‘Queen of the Bristol Channel Ports’: the intersection of gender and civic identity in Cardiff,c.1880–1914

This article explores how civic identity could shape, and be shaped by, gender distinctions during the period of commercial and municipal development. It argues that women's relationship to the urban scene was more nuanced than theories of exclusion imply, gender and civic identity being mutually constitutive. Through the case study of Cardiff, the article advocates the need for deeper analysis of the way regional and national complexities permeated gendered civic sentiments. Notions of femininity in Wales had been defined in opposition to England ever since the 1847 ‘Treachery of the Blue Books’. However, Cardiff's relatively anglicised status and aspirations in the local and global urban hierarchy meant there was often a desire by civic leaders to emulate what was occurring elsewhere, or to develop their own definition of Welsh femininity. Consequently, these competing gender ideals underlined Cardiff's civic and national—Welsh and British—identity.     

The Women's Movement and ‘Class Struggle’: gender,class formation and political identity in women's strikes, 1968–78.

ABSTRACT

Women workers’ industrial disputes were of fundamental importance to the WLM, reflected in the deeds of activists and early participant-histories. These disputes were sites of worker-employer conflict and conflict between feminists and the wider Labour Movement. This article considers how these differing interpretations related to the striking women themselves. It focuses on four key disputes and analyses contemporary reports and the accounts of those involved. It argues women strikers' particular experiences of trade unionism, class politics and feminism resulted in gendered, but still fundamentally class-based, identities, and concludes by considering the position of women workers' industrial actions in feminist histories.     

Redefining institutional identity: the YWCA challenge to extraterritoriality in China, 1925–30

This article explores how the May 30th, 1925 Incident forced American Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) Secretaries in China to rethink their relationship with imperialism and governmental power and to redefine, in collaboration with Chinese YWCA Secretaries, the Chinese National YWCA's institutional mission. It examines the American YWCA Secretaries’ efforts to challenge extraterritorial privileges granting foreign nationals immunity from Chinese laws, among a host of other ‘unequal,’ that is, non-reciprocal rights and prerogatives, claimed by the foreign governments and based on treaties signed with the Chinese Government. It restores the American YWCA Secretaries' voices to the historical narrative of the Western response to the May 30th Incident and reveals their agency and subjectivity. Although American YWCA Secretaries failed to achieve the goal that they defined for themselves when the May 30th Incident occurred – to reorder state-to-state relations between the USA and China on a more equitable, just and ‘moral’ basis – they nonetheless achieved some success in injecting their moral discourse into the US China policy debate. Moreover, their response to May 30th produced a significant feminist achievement: they dismantled the unequal and imperialist power relations within their own organization.     

Gettin’ Down Home With the Neelys: gastro-porn and televisual performances of gender,race, and sexuality

This article illuminates how performances of gender, race, and sexuality are integrated with representations of food and food performance in contemporary American cooking television. Interrogating the intersections of food, gender, race, sexuality, and performance, this essay explores how the cable-television show, Down Home with the Neelys, depicts a nouveau gastro-porn anchored in the perceived pornographic level of blackness itself. The author reveals the ways that food and performances of food become a medium of gendering and racialization employed by American popular media. Through the lens of reality television, shows like Down Home (re)produce a certain type of black heterosexuality and gendered enactments of domesticity and space, while challenging dominant televisual reflections of black love and labor. The author argues that the Neelys self-consciously employ a vernacular aesthetic performative of “down home” (a uniquely classed, temporally–spatially situated, and sexualized blackness) to exploit the phenomenon of gastro-porn in a highly lucrative performance that signals the entangled artifice of gender, race, and sexuality. More than offering culinary expertise and education, such cooking instruction reveals the pedagogy of gender, race, and sexuality as visual lessons of a complex and contradictory authenticity. This essay reveals television cooking shows as critical sites for considering the domestic laboring of gendered and racialized sexualities. In particular, shows like Down Home evince the ways that race continues to be rendered in visual terms and the enduring edibility of blackness.     

Striking Narratives: class,gender and ethnicity in the ‘Great Grunwick Strike’, London,UK, 1976–1978

This article explores the ways in which dominant narratives and images constructed the industrial dispute that took place between 1976 and 1978 at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in Britain's capital city, London. Since 1978, this strike has achieved almost mythic status in British labour history, as the moment when the trade unions supported the demands of minority women workers. The authors argue that the dominant narratives and images disguise the complexity of events and the diversity of the strikers, constructing a narrative of success and celebration, even though the strikers were not re-employed.     

