‘Purifying’ the public world: feminist vigilantes in late Victorian England

In late nineteenth-century England, a number of feminists confronted prostitution through the closing of brothels and the expulsion of prostitutes from places of entertainment. Feminist historians have either understood this behaviour as reflective of feminist' powerlessness within the largely non-feminist movement for social purity, or they have neglected the behaviour and concentrated on the aspects of these women' work that appear more positive to feminists today. Neither approach attempts to understand why women took this more repressive stance and thought of it as feminist. To understand the actions of these women, it is necessary to recognise that their vision of a ‘purified’ public and private world was often informed by religious beliefs and adherence to temperance. Concern with the morality of public space also related to women' desire for safety in public places. And their ‘repressive’ and statist actions related in part to feminist philanthropist' changing attitude toward local government.     

Rethinking the livret d’ouvriers: time,space and ‘free’ labor in nineteenth century France

ABSTRACT

The paper analyses the control of labor mobility through the livret d’ouvriers (1803–1890): a sort of internal passport aiming to subordinate workers’ circulation to the abidance of contract terms. The effective enforcement of livrets had a limited scope for various reasons. Nevertheless, those same difficulties offer a privileged perspective from which to analyze the shifting meanings of freedom and coercion in relation to labor poverty. The politics of identification show that it has been necessary to politically act on the spatial organization of productive processes in order to control labor through time, reacting to workers’ mobility as a specific form of collective bargaining. Through the lens of labor defection we see the emergence of a form of integration deriving from the cash nexus, the vehicle of market concurrence. Such integration calls for a form of control which cannot be subsumed within common law and that is rather axed on the modulation of market pressure – which we analyze through the 1850 debate over advance pay. From this perspective, the issues of breach of contract, police identification and debt insolvency allow to rethink the notion of coercion beyond its penal criminalization and, consequently, to frame the continuities between the police des manufactures, and the modern welfare State.     

The ‘Great Offender’: feminists and the campaign for women's ordination

Few scholars have investigated the relationship between feminism and religion in the aftermath of suffrage. This article explores how feminist organizations and individual feminists supported campaigns for women's ordination within the Anglican Church and their concern for gender equality within British churches more broadly during the forties and fifties. Focusing in particular on the 1944 ordination of the first female priest within the Anglican Communion (The Bishop of Hong Kong Ronald O. Hall ordained Chinese Deaconess Florence Li Tim Oi) and the institution of female chaplain's assistant positions in 1942, it argues that a full understanding of mid twentieth-century feminism requires consideration of the struggle for women's representation in their churches. The forties and fifties have often been portrayed by historians as the nadir of twentieth-century feminism, yet feminists continued their work for women's rights and religious identity and issues could be motivating factors for their activism. Feminists were neither anti-religious nor militantly secular and this article seeks to foster work which explores the connection between religion and women's political and social activism since the nineteenth century.     

To ‘Better the Breed of Men’: women and eugenics in New Zealand, 1900–1935

Over the past decade the relationship between feminism and eugenics has become an increasingly important site of research. This relationship, however, remains to be examined in New Zealand. This article interrogates the ways in which female reformers, colonial feminists and female health and welfare workers engaged in eugenic debates in New Zealand during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It situates the 1924 Inquiry into Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders in New Zealand and the sterilization debate of the 1930s as representative of women’s role as both the agents and subjects of eugenics in this period. Eugenics offered women a discourse of moral and social reform that fitted neatly with the ideals of colonial feminism and, by extension, enabled them to participate in national debates about racial health. However, in their testimony before the 1924 Inquiry and in the subsequent debates surrounding sterilization, women articulated and prescribed eugenic solutions for ‘deviant women’ and cast themselves as the ‘mothers of the race’. As authors of eugenics for other women, white middle‐class female reformers, health professionals and colonial feminists complicate the history of eugenics in New Zealand.     

The ‘Wrongs’ of Women: Sex and Sexuality in Irish American Women's Writing

A key trait distinguishing the writing of Irish American women from that of their male counterparts is a strong feminist bent often expressed in stories featuring sex and sexuality. In ignoring these characteristics, Irish studies scholars have disregarded a trait established by Irish women writers in oral traditions as early as 600 and in written English since 1685. Much of this material was categorized as the ‘Wrongs of Woman’, a phrase used to describe stories about physical and sexual abuse. These same themes can be traced in the writing of Irish American women since the late nineteenth century. By focusing on these ‘wrongs’, Irish American women have not only carried on the tradition begun by their foremothers; they have also battled patriarchal bonds on three fronts: religion, which created such bonds; society, which reinforced them; and politics, which tries to recreate and re-impose them. A complete understanding of Irish American writing therefore depends on recognizing and adding the contributions of these women to the definition of the literature. This essay defines that cohort, then provides a historically contextualized examination of their literary attempts to address the ‘wrongs’ of women inflicted by religion, society and politics from 1899 to the present. In so doing, this discussion demonstrates the role played by Irish American women writers in promoting, protecting and perpetuating the rights of women in the United States and around the world.     

