Pills,potions, and purgatives: women and abortion methods in Ireland, 1900–1950

This article examines women's efforts to induce miscarriage in Ireland (the Irish Free State, Éire, and the Republic) from 1900 to 1950. It demonstrates that, when possible, Irish women avoided surgical procedures, preferring instead to consume pills, potions, and purgatives to cause abortion. Irish women viewed emmenagogues and abortifacients as more natural than surgery and in keeping with women's traditions; these substances, they understood, had been used for centuries to restore menstruation and return the female body to normalcy and health. Overall, it was control—control over the methods of abortion and control over what they put into their own bodies, as well as autonomy when it came to managing their own reproductive health—that mattered most to Irish women seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Irish women's abortion efforts expose their resolve to manage their reproductive lives and thus remind us how they sometimes rejected the dictates of the conservative twentieth-century state-Church consensus, bypassing legislation and negotiating religious cultural norms.     

Left Activism,Succour and Selfhood: the epistolary friendship of two revolutionary mothers in 1970s Britain

At the height of mass activity on the Left, the ascendancy of the women's liberation movement (WLM), and the beginnings of real social and personal change for men and women, the 1970s are increasingly seen as the decade when sixties permissiveness began to be truly felt in Britain. This article draws upon a personal archive of correspondence from this turbulent decade, between two revolutionary women, Di Parkin and Annie Howells. It argues that the women's letters form an important contribution to new understandings about the construction of the post-war gendered self. The letters represent an interchange of motherhood, domesticity, far-left politics, and close female friendship. The article will show how the women's epistolary friendship offers intimate insight into female self-fashioning at a breakthrough social and political moment in 1970s Britain. As they reflected on some of the key political and social themes of the decade—class, labour, race and gender relations, as well as international politics—Di and Annie sought to negotiate themselves in relation to shifting discourses and social patterns. Writing as relational female subjects and individuals, the women's letters became simultaneously a private and shared space in which to compose themselves as women, revolutionaries and feminists, and autonomous sexual subjects. As a result, this article will show, the epistolary lives of these two radical women inform valuable understanding about some of the complex ways in which post-war individuals used available cultural and political resources to find meaning in their lives.     

Feminism,imperialism and race: a dialogue between India and Britain

Abstract

During the partition period and up to 1918, Polish women's interests and aspirations outside the family were in increasingly frequent cases directed to taking up paid work and resorting to other measures in order to sustain their family. In other cases women's activity was shaped by experiences of resistance to national and sometimes also religious discrimination. In the early twentieth century only small groups of women put forward demands for equality, and even if they did so, they usually thought that this would be possible only after the rebirth of an independent foolish state. It is to this supreme aim that they subordinated their interest and their struggle for equality.     

Women's political participation in inter-war Poland: opportunities and limitations

Abstract

This article analyses women's participation in public lifewithin the framework of the democratic-parliamentarian Polish state (Poland's Second Republic), rebuilt in the wake of the First World War. It examines the activity of women in parliamentary elections in connection with obtaining political rights equal to those enjoyed by men, as well as the role of women's representation in the two male-dominated chambers of Parliament (the Sejm and the Senate). The minimal presence of women in the state apparatus and in political parties and professional organisations is explained in relation to male hostility towards women's active participation in political life, religious opposition (especially from the Catholic Church) and the unwillingness of women themselves to become engaged in ‘pure politics’. Finally, it examines the rapid growth of women's associations (cultural, educational, cooperative, and professional) which, whilst weakly linked to feminism, bonded with competing political parties and blocks. The associations were divided along the lines of national allegiances within the multiethnic state and, during the 1930s in particular (the era of the authoritarian rule of Pi?sudski and the socalled sanacja camp), succumbed to nationalistic tendencies. Nevertheless, it is possible to see women's growing involvement in education and professional careers as a form of participation in public life.     

