the embroiderers used the hunger strike as a political tool and were forcibly fed. In this paper the embroideries are reframed as material and discursive evidence of suffragette prison experiences. The material narratives of the embroidered cloths are traced, drawing on a dialogue between critical theory, material object enquiry, practice as research and the work of contemporary textile practitioners. Embroidering by suffragettes is explored as an embodied and situated ‘thread act’ that materialised the making of networks, the need for protection of the body and mind, the powers and dangers of boundary crossing, and proto-political thinking.     

Fighting for Recovery: foremothers and feminism in the 1970s

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the feminist recovery of ‘a history of our own’ during the 1970s proved difficult in ways not fully addressed in generalising narratives (celebratory or regretful) of feminist historical work. The recovery of a nineteenth-century ‘pioneer woman', Mary Hallock Foote, demonstrates the competing interests in play—feminist and anti-feminist, popular and scholarly, public and familial, national and local—as well as the problematic positions of that these cross-cutting debates. The question of recovery, use and even ownership, of Foote and her history retains its ability to spark argument almost fifty years later.