‘This Spider Web of Woman's Life’: Private Space and Community Life in Peter Abelard

This essay explores such complex and ambiguous presentation of convent life in Helen Waddell's novel Peter Abelard (1933), considering Heloise's fear of women's communities as expression of concerns central to women's writing published in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Waddell uses Peter Abelard to intervene in these contemporary debates about private and public spaces. The dislike which her Heloise expresses for women's communities may, given the text's feminist ideology, seem surprising, but, as discussed, similar anxieties are voiced in texts by several of Waddell's contemporaries, and the novel is shaped by this tension between private, autonomous individual and shared public space. Peter Abelard is read in relation to selected journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (late 1920s), Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1928) and Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night (1935).     

Haunted by the Lady Novelist: Metafictional Anxieties about Women's Writing from Northanger Abbey to The Carrie Diaries

This paper argues that the development of the identity of the professional woman writer as a ‘lady novelist’ in the mid-eighteenth century has had a lasting and detrimental impact on the status of women's writing that lingers through to the present, particularly in the critical discourse surrounding chick lit. The first part of this paper discusses the figure of the lady novelist and traces her centrality to criticisms of women's writing from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. The second part of this paper then examines the haunting presence of the lady novelist in the metafictional works of seven representative women writers: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), and Candace Bushnell's The Carrie Diaries (2010). By drawing a through-line that connects these texts, I argue for a renewed understanding of the ways in which Western women writers from the eighteenth century to the present are unified by a pervasive anxiety about being a ‘lady novelist’.     

Editing the 1930s: The Lost Work of Josephine Johnson Excerpts from Josephine Johnson's published and unpublished writings are quoted with permission of the Estate of Josephine Johnson Cannon. All quoted materials © Estate of Josephine Johnson Cannon 2005.

The radical avant-garde has aged profoundly. Yet, led by director Judith Malina, the Living Theatre, founded in 1947, remains the longest surviving political theatre collective in the US. The Living Theatre opened its doors at a new theatre/home on New York City's Lower East Side in 2007, where Malina directed a much lauded revival of the company's groundbreaking 1963 production of Kenneth Brown's The Brig, and performed the role of Maudie in the premiere production of Hanon Reznikov's adaptation of Doris Lessing's Maudie and Jane. Vibrant and luminous at 81, an aged Venus rising from the half shell, Malina (dis)played the decaying and decrepit Maudie, standing naked onstage, sensually and lovingly bathed by Pat Russell, playing Jane. Malina's ageing activist/artist's body and voice spoke volumes about decades of societal and cultural transformations, of sexual revolutions, and of wounds that never heal.

Evoking Pierre Nora's ‘sites of memory’—this performative lieu de memoire ‘talks back’ on many levels, both in contemporary contexts and re-membering the zeitgeist of Malina's earlier performances—nearly naked, strident and much younger in the Living Theatres’ legendary production of Paradise Now (1968–70), and eloquently, flamboyantly anarchist, if too old, playing Antigone in Malina's adaptation of Brecht's version of Sophocles play (1967–84). This essay analyses the mise en scène and the reception of Maudie and Jane in light of the working processes and performance history of director/performer/inspirator Malina. Finally, the challenges and hope made visible and corporeal in Malina's on- and off-stage performances are explored.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Elsa's Housebook, A Woman's Photojournal, by Elsa Dorfman. Boston: David R. Godine. Pp. 80, with 80 black and white photographs. $5.95, softcover original.

Elsa's Housebook: A Woman's Photojournal, by Elsa Dorfman. Boston: David R. Godine, 1974.     

Battle of Femininity: romantic heroines and modern sexuality in the interwar middlebrow women's novel

Focusing on Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets, Rose Macaulay's Dangerous Ages and E. H. Young's William, this article examines the representation of young romantic heroines in the context of emergent discourses on women's sexuality, marriage and motherhood. It is argued that these heroines, ambivalent and tentative in their quest for sexual modernity, represent the middlebrow's moral stance that reflects the paradoxical attitude of the interwar era towards modern women. A juxtaposition of these texts reveals a battle of varying versions of femininity, while a fine balance is mediated between the progressive and conservative ends of the middlebrow spectrum of values.     

‘Sugar,Sugar’: questioning the sexual division of labour on Jamaica's sugar plantations in Sistren's The Case of Miss Iris Armstrong and Sweet Sugar Rage

Through an analysis of Sistren Theatre Collective's play The Case of Miss Iris Armstrong and the Collective's documentary film Sweet Sugar Rage, this article looks at the way the sexual division of labour on Jamaica's sugar plantations during the 1980s was based on the following gendered myths: women's labour capacity is lower than their male counterparts; and men are the breadwinners for their families. The article also critiques the sexism in the Jamaican union movement which did not support female workers and actively kept women's wages lower than men's on the plantations.     

