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.     

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.     

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.     

Helen Taylor’s work for land nationalisation in Great Britain and Ireland 1879–1907: women’s political agency in the British Victorian land movement

This article explores the contribution made by Helen Taylor to the Victorian land reform movement, 1879–1890. It concentrates on her political agency after 1882 to evidence that the importance of Taylor was three-fold. She was a leading activist in all land reforming groups and drew large audiences; she had independent means which enabled her to fund the organisations she was involved in and exert influence on them; and her background as John Stuart Mill’s step-daughter and intellectual collaborator put her in the position of being able to introduce the leading players in the 1880s land campaigns to one another. Taylor introduced Henry George and Michael Davitt to the leadership of the British land movement and thus enabled their involvement. Davitt’s and George’s importance in British land campaigns has been documented by historians but the woman who was instrumental in facilitating their involvement has been largely forgotten.     

‘The Trojan Horse’: Communist Entrism in the British Labour Party, 1933–43

Abstract

Entrism – the infiltration of political organisations by competitors – is typically associated with Trotskyism. Large-scale Communist entrism in the British Labour Party has been neglected by historians and reference in the literature is slight and impressionistic. Archival material permits reconstruction of a sustained attempt by the Comintern and British Communists to subvert Labour Party policy between 1933 and 1943. Documenting the development and dimensions of Communist entrism, this article establishes that, by 1937, 10% of Communist Party (CPGB) members were operating secretly inside British Labour, campaigning to change its policy on affiliation and engineer a Popular Front. Biographies of 55 such Communists provide new data and permit a typology of entrist activity. The episode sheds new light on Popular Front initiatives and the extent of genuine support for them within Labour. It illuminates the conspiratorial side of Stalinist activity at a time when the CPGB presented itself as a conventional British party.     

The 1968–1974 labour upsurge in Britain and America: a critical history,and a look at what might have been

This paper examines the last notable period of working-class unrest in Britain and America, the 1968–74 ‘upsurge’. It questions the widespread dismissal of such workplace-based, ‘economistic’ forms of resistance as disconnected from more explicitly political forms of rebellion. The explosive, dynamic character of the rebellion is argued to have contained both the potential and actuality of a transformed consciousness and thus fundamental questioning of existing political and economic relations. The loss of ‘what might have been’ is attributed less to absence of a grand political narrative, despite the ruling-class panic of 1974, than to a simple failure to build cross-class networks which could have achieved the coordination and unity of often separate struggles.     

The genesis of a scientific community: the British Universities Industrial Relations Association and the field of industrial relations in Britain,c.1950–1983

Scholarship dealing with labour-related topics has been prevalent in Britain from the early twentieth century, but a scientific field dedicated exclusively to the study of industrial relations did not emerge until the second half of the century. Although the socio-economic context of the post-war years provided a fertile ground for the field's emergence, the reason for its eventual development was a socialization process that took place in the early 1950s with the establishment of an informal group of industrial relations scholars. The group would grow to become the British Universities Industrial Relations Association and its activities would help the emerging community develop a ‘disciplinary identity’ and form the institutions that would subsequently define the field of Industrial Relations.     

Creating a (gendered?) military identity: the Women's auxiliary air force in Great Gritain in the second world war

The resistance of women to the vote is often regarded as a form of anti-feminism, particularly when it has its roots in an attachment to gender roles. However, the arguments of the women of the Radical Right who opposed the franchise at the beginning of the twentieth century not only contributed to the public debate on woman's role in society but also unmistakably evoked some of the teachings of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which, far from challenging the patriarchal ideology of the separate spheres, celebrated domestic virtues and invited the ‘Sex’ to regard the private world as its natural preserve. By appropriating a Wollstonecraftian kind of citizenship, based on the belief that woman's natural sphere was the home and maternity her true vocation, the Antis emerge paradoxically in the history of the cause more as the heiresses of the mother of feminism herself than as her fundamental opponents.     

‘Drunken Tans’: Representations of Sex and Violence in the Anglo-Irish War (1919–21)

War is a highly gendered experience which is both informed by and informs constructions of masculinity and femininity. The dominant depiction of masculine heroes and feminine victims simplifies the complex intersections of militarism, nationalism and gendered roles and identities. Focusing on a case study of the Anglo-Irish War or War of Independence (1919–1921), this paper examines how violence against women, especially sexual violence, was written about and reported in ways which framed representations of Irish and British masculinity and Irish femininity.In addition, by analysing a range of varied sources including newspapers, autobiographical accounts and recorded testimonies, this paper attempts to assess the extent to which violence against women formed a key aspect of military practice in the war. In conclusion, I engage with some of the difficulties faced by researchers today in exploring evidence of gendered violence in specific historical, cultural and militarized contexts.     

Simone Téry (1897–1967): writing the history of the present in inter-war France

Simone Téry (1897–1967), French journalist and novelist, joined the French Communist Party in the mid-1930s after visiting the Soviet Union. She worked as a correspondent for L'Humanité, Vendredi and Regards; the latter post took her to Spain during the Civil War. The resulting texts, Front de la liberté: Espagne 1937–1938 (1938) and Où l'aube se lève (1945), form the basis of my analysis of Téry's desire to write the history of the present in inter-war France. These texts, a work of reportage and a novel respectively, illustrate the relationship between the poetic, or imaginative, and the historical, or factual, in historical fiction. This relationship is particularly relevant to the literary history of 1930s France, given the highly politicized nature of literary production in the period and the resulting debates over the nature and future of the realist novel. Téry's rejection of modernism in favour of socialist realism suggests a conversion, common in left-wing writers of the period, to the notion that the modernist text is incapable of ‘containing’ history. The essay raises the question of French women writers’ relationship to committed literature in the 1930s, and demonstrates that women were active in this domain.     

