Accommodating ‘Mrs. Three‐in‐One’: homemaking,home entertaining and domestic advice literature in post‐war Britain

This article analyses the effects of the ‘servant problem’, meaning the contraction of the domestic service industry in the twentieth century, as represented in domestic advice literature (etiquette, homemaking and home decoration books). Before World War II, domestic advisors assumed that readers employed staff, while by the 1970s no such assumption could be made. Managing a home unassisted, especially when entertaining guests in the role American etiquette expert Emily Post termed ‘Mrs. Three‐in‐One’ (hostess, cook and waitress at once), formed an enduring topic for British and North American domestic advice writers between 1920 and 1970. Rather than reapportioning parts of the homemaker’s labour to other family members, the solutions offered by domestic advisors revolved around reshaping domestic space and its uses in order to facilitate the simultaneous performance of multiple tasks. Multipurpose objects were promoted to act as ‘bridges’ between distinct domestic regions, while multifunctional spaces and open‐plan interiors collapsed distinctions between such regions. Thus changes in the roles of women within society and the family are shown in this analysis of domestic advice literature to affect the design and layout of the home, and domestic advice books are seen to have promoted ultimately conservative solutions.     

Edith södergran and the sexual discourse of the fin‐de‐siècle

This article focuses on women's business positions in Swedish porn publishing from the 1950s to the 1970s, i.e. when pornography was legalized and when sexually explicit magazines made their commercial breakthrough. The research draws on statistical information on women's entrepreneurial roles in the overall publishing industry, which is then compared with women's agency in porn publishing. According to the findings, women seem to have had a slightly more central role in pornography than within the mainstream publishing industry. The analysis is also expanded with details about a few key female pornography entrepreneurs, tracing their publications and business strategies connected to the Freedom of the Press legislation. It is argued that women's presence in pornographic print and in the overall publishing industry were in fact similar, with a high ratio of family businesses. Women's entrepreneurship in pornography thus followed a more general historical pattern whereby women engaged in small-scale business with relatively low barriers to entry.     

Domination,Subordination and Struggle: middle‐class marriage in early twentieth‐century Wolverhampton,England

The aim of the article is to modify our understanding of the history of middle‐class marriage. It draws upon the detailed examination of one Wolverhampton couple’s marriage to explore relationships between husbands and wives—and between ex‐husbands and ex‐wives—in early twentieth‐century provincial England. It argues that patriarchal and companionate marriages co‐existed alongside one another; that even in patriarchal marriages wives were prepared to seek legal redress for their grievances; and that even in insular and unfashionable regions of the country such as the Black Country the courts, both civil and criminal, policed masculinity and femininity in their assessment of where fault lay.     

Songs of the eight‐hour movement∗

The Making of the Labor Bureaucrat: Union Leadership in the United States, 1870–1920. By Warren R. Van Tine. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973. 230 pp. $10.00.

Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform. By John D. Buenker. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973. xi + 299 pp. $8.95.

Labor's Search For Political Order: The Political Behavior Of The Missouri Labor Movement, 1890–1940. By Gary M. Fink. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973. viii + 228 pp. $10.00.

Them and Us: Struggles of a Rank and File Union. By James J. Matles and James Higgins. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice‐Hall, 1974. 311 pp. $6.95.

Writers in Revolt: the Anvil Anthology, 1933–1940. Edited by Jack Conroy and Curt Johnson. New York: Lawrence Hill &; Co., 1973. 234 pp. $8.95.

The Aristocracy of Labor: The Position of Skilled Craftsmen in the American Class Structure. Cambridge Studies in Sociology 7. By Gavin Mackenzie. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1973‐ 208 pp. $14.50.

Aspects historiques du mouvement ouvrier au Quebec. Edited and with an introduction by Fernand Harvey. Etudes d'histoire du Québec, 6. Montréal: Les Editions du boréal express, 1973. 226 pp. $5.80.

