Motherhood at center: Ellen key's social vision

The new Swedish women's movement was hampered in its analysis in part by the association of ‘feminism’ with a glorification of traditional feminity attributed to turn-of-the-century essayist Ellen Key. This paper examines Key's production during one controversial decade (1896–1905) and finds that she, in fact, sought freedom for women to be true to their own characters rather than follow patriarchal definitions or emulate male behavior. She advocated a new world-view based on social solidarity and the ‘self-assertion and self-surrender’ of the mother-child relationship, as well as a transformation of society that would put motherhood at the center of public life. Dismayed at sexual hypocrisy and the suffering it caused, she wanted to remove reproduction from its patriarchal moral and legal strictures and replace ‘man's erotic dualism’ with genuine love and a new understanding of sexuality based on ‘maternal feeling’. Several interpretive questions are raised: Where is the locus of feminism? How do we recognize it when we see it? Why is the so-called ‘exaltation’ of motherhood so problematic for modern feminists?     

Love and Marriage: Ellen Key and Hiratsuka Raichō Explore Alternatives

This article provides a case study of how maternal feminist ideas traveled across national and cultural boundaries in the early twentieth century. It briefly examines Swedish feminist Ellen Key's (1849–1926) ideas on love, marriage, and motherhood and then explores the impact these ideas had on Japanese feminist Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971). Encountering Key's writings early in her career had a lasting impact on Raichō's thought, writing, and activism. It also shows how Raichō drew on the modern, universal aspects of Key's thought to promote women's rights and influence in an increasingly nationalistic Japan. The condition of all development is, not to be content with the present, but to have the courage to ask how everything can be made better and the good fortune to find a right answer to this question in thought or in action. —Ellen Key, Love and Marriage 3.     

The prison letters of Alice Ker and Mary Ellen Taylor: suffragettes and mothers

ABSTRACT

This article considers the prison letters of Dr Alice Ker and the relatively unknown Mary Ellen Taylor which are held in the Women’s Library at LSE Library. These women were suffragettes and mothers who were both arrested on 4 March 1912, in separate incidents, but as part of the Women’s Social and Political Union’s window-smashing campaign. The letters allow us to consider what these women must have been feeling and reveal what factors they felt were important to write about at that time. Of even more significance is that they provide an insight into these women as people. The article also considers the effect that suffrage campaigning had on family life and family relationships and whether the letters convey any sense that campaigning caused tensions or concerns within families.     

Ellen Swallow,Lois Gibbs and Rachel Carson: Catalysts of the American environmental movement

There are none as responsible for the initiation and spirit of the American environmental movement as two scientists, Ellen Swallow and Rachel Carson, and a third woman, Lois Gibbs, a housewife and mother turned environmental activist. Ellen Swallow devised the world's first formal curriculum and scientific methods for the study of ecology. Although her science of ecology was ultimately rejected by male science and then relegated to the field of home economics, her legacy to environmental science has borne fruit nearly a century later in the phenomenon of the American housewife and mother, as exemplified in Lois Gibbs of Love Canal, New York. Gibbs, who is self-taught in the science of hazardous waste, has been the major force in the national protest against indiscriminate disposal of hazardous waste in the environment.Rachel Carson's final book. Silent Spring, was the clarion call to the American society to examine the excessive toll taken on insect, aquatic, animal, plant, and human life by the post World War II policy of increasing use of synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties in American agriculture, forestry, and management of natural resources. As a consequence of its passionate and irrefutable arguments, the American government created the Environmental Protection Agency and promulgated some of the most rigorous environmental legislation in the world.     

Apostolic Minds and the Spinning House: Jane Ellen Harrison and Virginia Woolf's Discourse of Alterity

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) are two of the most iconic figures in British feminist history whose enduring influence have helped create and sustain a multitude of feminist discourses. Interestingly, both produced their landmark feminist studies in Cambridge when it was, arguably, the most aggressively anti-feminist institution in Britain at that time. Evidence of the kind of institutionalized disciplinary control Cambridge historically exercised on women can be found in the three Committals books (1823–1894) of the Spinning House (1631–1894) in the University archives. So called because the inmates were given wool to spin, the Spinning House was a penitentiary for young girls who were judged to be compromising the morals of the undergraduates. The Spinning House had its basis in the legal authority of the University which declared ‘That the University by virtue of their Charter sanctioned by Act of Parliament, have an undoubted right to cause the Public Street to be inspected, and loose and disorderly women to be taken up and sent to the Spinning House or the house of correction’. Against the background of the culture encapsulated by the Spinning House, women academics, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, were making tremendous efforts to bring about intellectual equality. And though the two—the spinner and the woman student—occupied mutually exclusive spaces, they were nevertheless held on the margins of the power structure that produced both. This paper examines the socio-historical context and the puritan intellectual politics of Cambridge against which feminist theories of Harrison and Woolf were produced to identify some of the methods with which they negotiated masculine orthodoxy and structured their feminist discourse of alterity.