Dorset,Kincardine and peasant crisis: A comment on David Craig

David Craig's paper ‘Novels of Peasant Crisis’ is to be warmly welcomed. But Craig provides no adequate analysis of the peasant crises underlying the novels which he considers. This paper considers one of Craig's novels; Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song. Craig's explanation of this book in terms of depopulation and the destruction of the Kincardine peasantry from outside is seen to be inadequate. Sunset Song is about the crumbling of a peasant mode of production through the working out of internal contradictions within that mode of production. As an introduction to this discussion of Sunset Song Craig's dismissal of the utility of Thomas Hardy's work for the analysis of rural class relations is argued to be distinctly premature.     

Miss Reading

Against the backdrop of western culture's strong investment in gendered clothes, Stockton looks at clothing's intricate relations to shame and, for some queer women and men, the surprising value of these humiliations, especially in the service of sexual attraction. The word 'martyrdom', with its associations to bodily wounding and psychic pain, is not too strong for the acts of clothing and sartorial preference she discusses. Working through concepts that emerge from Sigmund Freud on femininity, Georges Bataille on sacrifice and Leo Bersani on debasement, along with debates among feminist thinkers about the New Woman, Stockton takes up 'martyrs' from three distinct histories, martyrs as diverse as the mannish lesbian of Great Britain's 1920s, American butches and femmes of the 1960s, and even the sailors of post-war France. How public self-betrayal and self-debasement in terms of clothes can offer creative social formations is the focus of this article. The highly famous novels of three queer authors provide the means for this surprising look: Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues and Jean Genet's Querelle.     

Women in the world of work: Past,present, and future

Women have not been usually credited with much Utopian writing, but in fact a number of women writers have projected societies which seek to improve the condition of their sex. This paper examines three eighteenth century English women writers's ideas of feminist utopias: Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal, Sarah Robinson Scott's Millenium Hall, and Clara Reeve's Plans of Education. It discusses their ideas on the rationale and organization of communities of women and how these communities could extend their benefits to society as a whole. It will also discuss the limitations of the thinking of these women for the reform of society especially in regard to woman's place.     

A Christian Challenge: Chō Takeda Kiyoko and feminist thought in modern Japan

References to Christian women in the English-language scholarship on the history of Japanese feminism have typically focused on one organisation, the Japan Christian Women's Reform Society. Chō Takeda Kiyoko's 1985 book, Fujin kaihō no dōhyō (Milestones for Women's Liberation), offers a more comprehensive and nuanced image of the contributions of Christian women to the elevation of women's status in pre-World War II Japan, by offering case studies of Christian women. These highlight the widespread influence of Christianity among educated men and women, the broad associational networks of the Christian community, the mutually-reinforcing connections between women's activities in the fields of education and journalism, and the personal struggles of Christian women to create a fairer and more moral society. Takeda portrays the Women's Reform Society as a foundational organisation in the history of feminism, but not the sole avenue through which Christian women worked for women's liberation.     

‘Brightening their leisure hours’? The experiment of BBC Women's Hour, 1923–1925

ABSTRACT

On 2 May 1923, the newly established BBC, launched Women's Hour, a daily bespoke programme aimed at its female audience produced by Ella Fitzgerald, a former Fleet Street journalist. In December 1923 a Women's Advisory Committee (WAC) was established to represent women's interests at the BBC with eminent members who included the Chairman of the National Federation of Women's’ Institutes, Lady Denman; the actress Dorothea Baird and the physician Elizabeth Sloan Chesser. The WAC, working with Fitzgerald and other BBC officials, introduced into Women's Hour an innovative range of programme ideas. It also prompted a debate about the premise of the programme, whether it should be about domesticity or provide escapism from the ‘common task’ of housework. In addition the WAC challenged the Women's Hour name. Through a consideration of the programme and the WAC, both of which were short-lived, this article explores how the BBC sought to address its female audience in the early 1920s.     

‘Call Us Ms.’: Viva and arguments for Kenyan women's respectable citizenship 1975–80

Drawing on Viva, the first women's magazine published in East Africa, this article articulates the ways educated Kenyan women actively inserted themselves into public debates and constructions of the new nation. It argues that Viva authors and editors employed rhetorics of nationalism and development to advocate for Kenyan women's right to equal citizenship. They wanted participation in the possibilities, power, and self-reliance that postcolonial nationalism promised its citizens and mobilized images of a productive, modern woman to make their case. Viva's producers appropriated the momentum of 1970s development rhetoric and international women's liberation to show that Kenyan women were already fulfilling mandates to develop themselves and their fellow Kenyans through education, wage labor, consumer habits, and moral respectability. Viva reveals the ambitions, strategies, and desires of Kenya's educated women, not only for themselves but also for their nation and their rural ‘sisters’.     

Nicki-aesthetics: the camp performance of Nicki Minaj

In this essay, the author contends that Nicki Minaj practices what he terms nicki-aesthetics, a form of black performance art that employs an extravagant theatricality and a vivid, intensely hued style. Nicki-aesthetics shares qualities with the sensibility of camp, as outlined in Susan Sontag's 1964 article “Notes on ‘Camp,’” yet challenges camp's assumed association with white gay men as well as its reduction of women to objects (rather than subjects) within the camp universe. Nicki-aesthetics realigns blackness and camp as mutually constitutive (rather than oppositional) forms, while reconfiguring camp as a black female-centered practice. In addition, Nicki Minaj demonstrates her dexterity at performing nicki-aesthetics in an offbeat interview on Elle magazine's website while deploying avatars to play multiple roles. In doing so, nicki-aesthetics' quirky blend of artifice and alterity ultimately rebukes hip-hop's obsession with authenticity.     

