Writing suffragette history: the contending autobiographical narratives of the pankhursts

On 10 October 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), an organisation that was to become the most notorious of the groupings campaigning for the parliamentary vote for women in Edwardian England. Their militant campaign was led by Emmeline and her eldest daughter, Christabel, the WSPU's Chief Organiser, the two younger Pankhurst daughters, Sylvia and Adela, also becaming active in the movement. While all four women wrote accounts of the campaign, the focus here is on the published autobiographical narratives of the three elder Pankhurst women – Emmeline's My Own Story (1914), Sylvia's The Suffragette Movement (1931) and Christabel's Unshackled (1959). In particular, the ways in which these women presented themselves and each other, and how they related the story of their private family relationships as mother, daughters and siblings, is explored     

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.     

The Work of Memory: embodiment,materiality and home in Jeanne Bouvier's autobiographical writings

In this paper I follow trails in the memory of work by reading the books and papers of Jeanne Bouvier, a French seamstress, ardent trade-unionist and passionate writer, who left a rich body of labour literature including four published historical studies, as well as the memoirs of her life, work and struggles. Work, action and creativity are three interrelated planes on which Bouvier situates herself, while memory and imagination are interwoven in the way she seeks to understand herself in the world with others. What emerges as a particularly striking theme from Bouvier's papers is a material matrix of mnemonic and imaginary practices, wherein bodies, places and objects are entangled in the narrative constitution of the self of the woman worker/writer.     

The adventure of capital with nature: from the metabolic rift to the value theory of nature

This paper suggests that the concept of metabolic rift situated in ‘the labor theory of value’ is not an adequate theoretical tool to historically explore capitalist development as a socio-ecological process and socio-historical domination of ecology. It situates the concept of nature in Marx’s critique of political economy and the concept of the metabolic rift in relation to his theory of value. Then, it explores two distinctive historical approaches to the relationship between ecology and capitalist development within the world-historical studies, i.e. the world-ecology perspective and the uneven ecological exchange perspective, in relation to their theoretical and epistemological premises. How they operationalize or recast Marx’s theory of value in understanding this relationship opens a realm to rethink the value theory in relation to nature and the socio-ecological nature of capitalist relations of production. Based on this, it proposes to reconsider the value theory as a value theory of nature in order to recognize the historical specificity of socio-ecological relations, and their historical transformation and alienation, as an integral constituent of the historical narrative of capitalist development.     

First to third nature: the rise of capitalist conservation on Palawan Island,the Philippines

The social relations and agricultural lands that rural peoples in Southeast Asia hold in common are being commodified through the converging pressures of agrarian change, conservation and capitalist development. This paper examines how broader and local processes driving agrarian differentiation have been accelerated through the revaluing of people and nature in market terms to ostensibly finance conservation through development at the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park – the flagship protected area of Palawan Island, the Philippines. Drawing on the notions of ‘first’ and ‘third nature’, I show how the pace and scale of agrarian change between rural peoples has gone ‘fast forward’ with the onset of resource partitioning, objectification, commodification and, ultimately, revaluing through translocal ‘capitalist conservation’, the rise of conservation as capitalist production. I examine how the national park's valuing as a ‘common’ World Heritage has drawn major private sector investments that objectify, commodify and rearticulate the value of nature as capital that finances and merges conservation and development according to the images and ideals of the modern Philippines. The conclusion asserts that while the processes of differentiation and capitalist conservation facilitate the revaluing of nature in market terms, the overall process remains recursive, partial and context dependent.     

The Capitalocene,Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis

This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow historicization, I argue for the Capitalocene, understood as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life. In Part I, I pursue two arguments. First, I situate the Anthropocene discourse within Green Thought’s uneasy relationship to the Human/Nature binary, and its reluctance to consider human organizations – like capitalism – as part of nature. Next, I highlight the Anthropocene’s dominant periodization, which meets up with a longstanding environmentalist argument about the Industrial Revolution as the origin of ecological crisis. This ignores early capitalism’s environment-making revolution, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities. While there is no question that environmental change accelerated sharply after 1850, and especially after 1945, it seems equally fruitless to explain these transformations without identifying how they fit into patterns of power, capital and nature established four centuries earlier.     

Unmasking the subaltern,or salamis without themistocles

The rubber tree is native to the humid tropics and has traditionally been cropped in the equatorial zone between 10°N and 10°S; in mainland Southeast Asia this includes portions of southern Thailand, southeastern Vietnam, and southern Myanmar. In the early 1950s, the Chinese government began to invest in growing rubber in environments perceived to be ecologically marginal and eventually established state rubber plantations in areas that lie as far north as 22° north latitude. China's success in growing rubber in these ‘non-traditional’ environments expanded the habitat in which rubber could be planted and pushed it further north. Today entrepreneurs from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand are investing in rubber plantations in areas of Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar, northwest Vietnam, northeast Thailand, and Yunnan, China. The impact of rubber on smallholders, however, is not yet clear. Experiences in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, China and northeast Thailand clearly show that smallholder rubber production is a viable and effective proposition in moving households and communities out of poverty. By contrast in countries such as Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar many farmers are struggling to maintain their lands and forests in the face of growing pressures from investors and government institutions to impose concession arrangements.     

