The awakened instinct: vegetarianism and the women's suffrage movement in Britain

Abstract

This article examines the extent to which vegetarianism was found in the militant and non-militant strands of the women's suffrage movement, and looks at some of the other movements contributing to vegetarian and suffrage thinking. The arguments linking the two movements are discussed, ranging from the psychological identification of women with animals as victims of male brutality, to the empowering idea that women confined to a homemaker's role could still help to create a new and more compassionate world by adopting a vegetarian diet. Vegetarianism and the women's movement are seen as linked with each other, and also with theosophy and socialism, as complementary ways of creating that longed-for new world.     

Cicely Hamilton's warriors: dramatic reinventions of militancy in the British women's suffrage movement

The campaigns for women's enfranchisement in Britain have been associated with public spectacle, metropolitan activity and sensational acts of militant law-breaking. The circumstances of the development, adaptation and performance of Cicely Hamilton's play, A Pageant of Great Women, provide an insight into the dynamics of local suffrage activism. This forgotten play reached several thousand spectators at a time all over Britain, promoting the activity of women's history-making as much as women's suffrage. It normalised the idea of women's achievements, and the cross-dressing warriors especially, drawn from several countries, unsettled a dominant anglocentric perspective, normalising militancy as national heroism.     

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.     

Sisters,not demons: the influence of british suffragists on the American suffrage movement

British suffragettes were an important, if controversial, influence on the American suffrage movement, for the successful achievement of the franchise in 1920 was helped by the adoption of the suffragettes' militant tactics in the final stage of the campaign. When Harriot Stanton Blatch returned to the USA in 1902 after living for twenty years in England, she found that the suffrage movement her mother, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had helped to found was stagnant. Blatch energized the movement in New York City by recruiting working-class women and organizing colorful parades and other dramatic events, strategies she had learned from Emmeline Pankhurst. Blatch arranged a successful tour of the USA for Pankhurst in 1909.     

Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs Humphry) and the opposition to women's suffrage[1]

This article analyses the tensions and contradictions in the work of the conservative writer and social reformer, Mary Augusta Ward and her role in the development of a constructive anti-suffragism designated as the ‘forward policy’. Ward's representation of the suffragette in her novel, Delia Blanchflower (1915), is discussed. Concentrating on Ward's principled support for women and her reforming imagination, the article shows how she shared much in common with feminists of her day and suggests ways in which her writing may be mined by historians and literary scholars interested in the history of women's suffrage.     

Kinship and friendship: quaker women's networks and the women's movement sandra stanley holton

Women Friends (or ‘Quakers’) were largely absent from the debates on the position of women in Britain in the 1830s-50s. But a significant group of women Quakers emerged at the forefront of organisations formed in the 1860s to campaign for Women's rights, participation in which was still by no means a norm among their co-religionists. A notable presence among them was a group of women Friends, identified here as the Bright circle, linked by kinship, religion and radical politics. This article analyses the relationship between public and private lives among the Bright circle, especially in terms of the strength of the political networks on which they were able to draw. It examines the church culture of Friends in general, the domestic culture of this circle in particular, and the basis of its networks in domestic life. It concludes that the values and activities on which this network was built illustrate the way in which personal and public lives may overlap, so that the women among this circle were able to sustain identities that were authoritative, and simultaneously family-centred, outward-looking and publiclyminded.     

American anti-feminist women: Comparing the rhetoric of opponents of the equal rights amendment with that of opponents of women's suffrage

This paper examines the rhetoric of American women opponents of the Suffrage Amendment 1890 to 1919 and of the Equal Rights Amendment 1970 to 1984. Basic to the rhetoric of those opponents is a belief that men and women are so different from each other that they must be treated differently under the law.     

Feminism,peace, and civil liberties: Women's role in the origins of the World War I civil liberties movement

Historians of the women's movement in the World War I era tend, understandably, to concentrate on the final heroic chapter of the suffrage campaign. Since the majority of suffragists followed their leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, into the war effort after April 6, 1917, suffragist‐feminist patriotism is a dominant theme. Recently historians have begun to chronicle women's pre‐war and wartime peace work, particularly through the aegis of the Woman's Peace Party, founded in early 1915.¹ Women's civil liberties activism during the war and in the Red Scare aftermath is still uncharted terrain. There is, to date, little appreciation of the way the World War I era experience in the United States influenced a small but determined and articulate number of left‐wing feminists to become civil‐libertarian activists. In this article I examine women's involvement in several important civil liberties organizations and argue that the convictions and activities of women not only helped to shape the agenda of the burgeoning civil liberties movement but also to influence federal public policy, particularly with respect to treatment of conscientious objectors, political prisoners, and “enemy aliens.” I also suggest that some feminists involved in both antiwar and civil liberties work during the war era came to see how militarism, war, and misogyny are related in western society, an insight which informed the thought and activities of the post‐war women's peace movement.     

Gutter politics: women newsies and the suffrage press

The article examines the role of the suffrage news-seller in light of the important role official organs came to play for organisations within the movement and the competing claims the act of selling placed on women unaccustomed to venturing into the streets and facing public hostility. The argument draws on evidence from a variety of newspapers, with a particular emphasis on Votes for Women, to demonstrate the extent to which organisations tried to encourage and reward volunteers to sell papers. These positive appeals and testimonials found in the periodicals are read against the more ambivalent and negative accounts of the experiences of paper-sellers found in suffrage fiction and autobiographies which deal more directly with the personal costs of these attempts to raise the profile of the movement. The conclusion stresses how the contradictions between such sources can offer insights into the dilemmas faced by women activists in these years.     

The women's movement in Bulgaria in a life story

This article is a first attempt to research the activity of Dimitrana Ivanova, one of the most prominent Bulgarian feminists and, for almost two decades, chairwoman of the major feminist organisation in the country, the Bulgarian Women's Union (founded in 1901). It explores the social conditions of her life and provides a perspective for the understanding of gender relations in modern Bulgarian history. The article highlights the key issues that were addressed by the women's movement in Bulgaria as well as the international context in which Bulgarian feminism was situated.     

Feminism, Aestheticism and the Limits of Law

This article seeks to identify and address the normative void that resides at the heart of postmodernist-feminist theory, and to propose a philosophical framework – beyond postmodernism, but incorporating its central insights – for thinking through the normative questions with which feminists are inevitably confronted in their engagements with positive law. Two varieties of postmodernist-feminism are identified and critically analysed: the ‘corporeal feminism’ of Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler, which seeks to ground feminist critical practice in the irruptive capacities of the material body considered as an arte fact of social construction; and the deconstructionist feminism of Drucilla Cornell, for whom ‘the feminine’ is an indeterminate but disruptive force beyond its construction in law and in other social sites. The first component of the argument elaborated here is that each of these approaches ultimately reduces to a form of aestheticism which is incapable of generating a worthwhile and workable feminist approach to the restructuring of politics and law. The second component of the argument involves a return to aesthetics, in particular to the philosophical aesthetics of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, it will be suggested, yields a framework of concepts which, duly re-manipulated, could speak to the very concerns that have inspired postmodernist-feminism: how to attend to (bodily) particularity while avoiding the dangers associated with ‘essentialism’; and how to theorise the propensity of the unrepresentable power of the feminine to exceed both embodied human capacities and the confining rein of socially privileged rationalities. Crucially, however it also responds to a set of preoccupations – those of the feminist lawyer – that cannot be accommodated by postmodernism: how to translate embodied experience into (legal) norms; generalise from the particular; seek consensus; and codify an endless potentiality in the form of law. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.