G. D. H. Cole. An Intellectual Biography. By L. P. Carpenter. Conference on British Studies Biographical Series. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973. 271 pp. $14.95.

Five Per Cent Philanthropy: An Account of Housing in Urban Areas Between 1840 and 1914. By John Nelson Tarn. Cambridge, G. B.; Cambridge University Press, 1973. xiv, 211 pp. $23.50.

The Emancipation of Women: The Rise and Decline of the Women's Movement in German Social Democracy 1863–1933. By Werner Thonnessen. Trans. Joris de Btes. London: Pluto Press, 1973.185 pp. £3.75.     

Technology and the housewife in nineteenth‐century America

ALICE JAMES: A BIOGRAPHY by Jean Strouse. Boston. Houghton, Mifflin, 1980. 367 pp. ($15.00).

THE DEATH AND LETTERS OF ALICE JAMES edited by Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Berkeley. University of California Press, 1981.214pp. ($12.95)

CONVERSATIONS WITH KATHERINE ANNE PORTER by Enrique Hank Lopez. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1981). 326 pp., $14.95.     

Doing it anyway Lesbian sado‐masochism and performance

Playwright Young Jean Lee, like many Asian-American playwrights of her generation, chafe at the thought of writing an ‘identity’ play—something that will genuinely or accurately reveal some truth of Asian-American gendered experience. Her response to the call of identity, in Songs of the dragons flying to heaven: A play about white people in love draws upon the exhaustion and anxieties that characterizes recent postfeminism and post-race discourses. Jameson's lamentations over the waning of affect notwithstanding, Lee's play set in this post-post landscape is full of feeling—of discomfort, self-loathing, boredom, and mild bemusement. Using Sianne Ngai's formulation of ‘ugly feelings,’ this essay considers Lee's work as indicator of, and response to, the generative value of ugly feelings.     

Philomela strikes back: Adultery and mutilation as female self‐assertion

The language of witchcraft and adultery in English Renaissance writing is marked by common metaphors: both are considered female crimes that threaten to subvert the patriarchy; both employ images of fragmentation. This cultural equation is embodied in the figure of the drama's adulteress. First, she is invariably linked with witchcraft by her betrayed husband. Second, she is threatened with brutal mutilation, often bodily dismemberment. The actual treatment of adulterers by the English court system enacts no such violence, but punishes through public shame. However, the treatment of suspected witches offers a useful paradigm: the court's search for the witch's mark, the brand of the devil, as the sign of a true witch; and the accuser's action of “scratching” a witch as a remedy for the witch's enchantment. Ultimately, the patriarchal attempts to contain both adultery and witchcraft are futile: woman retains possession of her power to subvert, whether her husband — or society — marks her with physical violence or not.     

Women,Godliness and Personal Appearance in Seventeenth‐Century England 1

This article discusses Lady Jersey's brief sojourn in New South Wales in 1891-92, as the wife of the colonial governor. In the context of colonial anxieties and hopes about the contemporary women's movement, Lady Jersey's aristocratic confidence and imperial authority gave her the appearance of an ‘Advanced Woman’. A published writer and confident public speaker before she arrived in the colony, Lady Jersey took a keen interest in local political affairs, and her demeanour and activity were swiftly satirised in the radical nationalist and frequently misogynist Bulletin. Local feminist groups, perhaps craving some of the legitimate public authority she so readily exercised, sought her patronage and support but were generally doomed to disappointment. The article suggests that Lady Jersey, despite her own conservatism, offered an ambiguous role model for those seeking positive ways in which to imagine female power.     

Farm size ‐ farm productivity re‐examined: Evidence from rural Egypt

A major component of the economic rationale for redistributive land reform is the empirically observed inverse relation between farm size and farm productivity. A major policy implication of this statistical relationship, frequently suggested, is for a small farm bias in agricultural development strategy. This article examines the hypothesis that while the above inverse relation may hold in the static context of a relatively backward agriculture, it breaks down with advancing levels of technological innovation, and to show, using primary data from village surveys, that this latter process has indeed been taking place in the context of rural Egypt. The article points out some of the conceptual and methodological confusion of earlier studies.     