Stories of life Stories of living: Women’ narratives and feminist biography

Narrative structure in biographical accounts is currently a much debated theme. This article brings together methodological debates in life story research and discussions within feminism about women's narratives and feminist biography. Connections between gendered conceptions of time and structures in narrative accounts are explored, and seen in relation to the context of interviewing. The latter is problematized as a setting that affects both the form and content of the biographical accounts given by informants. From this approach the opportunity arises for illuminating connections between “private troubles” in people's lives and “public issues” in society. An empirical discussion based on biographical interviews with white, Norwegian, middle‐class women, is carried out to illustrate the points made.     

‘After years in the wilderness’: The discourse of land claims in the New South Africa

This article examines land restitution in the new South Africa, and the intersecting roles of land‐claiming communities, forcibly resettled from their land during the apartheid years, and the NGOs and — since 1994 — Government Commissioners who have helped them to reclaim the land. Ideas and practices concerning land, community and development that emerge from the interaction between these different players are mutually constitutive but sometimes also mutually incomprehensible. A populist rhetoric, evident both ir: discussions with former land owners, and in much of NGO publications such as Land Update, depicts land as something communally owned which must be communally defended. This sense of uniformly experienced injustice and shared resistance against outside intervention obscures the fact that claims on land derive from a series of sharply differentiated historical experiences and articulate widely divergent interests, such as those — in the case of the farm Doornkop for example — between former owners and their former tenants. The restitution of land to these former owners, while of great importance to them as a source of identity and as a redress of past injustices, is not necessarily the key to solving ‘poverty, injustice and misery’ as claimed for the process of land reform in South Africa as a whole.     

Emotional Deviants and the Politics of Love: ‘spiritual friendships’ in late nineteenth-century Christchurch

William Smith, also known as ‘the man with two wives’, and Mary Colborne-Veel's ‘spiritual friendships’ are part of a significant window into the emotional politics of late nineteenth-century New Zealand. This research explores the relationship between the apparently ‘deviant’ emotions expressed by respectable middle-class political reformers like Smith and his second wife Kate Sheppard, and the political nation-state which they sought to reform. It is the contention of this article that emotional ‘deviancy’ was a reflection of the wider contemporary political situation which saw the nation in flux; the early women's movement politicised love and affection, while the fractured nation that that movement unsettled enabled emotional deviance the privilege of social sanctioning.     

Social change and social conflict in nineteenth‐century England: The use of the open‐closed village model

Following earlier articles on social change and conflict in rural England 1780–1850, we assert the relevance of the open‐closed model of social structure, particularly to the study of Burwash by Wells [1981]. This paper demonstrates that no parish was insulated from economic and other influences exerted in and by neighbouring parishes. More especially, although open parishes challenged the upper Establishment, they were not devoid of internal strife, since different interests were not subject to the overriding influence of the large landowners who dominated the populations of closed parishes.     

‘history’ is now: feminist theory and the production of historical feminisms1

Over the last decade, feminist practitioners across a variety of disciplines have been invoking history as an important grounding for both feminist politics and feminist theory. At the same time, however, insufficient account is taken of the extent to which standardized versions of ‘the feminist past’ are being invoked to represent a wide variety of feminist experiences and an equally heterogeneous set of historical circumstances and cultural contexts. It is suggested that if feminist reconceptualizations of history are to be taken seriously – if, in other words, history is the production of knowledges about the past and is itself contingent on the conditions of the present – feminist theorists must begin to reference both the imperial legacies of Anglo-European feminism and the multiplicity of feminist movements around the world. Only when feminists of all disciplinary persuasions begin to acknowledge the complex historical legacies of modern feminisms and situate their own critiques within them will feminist theory be properly grounded in, and responsive to, the exigencies of feminist history.     

The ‘Ins’ and ‘Outs’ of Women’s/Gender Studies: a response to reports of its demise in 2008

In the spring of 2008, fuelled by the impending demise of the undergraduate Women’s/Gender Studies programme at London Metropolitan University, a series of public statements proclaimed the death of Women’s/Gender Studies. This article constitutes a response to these statements. Taking a broadly European view of the state of Women’s/Gender Studies, it argues that the discipline has established a research infrastructure, mainstreamed its undergraduate curricula and its pedagogical underpinnings, and continues to attract research funding and significant numbers of postgraduate students. It finally suggests that the ‘fate’ of disciplines is not teleological but iterative.     

Land,kinship and identity: The cultural roots of agrarian agitation in eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Ireland

This paper seeks to uncover the underlying causes of agrarian agitation in eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Ireland. It argues, in contrast to existing explanations, that rural unrest was a highly complex form of popular protest, disciplined and with clear objectives. These objectives centred on the Irish peasantry's defence of traditional rights and customs with regard to the ownership, occupation and use of the land. It is further argued that these rights and customs were in turn grounded upon a system of social norms, beliefs and obligations which governed the relationship between land, kinship and identity in Irish peasant communities.     

