The pankhursts and the war: suffrage magazines and first world war propaganda

Abstract

This article focuses in depth upon the prison experiences of the suffragettes in Edwardian Britain and challenges many of the assumptions that have commonly been made about women suffrage prisoners. Thus it is revealed that a number of the prisoners were poor and working-class women and not, as has been too readily assumed, bourgeois women. The assumption too that the women prisoners were single is challenged. Married women and mothers as well as spinsters, endured the harshness of prison life. Other differences between the women, such as disability and age, are also explored. Despite such differentiation, however, the women prisoners developed supportive networks, a culture of sharing and an emphasis upon the collectivity. Their courage, bravery and faith in the women's cause, especially when enduring the torture of forcible feeding and repeated imprisonments, should remain an inspiration to all feminists today.     

the gendered embroilments of war

Intersectionality has become the primary analytic tool that feminist and anti-racist scholars deploy for theorizing identity and oppression. This paper exposes and critically interrogates the assumptions underpinning intersectionality by focusing on four tensions within intersectionality scholarship: the lack of a defined intersectional methodology; the use of black women as quintessential intersectional subjects; the vague definition of intersectionality; and the empirical validity of intersectionality. Ultimately, my project does not seek to undermine intersectionality; instead, I encourage both feminist and anti-racist scholars to grapple with intersectionality's theoretical, political, and methodological murkiness to construct a more complex way of theorizing identity and oppression.     

The domestic ideal and the mobilization of womanpower in world war II

This paper begins with an examination of domestic ideal in Britain at the beginning of World War II. The war saw a great increase in the number of women in the paid workforce, lead to the temporary dispersal of many families, and saw the State taking over some domestic labour, by the establishment of British Restaurants and of nurseries. Thus there was an attack on some elements of the domestic ideal, as women were encouraged to join the workforce and to cut down on housework.However, the domestic ideal was not abandoned during the war years. Rather it structured and influenced the development of labour policies to bring more women into the workforce. The way in which some women were brought into the workforce, and some were allowed to choose to remain out, and the way in which some women were designated as ‘mobile’ and others as ‘immobile’ workers, was very much mediated by domestic ideology. Through the development of and application of the womanpower policies, the state can be seen virtually prescribing what constitutes a ‘home’, and what should be the roles of people within it.The womanpower policies were also mediated by class and have been shown to have had a different impact upon women according to their economic circumstances.     

Gender,war and militarism: making and questioning the links

Feminist Review - The gender dynamics of militarism have traditionally been seen as straightforward, given the cultural mythologies of warfare and the disciplining of ‘masculinity’ that...     

Feminists on peace,war and ecology

Diana E.H. Russell (ed.) Exposing Nuclear Phallacies (Pergamon Press, The Athene Series), New York, 1989; Birgit Brock Utne, Feminist Perspectives on Peace and Education (Pergamon Press, The Athene Series), New York, 1989; H. Patricia Hynes, The Recurring Silent Spring (Pergamon Press, The Athene Series), New York, 1989.     

female fighters in the Sierra Leone war: challenging the assumptions?

Feminist Review - This article looks at how the category of female fighters in the Sierra Leone civil war (1991–2002) was interpreted by the local population and by the international...     

Iran's pieta: motherhood,sacrifice and film in the aftermath of the IranIraq war

Feminist Review - The Iran–Iraq war, which took place from 1980 to 1988, was one of the longest and bloodiest conventional wars in the history of the last century. The war was also the...     

’Old law’ and ‘divine law’ in the German peasant war

The paper treats the two core concepts of the Peasant War in the form of a report on the present state of research on law and social conflict in the late Middle Ages. The author attempts to outline a history of the meaning of the terms, based on the results of legal, constitutional and religious historians. The complex method of inquiry is particularly significant and may very well serve as a model for comparative studies of similar but different ideas of legitimation for revolts. Her tentative results suggest the necessity of revision of many hitherto uncritically accepted simplifications and promises to open up new vistas through in‐depth analysis of the terminology of the rebellious peasants.