‘We who strive for the foundation of a principle’: feminism and suffrage in the biography of Bessie Parkes Belloc

ABSTRACT

Bessie Rayner Parkes (later Belloc, 1829–1925) was a central figure in British women’s rights activism during the 1850s and 1860s. She was founding editor of the feminist English Woman’s Journal and one of the organisers of the pioneering 1866 petition for women’s suffrage. She lived long enough to witness some women gaining the vote in 1918, by which time her children, Marie Belloc Lowndes and Hilaire Belloc, were themselves public figures who had taken up opposing positions on women’s suffrage. This article takes as its starting point 1866, a pivotal moment in nineteenth-century agitation for women’s suffrage and in Parkes Belloc’s individual biography, before moving to a longer view of her feminist life before and after this date. It demonstrates the value of a biographical approach to exploring the diversity of perspectives and experiences of women within first-wave feminism and the suffrage movement.     

Faith,Fetes and Domesticity in Australia

To feminists in the 1970s the fete symbolised women’s marginalisation in church and society but in the nineteenth century its respectability was far from assured. This article uses the shifting history of the fete and other forms of women’s fund‐raising over the years between the 1880s and the 1970s to examine changes in ‘ordinary’ women’s subjective and practical experiences of domesticity. It shows how women used the fete to carve out a place for themselves on the borders of the public and private spheres and, in the process, ‘created and sustained communities’; how churchmen overcame their reluctance to allowing women into the public gaze because of the church’s financial need and how, as women came to envision a greater role for themselves in the church from the early twentieth century, a strand of resistance to being ‘used’ as fund‐raisers emerged. The history of women’s fund‐raising for the church offers insights into the under‐researched area of women and domesticity.     

Public history and popular memory: issues in the commemoration of the British militant suffrage campaign

Drawing on Raphael Samuel's work on the construction of historical knowledge, this article argues that British militant suffrage feminists had a strong sense of their role in history. Once the vote was won, militants became the first public historians of their own suffrage history by collecting ‘relics’ of the campaign and commemorating suffrage events. The work of curators, especially at the Museum of London and National Library of Australia, Canberra, also enabled wider access to the movement's ephemera. Subsequent generations have ‘remembered’ suffrage in different ways, including depiction in fiction, film, local histories and the physical landscape. An exploration of such depictions might help us start to understand the continuing fascination with this aspect of women's history.     

Fighting for the ‘Privileges of Citizenship’: the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), feminism and the women's movement, 1928–1945

In 1928 the YWCA welcomed the introduction of the universal suffrage by declaring that women in Britain were now entitled to the full political privileges of citizenship. This article will explore the way in which the YWCA, previously omitted from histories of the British women's movement, sought to educate and inform its members about the rights and duties of democratic citizenship. The involvement of the YWCA in citizenship education and its role in campaigning for the citizenship rights of women will be assessed, with a particular focus on workers’ rights and the appointment of women police. Despite its reluctance to be identified as overtly feminist, the YWCA was determined to ensure that women had access to social and economic rights within a democratic society. The article therefore argues that a new definition of the women's movement is required in order to uncover the full extent of female engagement in politics and public debate in the aftermath of the suffrage.     

Wounding and Healing: dealing with difference in Christian narratives of migrant women in East London since the 1980s

Setting oral histories conducted with a group of female Christian migrants to East London from various backgrounds and different stages in the life cycle alongside interviews with male migrants and non-migrant women, this article seeks to explore the relationship between gender, mainstream religious affiliation and the negotiation of the migratory experience. Informed by mimetic and feminist theory on religious subjectivities, the article focuses on the preoccupation with sacrifice and healing which emerges from these life stories and highlights the ways in which the emotional realities of pain, separation and suffering also give rise to powerfully reconceptualised, individual faith resources and creative strategies for claiming agency within familial, vocational and religious settings. Through a focus on domestic life, work and church leadership within ‘mainstream’ Christian churches, this article complicates assumptions about the nature and historical trajectory of ‘traditional’ religious organisations, and interweaves migrant women's experience closely with that of other members of their church communities. Through these ‘moving stories’, gender forms an integral part of these women's spiritual narratives and is constitutive of their articulation and negotiation of their faith, migration and inculturation.     

‘That splendid body of women’: nursing,professional registration,and suffragette militancy

ABSTRACT

In the decades before World War One, a group of women fought for their right to control their own futures, claiming that their governance was in the hands of men whose interests lay in keeping women subservient. Initially articulated by an educated, middle-class few, the women's demands were embraced by widening numbers of both women and men. They saw their hopes dashed on several occasions by political manoeuvring, and only after WWI did their demands begin to be met. This is not an account of the women’s suffrage movement, but rather of the fight for the registration of trained nurses. Both movements claimed the right of women to be actors in their public lives and both faced public condemnation for transgressing social boundaries. The two movements interacted, with nurses connecting their struggle to the wider call for women's rights, and with the suffrage movement foregrounding nurses as disenfranchised women professionals.     

