Political Life in the Shadows: the post suffrage political career of S. Margery Fry (1874–1958)

Drawing upon research on the working life of the penal reformer and educationalist S. Margery Fry (1874–1958) and her role as a policy-maker, this article argues that there were alternative ways in which women could participate in post-suffrage political culture, other than through elected office or party politics. The article positions Margery Fry both as a feminist and a public intellectual and argues that the First World War and the granting of women's suffrage allowed a step change to take place in Fry's career, taking her from a regional political stage to a national and international one. It also contends that she was able to wield considerable power ‘in the shadows’ as a policy advisor.     

The Avalanche Perspective: women jurists in Korea 1952–2008

The author proposes and employs the Avalanche Perspective in analysing the entry of women into the Korean judiciary from the first pioneers in 1952 to the present. Starting from a general atmospheric warming trend towards women in postwar Korea, there developed instability in the status quo, then a breakthrough that led to a cascade of women participating in the legal profession. Although cultural resistance and political obstacles remained to be overcome, this quantitative expansion ultimately led to a greater acceptance of women’s participation in the judicial arena. Significant judicial changes that furthered the causes of women in contemporary Korea were coincident with women being members of the judiciary. The quantitative changes of the past fifty-six years opened the possibility of qualitative progress for women in the Korean judiciary. The Avalanche Perspective as applied to the judiciary in Korea, provides an understanding of the forces at work that have had a profound effect upon the place of women in the new cultural and political reality of the Korean people.

Beyond the Centre: women in nineteenth-century Iceland and the grand narratives of European women’s and gender history

In recent years, women’s and gender historians have paid attention to the dissonance between the grand narratives of European women’s history and the history and experiences of marginal regions and countries. This article discusses the challenge of writing women’s history from the margins—Iceland—into the framework of the grand narratives of European women’s and gender history. It is argued that this framework grounded in theories of progress and modernisation is too narrow, offering little space for different or marginal voices from rural societies. Using the case study of the ‘ordinary’ woman Sigríður Pálsdóttir (1809–1871), the article argues that more voices from the margins and different histories, broaden our understanding of the multi-vocal and multi-levelled history of women in Europe.     

Gender,Religion and an Immigrant Minority: Jewish women and the suffrage movement in Britain c.1900–1920

Middle- and upper-class Jewish women enjoyed less equality within their faith communities than Christian counterparts. They were represented in every strand of the suffrage movement, and in 1912 formed the Jewish League for Woman Suffrage (JLWS), modelled on similar Christian leagues. A study of the origins of the JLWS, and its relations with parallel organisations, shows religious difference to have been no barrier, and even conducive to, cross-denominational collaboration. The JLWS confounded (largely male) communal expectations that it would not influence London's East End, and would exacerbate prejudice against Jews. Post-1918, Jewish women were denied the level of equality within their faith congregations achieved by their Christian peers.     

The role of collective mobilization in the divergent performance of the rural economies of China and India (1950–2005)

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the divergent performance of the rural economies of China and India after 1950 was a product of the different capabilities of the Chinese and Indian governments to mobilize the labor force and financial resources of the rural population. By mobilizing unpaid labor and the financial resources of the villagers through mediation by the collectives (before 1984) and local administrations (from 1984 to the abolition of agricultural taxation and compulsory rural labor mobilization in 2006), the Chinese state developed rural infrastructure and the quality of the labor force at a pace and geographical scope that was far beyond its limited fiscal capacity. Efforts by the Indian state to establish rural organizations with similar mobilization capabilities failed due to the effective opposition of well-entrenched political and economic interests in the countryside. Unable to mobilize the labor and financial resources of the villagers, the Indian government relied primarily on its limited fiscal resources, which produced a much slower development of physical infrastructure and labor force quality. These are the primary reasons why China’s rural economy developed much more rapidly than India’s, which contributed significantly to the divergence of their national economies in the post-1950 era.     

‘Our Freedom and Its Results’: measuring progress in the aftermath of suffrage

This article draws on compilations and collections of essays published between 1917 and 1936 to examine how suffragists and labour women, active in the movement before the war, measured the impact of enfranchisement and offered public reflections on developments in the women's movement after 1918. The process of retrospective and prospective analysis on the part of activists who continued to campaign in the interwar period runs counter to the narratives of demise and defeat which figure so prominently in the history of interwar feminism. These sources reveal the idealism and pragmatism which provided the impetus for complex struggles on an ever-growing variety of fronts. The article also stresses the importance of a reflexive approach to sources from the period and the discursive strategies of participants in order to foster a more comprehensive understanding of debates about feminism in the interwar period.     

