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.     

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.     

The Work of Memory: embodiment,materiality and home in Jeanne Bouvier's autobiographical writings

In this paper I follow trails in the memory of work by reading the books and papers of Jeanne Bouvier, a French seamstress, ardent trade-unionist and passionate writer, who left a rich body of labour literature including four published historical studies, as well as the memoirs of her life, work and struggles. Work, action and creativity are three interrelated planes on which Bouvier situates herself, while memory and imagination are interwoven in the way she seeks to understand herself in the world with others. What emerges as a particularly striking theme from Bouvier's papers is a material matrix of mnemonic and imaginary practices, wherein bodies, places and objects are entangled in the narrative constitution of the self of the woman worker/writer.     

Changing the world: Time,space and perceptions

The vicissitudes of one small feminist organisation are used to illustrate the problems of others, even in the context of a period when attention has supposedly been directed at women. The prejudices and problems experienced have, however, come from other women as well as from men, and these require examination in order to be overcome. The objectives of the organisation are outlined, with several informal strategies that have evolved through the experience of putting the objectives into effect.     

Why University Education Matters: Youth Work and the Australian Experience

In many countries youth work education in the university confronts a precarious future. Paradoxically, this takes place as the labor market is unable to meet demands for qualified practitioners. This article makes a case for further investment in university-based youth work education. While presenting labor demand and supply arguments, we also suggest that a good university education is important for producing graduates capable of becoming experts and good practitioners in the Aristotelian sense of the word. This entails the provision of learning opportunities to attain specialist knowledge, technical expertise and ethical capacities of the kind that distinguish youth work practice from other approaches to work with young people. Such an education also promotes the prospect that practitioners are able to develop a professional habitus that advances youth work as a discrete field of professional practice. While the material used in this article is Australian, we suggest there are sufficient commonalities between the Australian experience and many other countries for the arguments, findings and recommendations made here to have more general applicability.     

Household production and the national economy: Concepts for the analysis of Agrarian formations

This essay argues that the central concept for analysis of agrarian social relations is the form of production. This is conceived through a double specification of the unit of production and the social formation. The approach allows for the analytical specification of simple commodity production and capitalist relations of production in a manner consistent with the development of new concepts within political economy for agrarian structures which do not correspond to modes of production. The latter have generally been referred to as ‘peasant’, a term derived through empirical generalisation and resting on a (usually) implicit contrast with simple commodity production. The contrast can be made more rigorous through the concept of commoditisation, defined as the penetration into reproduction of commodity relations. Simple commodity production is a concept within political economy, allowing for deduction of conditions of reproduction and class relations. ‘Peasant production is negatively defined as resisting commoditisation, and nothing can be deduced about reproduction or class relations. ‘Peasant’ must be replaced ty a comprehensive and mutually exclusive set of rigorously defined concepts specifying forms of production. Procedures for defining such forms of production are suggested.     

Attitudes to marriage and prostitution in the writings of olive schreiner,Mona Caird,Sarah Grand and George Egerton

Abstract

In recent years scholars have carried out valuable research into aspects of Victorian sexuality. This article offers some insights into the many and varied attitudes taken in the late nineteenth century towards marriage and prostitution, highlighting the fact that a number of advanced thinkers actually dared to speak of marriage itself as a form of prostitution. Four major figures of the fin-de-siècle period are discussed: Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, Sarah Grand and George Egerton.     

Creating the space: Feminist publications outside the mainstream

Some mainstream publisher have been responsible for feminist publications; some mainstream publishers have also suggested that feminism was an interesting but passing phase. The Crossing Press has a different view and a sound rationale for insisting on the necessity and the value of small publishers who can publish and promote feminist writing.