Documenting the Louisiana Sugar Economy, 1845–1917: An On-line Database Project

Documenting Louisiana Sugar (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/louisianasugar), an on-line database project rolled out in July 2008 and now freely available, provides historians and social scientists with an innovative tool for examining one sector of the plantation economy and agrarian society in the American South. Utilizing exceptionally detailed annual crop returns and additional census records, the project makes available two fully searchable databases that allow users to examine in micro and macro detail the evolution of one of America's definitive plantation crops, namely cane sugar. These are available on the project's website, which also includes census material, illustrations, bibliographies, and essays. What follows is a report describing the evolution and aims of this innovative effort to make primary sources widely available in digitized form on the internet.     

‘Everyone needs a holiday from work,why not mothers?’ Motherhood,Feminism and Citizenship at the Australian Royal Commission on Human Relationships, 1974–1977

The Royal Commission on Human Relationships was an initiative of the Whitlam government, instigated in 1974 to investigate ‘the family, social, educational, legal and sexual aspects of male and female relationships’, with particular attention to the concept of ‘responsible parenthood’. The Commission heard evidence from thousands of Australians on a broad range of topics, and given the Royal Commission's origins in the 1973 Federal Parliamentary debate over abortion, it is perhaps unsurprising that motherhood featured so prominently in submissions presented to the Commission. In this article it is argued that mothers’ submissions to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships reveal the ways that social and cultural meanings of motherhood were being contested in 1970s Australia. Rather than making claims for rights in the established language of maternal citizenship, many women deployed their private experiences of mothering to argue that the state should facilitate their access to both paid employment and time away from mothering. These mothers argued for equal citizenship rights, challenging the reproductive compact that had long been central to maternal citizenship. The submissions reveal the ways that mothers (and their critics) drew upon both new and old meanings of motherhood to articulate new cultural and political possibilities for motherhood and citizenship in 1970s Australia.     

Mona Caird (1854-1932): wild woman,new woman,and early radical feminist critic of marriage and motherhood1

Abstract

This paper, which makes available previously unknown pictures and personal information drawn from interviews, introduces aspects of the life and work of a neglected First Wave feminist writer. In particular, it examines Caird's analysis of the social construction of marriage and motherhood and the dynamics of mother-daughter relationships. The conceptual framework within which Caird wrote, while being embedded in its historical context, bears striking resemblance to some theories within Second Wave thought, especially those of Carol Gilligan and Adrienne Rich. The paper addresses the problem of how to negotiate the danger of ahistoricism when establishing ideological and conceptual links between feminists of different historical periods, and argues for regarding Caird as a radical feminist in the making.     

Book Review: Work,children and gender equality

The motivating concern behind this article is that women, in the diversity of their ages, life situations, cultural traditions of gender and actual sexual connections to men, are still marginalized by prevailing approaches to HIV and AIDS. Safe sexual practices for women, within social contexts and actual sexual relations with men, are not being approached in ways that engage women's (or their male partners') active involvement. Conventional heterosexual distinctions between women's and men's sexuality disables prevention processes. Categories and perspectives which prevail in ''interpreting'' the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, inhibitions and assumptions framing sexual safety information, and cultural narratives of gendered love/desire/sex, converge into two highly problematic outcomes: a dissociation of heterosexually-defined men who have sex with women from central responsibility for HIV prevention, and marginalization of women who have sex with men from concern about women's sexual safety.     