Women's studies and the women's movement in Britain: origins and evolution, 1970–2000

The article is based on research carried out in 1998-99 which involved interviewing United Kingdom based women who had been responsible for introducing degree courses in women's studies into British universities and polytechnics. The interviews are records of the memories of those women as they look back on a political moment when they were engaged in collective attempts to transform the academic curriculum. Personal memories are placed alongside accounts and debates which appeared in printed sources, such as books and newsletters from the British Women's liberation movement from 1970 onwards. The article also reflects on the process in which past events and personal memoirs move from stories to histories, enter the archive, and begin to acquire the status of history.     

transgender identity,sexual versus gender ‘rights’ and the tools of the Indian state

Sexual and gender minorities in contemporary India are formed in the interstices between the neoliberal, Hindutva state; transnational discourses of liberal democracy and sexual ‘rights’; as well as cosmopolitan culture and global LGBT movements. As is evident in recent court judgments and legislation, particularly since 2014, postcolonial Hindu nationalism has created cultural conditions where forms of queer gender are permissible while queer sexuality is generally unacceptable. In recent years, significant developments have focused on transgender communities, complicating activism surrounding sexual and gender identities. By positing some identities as state-sanctioned acceptable citizens and others as not, certain ‘transgender’ individuals are conceptualised as bearers of rights while finding other facets of their identities discriminated against and maintained as illegal. The 2014 Supreme Court NALSA v. Union of India judgment and The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016 passed by the Lok Sabha, alongside further judgments and legislation affecting wider LGBT communities, have kept discourses fixed on sexual and gender identities and their relationship to Indian citizenship at the forefront of discussions of gender justices and injustices in India today. Focusing on recent judicial and legislative developments, this paper examines how transgender rights are being granted in the context of the neoliberal, Hindutva state and considers which forms of transgender identity are currently being conceptualised as legitimate and authentic in such discourses, which can serve to bolster larger right-wing visions and ideologies of the nation and its citizens. It contemplates the ways in which gender ‘justices’, framed in relation to both transnational LGBT rights discourses and right-wing agendas, are conceptualised and played out on the bodies of sexual and gender minorities.     

Indispensable Outcasts: Harvest Laborers in the Wheat Belt of the Middle West, 1890–1925

This article assesses the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) during the presidency of John J. Sweeney, which lasted from 1995 until 2009. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including press accounts and the AFL-CIO's own papers, it provides one of the first scholarly assessments of the entire Sweeney presidency. Sweeney won office in the first contested election in the AFL-CIO's history, and he came into power promising to revitalize the Federation, which is the largest labor federation in the Western world. Under Sweeney, the AFL-CIO invested an unprecedented amount of resources into both organizing and political mobilization, two key areas. In the early years of his presidency, Sweeney oversaw some important gains, particularly in the organizing arena, but the 2000 presidential election proved to be a turning point. After 2000, Sweeney's reforms were undermined primarily by external factors, particularly mounting corporate opposition, deindustrialization, and a hostile political climate, although internal resistance and division also played a role. As a result, a major campaign to secure labor law reform fell short, and union density continued to decline, yet the rate of decline was slower than it had been in the 1980s and early 1990s. Overall, although the results of Sweeney’s efforts were mixed, the important role that the AFL-CIO played in electing Barack Obama partly justified Sweeney’s emphasis on political mobilization.     

Between Convergence and Exceptionalism: Americans and the British Model of Labor Relations,c. 1867–1920

Between the late 1860s and the aftermath of the First World War, American discourse about the ‘labor problem’—relations among workers, unions, employers, and the state—was permeated by comparisons. Reformers looked especially toward Britain, the first industrial nation, for clues about how to build an industrial relations system. This article explores how three generations of American employers reflected on what Britain's experience with relatively strong, recognized, legally secure unions could teach about how to handle the challenge of American labor. Their interest was serious, sustained, if discontinuous. It was most important at key moments of decision in the early 1900s and in 1918–19 when the Open Shop was first built, and then refurbished and defended. Examination of their understanding and representations of the British model of labor relations aids our appreciation of the ideological framework within which they conceived and constructed the American Way.     

Women's Liberation at the Grass Roots: a view from some English towns,c.1968–1990

ABSTRACT

Historical scholarship on the women's liberation movement (WLM) across the UK is as yet underdeveloped. This article argues against the commonly held assumption that London socialist-feminist accounts speak for England as a whole. This article examines the history of the WLM in England as refracted through a range of different English urban localities, specifically Bristol, Brighton, Norwich, Bolton and Leeds/Bradford. It attempts to show the importance of local studies to appreciate the diversity of the English women's liberation movement. The movement had very many unifying characteristics, but how they played out across the country differed according to local contexts.     

Menstrual fictions: languages of medicine and menstruation,c. 1850–1930

Abstract

Gynaecological narratives of menstruation in the late nineteenth century placed woman firmly within the orbit of domesticity by virtue of her biology. In the rhetoric of medical ‘truths’, menstruation was defined as a ‘ldisability’, a physical ‘illness’ and a threat to emotional stability. Thus, it was argued, women could not hope to achieve equality with men when the dictates of Nature (as opposed to society) stipulated that they remain mothers, carers and homemakers. This article explores the notion that narratives of menstruation were created and articulated through subjective readings of social and cultural truths: menstruation was perceived and defined through the medium of ideas relating to what femininity was and ought to be. An examination of the medical languages of menstruation articulated between 1850 and 1930 reveals that the creation of menstrual knowledge was in perpetual flux. What remained a constant, however, was the appropriation of the female body as a field for the definition of ‘difference’