London as text: Eighteenth‐century women writers and reading the city

Moral convention required that the eighteenth‐century English novelist express disapproval of the opportunities London afforded women for mobility, deception, and independence. Women novelists of the period, however, subverted this code by depicting urbanized heroines who gain forbidden knowledge about male and female sexuality and social roles, and are thus able to manipulate convention rather than merely following it. Examination of five novels of the period — two by men, three by women — demonstrates that male and female novelists, while allegedly working within the same moral framework, generated vastly different moral texts out of the complex semiotic of the London environment. As the novel gained in respectability, women novelists’ use of the London convention became on the surface more conventional, and their heroines’ attitudes toward urban mores more disapproving, but subversive alternative behaviors are still depicted in late eighteenth‐century novels.     

We are all hybrids now: The dangerous epistemology of post‐colonial populism

This review article considers the political effects of the construction by postcolonial/postmodern theory of an emancipatory project embodying an alternative modernity. It is argued that, in the case of the north Indian peasantry, what is perceived as a subaltern hybridity entails a paradoxical combination: namely, science‐driven technology with an irrational, pre‐scientific worldview. The latter elements, according to postcolonial theory, correspond not just to an authentically indigenous knowledge emanating from an undifferentiated ‘people’ but also to the way in which in non‐Western societies resist the continuing dominance exercised by erstwhile colonial masters through a system of Enlightenment/Western values. Epistemologically, however, such a backwards‐looking critique of science, technology and development has much in common with the discourse of the political right.

Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India, by Akhil Gupta. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Pp.xv + 407. £14.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 8223 2243 7

Rivalry and Brotherhood: Politics in the Life of Farmers in Northern India, by Dipankar Gupta. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp.230. £12.99 (hardback). ISBN 019564 1019

Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth, by Tom Brass. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 2000. Pp.xii + 380. £18.50 (paperback). ISBN 0 71468000 1     

Stelarc's post‐evolutionary performance art: Exposing collisions between the body and technology

Performance

The Tarnished Angels and The Elizabethan Phrasing of the Late Albert Ayler. Choreographed by Karole Armitage. Performed by The Armitage Ballet Scenery by David Salle. Brooklyn Academy of Music, November 1987.

Eden. Choreographed by Maguy Marin. Performed by Compagnie Maguy Marin (Creteil, France). Brooklyn Academy of Music, Next Wave Festival, October 20–22, 1987.

Elena's Aria. Choreographed by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. Performed by Rosas. Brooklyn Academy of Music, Next Wave Festival November 3–8, 1987.

Blue Scene Grey. Written, directed and designed by Linda Mussmann in collaboration with Claudia Bruce; music by Semih Firincioglu. Time &; Space Limited production, New York, October, 1987.

Dress Suits to Hire. Written by Holly Hughes in collaboration with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw. Performed by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw. Women's Interart Center, New York, through January 16, 1988.

Improvisations by Simone Forti and Pooh Kaye. 2nd Annual Festival of Women Improvisers, Kraine Gallery, New York City, October 10, 1987.

Blood on the Saddle. Choreographed by Jennifer Monson in collaboration with Zeena Parkins. Danspace, New York City, November 7, 1987.

Active Graphics II and Tangled Graphics. Choreographed by Pooh Kaye. Performed by Eccentric Motions. The Kitchen, New York City, December 5, 1987.

US. Written by Karen Malpede. Directed by Judith Malina. Co‐production of Theater for the New City and Living Theatre. New York, December 1987‐January 1988.

Film

The Golddiggers. Written by Sally Potter, Lindsay Cooper, and Rose English; directed and edited by Sally Potter; music by Lindsay Cooper; Rose English, art director and assistant editor; Babette Mangolte, lighting camera. Released 1983; New York premiere February, 1988.

