White collars and labour history: the contractual regime in Italy from the Liberal to the Fascist era, 1919–1945

This article aims to re-examine the history of non-manual labour, beginning with an analysis of the evolution of general norms governing the contracts of private sector workers in Italy, from the post-First World War period up until the creation of the fascist corporate system in the 1930s. The starting point is the 1919 law that defined the specific characteristics of white-collar workers, expressed as a bond of trust and delegation on the part of employers, from whom legally established and binding guarantees were issued. These guarantees included the offer of permanent employment and the right to compensation should said employment be terminated. This law was reformed during the fascist era, but continued to influence the collective labour agreements stipulated by unions under the regime, contributing to the sustained social status of white-collar workers, particularly in comparison to manual labourers. This article will highlight the difficulties in applying these standards, and the legal and union disputes they generated, exploring an area rarely discussed by historians, while also, as a case study, scrutinizing the more advanced situation of employees in the banking sector – a sector which, from a regulatory and contractual point of view, represented the white-collar élite, as it would continue to do for a long time after the Second World War.     

Women on the Move: a review of the historiography of Irish emigration to the USA, 1750–1900

Emigration was an integral part of Irish life in the nineteenth century and much of that experience was characterised by banishment, exile and loneliness. This article reviews the historiography of Irish emigration to America and focuses on Irish women's unique experience of emigration, specifically looking at their reasons for leaving, the mechanics of departure and the kind of life that awaited them in the USA. This interpretation places gender at the centre of the narrative and argues that Irish emigrant women were agents of their own lives and not secondary agents and also that, by the end of the nineteenth century, personal ambition and a desire to improve and progress their own lives was as influential with them as the financial imperative to assist family and friends in the USA and Ireland.     

Battered Women’s Experiences of the Criminal Justice System: Decentring the Law

This article takes up Smart??s suggestion to examine the way the law works in practice. It explores the context of current criminal prosecutions of domestic violence offences in Queensland, Australia. This article argues that legal method is applied outside the higher courts or ??judge-oriented?? practice and that the obstacles inherent to legal method can be identified in the practices of police, lower court staff, magistrates and lawyers. This article suggests that it may be difficult to deconstruct legal method, even by focussing on law in practice, and as a result it may be difficult to successfully challenge law??s truth claims in this way. The analysis of criminal prosecutions of domestic violence offences reported here supports Smart??s earlier findings that women and children who seek redress through the criminal justice process find the process at best ambivalent and at worst, destructive. However, the article also shows how, in the Queensland context, women sometimes find their way to feminism and personal empowerment by going to law.     

Forgotten Feminists: the Federation of British Professional and Business Women, 1933–1969

Using archive documents of the British Federation of Business and Professional Women (BFBPW) this article explores the role of this early business organisation in campaigning for feminist issues in the post‐war period. It argues that the BFBPW is indicative of the complexities of the women’s movement in the post‐suffrage era when it fragmented into interconnecting campaigning organisations around a multitude of women’s issues. The article suggests that businesswomen in this period acted in ways that anticipated modern ‘femocratic’ practice in the way they sought to use business networks to gain access to parliamentary policy networks.     

A Transnational Project? Women and Gender in the Social Sciences in Australia, 1890–1945

This article presents a broad overview of the gendered regimes which shaped the development of social scientific knowledge in Australia, and the position of women within the field, from 1890 to 1945. It particularly explores the local desire to emulate developments in Europe and the United States. Australian women were prominent in early ‘amateur’ social science, which was strongly linked to social reforming activities. However, the social sciences developed exceedingly slowly within the Australian academy and rather continued to be sustained largely by the social reform movement. The continuing lack of formal institutionalisation, well into the twentieth century, provided considerable scope for some (privileged) women to create themselves as social scientific experts. Indeed, it was largely the interests of women social reformers who eventually drove professionalisation of the social sciences from the 1930s. Nevertheless, when professionalisation and institutionalisation did finally come in the 1940s, Australia followed remarkably similar patterns to those seen in the United States and United Kingdom nearly 50 years earlier. Women were largely regulated to the lower‐status, applied, feminine field of social work while men took over the new and more prestigious academic arena.     

Launching a New Journal: Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000

This article traces the founding and development of an online journal, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 (WASM), which Sklar & Dublin began editing in 2003. A quarterly journal, a database, and a website, WASM publishes edited collections of primary documents and full‐text sources that focus on the history of women and social activism in the United States. The journal’s editors discuss their experience in launching the journal and reach out to scholars in the UK to expand the transnational and comparative dimensions of the project.     

Women and trade unions 1870–1920: The quandary of the reformer

For the first two decades of the twentieth century, syndicalism (revolutionary trade unionism) was the most vigorous of the left's challenges to the capitalist order in many parts of the world. In Britain, syndicalism was reckoned to have had most impact in the South Wales coalfield but there have been no detailed studies of its influence in other British coalfields. This article explores the various ways in which syndicalism's influence can be gauged in the Durham coalfield, comparing it with the South Wales experience. While the two coalfields had a good deal in common, a number of considerations, most importantly relating to the agency of syndicalists on the one hand and Independent Labour Party (ILP) activists on the other, militated against syndicalism's relative influence in Durham.     