New Heroines for New Causes: how provincial women promoted a revisionist history through post-suffrage pageants

The selection and promotion of powerful role models was a major source of inspiration during the suffrage movement, with figures such as Joan of Arc invoked as justifying women’s rights. This research shows the tradition continued post-1914, but with a different focus. Well over a hundred amateur pageants of noble women were staged with a changing pantheon reflecting women’s new roles and aspirations. These events were staged by both religious and secular groups throughout Britain, but were most common in the small industrial towns of the Pennines, the South West and North East where Nonconformity was strong. The pageants varied from a couple of dozen performers to 1000, with newspapers frequently praising their elaborate costumes and historical accuracy. Though certain formats and characters appeared regularly, narrative choices often reflected the organisers’ tastes, sometimes introducing local heroines or reclaiming the Bible as a source of inspiration for powerful women.     

Grand Dames and Gentle Helpmeets: women and the royal honours system in New Zealand, 1917–2000

This article focuses on black and white Christian women's groups in the Anglican and Methodist churches in twentieth-century South Africa. While the Mothers' Union was exported from the metropolitan heartland to the colonial Anglican periphery as a nominally multiracial organisation, Methodist women set up racially divided women's groups, which, nevertheless, intersected in various ways. By the 1960s, Africans dominated the Mothers' Union, and white and mixed-race Anglican women turned to a more liberal alternative, while Methodist women faced growing pressure to form one united organisation. Democratic transition in South Africa found female church groups still wrestling with historic divisions which were not simply racially based, but the black ‘periphery’ was now clearly numerically, if not always organisationally, dominant while its spiritual style constituted the heartland of South African ‘mission’ Christianity.     

The angel of freedom[1]: Dora Marsden and the transformation of the freewoman into the egoist

The article discusses the suffrage periodical press and shows how the disjunction between ‘the public face of suffrage’ and the aspirations of feminist dissidents led to the publication of a new feminist paper, The Freewoman, edited by two disenchanted suffragettes, Dora Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe. The Freewoman and its successor, The New Freewoman, had a symbiotic relationship to the women's suffrage movement. But Marsden's literary interests and her interest in philosophical individualism resulted in a decisive break with the Edwardian women's movement. The Egoist, which evolved out of The Freewoman, severed all earlier connections with feminism, suffrage and progressive politics.     

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.     

Forgotten Feminists: the Federation of British Professional and Business Women, 1933–1969

Using archive documents of the British Federation of Business and Professional Women (BFBPW) this article explores the role of this early business organisation in campaigning for feminist issues in the post‐war period. It argues that the BFBPW is indicative of the complexities of the women’s movement in the post‐suffrage era when it fragmented into interconnecting campaigning organisations around a multitude of women’s issues. The article suggests that businesswomen in this period acted in ways that anticipated modern ‘femocratic’ practice in the way they sought to use business networks to gain access to parliamentary policy networks.     

Gender,Metaphor and the State

The neo-liberal upsurge of the last twenty years and the neo-liberal case against the welfare state has gained much of its emotional force from a sub-text which is highly gendered. Whereas social liberalism had contained the promise of more autonomy within the private sphere and more caring values in the public sphere, neo-liberalism depicts the results of social liberalism as a loss of self reliance - through ‘over-protection’ by the state in the public sphere and usurpation of male roles in the private sphere. The identification of the welfare state as female (the ‘nanny state’) helps fuel resentment on the part of those already confused by rapidly changing gender roles.This paper tracks the sex change which took place in the image of the liberal state as it evolved out of the night watchman state - the link between the women's suffrage movement and social regulation, maternal principles of distribution and demands for the public organization of caring. It examines the neo-liberal rejection of the breast and neo-liberal claims that the maternal state is incompatible with ‘self-reliance’ and a barrier to competitiveness in the world market.     

Overcoming Inner Division: post-suffrage strategies in the organised German women's movement

German women were working within a context strikingly different from either the USA or the UK following the granting of suffrage in 1918. Focusing on the largest of the bourgeois women's organisations, the Federation of Women's Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, BDF), this article situates the post-suffrage strategies and priorities of the German women's movement within their particular national context. The BDF have been accused of failing to fully utilise the vote as a tool for change, but a study of their journal, Die Frau, shows that it was the weight of external factors that reduced the BDF's impact, rather than any failure of courage or commitment by the women. An overview of German press coverage of female suffrage before, during and after the war sets out the mental landscape within which the women were operating and gives for the first time a much-needed indication of public response to the issue.     

‘The Injustice of the Woman's Vote’: opposition to female suffrage after World War I

Winning the vote in 1918 for British women over the age of thirty and, in 1928, on equal terms with men, did not mean that the controversy over the legitimacy and soundness of women's suffrage ceased to exist during the interwar period. In the context of the backlash against egalitarian feminism, many men and women remained opposed to women's suffrage. This article presents the views of three individual women, Arabella Kenealy, Charlotte Cowdroy and Charlotte Haldane, who, although they held diverging views on politics and feminism, agreed that female suffrage might have adverse consequences for the future of Britain. They shared the widely accepted views on the disappearance of sex differences and on the danger of ‘race degeneration’, which led them to advance critical views on female suffrage.     

