Woman's brain,man's brain: feminism and anthropology in late nineteenth-century France[1]

This article deals with the tangled web of late nineteenth-century French arguments for the biological inferiority of women and of non-whites. These arguments were largely based on an anthropological paradigm: the brain was materialist in its function and brain size was therefore linked to intelligence. The article demonstrates that these arguments were linked to progressive, anticlerical, masculinist Republican views by analysing the anthropological work of a woman anthropologist, feminist and socialist, Dr Madeleine Pelletier, work in which she struggled to subvert the paradigm in its application to women.     

Emmeline pankhurst: a biographical interpretation [1]

This article examines a dominant narrative about, Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), the most notorious of the groupings campaigning for the parliamentary vote for women in Edwardian Britain. It is claimed that this narrative is to be found in the influential book, The Suffragette Movement (1931), written by one of Emmeline's daughters, Sylvia. In this book, Sylvia portrays her mother as a traitor to the socialist cause, a leader who deliberately encouraged wealthy Conservative women to join the WSPU and who failed to mobilise the working classes, a misguided autocrat who supported a single-issue campaign, a weak woman easily swayed by her eldest daughter, Christabel, and a failed mother who neglected her less favoured children, Harry, Adela and Sylvia.     

Proto-industrialization, sharecropping, and outmigration in nineteenth-century rural Westphalia

This article examines proto-industrialization and the social relations of production in a rural parish in eastern Westphalia that experienced large-scale outmigration to the American Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century. Relying on local and individual-level Prussian tax and emigration records, the study identifies and analyses the socio-economic background of the migrant cohort in terms of proto-industrial activity and peasant economy. Preceded by the downfall of domestic textile industries due to British industrial competition, outmigration was highly selective, drawing individuals from specific socio-economic niches. Landless sharecroppers - linked by debt and labour obligations to better-off peasants and landlords - were underrepresented in the migration, while smallholding peasants and day-labourers - 'free' to commodify their labour power through the sale of home-produced textile products or seasonal migratory labour - were overrepresented. The findings of the study have implications for an understanding of the localized nature of the relations of production in proto-industrial regions, the historical nature of German emigrations, and the dynamics of the German transition to industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century.     

Physical purity feminism and state medicine in late nineteenth-century england

Abstract

Late nineteenth-century England saw the development of a number of campaigns and social movements which were connected by both a hostility towards the medical profession and by the use of discourses of purity and sanitary reform. This article explores the involvement of women within these movements, analysing their activism as an aspect of social purity feminism. It argues that many of these movements drew on widespread female anxiety regarding male violence – both physical and sexual – towards women. The anti-medical feminists claimed that some pieces of ‘sanitary’ legislation represented a state-sanctioned violation of the bodies of women and children. Finally, this article analyses the use made, by some of these activists, of the discourses of sanitary reform to challenge the gender ordering associated with the reason/nature dualism in Victorian society.     

Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs Humphry) and the opposition to women's suffrage[1]

This article analyses the tensions and contradictions in the work of the conservative writer and social reformer, Mary Augusta Ward and her role in the development of a constructive anti-suffragism designated as the ‘forward policy’. Ward's representation of the suffragette in her novel, Delia Blanchflower (1915), is discussed. Concentrating on Ward's principled support for women and her reforming imagination, the article shows how she shared much in common with feminists of her day and suggests ways in which her writing may be mined by historians and literary scholars interested in the history of women's 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.     

Lavinia seabrooke,gender and state formation in late nineteenth-century South Australia

The strained relations between feminist organisations and the labour movement have often been attributed to the male dominance of the labour movement rather than the influence of class and political loyalties. This article questions that approach. Using the minutes of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Suffrage Society, labour movement organisations, and Glasgow City Council and newspaper accounts, it examines relations between the Independent Labour Party in the west of Scotland and the Glasgow and West of Scotland Suffrage Society. These highlight how the class and political loyalties of feminists from this organisation were as destructive to any potential feminist and non-feminist alliances which would improve the lives of working-class women as the ‘male dominance’ of the Independent Labour Party.     

