Room of One's Own: 1920s Feminist Utopias

Virginia Woolf's aspiration in A Room of One's Own (1929) for a private space and independence for the 'uneducated' women who would write fiction was echoed in Jipping Street (1928), the fictional autobiography of the working-class Kathleen Woodward, as well as by numerous other women during the period. This article asks why this wish for a room emerged in the twenties, and what is shows about the political affect of feminism at that time. One of the effects of post-suffrage feminism was that working-class women's experience began to be not only observed but listened to, written down and published, but real changes in the legal and economic position of women only came slowly. Both Woolf's polemic and Woodward's fictional autobiography are diatribes against poverty and laments for women's wasted lives. Neither idealized suffering; poverty in their texts was an injustice that aroused anger, not a state of abjection or redemption which required an anguished identification. When these two books were published, just after women's suffrage was achieved, hopes were high. The thirties were a more brutal decade, with unemployment and the growth of fascism, and Woolf's Three Guineas (1938) is darker in tone. Neither Woolf nor Woodward had faith in conventional politics. Instead both writers chose silence, solitude and the aesthetic seduction of words and thoughts. Neither wanted to enter the world of men, but nor did they want to live lives like their mothers. Both these books require of women an inner change. The room represents a transitional space. There was no clear vision of the future yet. As so often with feminist thought, the wish is for a break with the past, a resistance to culture and a change in human nature.     

The Scent of Memory: Strangers,Our Own,and Others

Using, as a point of departure, Tim Lott's recent autobiography where he attempts to make sense of his mother's suicide of 1988 through a reconstruction of his family genealogy, this article tries to map the production of gendered, classed, and racialized subjects and subjectivity in west London. It addresses the tension between Lott's discourse of his own white working-class boyhood during the 1970s where questions of ‘race’ are all but absent, and the racialized ‘commonsense’ that pervades the interviews with other local white contemporaries of Lott and his parents. These narratives are analysed in relation to the socio-economic context and the political activism of the period. Theoretically, it analyses the ‘diaspora space’ of London/Britain, interrogating essentialist ‘origin stories’ of belonging; reaching out to a glimmer on the horizon of emerging non-identical formations of kinship across boundaries of class, racism, and ethnicity; and exploring the purchase of certain South Asian terms – ‘ajnabi’, ‘ghair’, and ‘apna/apni’ – in constructing a nonbinarized understanding of identification across ‘difference’.     

Queer nations: Nationalism, sexuality and the discourse of rights in Quebec

Gays and lesbians are full-fledged members of the great Quebec family, and it is perhaps time to reinvent and enlarge our family. The research on which this article is based was undertaken while I was a visitor at the Faculty of Law, McGill University, Montreal, in 1996. I would like to thank the University and colleagues in the Faculty of Law for their collegiality during my stay. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Critical Legal Conference, University of East London, 6 September 1996. My thanks to the participants for their insightful questions and comments, and thanks also to Didi Herman and Davina Cooper for their help on a previous draft.     

Woman Suffrage and Irish Nationalism: ethnic appeals and alliances in America

Nationalism first brought Irish-American women into a political struggle in the late nineteenth century, a role that did not go unnoticed by suffragists, who reached out to Irish-Americans through sympathy with the Home Rule movement. These connections also continued into the twentieth century as the crisis of World War I converged with revolutionary nationalism and the final push for suffrage in America. A small group of nationalists and suffragists worked together and sought alliances in an environment where Irish-American men wielded political power and Irish-American women continued to be active in the nationalist movement beyond the Ladies' Land League era.     

Of Mail-Order Brides and ‘Boys' Own’ Tales: Representations of Asian-Australian Marriages

Asia is increasingly entering into the Australian imaginary as the nation grapples with the issue of ‘Australian identity’. This article examines two instances in which the idea of Asia has been taken up in debates about marriage and relations between men and women. Asia is a site of fantasy for men in an era when they feel that ‘traditional’ values of male pre-eminence in the family are being undermined. In this fantasy, ‘Asia’ is known through stereotypic representations, the stereotypes underlying the nature of the response in the popular media.