Books

Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction, by Teresa de Lauretis. Indiana University Press, 1987.

Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, edited by Jane Bowers and Judith Tick Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

The public forum

On the Road: Voices of Bay Area Women in Performance. Performed, compiled, edited and produced by Anna Deavere Smith. West Coast Women in Theatre Conference, in conjunction with Julian Theatre, San Francisco, January 8–10, 1988.

Electra: An International Festival of Experimental Performance by Women.Double Edge Theatre, Boston, January 8–24, 1988.     

Beyond stereotypes: Mary Wilkins Freeman's radical critique of nineteenth‐century cults of femininity

MARY SHELLEY &; FRANKENSTEIN; THE FATE OF ANDROGYNY by William Veeder. (The University of Chicago Press, 1986), Cloth, $22.50

THE FEMALE MALADY: WOMEN, MADNESS, AND ENGLISH CULTURE, 1830–1980 by Elaine Showalter. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 312 pp., 29 illustrations.

PATRIARCHAL STRUCTURES IN SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMA by Peter Erickson. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985) xii + 209 pp. $22.00

RECLAIMING A CONVERSATION: THE IDEAL OF THE EDUCATED WOMAN by Jane Roland Martin. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); ALMA MATER: DESIGN AND EXPERIENCE IN THE WOMEN'S COLLEGES FROM THEIR 19TH‐CENTURY BEGINNINGS TO THE 1930s by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. (New York: Knopf, 1984); IN THE COMPANY OF EDUCATED WOMEN: A HISTORY OF WOMEN AND HIGHER EDUCATION IN AMERICA by Barbara Miller Solomon. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).     

Growth of money economy and some questions of transition in late pre‐colonial India

One of the more remarkable but neglected features of the growth of commercial capitalism on an international scale from the sixteenth century consists of widespread processes of monetization affecting a number of Asian societies, and especially India. This was in turn connected with commercialization of both agrarian and urban economy, and the development of markets and manufactures. By the middle of the eighteenth century, this development had become distorted through increasing European intervention in both trade and manufacture; in this respect colonial occupation was both a culmination of earlier processes, and the means (through political monopoly, use of violence, control over the taxation system) for the East India Company to destroy competition and drive prices downwards in an increasingly competitive world. The corollary was that up until the mid‐nineteenth century at least India's integration into a colonial empire was marked by a broad‐based process of under development of which deindustrialization was merely part, and including a process of relative demonetization.¹ This article begins by presenting the problem in terms of the unprecedented international flow and sub‐continental use of monetary media which took place between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author then considers the implications of these phenomena for an understanding of the development of commercial capitalism during this crucial period, firstly within India itself, and secondly within a broader international context. Finally, he ends with some statements concerning the implications of this hypothesis for an understanding of the early colonial period. The result is to place India firmly on the map of developments affecting the world more generally, long before colonialism.     

International Feminism and Empire‐Building between the Wars: the case of Viola Smith

This article examines US Trade Commissioner Viola Smith’s role in the furtherance of the American empire between World Wars I and II. As a Foreign Service Officer in Shanghai, China on behalf of the Department of Commerce and through her activism as an international feminist in the Pacific region, Smith perpetuated the imperialist project. As Trade Commissioner, she implemented trade policy in lucrative China that helped to economically enrich the USA. Likewise, as an international feminist, Smith injected Western superiority to the international feminist sphere through her work for peace and women’s rights in the Pacific.     

Gendered bodies in academia — an analytic approach to social meaning‐making among students

This article presents an analytic approach to the study of gender meaning in an academic context. In the presentation empirical material from an interview study among 29 Danish male and female university students is applied. The analytic approach is based on the conception of gender meaning as a culturally constructed phenomenon in continuous process. Current gender meaning is seen as a construction based on the idea of coherence between the gendered sign on the body and a variety of components including sexual and professionally related aspects. The connections between body sign and the components as well as among the components themselves are a continuous goal of negotiation processes among the male and female students.