Intimacy and the life cycle in the marital relationships of the Scottish elite during the long eighteenth century

Traditionally marriage has been treated as one step in the life cycle, between youth and old age, singleness and widowhood. Yet an approach to the life cycle that treats marriage as a single step in a person's life is overly simplistic. During the eighteenth century many marriages were of considerable longevity during which time couples aged together and power dynamics within the home were frequently renegotiated to reflect changing circumstances. This study explores how intimacy developed and changed over the life cycle of marriage and what this meant for power, through a study of the correspondence of two elite Scottish couples.     

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.     

Reviving rosetta tharpe: performance and memory in the 21st century

This article examines the pleasures and dangers of the 'reviving'—that is, restoring to memory, of a 'forgotten' female gospel-guitarist, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. It argues that the erasure of black women from cultural memory is not merely the effect of the passage of time, but of small but significant acts of forgetting that themselves constitute cultural practices. As examples of attempts to forestall forgetting and 'revive' the dead, the essay looks to a recent Rosetta Tharpe tribute CD, composed of women musicians' versions of songs Tharpe made famous, as well as a local Pittsburgh theatre incorporation of Tharpe as a character in its production 4 Real Women. Both projects, although inevitably fraught by difficulties specific to their medium of performance and address, set the terms of cultural 'revival' crucial not merely to Rosetta Tharpe but to black women performers generally.     

Narratives of race and nation in china: Women's suffrage in the early twentieth century

This paper explores the ways in which the Chinese women's suffrage movement used racializing narratives to alter the boundaries that had excluded women from full participation in politics in the first two decades of the 20th century. It extends existing work on the connection between narratives of race and women's suffrage in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA to explore how “race” was mobilized in China in the late-Qing and early Republican period. The article has three main areas of innovation. First, it explores the deployment of racializing narratives within the broader discourses of modernity circulating in China wherein modernization was premised on a racialized notion of national identity—that is “modernization as Han chauvinism.” Second, this article aims to participate in the process of extending the history of women's suffrage from primary reliance on class analysis and towards methods that explore the multiple categories of exclusion and inclusion. Third, this article aims to explore the manner in which narratives of race were invoked within a feminist political campaign that occurred in a nation without a history of European colonization. The article demonstrates that the multiplicity of possible gains sought under the banner of “race” makes it an unreliable category to invoke for struggles that are ultimately determined by “gendered” divisions.     

浅谈新世纪图书馆管理的发展方向

2 1世纪对图书馆的管理工作提出了新的要求。建立适合中国国情的图书馆管理体系 ,形成权责利相统一 ,办事高效、运行协调、科学的监督约束机制 ;调整图书馆的资源建设方式 ;优化人才结构 ,提高图书馆员素质 ,是图书馆管理今后发展的趋势     

Woman,medicine and abortion in the nineteenth century

The author would like to thank Moira Wright, Sally Sheldon and Ian Dorrington for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.     

Social change and social conflict in nineteenth century England: A comment

This article addresses the potential for food movements to bring about substantive changes to the current global food system. After describing the current corporate food regime, we apply Karl Polanyi's ‘double-movement’ thesis on capitalism to explain the regime's trends of neoliberalism and reform. Using the global food crisis as a point of departure, we introduce a comparative analytical framework for different political and social trends within the corporate food regime and global food movements, characterizing them as ‘Neoliberal’, ‘Reformist’, ‘Progressive’, and ‘Radical’, respectively, and describe each trend based on its discourse, model, and key actors, approach to the food crisis, and key documents. After a discussion of class, political permeability, and tensions within the food movements, we suggest that the current food crisis offers opportunities for strategic alliances between Progressive and Radical trends within the food movement. We conclude that while the food crisis has brought a retrenchment of neoliberalization and weak calls for reform, the worldwide growth of food movements directly and indirectly challenge the legitimacy and hegemony of the corporate food regime. Regime change will require sustained pressure from a strong global food movement, built on durable alliances between Progressive and Radical trends.     

Leaving home: Irish press debates on female employment,domesticity and emigration to Britain in the 1930s

Although Ireland has had a long history of female emigration, the 1930s saw an important shift in emigration patterns. In the context of southern Irish nation-building, the emigration of tens of thousands of young Irish women to Britain raised serious questions about the opportunities and roles of women in the Irish Free State. This article analyses the Irish print media of the 1930s as discursive spaces within which female emigration was repeatedly highlighted and debated. Discussions of female emigration were usually related to issues of female education, female employment and the duties of women within the home. These issues need to be located within the specific context of Irish Free State economics and politics. The Conditions of Employment Act (1936) and the Constitution of 1937 were legislative measures that attempted to define and regulate the role of Irish women. But that is not to imply a simple ideological hegemony in the Free State; I argue that the media debates reveal the competing discourses surrounding women's roles in the newly established nation state. For example, one view was that young women and girls should be given training and preparation for emigration, another view was that plenty of jobs were available at home, while a third view was that women should be content to remain within the domestic sphere. The much-repeated view that women would be better off (at home) illustrates the overlapping constructions of home – domestic sphere – and home – the nation. The overlapping and interconnecting of these home spaces signified a blurring of boundaries that meant Irish women were expected to carry the responsibility for national as well as domestic well-being.     

Two models of infant welfare in the first half of the twentieth century: New Zealand and the USA

In New Zealand, as elsewhere in the Western world in the early twentieth century, maternal and infant health became a national concern and the task of organising health services was taken up by women in a voluntary capacity. In the USA this culminated in the Sheppard-Towner (Maternity and Infancy) Act of 1921. However, within a decade American paediatricians had assumed control of the services. By contrast, the services in New Zealand remained in the hands of a female-run voluntary organisation, the Plunket Society. From the foundation of the Society in 1907, health services for mothers and their infants became the site of territorial disputes between various health providers – the Health Department, the Plunket Society and paediatricians. This article explores why and how the Plunket Society managed to retain control of this important area of public health in the face of challenges by these other health providers. It will be argued that the reasons relate to the tenacity with which the ‘maternalists’ claimed the territory as their own, their informal access to channels of power, their public support, and their success in maintaining medical respectability through their own honorary and paid professional staff.     

Towards the formation of a professional identity: women artists in Greece at the beginning of the twentieth century

In nineteenth-century Greece women of the upper and middle classes were usually occupied with some form of art destined for the private sphere of their familial or friendly circle or sold for philanthropic purposes. The foundation of a female class for painting and sculpture at the state School of Arts in Athens in 1894 seems to have given women the chance to demand and assure equal academic opportunities with men in the first decade of the twentieth century, despite strong objections from their opponents on the issue of the life-class. For some women this was the first step away from amateurism and towards professionalism and was to be followed by a series of initiatives, including the maintenance of a well-organised atelier, steady participation in exhibitions and artistic unions, the adoption of modern art tendencies and publicity through the press, all of which guaranteed their professional engagement with art. Next to contemporary feminist demands for emancipation and female attempts to enter traditionally male professions, women artists' endeavours contributed, as can be detected in some painted and photographic portraits of Flora, Laskaridou and Asprioti, to the formation of the image of the New Woman as well as to the promotion of female artistic individuality.