Informing Red Power and Transforming the Second Wave: Native American women and the struggle against coerced sterilization in the 1970s

It is argued that despite formidable foes—including powerful feminist organizations and Native American rights groups—Indigenous women's activism had an important influence on the larger movement for the termination of sterilization abuse in 1970s USA. Their work highlighted coerced sterilization as a most agonizing example of compromised tribal sovereignty—and demanded that political leaders address it. The article describes the tangible achievements of these women in effecting federal regulations as well as their influence on mainstream American feminist ideology and Indian Country's interpretation of women's rights as sovereign ones.     

feminism,policy and women's safety during Australia's ‘war on terror’

The main argument in this article is that the Australian government in power from 1996 to November 2007 failed women's domestic security by denying the central policy role of women's organizations in the struggle against domestic violence and by successfully expunging public debate on gender issues in Australian governance, while participating in the ‘war on terror’ to guard national security. In bringing together a discussion about the war on terror and the importance of feminism for women's security, key issues about feminism, race and gender are considered. This article also explores the prevalence of violence against women and the social implications of the lack of leadership in public debate about the gendered nature of violence against women. Under the Australian government led by Prime Minister John Howard that gained power in 1996 and was defeated in 2007, women's organizations lost financial support and women's policy infrastructure was decimated. Violence against women, however, continued to increase, reaffirming women's place in Australian society as insecure and dangerous. After more than 30 years of struggle to maintain domestic violence and sexual assault as serious social policy problems, provide services, support and advocacy for women who are victims of violence and assault, women's organizations are coming to terms with a society where there is a blindness to the role of gender in violence against women.     

Women and radio: sounding out new paths in women's history

ABSTRACT

Since its early introduction in the domestic sphere in the 1920s, radio has been used as a medium for the expression of women's voices, needs and concerns. In this introduction we would like to mobilise an understanding of radio as a vital source for doing women's history. Women's radio programming, women broadcasters, and women listeners provide a lens through which a number of histories can be analysed. This introduction provides an overview of the historical relationship between women and radio. It is further dedicated to research that explores the overlapping spaces of radio and women's history, and in particular, points to how radio-related source material can provide new points of departure for women's history.     

Survival and song: Women poets of the Harlem Renaissance

This paper concerns Black women poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Considered by modern critics to have adopted anachronistic subject matter and to be out of step with the militant race‐consciousness of the period, these poets have been largely neglected in discussions of the 1920's, despite the fact that this was the most significant flowering of Black women's writing until the 1960's. I provide an interpretive model that reveals the rebellious messages in this verse, one that helps explain the poets’ imaginative choices by placing them in their historical context and linking them to a female poetic tradition. This approach makes clear the affirming nature of Renaissance poetry by women and makes it accessible to us today, anticipating as it does contemporary issues and forging a modern sensibility.     

Gender,body, and feminine performance: Edna St.Vincent Millay's impact on Anne Sexton

This paper will discuss Edna Millay's influence on Anne Sexton, with particular reference to issues such as gender politics, femininity, performativity, and the female body. Through close comparative readings of some of the two women's most representative poems, I analyze, firstly, how Millay's outspokenness and daring self-presentation as a woman writer facilitated Sexton's handling of material that was previously considered unacceptable for poetry and, secondly, how Sexton expanded the scope of women's writing in a manner that paid tribute to the earlier poet's innovation. My paper maintains that Millay's repeated attempts to explore gender and interrogate the concept of ‘authentic’ femininity anticipated Sexton's overtly feminist works. Ultimately, I am arguing that, despite the literary climate of the 1960s (which urged the rejection of poets like Millay) and despite her own ambiguous feelings for the earlier poet, Sexton eventually recovered Millay as an important literary predecessor for her generation, consistently imitated her artistic posturing, performance strategies, and self-presentation, and finally acknowledged her unique contribution to women's writing.     

‘Great Expectations’: Rehabilitating the Recalcitrant War Poets

Formulating a definition of ‘good’ poetry is, and should be, impossible. Yet women's poetry of the First World War seems generally to have been condemned as ‘bad’. It inspires an ambiguous response from readers who recognize the value of its historical, social and psychological content, but shudder at the limitations of its form. However, I believe that a much more fruitful reading of these ‘recalcitrant’ texts is possible. It is not my intention to deny either their problematic nature, or the diversity and complexity of male responses to the war, but rather to emphasize that women's experience of the First World War was radically different from that of men, and we should not therefore be constrained by the traditional parameters of 1914-18 criticism when we explore these works. This article examines a selection of this poetry in the light of the psychological processes of grief and bereavement, and in so doing indicates other areas in which constructive readings of these texts might be made.Why do we expect the articulation of a radically new and uniformly consistent poetic voice from what was a large and diverse group of women? The expectations of modernism ironically have created a literary ‘mainstream’ out of a selection of experimental, and largely male, writing. I hope to show that the ‘failure’ of these women to conform to our textual ‘great expectations’ is irrelevant. The single most characteristic feature of these women's experience of war was isolation. Their position had neither the homogeneity of the trenches, nor the intense intellectualism of experimental circles. Predominantly middle class, alienated by absence and bereavement, they attempted to articulate the unprecedented nature of their experience. That their experiments were not wholly successful is perhaps indicative of the near impossibility of the task they undertook.     