Between tradition and modernity: Bulgarian women during the development of modern statehood and society, 1878–1945

Abstract

The paper attempts to draw the general outlines of women's input in the establishment of the modern Bulgarian state and society in the period 1878–1945. Set against the background of traditional roles and attitudes that were prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century, women's contributions include active participation in the nation's economy and labor force, disproportionately significant representation among the educated élite, nationally and internationally recognized achievements in the arts, and the establishment and promotion of Bulgarian feminism. The paper suggests that a detailed study of the public role played by women will achieve a more accurate understanding of the modernization process in the Balkans since women have tended to act in a trend-setting manner. Furthermore, Bulgarian feminism is viewed as an example of the existence of elements of a civil society in the region.     

Cernoises and Horrible Cernettes: a history of women at CERN 1954–2017

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) was founded in 1954 by a group of men seeking to explore the fundamental building blocks of our Universe. Since then, they and a host of international scholars have succeeded, exemplified by the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 and numerous Nobel Prize awards. But running parallel to the ‘great men’ of high-energy physics, is the untold story of the women of CERN. The organisation is an elite institution, and can thus provide insight into why numbers of women remain low in all facets of its work (except professional administrative). This viewpoint explores the role of women at CERN, both scientists and non-scientists, drawing on archival research from the organisation’s collection in Geneva and interviews, providing an analysis of why gender diversity is still one of the puzzles left for this elite space to solve.     

Fighting for the ‘Privileges of Citizenship’: the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), feminism and the women's movement, 1928–1945

In 1928 the YWCA welcomed the introduction of the universal suffrage by declaring that women in Britain were now entitled to the full political privileges of citizenship. This article will explore the way in which the YWCA, previously omitted from histories of the British women's movement, sought to educate and inform its members about the rights and duties of democratic citizenship. The involvement of the YWCA in citizenship education and its role in campaigning for the citizenship rights of women will be assessed, with a particular focus on workers’ rights and the appointment of women police. Despite its reluctance to be identified as overtly feminist, the YWCA was determined to ensure that women had access to social and economic rights within a democratic society. The article therefore argues that a new definition of the women's movement is required in order to uncover the full extent of female engagement in politics and public debate in the aftermath of the suffrage.     

Justice,Morality or Politics: why did the British legal system execute Selina Wadge?

Although infanticide was a capital crime, mothers who killed their children were seldom convicted of murder and, from 1849 onward, hardly ever faced the death penalty. In fact, between 1843—when the authorities began documenting the gender of offenders—and 1899, only five women were hanged for infanticide. This article follows the story of one of these women, Selina Wadge, who was hung in the prison yard of Bodmin Gaol in Cornwall on 15 August 1878. The author read depositions, trial proceedings, newspaper reports, letters, notes and petitions, attempting to understand why the court and the Home Office chose to circumvent the accepted lenient policy and apply the severe letter of the law. Was Wadge executed for infanticide? Or did her hanging serve other social and political agendas? Through analysis of the case, the article provides insights into the attitudes of the British establishment towards mothers living on the margins.     

A Woman’s Work is… Unfinished Business: Justice for the Disappeared Magdalen Women of Modern Ireland

In this article I explore one core feature of contemporary campaigns for justice for Ireland’s Magdalen women concerning their deaths and disappearances, which continue to be denied by a State that has only recently started to acknowledge civilian deaths in other contexts such as armed conflict. I examine the treatment of the disappeared and deceased Magdalen women in the economic and political context of the Irish use of religious institutions and consider the significance of this regime for women’s citizenship in the postcolonial nation-building processes of the twentieth century. I aim to illustrate the connections between gender, violence and citizenship that are implicated in outcomes for justice for Magdalen survivors and victims, as well as conceptions of Irish women’s citizenship in general. In this discussion I consider the Magdalen campaigns for justice as significant for the individual women and families involved, as well as the entire nation’s conception of self as represented in history.     

the home,the veil and the world: reading Ismat Chughtai towards a ‘progressive’ history of the Indian women's movement

This paper discusses the work of Ismat Chughtai (1911–1991), a controversial writer whose long literary career extending over four decades roughly corresponds to the formative stages of the Indian women's movement. It interprets Chughtai's novella The Heart Breaks Free (1966) to forward an anti-teleological enquiry of the women's movement in India. This progressive teleology often suggested by a discussion of the ‘waves’, ‘stages’ or ‘phases’ of the Euro-American women's movement and adopted to postcolonial women's movements, such as those in India, Jamaica and South Africa, is belied by the piecemeal legislative gains won by activist efforts. Some of the questions governing my enquiry are: What lessons can a questioning of teleology teach us about the gains and losses of postcolonial women's movements? If the alternative to teleology is, as I suggest, a genealogy, then what constitutes a genealogical enquiry into the women's movement in India? In face of apparent and self-acknowledged losses and ineffectiveness in recent times, would the movement's apparent unity across religious differences be a way of initiating such an inquiry or is another mode of analysis required? The paper directs attention to the Indian women's movement's attempts at bringing together women of different religious persuasions, legislative, and religious edicts related to Muslim women's right to co-habitation and divorce, and ‘cases’ that serve as testing points of the movement's struggle against religious and state authority. It also points to the neglected factor of economic security for women as a way in which a genealogical inquiry can proceed so as to strengthen the legislation and the movement itself.