Women,Science and Culture: Science in the Nineteenth-century Periodical

The Victorian periodical press offers unique insights into many diverse areas of nineteenth-century experience, and the complex relations between gender, science and culture in particular, yet it has been consistently marginalized as a primary resource in academic study. The Science in the Nineteenth-century Periodical (SciPer) project at the universities of Sheffield and Leeds is creating a new point of access to a wide range of non-specialist periodicals across the century by means of a fully searchable electronic index. By detailing the entire contents of each journal, and not just those articles that have a clear scientific relevance, it becomes clear that science formed a fundamental and integral part of nineteenth-century culture. The electronic index, moreover, will include hypertext cross-reference links that will allow the user to identify a dialogic pattern of encounters between ostensibly diverse articles, rather than only to browse in a simple chronological mode. By adopting this innovative approach, the SciPer database will reveal the manifold intertextual relations between the fictional works of women writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and the scientific articles that often appeared in the pages of the same magazines, and will show that writers of both sexes and across several different genres actively engaged in vibrant interdisciplinary debates concerning scientific issues in a forum provided by the periodical. Although the SciPer database itself is not specifically focused on issues of gender, the index will include several periodicals aimed explicitly at a female readership and, by providing access to titles still rarely utilized in modern scholarship, it will offer further insights into the important contemporary debates about women and science, as well as the more subtle ways, in which gendered imagery was employed within scientific discourse. This article details some critical findings from Punch , The English Womans Domestic Magazine , Cornhill Magazine and the Review of Reviews .     

The Female Body and Reviews of Women Pianists in 1950s London

Women pianists in London in the 1950s, performing mainstream repertoire (Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt and Chopin) as well as modern pieces which demanded stamina, physicality and bravura, were often the subject of negative reviews. The critics’ attitudes towards them seems to echo the prevailing Freudian mantra, ‘anatomy is destiny’: women, generally smaller than men, apparently possessing less power and mental capacity, were deemed unfit for this repertoire. But if some women pianists demonstrated ‘unusual’ (for women) physical and mental power, successfully performing long and difficult pieces, they too were damned by the critics, because they did not fit the traditional notion of femininity. In this article, the author demonstrates the magnitude of the effect of the cultural image of women on the reception of both the ‘feminine’ and ‘unfeminine’ women pianists in 1950s London.     

The Subversive Stitch: Female craft,culture, and ecriture

By making an embroiderer her central narrative voice and embroidery both the structural and the thematic focus of her most recent novel (Le Passé empiété [The Back Stitch]), Marie Cardinal complements Rozsika Parker's efforts (The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine) to trace the parallel histories of embroidery and femininity through the novel. For both Parker and Cardinal, embroidery figures the creative tension between conformity and subversion that Cardinal posits as common to all women and that results in Le Passe empiete in a complex reevaluation not only of the female artist herself but of both the traditional and the feminist critical context within which she currently creates. In particular, Cardinal explores the relationship between women's traditional domestic tasks and their artistic production, and she uses the specific qualities of embroidery to rethink common assumptions about literary influence and authority, the writing process, and the mythic tradition.     

Organising and Representing Women: the historical case of the Female Confectioners Union

How women workers’ interests should be represented and advanced by unions underpins debates about the merits of separate organising. This study of an Australian women's union, the Female Confectioners Union, shows how separate organising created union space and voice for female confectionery workers. Set against this was inter-organisational conflict that developed between the union and the existing male-dominated union, in which separate organising became a contested strategy. For the Female Confectioners Union, this conflict not only reinforced the necessity of separate organising to ensure that the interests of women workers remained a central union concern but also what form the separate organising should take.