‘Equal Laws Based upon an Equal Standard’: the Garrett Sisters,the Contagious Diseases Acts,and the sexual politics of Victorian and Edwardian feminism revisited

Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917), co-founder of the London School of Medicine for Women, and Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), leader of the constitutional suffrage movement, were centrally involved in the Victorian and Edwardian campaign for women's equality. Both women attempted to maintain a separation between the suffrage movement and the sexualized realm of the female body, which was subject to state intrusion during the debates over the Contagious Diseases Acts and again during the force-feeding of imprisoned suffragettes some forty years later. But the Garretts had to negotiate the intersection of gender, class, and sexual politics in order to advance the cause of feminist social reform.     

Rules of thumb: British history and ‘imperial culture’ in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain1

Abstract

This paper examines the traditions of both British imperial and British domestic historiography and calls for a re-mapping of both so that the so-called separate spheres of ‘home’ and ‘away’ may be brought back into the same fields of debate. Its central claim is that imperial ideology and its effects were not phenomena ‘out there’. Empire was not a singular place; nor did ‘home’ exist in isolation from it. In spite of the polarization, which has been characteristic of their historiographies, their relationship was dialectic rather than dichotomous. These insights, while derived in part from new trends inside British history itself, owe both their theoretical rigor and their self-avowedly political concerns to post-colonial and feminist historiographical work, which together insist on the desacralization of ‘Britain’ proper.     

Ironies of Emancipation: Changing Configurations of ‘Women's Work’ in the ‘Mission of Sisterhood’ to Indian Women

On her arrival in Travancore in 1819 Mrs Mault, as wife of the new missionary, immediately set about establishing a school for convert girls and a ‘lace industry’ to employ convert women. Her actions reflect that pattern of activism and organization historians of gender and imperialism have identified as the ‘mission of domesticity’ conducted by European and North American Christian missionary women to their non-Christian ‘sisters’ in the colonial empires being established by their respective nation-states throughout the nineteenth century. Mrs Mault was herself among the first generation of missionary women to pioneer this specifically female branch of colonizing endeavour, designed to ‘emancipate’ Indian women in terms of the norms of metropolitan ideologies of femininity and womanhood.Drawing on a case study of the London Missionary Society's activities in South Travancore, South India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I argue that this ‘mission of domesticity’ was not a straightforward transfer of conventions of marriage and motherhood to the colonial context. On the contrary, the project was from the start caught in a complex and contradictory web of agency and discourse which ‘remade’ not only convert women but missionary women as well. Central to this process of refiguring femininity on the imperial fulcrum were changes to the meanings of ‘work’ in relation to both ‘home’ and womanhood, articulated through a religious idiom and framework of action. The consequences of these processes, the article argues, were somewhat contrary. On the one hand, the Indian Christian woman is reconstructed as a wife, mother and worker, while on the other, the missionary women are bifurcated: the missionary wife increasingly viewed as an amateur appendage to her husband, firmly secured in the domestic sphere, while the single woman attains a new status as a professional worker.     

‘door bitches of club feminism’?: academia and feminist competency

After years of invisibility, the position of migrant women from Islamic countries now forms the core of the Dutch discourse on integration and emancipation. This article presents the downside of this visibility by showing that it is situated within a growing culturalist discourse. In addition to being culturalist, this discourse focuses on the shortcomings of migrants and is flavoured with a touch of new realism in its argument that it is a right to break the taboos of migrants. More visibility for migrant women will not help their empowerment if the basic assumptions of the dominant discourse are not challenged. Through presenting a case study, this article shows how this visibility can even strengthen the border between the Dutch as ‘emancipated self’ and Islamic migrants as the ‘unemancipated other’. In so doing it reinforces boundaries instead of alliances, isolation instead of empowerment, and suppression instead of emancipation.     

Beyond the ‘big three’: the development of feminist theory into the 1990s

Abstract

This paper examines some of the changes that have taken place in Western feminist theory during its recent past. It begins by questioning whether previous practices of labelling feminism as liberal, Marxist or radical are still useful. It then considers those influences that have especially effected feminist thinking, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis and post-structuralism. The paper argues that the nature of feminist theory has been profoundly transformed since the early days of second wave feminism. While some of these changes have been positive, others have had unfortunate and negative consequences. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to how the usefulness and political potential of feminist theorising might be harnessed for the future.     

‘Quite the opposite of a feminist’: Phyllis McGinley,Betty Friedan and discourses of gender in mid-century American culture

This article examines the relationship between feminist and anti-feminist discourses in the period between World War II and the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). It takes as its primary focus the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘housewife poet’ and self-proclaimed anti-feminist, Phyllis McGinley. McGinley was a successful poet who has disappeared from the record since the publication in 1964 of Sixpence in her Shoe—her best-selling retort to The Feminine Mystique. Her example is important because it gives voice to the much-maligned suburban housewife and offers a spirited alternative to Friedan's reading of white, middle-class domesticity as always and inevitably oppressive. The article offers a close reading of McGinley's work and situates it in relation to its historical and cultural contexts (specifically the highly charged domain of suburban domesticity) and to its wider readership. It compares her anti-feminism with that of other anti-feminist writers of the period, thereby illuminating the tensions and contradictions in contemporary debates.