Feminism, suffrage and the nineteenth-century English women's movement

The nineteenth-century English women's movement has usually been studied in terms of its attempts to increase the access of women to the public and political spheres. This approach to the movement ignores the immense concern amongst its members with the private and domestic lives of women. Within the movement there were widely differing views as to how reform in the private sphere and in the public sphere should be integrated.This concern is most clearly evident in the many discussions of marriage which accompanied not only the campaign to reform the legal status of married women, but all the educational, suffrage and employment campaigns as well. These differences came to the fore in the early 1870s in the controversy aroused by the Contagious Diseases Acts. The split within the suffrage movement over this issue reflected differing views as to whether political rights or sexual and moral questions ought to be the primary concern of the movement.     

Gutter politics: women newsies and the suffrage press

The article examines the role of the suffrage news-seller in light of the important role official organs came to play for organisations within the movement and the competing claims the act of selling placed on women unaccustomed to venturing into the streets and facing public hostility. The argument draws on evidence from a variety of newspapers, with a particular emphasis on Votes for Women, to demonstrate the extent to which organisations tried to encourage and reward volunteers to sell papers. These positive appeals and testimonials found in the periodicals are read against the more ambivalent and negative accounts of the experiences of paper-sellers found in suffrage fiction and autobiographies which deal more directly with the personal costs of these attempts to raise the profile of the movement. The conclusion stresses how the contradictions between such sources can offer insights into the dilemmas faced by women activists in these years.     

Women's Citizenship and the First World War: general remarks and a case study of women's enfranchisement in Austria and Germany

Historians' views about the impact of World War I on women's citizenship have diverged. Some scholars have emphasized that the war changed cultural understandings of suffrage due to women's patriotism and dedication to the war effort. Others have underlined that the politics of electoral reform determined whether or not women attained voting rights. Based on the cases of Austria and Germany where women were enfranchised in the context of revolutionary unrest triggered by the war, this article argues that the political process was in fact crucial. However, the claim of women's suffrage during the war is to be contextualized within a general understanding of republican citizenship and the concept of the ‘citizen soldier’. This discourse was essential to keeping the issue alive during the war. Nonetheless, further studies are still required to assess the war's impact on women and citizenship in the subjective sense of participation.     

‘A crisis in woman's history’: Frances power cobbe's duties of women and the practice of everyday feminism

The article explores the ways in which Cobbe's Duties of Women grapples with new challenges facing the late nineteenth-century feminist movement, with an emphasis on the particular force of Cobbe's text that results from her unique role as a mainstream journalist of mid-Victorian feminism to non-feminist-identified audiences. It argues that Duties of Women participates in the ongoing negotiation of the representation of suffrage, both within feminist communities and in the ways that feminism is represented and understood by a non-feminist public. Specifically, the author argues that Cobbe's lecture series and book are generically linked to the conduct book. They offer advice for the appropriate daily practice of emancipated womanhood at a time when significant changes in feminist practice, such as the increasing emphasis on suffrage, threatened, in Cobbe's view, the larger public perception of that movement.     

Kinship and friendship: quaker women's networks and the women's movement sandra stanley holton

Women Friends (or ‘Quakers’) were largely absent from the debates on the position of women in Britain in the 1830s-50s. But a significant group of women Quakers emerged at the forefront of organisations formed in the 1860s to campaign for Women's rights, participation in which was still by no means a norm among their co-religionists. A notable presence among them was a group of women Friends, identified here as the Bright circle, linked by kinship, religion and radical politics. This article analyses the relationship between public and private lives among the Bright circle, especially in terms of the strength of the political networks on which they were able to draw. It examines the church culture of Friends in general, the domestic culture of this circle in particular, and the basis of its networks in domestic life. It concludes that the values and activities on which this network was built illustrate the way in which personal and public lives may overlap, so that the women among this circle were able to sustain identities that were authoritative, and simultaneously family-centred, outward-looking and publiclyminded.     

“abandoned women and bad characters”: prostitution in nineteenth-century Ireland

Abstract

This article examines the extent of prostitution in nineteenth-century Ireland. It centres on the problem of prostitution as one of visibility and the prostitute as a site of possible contagion, both physical and moral. The legal powers given to the police to control prostitution were used when prostitution became a particular problem and the focus of public and clerical condemnation. However, for the public prostitution was most acceptable when it was hidden from public view. Attempts to rescue and reform prostitutes came from lay and religious women in particular. The establishment of Magdalen Asylums offered the Irish public a place of confinement for their ‘wayward’ daughters, placing them away from the public gaze. Examining the registers of these asylums reveals that ‘fallen women’ were capable of using these institutions for their own ends, particularly in the nineteenth century. The decline in prostitution evident in Ireland from the 1870s owned much to the new ‘morality’ being imposed on the Irish people by the middle classes and the Catholic church.