Gendered perceptions: women in the labour market in Poland

Abstract

This paper considers the consequences of economic and political change in the early 1990s for women's situation in the Polish labour market. New types of employment emerged in various sectors of the Polish economy around the mid-1970s. Some, such as finance, insurance, education and health care became highly feminised. Under the Communist system, many regulations were introduced to allow women to combine paid labour with taking care of the household. In the new post-Communist economic situation, these gender-specific regulations work against women, making them less attractive to employers. In a situation of high unemployment, employers in the growing private sector can afford to make specific demands of their employees: that they be young, male, and mobile. Women are thus in a worse situation in the labour market even though they are often more educated than the men with whom they must compete for work. There is urgent need to introduce mechanisms to create a more equal labour market.     

Women's right to work: The interplay of state,market and women's agency

This article addresses questions central to the conception of women's citizenship: Do women have the same right to wage work as men have? That is, do women have the same access to and chances to keep jobs as men? Is women's right to employment perceived as an individual right, disconnected from men's traditional prerogative to hold jobs as breadwinners? Women's right to work is conceptualized as a complex structural and ideological construct, shaped by the interplay of the labour market, welfare state and women's agency. The empirical analysis takes one of the Scandinavian welfare states, Norway, as its main case. The study concludes that women's individual right to work was significantly strengthened from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.     

‘Older Sisters Are Very Sobering Things’: Contemporary Women Poets and the Female Affiliation Complex

If, as history indicates, the directions of poetry are determined by its inheritance – that is, its perception of its past – in looking at literary records such as poems, reviews and other critical texts, it is possible to anticipate how twentieth-century women's poetry will come to be defined and the extent to which it will have value and authority. This in its turn will formulate the nature and status of women's poetry in the twenty-first century. In surveying twentieth-century poetry in Britain, the signs are that just as the label ‘poetess’ was a handicap to the self-perception of a woman at the beginning of this century, so the label ‘woman poet’ will shackle her in the next, largely because her end-of-the-twentieth-century predecessors will have become mythologized as a literary underclass, undermined and overlooked. One reason for the pattern of the last three hundred years, where women publish and then slip from literary histories, is that they do not receive proper attention from male-dominated literary criticism. Although women now seem to be sufficiently published to make segregation unnecessary, there is still a case for positive discrimination or their names will disappear from the records. Positive discrimination in the form of gendered segregation is, however, opposed by poets because of their uneasy relationship with one another. Women poets need an alternative line of development to the ‘masculinity complex’ whereby they unsuccessfully seek recognition within the male traditions, or the ‘female affiliation complex’ which prevents them from identifying themselves with one another. It will be argued that there is an emerging tendency in recent poets to plunder and appropriate the associations of the male tradition and that feminist critics need to theorize this aesthetic and make connections between poets so that they become positive role models for poets of the future.     

Constructing women's citizenship in the interwar period: the Edinburgh women citizens’ association

As a new stage in women's political participation, enfranchisement brought new efforts to advance gender equality and women's social position and new organisations were formed of women voters, including the women citizens' associations. Concerns with women's and children's welfare and social reform that had been important to sections of the pre-war women's movement were repositioned alongside the pursuit of an equal franchise, equal pay and opportunities and women's representation, in relation to women's new political status. Study of the women citizens' associations in Scotland supports an account of the period 1918-30 as one of considerable political activity, particularly in developing women's role and influence in relation to established political institutions and civil society. It suggests that the division between ‘old’ and ‘new’ feminisms after 1918, mapped onto the binary of equality and difference, was not necessarily a tension for women's organisations. It gives insight into the meaning of ‘citizenship’ for women activists and how the status, rights and responsibilities of citizenship articulated and shaped a distinctive women's politics, bridging political, civil and social rights.     

