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.     

Frontiers of imagination: Feminist worlds

New Feminist scholarship in diverse disciplines, including the social sciences, suggests a distinctive female reality which finds itsbesr literary expression in contemporary speculative fiction by women. Feminist utopias, in particular, delineate alternative societies in which ‘female’ values predominate. In novels by Marge Piercy, Doris Lessing, Ursula Le Guin and many other women, readers may discover holistic and dynamic worlds different from both our current reality and the patriarchal tradition of utopian speculation. When women imagine the ‘good society’, dualistic divisions, often ranked hierarchically in current power structures, tend to disappear, Feminist speculative fiction heals such schisms as those between male and female, matter and spirit, public and private rights, ends and means, even technology and ecology. Although these ‘utopias’ are not perfect, nor intended to be, their depiction of more balanced and integrated societies affords a fresh perspective on traditional political and cultural problems. Ultimately, then, the newly released female imagination may provide us not only a fascinating literature but substantive directions for actual change.     

Why don't girls misbehave more than boys in school?

Reviewing research on sex differences in school misbehavior and delinquency, the author speculates on six possible reasons why girls appear to misbehave less than boys despite the fact that girls are characterized by more personal problems during adolescence. Several reasons including the possibility that girls' misbehavior is inaccurately reported are rejected as insufficient to account for the discrepancy between boys' and girls' misbehavior. On the basis of existing evidence, the author concludes that a combination of personal characteristics (i.e., high need for affiliation and low aggressiveness) and external pressures (parental and teacher expectations and attitudes) function to inhibit misbehavior in girls. Some indications that the situation is changing are reported.Received his Ph.D. in education from the State University of New York at Albany. Main interests include adolescent behavior problems, school discipline, and alternative schools.     

Imagined more than women: lesbians as hermaphrodites, 1671-1766

In texts circulating in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women who had sex with women were often denounced, mocked, and exiled from womanhood; one of the most common strategies was to call them hermaphrodites. There was constant slippage between concepts of sexual deviance at this time, but two ideas in particular – lesbian desire and hermaphroditical anatomy – became tightly bound into the figure of the tribade, a woman whose phallic ‘member’ (whether a prolapsed vagina or an enlarged clitoris) was thought to enable her to have penetrative intercourse with women. This essay follows the hermaphroditical tribade through children's compendia, gynaecological handbooks, neoclassical satires, love poems and anti-masturbation treatises. Though the writers were generally hostile, their debates over anatomy and motivation, and the tonal ambiguities in their treatment of these freakish heroines, make these texts rich sources for lesbian history.     

Everyday worlds of young refugees in London

This article examines the everyday lives of a sample of young refugees living in London, based on a study of the social roles and social networks of refugee children undertaken under the ESRC Children 5–16 Programme. It draws on findings from a survey of refugee and non-refugee children aged between 11 and 14 in two London schools, complemented by data from in-depth interviews with refugee children. The article focuses on the children's responsibilities towards home and family, friendships, and leisure activities. It highlights the experiences of the refugee children in the sample, and explores some gender differences between the social lives of refugee boys and girls, and between the lives of refugee children and those of their non-refugee peers.     

Museums and Feminist Matters: Considerations of a Feminist Museology

This article speaks to a post-human feminist museology. It argues that considerations of a feminist museology would benefit from engaging with post-human feminist dialogues currently unfolding within academia. Dynamic political landscapes and global circumstances challenge dualist paradigms. Theorizations of museums are not exempt from these challenges. Critiques of androcentricity indicate that feminist theorizations have never fully centred on “the human”, but always already contextualized how we affect the world, and how the world affects us. Discussions in this article follow Barad’s agential-realist theorization of the material-discursive practices that shape our understandings in and of the world, and Haraway’s notion of diffraction that engages the material and re-tools recordings of object histories as entangled human and non-human processes that can be taken apart and reassembled, making different possibilities possible. The article demonstrates that museological alternatives that emerge from conversations about entanglements not only aim to move beyond the paradigms they have been circling within for so long, but towards a re-thinking of museology and cultural heritage museums. Thus, considerations of a feminist post-human museology re-imagine museums as entangled becomings that make different possibilities possible.     

Citation and marginalisation: the ethics of feminism in Medieval Studies

This article draws on my experience both as a medievalist and as a feminist working in a UK university today to discuss the challenges facing feminist academia more widely. Using Medieval Studies as a case study, this article argues that in times of austerity the pressure on young feminist academics to conform is greater as it is increasingly important to get one's work published in order to stay competitive. This pressure to publish limits intellectual curiosity and forces research down more conventional paths. This article lays out how this functions in Medieval Studies and attempts to suggest some ways in which it could be overcome. One strategy of resistance I suggest entails what I call an ‘ethics of source study’; a way of looking at and responding to both medieval and modern texts with an awareness of their potential effect on the world. I begin by discussing the pressing need to publish work forced upon us by the Research Excellence Framework, and how this drive towards publication can make our work less radical. I then illustrate this with examples from my own discipline. In Medieval Studies, the publication of more articles means that the production of editions is neglected, and this forces scholars to use out-of-date and misogynist editions. Finally, I suggest some ideas of how we can create alternative networks in which feminist academia can survive and flourish, including an outline of what an ethics of source study might look like.     