Navigating class power and inequalities: new deal liberals and the Los Angeles regional labor board, 1933-1934

ABSTRACT

This article examines how local state officials operated the Los Angeles Regional Labor Board, 1933-1934, a regional branch of the National Labor Board. Amid a surge in workers mobilizing strikes and organizing unions, which faced fierce business opposition in LA, one of the period’s most anti-union cities, local state officials discarded initial solutions to industrial conflict – solutions based on state paternalism and involved parties’ voluntary compliance – and proposed more robust state interventionist tools. Such efforts were to enhance state authority and power and forge greater class equality by accepting worker rights and limiting business prerogatives, while the officials also obsessively encouraged the economic ‘wheels be kept turning and the pulse quickened.’ Drawing on regional-based archives, we trace local officials navigating and shaping social relations, and investigate the unpredictable, everyday workings of local responses to national-level policy-making. Earlier scholarship on the period highlights the role of leaders, like FDR or Senator Wagner, or business elites crafting seemingly pro-working-class policy, alongside the accounts of structural political economy. We emphasize local state agencies tasked with policy implementation becoming sites of contention for class actors and state officials, reflecting more general patterns but also initiating institutional procedures with enduring implications for US capital-labor relations.

Abbreviations: LA: Los Angeles; NLB: National Labor Board; RLB: Regional Labor Board; NLRB: National Labor Relations Board; AFL: American Federation of Labor; LACC: Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce; M&M: Merchant and Manufacturers Association; NRA: National Recovery Administration     

‘Brightening their leisure hours’? The experiment of BBC Women's Hour, 1923–1925

ABSTRACT

On 2 May 1923, the newly established BBC, launched Women's Hour, a daily bespoke programme aimed at its female audience produced by Ella Fitzgerald, a former Fleet Street journalist. In December 1923 a Women's Advisory Committee (WAC) was established to represent women's interests at the BBC with eminent members who included the Chairman of the National Federation of Women's’ Institutes, Lady Denman; the actress Dorothea Baird and the physician Elizabeth Sloan Chesser. The WAC, working with Fitzgerald and other BBC officials, introduced into Women's Hour an innovative range of programme ideas. It also prompted a debate about the premise of the programme, whether it should be about domesticity or provide escapism from the ‘common task’ of housework. In addition the WAC challenged the Women's Hour name. Through a consideration of the programme and the WAC, both of which were short-lived, this article explores how the BBC sought to address its female audience in the early 1920s.     

‘It wasn't like that at all’: memory,identity and legacy in Jessie Kenney's The Flame and The Flood

ABSTRACT

This article uses Jessie Kenney's unpublished and fragmentary autobiography The Flame and the Flood to show how suffragettes reacted to, and tried to re-write, the emerging historical narratives on militant suffrage. As June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton have shown, Sylvia Pankhurst's The Suffragette Movement became the dominant frame through which the suffragette movement was understood. Yet Krista Cowman's revealing study of Mary Gawthorpe also demonstrates that many suffragettes were distressed at the way this narrative became cemented in popular and academic understandings of the movement. Developing this understanding by showing how suffragettes resisted Pankhurst's account to offer an alternative account of suffrage history, this article offers new insights into suffrage life-writing in the later twentieth century. It conceptualises The Flame and the Flood not as a monologue focused on Kenney's own experience, but as a dialogue with existing cultural narratives, and demonstrates the interaction between collective and individual identity in suffrage autobiography.     

Women's right to work: The interplay of state,market and women's agency

This article addresses questions central to the conception of women's citizenship: Do women have the same right to wage work as men have? That is, do women have the same access to and chances to keep jobs as men? Is women's right to employment perceived as an individual right, disconnected from men's traditional prerogative to hold jobs as breadwinners? Women's right to work is conceptualized as a complex structural and ideological construct, shaped by the interplay of the labour market, welfare state and women's agency. The empirical analysis takes one of the Scandinavian welfare states, Norway, as its main case. The study concludes that women's individual right to work was significantly strengthened from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.     

The awakened instinct: vegetarianism and the women's suffrage movement in Britain

Abstract

This article examines the extent to which vegetarianism was found in the militant and non-militant strands of the women's suffrage movement, and looks at some of the other movements contributing to vegetarian and suffrage thinking. The arguments linking the two movements are discussed, ranging from the psychological identification of women with animals as victims of male brutality, to the empowering idea that women confined to a homemaker's role could still help to create a new and more compassionate world by adopting a vegetarian diet. Vegetarianism and the women's movement are seen as linked with each other, and also with theosophy and socialism, as complementary ways of creating that longed-for new world.     