Political Life in the Shadows: the post suffrage political career of S. Margery Fry (1874–1958)

Drawing upon research on the working life of the penal reformer and educationalist S. Margery Fry (1874–1958) and her role as a policy-maker, this article argues that there were alternative ways in which women could participate in post-suffrage political culture, other than through elected office or party politics. The article positions Margery Fry both as a feminist and a public intellectual and argues that the First World War and the granting of women's suffrage allowed a step change to take place in Fry's career, taking her from a regional political stage to a national and international one. It also contends that she was able to wield considerable power ‘in the shadows’ as a policy advisor.     

Peasants,the state and policy constraints: The political economy of rural development in peninsular Malaysia 1957–69

This article draws attention to two propositions concerning the analysis of public policy formation. First, such analysis should take account of inherent constraints that the state faces in the formulation and implementation of its economic policies. Second, policy analysis must necessarily deal with specific historical contexts within which constraints on state policy formation operate. The main purpose of this article is to apply these two propositions to a study of the rural development strategy pursued by the Alliance government in Peninsular Malaysia. A second purpose is to derive from the empirical case certain theoretical implications which can be relevant for the analysis of the role of the state in economic development.     

Gaining a Public Voice: Ottoman women's struggle to survive in the print life of early twentieth-century Ottoman society,and the example of Halide Edib (1884–1964)

After delving into the emergence of women in Ottoman print culture and the challenges associated with this process, this paper focuses on women's periodicals which provided a platform for women writers, education for a female audience and a means of communication between both parties. Analysing the social and technical challenges of establishing independently run and long-lived women's journals under the restrictive circumstances of the early twentieth century's gender-segregated Ottoman society, this article not only documents women's struggle for survival in the publishing world but also explains why women's periodicals and their female authors had an ephemeral print life. After acknowledging the role of print culture in the women's emancipation movement, the focus is on Halide Edib as an exceptional example in terms of her survival and transformation from unknown to world-renowned author. Her struggle to enter and become established in the print life of the late Ottoman society illustrates the potential and available positions for women in the publishing sphere and explains the failure of her female contemporaries to achieve success in this area.     

The Liverpool Dock Strike, 1995–98: a resurgence of solidarity in the age of globalisation

As the 20th anniversary of the 1995–1998 Liverpool Dockers’ Strike approaches, this case of industrial action should not be dismissed as a reminder of yet another nail in the coffin of organised labour. Rather, this event needs to be viewed more optimistically in hindsight as a symbol that working-class consciousness and systems of solidarity had not vanished entirely from Britain after the crushing collapse of domestic manufacturing and the fall of the miners in 1985. Indeed, the Liverpool dockers invented a fresh campaign of industrial action at this time, led more from the ‘bottom-up’ than most other labour protests in the past. Fuelled by a cognisant awareness of both community and workplace experience within the context of popular historical memory, this industrial action played significant roles in reconfiguring and adapting solidarity in this new era of rentier, global capitalism. It is appropriate we recall working-class militancy in a city whose own historical narrative is often described as ‘exceptional’ when one reflects upon Liverpool’s long entrenched culture of opposition.     

Fighting for the ‘Privileges of Citizenship’: the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), feminism and the women's movement, 1928–1945

In 1928 the YWCA welcomed the introduction of the universal suffrage by declaring that women in Britain were now entitled to the full political privileges of citizenship. This article will explore the way in which the YWCA, previously omitted from histories of the British women's movement, sought to educate and inform its members about the rights and duties of democratic citizenship. The involvement of the YWCA in citizenship education and its role in campaigning for the citizenship rights of women will be assessed, with a particular focus on workers’ rights and the appointment of women police. Despite its reluctance to be identified as overtly feminist, the YWCA was determined to ensure that women had access to social and economic rights within a democratic society. The article therefore argues that a new definition of the women's movement is required in order to uncover the full extent of female engagement in politics and public debate in the aftermath of the suffrage.     

Abortion Policy and Social Suffering: the objectification of Romanian women's bodies under communism (1966–1989)

The aim of this article is to address why and how the solution to the demographic decline envisaged by the Romanian communist state did not alleviate its repercussions on society, but rather generated untoward social, moral and gender effects that exacerbated the existing social pathology. This study centres on the social suffering experienced by Romanian women, revealing the close connection between their predicament and the state's flawed approach to the problem and focusing on their lived experiences of oppression, pain, shame and illness. Their suffering is framed as a response to forms of loss: the loss of health, the loss of dignity, and the loss of self.     

Beginning an ‘Extraordinary Opportunity’: Eleanor Roosevelt,Molly Dewson,and the expansion of women's boundaries in the Democratic Party, 1924–1934

This article contributes to recent reinterpretations of women's participation in the United States' political system in the 1920s and 1930s by arguing that the years 1924 through 1934 demonstrated an expansion of female boundaries in the Democratic Party. Eleanor Roosevelt became the first agent in this process through her involvement in both the New York State Democratic Party and in social justice feminism. Her protégée, Molly Dewson, continued the expansion as the first full-time director of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, also helping to re-establish social justice feminism's national prominence.