Housework,Wages and Money

Abstract

According to a range of authors and popular commentators, the post-Fordist socioeconomic order has produced a new category of female labourer, the ‘female principal breadwinner’. This article opens out this category of worker to critical scrutiny. We suggest that while the very idea of the female principal breadwinner is open to all manner of existing lines of feminist critique, beyond this it forces a confrontation with a number of issues vital to feminist analyses of transformations to women's labour—both waged and unwaged—in contemporary financialised post-Fordism. We pursue two issues in particular. First, transformations to the labour of social reproduction—including transformations to the measurement and valuation of domestic labour—and second, the financialisation (and shifting capacities) of wages specifically and money more generally. We suggest that if transformations to women's labour are to be fully grasped and understood feminist theory must renew and rethink its analyses of domestic labour, wages and money.     

‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities,c. 1650–1838

Abstract

In this article, the author addresses the problem of how much historians can understand about the identities of individuals living in a different epoch in time, in relation to what has been termed the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities in slavery and freedom. A central argument is that stereotypes of black women were highly gendered and clustered around contradictory representations, particularly the ‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ and passive ‘drudge’. Thus, the persistence of an African-centred ‘woman's culture’ and strategies of resistance, collaboration and survival are vital to understanding black women's self-defined (as opposed to white attributed) identities. The first section examines the relationship between gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women's identities. This is followed by a critical deconstruction of the ‘Sable Venus’ and interrelated black and white gendered identities in colonial slave society. The final section analyses the importance of the ‘She Devil’ in representing the resistant slave woman who defied the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white stereotyping of black women. A wide time span is adopted in order to analyse how black women's relationship to the gendered power structures underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time, as did ‘white visions’ of their identities. Unifying themes are the central location black women had in the development of colonial relations between black and white and the implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European cultures for black women's gendered identities.     

‘Memory Speaks from Today’: analyzing oral histories of female members of the MIR in Chile through the work of Luisa Passerini

This article engages the work of Luisa Passerini in order to analyze the oral histories of women who belonged to the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) in Chile during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a theoretical framework that considers the interplay between memory, testimony, and gender as well as a transnational historical perspective can help explain how feminism and ‘new left’ groups emerged from the revolutionary 1968 context. Of primary concern is the manner in which certain gendered aspects of the MIR women's experiences—particularly the brutal sexualized political violence they endured at the hands of the state—have been historically silenced and also how, more recently, women's testimonials have helped to break that silence. Finally, the article proposes that feminism, both as a mode of critical thinking and as a social movement, will allow us to more fully ‘hear’ the testimonies of these women and to understand how their memories are ‘speaking from today.’     

Gendered Testimonies: Autobiographies,Diaries and Letters by Women as Sources for Caribbean History

Although history has been one of the main disciplines through which we can understand gender, the paucity of data written or recorded by women makes it more difficult for the historian to research women's lives in the past. In the Caribbean, this task has been made easier by the discovery of a few key sources which allow an insight into the private sphere of Caribbean women's lives. These records of women who have lived in the Caribbean since the 1800s consist of memoirs, diaries and letters. The autobiographical writings include the extraordinary record of Mary Prince, a Bermuda-born enslaved African woman. Other sources which have been examined are the diaries of women who were members of the elite in the society, and educated women who worked either in professions or through the church to assist others in their societies. Through her examination of the testimonies of these women, the author reveals aspects of childhood, motherhood, marriage and sexual abuses which different women – free and unfree, white, black or coloured – experienced. The glimpses allow us to see Caribbean women who have lived with and challenged the definitions of femininity allowed them in the past. It demonstrates that the distinctions created between women's private and public lives were as artificial then as they are at present.     

‘Tied to the kitchen sink’? Women's Lives and Women's History in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain and Australia

In the decades after World War Two, women in Britain and Australia lived with—and sometimes against—a compelling expectation about women's role: they should marry and devote their lives to suburban domesticity and childcare. This article considers how the life stories of four women—born in Britain between 1928–38, and living in Australia from the 1950s to the 1970s—can illuminate and complicate our understanding of the experience of the postwar suburban dream. It shows how women sometimes articulated imaginative responses to limiting circumstances and thus stretched the boundaries of possibility.