Maternal Responsibility and Traceable Loss: medicine and miscarriage in twentieth-century Australia

This article historicises the meaning of miscarriage in twentieth century Australia. It identifies a number of crucial turning points in scientific interpretations of the causes and treatments of miscarriage that produced shifts in the communication of responsibility to women for their own pregnancy losses. It also describes the changes that a number of medical technologies, including pregnancy detection, foetal visualisation and assisted conception, have brought to bear on the pregnant and pre-pregnant body. These technologies proliferated a variety of forms of reproductive loss during a period in which women experienced enhanced prospects of conception, as well as foetal, infant and maternal survival.     

‘Girls who arouse dangerous passions’: women and bathing, 1900-39

Abstract

This article focuses on the struggle by women to achieve unsegregated access to beaches and swimming pools in Britain from the beginning of the twentieth century until the start of the Second World War against a background of bureaucratic regulation. Through a variety of sources that contrast official material with the mood within popular culture, it exposes the clash of patriarchal prudery against changing public opinions. It poses questions on the notions of female modesty and emancipation as women's swimwear reflected changing perceptions of the female body and explores conflicting discourses of glamour and sex versus health and efficiency.     

‘This Spider Web of Woman's Life’: Private Space and Community Life in Peter Abelard

This essay explores such complex and ambiguous presentation of convent life in Helen Waddell's novel Peter Abelard (1933), considering Heloise's fear of women's communities as expression of concerns central to women's writing published in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Waddell uses Peter Abelard to intervene in these contemporary debates about private and public spaces. The dislike which her Heloise expresses for women's communities may, given the text's feminist ideology, seem surprising, but, as discussed, similar anxieties are voiced in texts by several of Waddell's contemporaries, and the novel is shaped by this tension between private, autonomous individual and shared public space. Peter Abelard is read in relation to selected journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (late 1920s), Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1928) and Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night (1935).