Democracy,development and (Re-) visions of nature: Rural conflicts in the western Himalayas

This article explores the interacting politics of development and conservation and the contradiction between conservation and democracy through the specific experiences in the Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP), India. Unravelling the connections between the local, regional, national and the global, in the sphere of politics, conservation, and development, we examine the context within which the specific conservation outcomes have evolved. We argue that centralized governance of nature – especially wildlife conservation – is incompatible with the exigencies of democracy. Secondly, we demonstrate that the locus of the problem is not opportunistic politics, but the particular science and ideology of conservation, which seeks to impose a culturally narrowly defined vision of nature on society at large. We suggest that the events in GHNP are representative of a widespread phenomenon, whereby rural communities adversely affected by conservation policies have exploited the exigencies of democratic politics to good effect, exhibiting an agency that is yet to be theorized adequately.     

Adolescents' perceptions of the nature of their communication with parents

This study examines the effects of the age and sex of adolescent and the sex of parent upon adolescents' perceptions of the nature of their communication with each parent. Two hundred and ninety-six adolescents aged 13–17 years completed a communication schedule, rating 14 content areas along six process dimensions: frequency of conversation, initiator, levels of recognition of adolescents' opinion, self-disclosure, domination, and levels of satisfaction. Multivariate analyses of variance were conducted separately for each process dimension. Frequency ratings revealed that adolescent females of all ages reported talking more often with mothers than did adolescent males. Adolescent males, however, believed they talked more often than did females with fathers about interests, sexual issues, and general problems. Mothers were seen to initiate more conversations than fathers on a wide range of topics. Mothers were also perceived as more likely to recognize and accept the adolescents' opinions. Adolescent females believed they disclosed more to mothers than fathers, but males believed they disclosed equally to both parents. Males disclosed more to fathers than did females about their sexual or other problems, while females disclosed more often overall to their mothers than did males. Adolescent males were equally satisfied with their discussions with both parents, but females were more satisfied about conversations with mothers rather than fathers. In sum, the results suggest that mothers' more frequent initiation of discussions with their younger adolescents and their greater recognition of their opinions lead to older adolescents interacting more with mothers than fathers.Ph.D. in Social Psychology, University of Queensland. Her current interests are in the areas of marital and family communication, adolescence, and personal relationships.Ph.D. in Social Psychology, Australian National University, with research interests in adolescence, marital communication, and childless couples.     

The nature of woman and the development of American folklore

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the connection between women and folklore in America on ideological, social, metaphoric, and disciplinary levels. Initial observations tie women into American folklore studies in three major ways: as a study of women, a study by women, and a womanly study. It goes on to investigate the intellectual climate of the late 19th century, with its focus on sex and gender, and the scientific doctrines, which prescribed social and organizational behavior, which brought this into being.Through analogies and ‘congruities,’ the methodology of late Victorian science, women became connected with others on the lower end of the evolutionary scale: plants, animals, children—and the folk. This resonance between women and the folk explains the numbers of women drawn to the American Folklore Society; it also proposes a feminized identity for the study of Folklore itself. Implications of these connections at the formative stage of the Society are explored.     

Why the revolution doesn't solve everything: What we can learn from the economics of ‘real’ socialism

In this paper I shall review some of the theoretical obstacles which the classical Marxist analysis of women's subordination placed in the path of the socialist movement when it attempted to solve the question of women's inequality in practice. I will also show how the particular path of socialist construction that the Eastern European countries chose helped to perpetuate the traditional division of roles between men and women and to create a chain reaction which appears to be impervious to the demands of ideology.     

between Pachamama and Mother Earth: gender,political ontology and the rights of nature in contemporary Bolivia

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/Mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts.     

The nature of the association between parental rejection and delinquent behavior

A panel design with approximately 300 adolescents was employed to investigate the relationship between parental rejection and delinquency. Previous studies have failed to control for potentially confounding family factors and have ignored the possibility that the causal priority is from delinquency to parental rejection, rather than the reverse. Parental rejection continued to show a moderate association with delinquency after relevant controls were introduced. The results were the same across sexes. LISREL was employed to estimate the parameters of the reciprocal relationship between parental rejection and delinquency. Analysis indicated that the predominant causal flow is from parental rejection to delinquency.Research interests: the etiology of adolescent depression, substance abuse, and delinquency; identification of factors which influence parenting practices.Research interests: the causes, treatment, and prevention of adolescent depression and substance abuse.Research interests: causes of adolescent and adult substance abuse; antecedents, and consequences of domestic violence.