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.     

Patchwork politics in the Netherlands, 1946-50: women,gender and the world war II trauma[1]

Abstract

This paper describes the campaign launched in 1946 by a prominent Dutch feminist, resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor, to make women wear so-called National Celebration Skirts, homemade patchwork skirts constructed of, for instance, old pieces of cloth of family members and friends that were killed by the Germans or of Jewish children hiding from the German persecutors. The skirts were to be worn on public holidays as well as in private celebrations. The campaigners supposed that by making such skirts women could cope with their wartime experiences. The Celebration Skirt is analysed as a female mode of political expression to be understood in the context of the politics of war, reconstruction and gender. The story of the skirt refutes some standard Dutch historiography on (the failure of) post-war renewal; it gives new information on what happened to women after the war, and on the ways in which some women tried to overcome their grief; and it contributes to the women's studies debate on, ‘equality and Difference’.     

Women's experience of world war one: Suffragists,pacifists and poets

The period of 1914–1918 was a time of immense change for women in Britain. The Suffragist movement, begun in 1867, gained irresistible force, culminating in the Act of 1918 in which women were given the vote at thirty and men at twenty-one. It was not until the 1928 Act that for the first time in the history of Britain there was full adult suffrage, granting the vote to both sexes at twenty-one. The picture is a complex one; Mrs Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel identified their movement with the war effort, indeed their pre-war militancy became militarism. Mrs Fawcett, an avowed non-militant suffragist before the war, who believed in the verbal power of argument over revolutionary tactics, also supported the war effort and nationalism. However, there were other suffragists such as Sylvia Pankhurst, Emily Hobhouse, Catherine Marshall, Helena Swanwick, Olive Schreiner and Kate Courtney, who were opposed to the war. Mrs Pankhurst believed if women couldn't fight, they shouldn't vote. The pacifists believed that this view simply gave in to the argument for physical force. They also saw militarism as yet another version of the strong oppressing the weak and thus an emphatic form of patriarchy. However, although the suffragists were bitterly divided in their moral view of the war, they were united in the cause of women's emancipation.The war itself provided all classes of women with important opportunities to work outside the home, as munition workers, land-army workers, police-women, doctors and nurses. The experience of change caused by the suffrage movement, together with the effect of the war upon women's lives, transformed women's image of themselves in radical and irreversible ways.My paper draws on some 125 poems by 72 women poets; Scars Upon My Heart is the first anthology of its kind and testifies to women's involvement in the war and the impact it had upon their lives. The anthology is necessary reading, together with the soldier poets like Owen, Sassoon, Blunden and Rosenberg, whose war poetry has been known to us for the past sixty years, for a full understanding of the significance of war for women and men.     

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.     

An Accidental Liberation: Ugandan women on the front lines of Idi Amin's economic war

This article considers one of the most curious outcomes of Idi Amin's military dictatorship—the ‘accidental liberation’ of Ugandan women. By expelling the Asian population in late 1972, Amin inadvertently opened up a new economic space for urban women. Whether they were forced to engage in petty trade out of necessity or because they received a shop ‘abandoned’ by the departing Asians, numerous women fondly remembered Amin as the one who ‘taught us how to work’. For the first time, they gained access to financial resources and decision-making power. Despite the economic windfall, many women continued to suffer the brutal realities of a harsh military dictatorship. Thus, for most women in Uganda, liberation was partial at best.     

The agrarian origins of US capitalism: The transformation of the northern countryside before the civil war

This article examines the women and environment linkage which characterises not only ecofeminist thought but, increasingly, also development discourse and practice ‐from NGOs to the World Bank. It suggests that gender analysis of environmental relations leads to very different conclusions, of potentially conflicting rather than complementary agendas, for gender struggles and environmental conservation.     

The sultana and her sisters: black women in the British Isles before 1530

This interdisciplinary study examines cultural representation of black women in the British Isles before 1530. It addresses a lacuna in the historiography of black women which has, hitherto, paid little attention to the fact of their existence in the British Isles before British involvement in the slave trade. Representations of black women in stained glass and in poetry of the Middle Ages are examined and their meaning and function interrogated through an analysis of the medieval discourses which framed them and through which they were refracted: biblical exegesis, natural histories and travel literature, bestiaries, constructions of female beauty and medical treatises. These images suggest that the bodies and behaviours of black women were the site for a definition of gender and racial otherness long before the development of the slave trade of Elizabethan and Jacobean England     

Women in the firing line: the home guard and the defence of gender boundaries in Britain in the second world war

This article focuses on the formation and application of the principles of Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936). Despite her lifelong and innovative commitment to social and housing reform, she has received only perfunctory recognition in women's history. The aims here are twofold. First, this oversight will be redressed by foregrounding the subtle, shrewd and imaginative means of persuasion Barnett used in the pursuit of her ideals. Second, her principles and practices will be included in a wider debate concerning the means by which middle-class women subverted dominant discourses without apparently transgressing boundaries of decency. Throughout, the intention is to problematise the widely held assumptions of her intransigence and insensitivity, which appear to have confined her to the footnotes of history.     

Women United for the United Nations: US women advocating for collective security in the cold war

This article details the creation of Women United for the United Nations (WUUN), a coalition of US women's non-governmental organizations created in the wake of the Second World War to advocate for the United Nations and the efficacy of collective security. The article illuminates the strategies the organization used to flourish in the 1950s, an era characterized by suspicion of political activism and conformity for US women. It describes WUUN's initiatives and documents the way the organization clashed with a more radical women's peace group, WOMAN. The article places the discussion of WUUN in the context of work done by other historians on the fate of other US women's organizations in the 1950s and provides a detailed account of the measures WUUN took to navigate the complexities that confronted women activists in the Cold War.