Miss Agnes Resbury (1858–1943): the memoirs of a warder at Holloway

This article contains the memoirs of Agnes Theodosia Resbury (1858–1943), the fifth of nine children born in Essex, England to Henry Richard Resbury, a tanner, and his wife Sarah Elizabeth (née Cole). Aggie joined the prison service in 1894 and was employed as a warder at Holloway prison during the time when the suffragettes were imprisoned there. Unfortunately, few facts are known about her, but the owner of the memoirs, Jenny Dodge, has written down her childhood reminiscences about her great aunt. The memoirs follow, with endnotes.     

The trouble with ‘women in computing’: a critical examination of the deployment of research on the gender gap in computer science

The pessimistic scenario for ‘women in information communications technology’ and for ‘women in technology’ generally is even more paradoxical and insidious with respect to ‘women in computing’. Studies within this field not only report insignificant improvement in the proportion of women in Western countries’ computing fields but also alert us of a declining trend. Moreover, that decline has been accompanied – or even preceded – by years of research and programs that have specifically focused on increasing women’s participation in computing; however, they have not had the expected effect. More surprisingly, there has been a significant increase in the representation of women in all other science-related fields and professions. Our aim is to provide some clues to fight the feeling of inexorability that may be entailed by the research on women in computing. We will argue that part of the problem is related to the static nature of the research deployed around the problem of ‘women in computing’, primarily, the research constructed around the ‘leaky pipeline’ metaphor. We provide a synthesis of the critiques this research has received in recent decades and highlight research trends that render other landscapes visible when studying ‘women in computing’. These trends help us question how we are conducting research within this field and urge us to problematise assumptions about computing and gender that we may paradoxically continue to reproduce even while denouncing the paucity of women in computing and studying the reasons for this state of affairs. In short, we present the need for different researchers’ eyes that allow different landscapes of women and computing to be seen and produced.     

Challenging constructions of nationhood and nostalgia: exploring the role of gender,race and age in struggles for women’s rights in Scandinavia

Drawing on a multi-sited ethnographic approach, this article aims to study interactions between women’s organizations, state agendas and national histories in the contemporary struggle for women’s rights in Scandinavia. Upon examining a diverse range of material (debates, survey responses, fieldnotes and interview data), it is revealed how the largest women’s organizations appeal to dominant discourses of Scandinavia as a homogeneous region and Scandinavian women as a uniform collectivity. It is shown how divisions between groups of women are shaped along categories of national belonging, race and age, and it is argued that a conceptualization of women as a uniform group offers a too simplistic frame for an understanding of these dynamics. By contrast, it is suggested that the contestations evoked by nostalgic articulations of homogeneity, and uniformity can be rich sources for social analysis, as attention to such tensions can help us to visualize the existence of multiple historical pasts and presents.     

Preventing ‘robotised women workers’: women,sport and the workplace in Scotland 1919–1939

This article examines a new area of women's leisure; women's participation in work-related sport. The growth and development of industrial welfare in Scotland in the interwar period will be discussed. Within broader studies, Stephen Jones, Helen Jones and Melling have all indicated that there was a growth in industrial welfarism in Britain from the turn of the twentieth century. This development of welfarism, which included provision of educational classes, pensions and medical support, increasingly also encompassed a variety of sports and physical activities. By looking at case studies, developments in provision across a range of industries will be examined. This discussion will draw on a wide range of sources from a variety of women's employment, from factories to clerical positions and from the retail sector to the civil service. This article will examine the types of sporting opportunities open to women through their workplaces, including organised welfare schemes and independent employee-led activities. Moreover, it will explore working women's experiences of these activities and the ways in which they chose to participate in sport.     

‘Stepping back and moving in’: the role of the state in the contemporary food regime

In recent years, a number of middle-income countries and influential multilateral institutions have instigated actions that frame food system governance around social protection and rights. These state-centered mobilizations raise fundamental questions about how to portray the global politics of food. Since the late 1980s, analysts have largely concurred that US hegemony in the global politics of food has given way to diverse and volatile neo-liberalist and corporate-led food system governance. However, what should we make of a situation where state and supra-state actors are flexing their powers to reshape food systems in line with rights-based models? Should this be understood as reflexes which aim to preserve national order, at a time of intensified food and nutrition insecurities? Or, does it lay the foundations of a re-governed system which curbs and molds a corporate-led politics of food within frameworks of justice? This contribution responds to these questions by tracing the evolution of social protection and rights-based approaches to the politics of food at the multilateral level and in two influential jurisdictions (India and South Africa). We argue that these initiatives underline a robust and continuing role of state power in global food politics, albeit in a novel fashion compared to previous entanglements.     