Technoecologies of Borders: Thinking with Borders as Multispecies Matters of Care

ABSTRACT

Reading Félix Guattari’s concept of ecology through feminist accounts of care and solidarity, and vice versa, in this article, we propose the concept of feminist technoecology as a speculative mode of thinking with borders. Rather than considering borders as lines on maps or primarily as physical arrangements, we argue that feminist technoecology allows for an understanding of borders as multispecies matters of care where cuts that matter are enacted, and precisely therefore calls for transversal solidarity and care that goes beyond the human. Turning to two stories revolving around the naturalisation of borders, bodies, and territories, we demonstrate that a technoecological take on borders not only fundamentally questions an a-priori distinction between technology, ecology, geology, politics, bodies, and a more-than-human world, but also foregrounds different modes of attentiveness with regard to questions of care, nativity, and mattering.     

rethinking the boundaries: towards a Butlerian ethics of vulnerability in sex trafficking debates

Feminist debates on sex trafficking have become entrenched and polarised, with abolitionists producing images of helpless abused victims, while sex worker advocates work hard to achieve some recognition of the agency of migrant sex workers. This article explores constructions of embodiment, subjectivity and agency in the debate, showing how abolitionist views, in spite of their efforts to challenge liberal pro-sex perspectives, rely on a familiar vision of the body as a singular, bounded and sovereign entity whose borders must be secured against invasion. The result is a vision in which victimisation is taken to epistemically compromise the subjectivities of sex workers, forcing them and their advocates to argue for recognition of their agency according to familiar liberal models of consent in order to be able to enter the debate. Drawing on the recent work of Judith Butler on consent and vulnerability, this article argues that what is needed is a rethinking of bodily ontology so that the vulnerability of sex workers is not opposed to their agency, but rather seen as an inevitable aspect of embodied sociality, constituting a call to ethical engagement and a recognition of the inequitable global distributions of precarity that produce sex trafficking as part of contemporary geopolitics. From this perspective, the alignment between radical feminist efforts to secure women’s bodily borders and global efforts to secure national borders no longer appears as coincidence.     

beyond emancipation: subjectivities and ethics among women in Europe's Islamic revival communities

This article addresses the complex reflections regarding gender relations expressed by women active in the contemporary Islamic revival movements in Europe (especially France and Germany). Much recent research conducted among these groups aims to counter the rather negative accounts prevailing in public discourses on gender and Islam. This literature notably argues that women's conscious turn to Islam is not necessarily a reaffirmation of male domination, but that it constitutes a possibility for agency and empowerment. However, when faced with certain ‘traditionalist’ positions defended by these women, even this well-meaning literature seems precarious, left in a state of uncertainty. Taking this puzzlement as a point of departure, this contribution aims to think about the dilemmas involved in articulating a language for women's dignity and self-realization, which competes with dominant languages of equality, individual rights and autonomy. This project is rendered even more intricate by the fact that these pious Muslim women socialized in Europe have also been partly fashioned by the liberal discourses against which they want to position themselves.     

‘First in man’: the politics and ethics of women in clinical drug trials

Within the world of pharmacology, the male body has traditionally been taken as the biological norm. Coupled with this, concern about danger to the unborn foetus has meant that, until very recently, ‘women of childbearing potential’ were routinely excluded from most of the early phases of clinical drug testing. Consequently, most drugs tested during Phase I trials were initially carried out on healthy male volunteers. During subsequent phases when drugs were tested on patients, women remained largely under-represented. As a result, some drugs prescribed for women have later been discovered to be lacking in efficacy, and women are more likely to suffer adverse drug reactions than men. The exclusion of women during the early phases of clinical drug trials has now been lifted and drugs are currently being more widely tested on women. This paper examines the differing political and ethical positions adopted by the pharmaceutical industry, drug regulators, pharmacologists, women's groups and patient activists in relation to the exclusion and inclusion of women in clinical drug trials.     

Book Review: Emergence of modern maternity care in Sweden

A useful point of departure for discussing ethics and the role of the researcher in history‐writing is in translations, in the post‐encounter stage, when what was in the mind of the researcher while preparing, what happened in the interaction with research subjects, and how this dialogue started to find its shape, is translated into conceptual thinking on paper. This includes, in this article on translating encounters with Finnish war widows, reflexive work at all levels of the process, including considerations of concepts, theory, positions, cultural reading, and gender. Translating as a term, even beyond its use for linguistic and cultural transfers, expresses the crux of research praxis, since it involves a process of choices made in relation to the intentions and preferences of the researcher. It is an “ethics in practice”.