Words as Deeds: debates and narratives on women's suffrage

Abstract

This article is about the experience of menstruation, a function which many women spend much of their lives concealing. It is a topic which many regard as intensely private. Some, men and women, consider it distasteful and others still, historically unchanging and inconsequential. The authors argue that menstruation has played an important role in the twentieth-century construction of ‘womanhood’, and in constituting women as ‘the other’ in the eyes of male non-menstruators. This New Zealand study draws principally on two narratives about women's bodies. One is derived from cultural representations of the modern feminine body through sanitary product advertising, some of it international in origin, covering the time span 1935 to 1969. This is considered alongside the practical lives of bodies, the personal narratives given to us by 50 women relating their experiences of menarche and subsequent periods.     

Fragments from a fading career: Personal narratives and emotional investments

In this paper I aim to document the personal journey by which I became interested in researching issues of sexuality and schooling. Something which has now become an academic quest did not start out as such. Through the use of memory‐work to generate personal narratives, I draw upon incidents from my early career as a teacher as the basis for the recollection and analysis of this personal journey. The article illustrates the ways in which my present research interest is inextricably linked to my biography as a teacher and my political and emotional investments in certain forms of pedagogic practice. Finally, the article suggests that the use of memory‐work can be a productive approach as a method for research and as a mode of analysis.     

Interactive narrators and performative readers: Gendered interfacing in Heian narratives

In Go Fish, Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner's seminal lesbian film from 1994, one of the protagonists complains that the woman who her friends want to set her up with has cupboards of herbal tea and no sex appeal. In the course of the film, the women end up together, but the joke/not-joke about lesbians and their fondness for herbal tea remains. What can we make of this conjunction? What does the linkage of tea and lesbianism connote and how does tea function within representational economies of lesbianism? On the one hand, tea functions as prelude to eroticism and codes for the opacity of lesbian sex. On the other hand, it also works to consolidate stereotypes about lesbianism. In this essay, the author explores the factors that make this almost joke possible – the gendering of tea as feminine, stereotypes about lesbian feminism – and examine ways in which it has been deployed as a form of lesbian shorthand. In working to understand why tea has evoked this stereotype, a sense of American counter-cultures, Orientalism, and historical memory come together to paint second-wave lesbian feminism as out of touch, politically inactive, and intimidated by sex. But what alternatives might tea open towards? Focusing on tea, then, gives us access to economies of desire and pleasure that both build on perceptions of radical feminism and expands upon it by establishing a vernacular of fluids, taste, and tactility.     

Virile womanhood: Olive Schreiner's narratives of a master race

Olive Schreiner's enormously successful novels, as well as her feminist tract Woman and Labor (1911), enact conflicts between ideologies of motherhood and the desire for female independence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a white woman from Southern Africa, Schreiner feels affinities with both colonial rulers and colonized people of South Africa; her writing uses myths of transcultural motherhood to mediate between these opposed political positions. The allegorical endings of Schreiner's narratives are at odds with the complexities of gender and sexuality imagined in her powerful prose.     

Writing suffragette history: the contending autobiographical narratives of the pankhursts

On 10 October 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), an organisation that was to become the most notorious of the groupings campaigning for the parliamentary vote for women in Edwardian England. Their militant campaign was led by Emmeline and her eldest daughter, Christabel, the WSPU's Chief Organiser, the two younger Pankhurst daughters, Sylvia and Adela, also becaming active in the movement. While all four women wrote accounts of the campaign, the focus here is on the published autobiographical narratives of the three elder Pankhurst women – Emmeline's My Own Story (1914), Sylvia's The Suffragette Movement (1931) and Christabel's Unshackled (1959). In particular, the ways in which these women presented themselves and each other, and how they related the story of their private family relationships as mother, daughters and siblings, is explored     

birth,belonging and migrant mothers: narratives of reproduction in feminist migration studies

This article seeks to interrogate the category of the ‘political’ through an exploration of the present trajectory of feminist peace activism in Sri Lanka. It provides a critical appraisal of current strategies adopted by the majority of feminist organizations that seem to suggest a shift from ‘refusal’ to ‘request’. This results in the resort to more ‘feel safe’ campaigns, rather than the placement of oneself in an antagonistic and oppositional relationship with the state, which continuously calls the political into question. It concludes by considering two other kinds of political trajectories and the disparate conceptual challenges each offers.     

Elspeth Huxley: gender,empire and narratives of nation, 1935-64

Abstract

This article explores the impact of empire on narratives of the British nation during a period of decline of British colonial rule through a study of Elspeth Huxley's successive reworkings of such narratives between 1935 and 1964. It sets Huxley's work in the context of post-1945 anxieties about national decline and their connections with the loss of imperial power, and looks at the difficulties surrounding the articulation of national identity as virile and masculine in post-imperial Britain. Although anxieties about masculinities were often addressed through a misogynistic discourse which showed women emasculating men, Huxley's work suggests the significance of a counter-theme. It indicates not only her own attachment to an imperial identity but also the ways in which this continued to be articulated in the midtwentieth century as an identity with a wide appeal to a metropolitan audience, and one through which women could be incorporated into the story of nation. In exploring the terms of this incorporation, the article considers the opportunities open to women to claim to embody exemplary national qualities through the figure of the doughty, intrepid, imperial female pioneer, and the particular resonance and appeal this figure acquired in the context of the end of empire.     