Indigenous Feminisms in Canada

Abstract

This essay explores three case studies that show how Indigenous women enact the principles of Indigenous feminism by deploying the concept of active silence to bring attention to the social justice goals of Indigenous communities in Canada. It begins by defining Indigenous feminism and its broader objectives before turning to a discussion of the Sahtu Dene’s efforts to restore land polluted through uranium mining, Heiltsuk resistance to the Northern Gateway Pipeline Project, and Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.     

From Hiroshima to Lausanne: the World Congress of Mothers and the Hahaoya Taikai in the 1950s

ABSTRACT

The World Congress of Mothers in Lausanne in 1955 brought together over 1000 women from more than sixty countries. The Congress was held under the auspices of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF). In this article, the relationship between the World Congress of Mothers and the Japan Mothers' Congress (Nihon Hahaoya Taikai), which has met annually since 1955, is considered. This provides a suitable locus for exploring the dynamic interrelationships of local, national, international and global politics, especially from 1953, when women from Japan started to interact with the WIDF, until the late 1950s, by which time the Hahaoya Taikai meetings were well established there. Three stages are explored—preparations for the World Congress of Mothers in Lausanne by the WIDF and by delegates from Japan; the participation of the Japanese delegates in the World Congress in 1955, and the legacy of the Japanese delegates' participation in the Lausanne Congress. By focusing on these three stages in one country's interactions with an international organisation, we can gain a more complex understanding of the dynamics of transnational politics and the embeddedness of global politics in local contexts. Although common issues were often discussed in different places, discussions in each place were inflected by their local contexts. The positioning of a particular nation in the global geopolitics of the Cold War also affected the possibilities of participation by individuals in such international congresses.     

Nicki-aesthetics: the camp performance of Nicki Minaj

In this essay, the author contends that Nicki Minaj practices what he terms nicki-aesthetics, a form of black performance art that employs an extravagant theatricality and a vivid, intensely hued style. Nicki-aesthetics shares qualities with the sensibility of camp, as outlined in Susan Sontag's 1964 article “Notes on ‘Camp,’” yet challenges camp's assumed association with white gay men as well as its reduction of women to objects (rather than subjects) within the camp universe. Nicki-aesthetics realigns blackness and camp as mutually constitutive (rather than oppositional) forms, while reconfiguring camp as a black female-centered practice. In addition, Nicki Minaj demonstrates her dexterity at performing nicki-aesthetics in an offbeat interview on Elle magazine's website while deploying avatars to play multiple roles. In doing so, nicki-aesthetics' quirky blend of artifice and alterity ultimately rebukes hip-hop's obsession with authenticity.     

‘Good-bye Pompey,komm bald zurück’: Stevie Smith's Vision of Germany in Novel on Yellow Paper

Abstract

In Stevie Smith's debut novel Novel on Yellow Paper, set in 1936, the narrator Pompey Casmilus recalls several trips to Germany she made in the years shortly before the rise of the Hitler regime. The memories of these German travels are linked to Pompey's love affair with a Swiss-German student named Karl with whom she has spent time in both England and Germany. The essay explores the significance of the German theme in the novel. This theme emerges in Pompey's memories of Germany and Karl, which at first glance appear to be random moments of recollection. However, the German theme also asserts itself in what I call Pompey's German voice, a distinct narrative voice that uses a specific German vocabulary and mimics German speech patterns, which appears at different points throughout the novel and is not exclusively linked to Pompey's memories of Germany. The essay argues that this narrative voice, the Karl-Pompey romance plot and the narrator's obsessive concern with Jewishness combine into an exploration of the Anglo-German relationship in the inter-war years and the attraction which Germany held for some British visitors during the 1920s and early 1930s, an attraction which is linked to previous literary explorations of the country by British writers such as D. H. Lawrence and which by 1936 has taken on an ominous significance as Pompey observes from afar the atrocities being committed within Germany in the name of the Hitler regime.