A Local Authority v JB [2020] EWCA Civ 735; [2019] EWCOP 39

In Re JB, a local authority, concerned with the risk the respondent posed to vulnerable women, successfully appealed against an order made in the Court of Protection that declared JB, an autistic man with impaired cognition, possessed capacity to consent to sexual relations. In this recent decision, the Court of Appeal has arguably reset the last 15 years of jurisprudence concerning P’s capacity to make decisions in regard to sexual relations. Previous case law focused on P’s ability to consent to such relations, and whether P understood the information relevant to that decision. Notwithstanding the abundance of legal authority, including the recent appellate judgments of Hayden J in London Borough of Tower Hamlets v NB and AU (consent to sex) [2019] EWCOP 27. and B v A Local Authority [2019] EWCA Civ 913. there was a lacuna in the existing law in relation to what information was relevant for the purposes of assessing the issue of capacity to consent to sexual relations. Judges have traditionally adopted a protectionist stance in understanding “the information relevant to the decision” under s3(1) of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA), with an emphasis on whether P understood the risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. However, the Court of Appeal in Re JB has broadened its interpretation of ‘relevant’ information to also include the ability to understand the importance of a partner’s consent to such relations. This is a welcome change to previous courts’ interpretations of the ‘nature’ of the sexual act, moving from an approach focused on the physical sexual mechanics to one which views the nature of sex as a mutually consensual engagement. However, a fundamental shift in how we view such cases is likely to have far-reaching consequences, particularly for local authorities and professionals seeking guidance in relation to their care planning.

     

Schools,discipline and community: diary-writing and schoolgirl culture in late nineteenth-century France

Abstract

This article uses the case-study of one French boarding school in the nineteenth century to explore the characteristics of schoolgirl culture. Beginning with an analysis of the multiple effects of constant discipline within the school, the author argues for the existence of rules that sought to develop a sense of moral community among students. The teachers used the ideal of community to transmit feminine but not necessarily domestic values, particularly the virtues of obedience, selflessness and interdependence. But students did not passively absorb these institutional messages. The existence of a student diary, written from 1875 to 1881, allows the author to explore how students absorbed, transformed and challenged both the implicit and explicit messages within schools. The very act of writing her daily life allowed the diary writer, Eugénie Servant, to structure her sense of feminine identity. While Eugénie posed no radical challenge to the prevailing domestic ideology communicated within her school, through her writing, she reworked cultural messages to highlight her own special gifts. This case-study offers an insight, then, into how individuals could refashion the parameters of school life, allowing forms of autonomy that raise questions about the realities of French bourgeois domestic life     

Land reform and Agrarian change in India and Pakistan since 1947: 1

Analysing the class character of land reform in India and Pakistan the author makes a distinction between ideology and programme. Judged by its ideology, land reform in India is sharply anti‐landlord and pro‐peasant and is thus a mobiliser of peasant support for the ruling elite. The programme of land reform, however, serves primarily the interests of an emerging intermediate class of under‐proprietors and big peasants. This intermediate class makes a joint front with the rural poor to curb the privileges of landlords. But it makes a common cause with the landlords to thwart any prospect of agrarian radicalism turning into a pro‐poor agrarian programme. In Pakistan the conflict between the old landlords and the emerging intermediate class is not as sharply articulated as in India and land policy therefore had a more pronounced pro‐landlord bias than was the case in India. In Pakistan at best it denotes the tension between the old moribund and a new dynamic landlord class.?     

Women's employment and industrial organisation: commercial lace embroidery in early nineteenth-century Ireland and England

Abstract

The early nineteenth century saw expanding work opportunities for women in commercial lace embroidery in Britain. This article traces the connection between the development of commercial lace embroidery in several locations – Nottingham, Essex and Limerick. Despite the fame of the Irish industry, it has received almost no academic attention. The differing structures of the Irish and English industries are examined. Aspects of lace manufacture highlight the increasing emphasis on cleanliness and the respectability of women's work in the nineteenth century. The authors suggest that to appreciate fully the impact of the Industrial Revolution on women's employment opportunities, we must look to the periphery of the national economy, as well as the centre.     

Mimesis,metaphor and representation: holding out an olive branch to the emergent schreiner canon [1]

There are complex and interesting representational issues and interpretational practices involved in claiming to ‘know past lives’ and these have particular resonance in feminist terms. These ideas are examined in relation to a particular case study, of the feminist writer and theorist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), although the discussion contributes to the ‘women's history and post-structuralism’ debate by eschewing taking up an abstract ‘position’ in favour of examining these ideas through a grounded historical example. A range of representations of Schreiner is discussed, including a photograph which her estranged husband contemporaneously had ‘touched up’ before sending it to some of her friends just after her death, and presentday representations of Schreiner in the emergent feminist canon of claimed knowledge about her. The ideas of mimesis and alterity are used both in relation to photographic representation and also in relation to the use of metaphor to stand for perceived facets of Schreiner's character. Representational issues are fundamental and ought not to be excised from feminist discussion; at the same time, the past and its ‘irreducible things that happened’ must also be taken seriously.