Women's history: a study in continuity and change

In this response to Bridget Hill's viewpoint published inWomen's History Review, 2, pp. 5-22, Judith Bennett argues that her position is more subtle and more nuanced than Hill's critique would suggest. Bennett defends the historiographical importance of re-assessing the place of continuity in women's history; she emphasizes the legitimate place of generalization in women's history; and she argues that patriarchy is a critical subject of investigation for feminist historians.     

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     

Europe's Northern Periphery and the Future of Women in the Travel Narratives of Ethel Tweedie

Among the writers who defined the European northern periphery for British readers towards the end of the nineteenth century, Ethel Brilliana (Mrs Alec) Tweedie was a significant figure. In addition to numerous articles about various aspects of Fenno-Scandinavian culture, she published three book-length narratives based on her northern journeys, A Girl's Ride in Iceland (1889), A Winter Jaunt to Norway (1894), and Through Finland in Carts (1897). Though almost forgotten today, these books were widely read at the time, and Tweedie came to be regarded as an authority on the north. What makes Tweedie's Nordic travel narratives unique and of interest today is their conflation of discourses of northernness and female emancipation.

This article outlines two different and apparently contradictory representations of the European north in Tweedie's travel narratives of the 1890s. On the one hand, they primitivize Fenno-Scandinavia by emphasizing the arctic climate and the area's distance both culturally and geographically from metropolitan European centres. On the other hand, Tweedie's Nordic travel narratives give the peripheral countries of Fenno-Scandinavia a symbolic centrality in the development of Europe. In some respects, particularly women's participation in social life, the northern nations are represented as models of progress. My focus is on Tweedie's final and most ambitious Nordic travel narrative, Through Finland in Carts, which equates northernness with modernity and the future of women. Compared to this exemplary north it is Britain that lags behind, and the contrast implies a fundamental critique of British culture at the fin de siècle. Finally, I trace the personal circumstances informing Tweedie's interest in Finnish women and discuss why they are deliberately concealed in the text itself.     

Woman's hour at the women's library

This article, written by a BBC Producer, describes a Woman's Hour Radio Four programme that was broadcast from the new Women's Library, London Guildhall University, on Thursday 31 January 2002 to celebrate the Library's opening.     

Putting Dad in the Picture: fatherhood in the popular women's magazines of 1950s Australia

This article explores the shifting meaning of fatherhood within the popular women's magazines of 1950s Australia. Breadwinning fatherhood reigned throughout the decade, and magazines such as Women's Weekly and Woman's Day keenly emphasised the care of children as a mother's domain. Even in these manuals of idealised motherhood, though, this division was not inviolate. As the 1950s went on, letters, articles and advertisements make it clear that fathers—just as the breadwinner was legitimated by economic boom—were increasingly expected to do more than simply earn the bread, although these expectations fell some way short of a gender revolution.     

Jane Eyre's Daughters: the feminist missions of Mary Carpenter and Josephine Butler in India

The nineteenth-century literature served as a theatrical space wherein culture and politics merged to constitute women's subjectivity. Charlotte Brontë's literary imagination of the heroine's ‘mission’ in Jane Eyre heralded Mary Carpenter's reform of Indian women's education and Josephine Butler's campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in India. This article explores the way in which the writings of both feminists betray imperial/anti-imperial and domestic/political aspects of their activities, as Brontë represents such complex issues through the deliberate articulation of the protagonist's subject-position, seeking the configuration of the female political network which stemmed from Jane's individual engagement with nineteenth-century gender politics.     

Sonia Delaunay: Fashioning the Modern Woman

Focusing on questions of gender and modernity, Gronberg examines representations of Simultaneous fashions designed by the Paris-based artist Sonia Delaunay in the German illustrated press of the 1920s. Simultaneous dress was presented as a means of rendering woman 'modern' both through fashion and through association with Parisian artistic avant-gardism. Gronberg explores the figure of the fashionably dressed Parisian femme moderne in relation to 1920s concepts of the neue Frau. The identity of Sonia Delaunay as an artist turned professional designer marked her out as a 'modern woman' and was crucial in the promotion of Simultaneity to international audiences. Delaunay's persona as a 'modern woman' also related to her status as a wife. The German press depicted Sonia Delaunay and her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay, as a Knstlerehepaar, an artist-couple exemplifying contemporary notions of 'companionate marriage'. Gronberg shows how such concepts of the modern woman were important not only in marketing Sonia Delaunay's fashions but also in claims for Robert Delaunay's post-war painting as a renewed form of avant-gardism. The essay concludes by considering Paris as a milieu in which women interacted with each other professionally-as writers, artists and photographers-engaging with and reformulating the visual imagery of modernity. The production, promotion and consumption of Simultaneous fashion during the 1920s reveals the 'modern woman' as both subject and object of representation. A preoccupation with fashion could be as much to do with challenging and overcoming, as with acquiescing to, stereotypes of femininity.