Differences in mothers' and children's perceptions of urban black children's life stress

Differences between mothers' and childrens' perceptions of the children's life Stressors were evaluated among 380 urban black elementary school children and their mothers. Fifty-eight life Stressors were rated for frequency of occurrence to the children over the last year and the degree of negative affect associated with Stressors that occurred. Fifty-one items were classified into seven specific contextual categories. Predicted mother-child differences were noted for total frequency and subjective weight ratings and in mulnvariate comparisons of frequency and subjective weight ratings across the seven categories, confirming mothers' tendency to underreport in comparison with their children. Gender differences were not evident for total frequency or subjective weight ratings, but multivariate analyses support gender differences across categories. Mothers showed no consistent pattern of differences between reports for sons and daughters. Development of population-appropriate stress measures, use of stress categories, and implications for the interpretation of stress reports are discussed.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Human Development, Richmond, Virginia, March 1990. This project was supported by a postdoctoral research fellowship from the American Heart Association of the National Capital Area awarded to Dr. O'Brien, a grant from National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (HL 35261) to Dr. lannotti, and a grant from National Institute on Drug Abuse (DA 4497) to Dr. Patricia J. Bush.Received Ph.D. in developmental psychology from The Catholic University of America. Research interests include life stress during middle childhood and adolescence as it relates to risk behaviors, and family support and conflict during adolescence, particularly among siblings.Received Ph.D. in developmental psychology from The State University of New York at Buffalo. Research interests include social and environmental influences on the early use of abusable substances, the development of children's eating and exercise patterns and their relationship to cardiovascular risk factors, and the development of understanding of and attitudes toward health and illness, including heart disease and AIDS.     

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon's Travel Letters: performative identity-formation in epistolary narratives

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was a mid-nineteenth-century feminist, philanthropist and painter. This article examines Bodichon the female traveller as a way of discussing the process of identity-formation in letter-writing. It proposes reading letters through the lens of Judith Butler's theory of gender (1990). Following her concept of performativity, letter-writing is conceived as a performative act of identity-formation. The article argues that, conditioned by the addressee she wrote to, Bodichon gave written expression to her subjectivity in her travel letters via her epistolary persona. This autobiographical gesture acted as one means through which she constituted her identity as a female traveller. In turn, drawing on Butler's notion of subversive repetition, the article concludes that the resulting multiple epistolary ‘I's Bodichon developed in accordance with each of her addressees permitted her to venture into her subjectivity as a female traveller—ultimately prompting her epistolary challenge of normative codes.     

Self-image complexity and identity formation in adolescence: Longitudinal studies

Using a specially designed Q-sort technique, multiple self-images which were held by each of 60 adolescents were studied. Sixty normal and psychiatrically hospitalized adolescents were tested initially and then every 6 months for 12–18 months. Each subject's self-images were analyzed in terms of their complexity. Results showed that, as predicted, the patients and normals differed significantly. The patients had consistently lower complexity scores on each trial. The patients' and normals' patterns of complexity scores are discussed in terms of their reflecting the ego identity configurations described clinically by Erikson and operationally defined herein.This study was supported in part by a Research Scientist Development Award (Kl-70-178) from the National Institute of Mental Health.Received his medical training at Yale University School of Medicine and his psychiatric training at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Currently continuing graduate training in personality and development in the Psychology and Social Relations Department at Harvard University. Present research interests are in the interplay between fantasy and nonverbal process in interracial adolescent dyads; and in the longitudinal study of adolescent identity development.     

Parallel narratives: resistance strategies of low-wage female hospitality workers and nineteenth-century black enslaved females

This research explores control and gendered resistance strategies of female low-level hospitality workers and nineteenth-century black enslaved females by linking resistance patterns in historically documented slave narratives with oral narratives of current female hospitality workers. Emerging narratives document parallel stories of oppression, abuse, devaluation, and exploitation and focus awareness on the subordinate position of low-level workers in an oppressor/oppressed relationship. Functioning under two different economic systems, slavery and capitalism, these low-level workers’ narratives allow similar patterns of resistance to surface and help us expand our understanding of worker exploitation, female resistance, and narrative as possessing liberatory potential.     

Archives,genealogies and narratives in women workers’ education

ABSTRACT

In this paper I look back at my research of writing a genealogy of women workers’ education and I map methodological moves and strategies that I have deployed in the process. While there is a rich body of literature around genealogical histories little has been written about a genealogical approach to archival work. It is precisely in the lacuna of how to do archival research from the situated position of a feminist genealogist that I look at three interrelated methodological and epistemological planes: (a) living and re-imagining the archive; (b) working with the possibilities and limitations of archival technologies of the self and (c) considering the visual turn in the era of the digital revolution. While I perceive archival research as a process, I also take the archive as an event, marking discontinuities and ruptures in our modes of analysis and interpretation.