Locality,gender and co-operation in England: a comment on Barbara J. Blaszak

This article is a response to Barbara Blasak's article on the gendered geography of the English Co-operative movement (Women's History Review, 9, pp. 559-584. It argues that Blasak has neglected important secondary sources on regional complexity, the social structure of Co-operative membership and the division of labour within the household. Her explanation for her interesting finding that women found it more difficult to secure election to Co-operative committees in some parts of England than in others needs to be revised in the light of the full array of available published evidence.     

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon's Travel Letters: performative identity-formation in epistolary narratives

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was a mid-nineteenth-century feminist, philanthropist and painter. This article examines Bodichon the female traveller as a way of discussing the process of identity-formation in letter-writing. It proposes reading letters through the lens of Judith Butler's theory of gender (1990). Following her concept of performativity, letter-writing is conceived as a performative act of identity-formation. The article argues that, conditioned by the addressee she wrote to, Bodichon gave written expression to her subjectivity in her travel letters via her epistolary persona. This autobiographical gesture acted as one means through which she constituted her identity as a female traveller. In turn, drawing on Butler's notion of subversive repetition, the article concludes that the resulting multiple epistolary ‘I's Bodichon developed in accordance with each of her addressees permitted her to venture into her subjectivity as a female traveller—ultimately prompting her epistolary challenge of normative codes.     

Barbara Wootton (1897–1988): pioneering social scientist,feminist and policymaker

This article briefly surveys the life and work of Barbara Wootton, who made an outstanding contribution to the social sciences and to public life, and to the connection between the two, between the 1920s and 1980s, but is too little remembered now. She campaigned for the parliamentary vote for women, for equality in public life when women had the vote, for equal pay, abortion, abolition of capital punishment, homosexual law reform, reform of the criminal justice system to encourage rehabilitation in place of punishment, for social equality more broadly and for policy changes to be underpinned by sound research. She deserves to be remembered.     

A chromatic presence: Barbara Hammer and “What You Are Not Supposed to Look At”

Since the 1970s, Barbara Hammer has been known for her photographs and experimental films chronicling and exploring lesbian experience. Since her 2006 diagnosis of ovarian cancer, she has ventured into an unflinching depiction of her own illness, aging, and dying. In “What You Are Not Supposed to Look At,” a 2014 collage series collaboration with Ingrid Christie, Hammer and Christie illuminate new modes of thinking about life, illness, and what we are describing the prismatic gaze: a mode of looking that subverts objectification and objectivity by positing sensuality, relationality, and spectacularity.