Wage labor in historical perspective: a study of the de-proletarianization of the African working class in Zimbabwe, 1960–2010

Abstract

This paper traces the rise and fall of wage labor in Zimbabwe between c.1960 and 2010. Building on Giovanni Arrighi’s seminal study, ‘Labour supplies in historical perspective: a study of the proletarianization of the African peasantry in Rhodesia’, we argue that the 1950s were the highpoint of African wage labor participation in the Southern Rhodesian/Zimbabwean economy. From that point, the percentage of wage labor as part of the economically active population fell consistently until the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy from the late 1990s onward, when it shrunk emphatically. This process is observable elsewhere in southern Africa over the second half of the twentieth century. Writing in the 1960s when the Southern Rhodesian economy was diversifying and absorbing large numbers of African workers from within and beyond the country’s borders, Arrighi overstated the stability and longevity of the proletariat. From that point, though, combined internal and external forces resulted initially in the stagnation of secondary and primary industry and commerce, and latterly in their contraction. The ensuing processes of de-proletarianization, falling wages, and heightened livelihood precarity have been the norm for an ever-increasing proportion of the African working class up to the present.     

Simone Téry (1897–1967): writing the history of the present in inter-war France

Simone Téry (1897–1967), French journalist and novelist, joined the French Communist Party in the mid-1930s after visiting the Soviet Union. She worked as a correspondent for L'Humanité, Vendredi and Regards; the latter post took her to Spain during the Civil War. The resulting texts, Front de la liberté: Espagne 1937–1938 (1938) and Où l'aube se lève (1945), form the basis of my analysis of Téry's desire to write the history of the present in inter-war France. These texts, a work of reportage and a novel respectively, illustrate the relationship between the poetic, or imaginative, and the historical, or factual, in historical fiction. This relationship is particularly relevant to the literary history of 1930s France, given the highly politicized nature of literary production in the period and the resulting debates over the nature and future of the realist novel. Téry's rejection of modernism in favour of socialist realism suggests a conversion, common in left-wing writers of the period, to the notion that the modernist text is incapable of ‘containing’ history. The essay raises the question of French women writers’ relationship to committed literature in the 1930s, and demonstrates that women were active in this domain.     

Cernoises and Horrible Cernettes: a history of women at CERN 1954–2017

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) was founded in 1954 by a group of men seeking to explore the fundamental building blocks of our Universe. Since then, they and a host of international scholars have succeeded, exemplified by the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 and numerous Nobel Prize awards. But running parallel to the ‘great men’ of high-energy physics, is the untold story of the women of CERN. The organisation is an elite institution, and can thus provide insight into why numbers of women remain low in all facets of its work (except professional administrative). This viewpoint explores the role of women at CERN, both scientists and non-scientists, drawing on archival research from the organisation’s collection in Geneva and interviews, providing an analysis of why gender diversity is still one of the puzzles left for this elite space to solve.     

Peasants,proletarianization and the articulation of modes of production: The case of sugar cane cutters in northern Peru, 1940–69

This article examines the transformation of the labour market for sugar cane cutters in an area of Northern Peru between 1940 and the onset of the Agrarian Reform in 1969. The system of enganche (debt bondage) is described for one large sugar estate and is identified as a historically specific stage in the development of the labour market. This system disappeared in the 1960s, owing to a combination of population growth in the highlands, heavy rural‐urban migration, unionization of field labour and technical change in cane harvesting. The evidence presented suggests that the concept of the articulation of different modes of production is a more useful framework for analysis than that provided by Lewis‐type models of dualism.     

‘After years in the wilderness’: The discourse of land claims in the New South Africa

This article examines land restitution in the new South Africa, and the intersecting roles of land‐claiming communities, forcibly resettled from their land during the apartheid years, and the NGOs and — since 1994 — Government Commissioners who have helped them to reclaim the land. Ideas and practices concerning land, community and development that emerge from the interaction between these different players are mutually constitutive but sometimes also mutually incomprehensible. A populist rhetoric, evident both ir: discussions with former land owners, and in much of NGO publications such as Land Update, depicts land as something communally owned which must be communally defended. This sense of uniformly experienced injustice and shared resistance against outside intervention obscures the fact that claims on land derive from a series of sharply differentiated historical experiences and articulate widely divergent interests, such as those — in the case of the farm Doornkop for example — between former owners and their former tenants. The restitution of land to these former owners, while of great importance to them as a source of identity and as a redress of past injustices, is not necessarily the key to solving ‘poverty, injustice and misery’ as claimed for the process of land reform in South Africa as a whole.