Portraying history and heroism in Rebecca West's The sentinel

Rebecca West's early interest in the suffragette movement gives us a strong sense of her development as a writer and feminist thinker, as her feminist perspective shifts from impassioned and enthusiastic supporter of the suffragettes in her incomplete novel, The Sentinel, to the more measured assessments in her early journalism. This article discusses some of the ways in which the imagery, iconography and militant discourse of suffragette writing and public speaking shaped the imagination of the young Rebecca West. It also shows how her celebration of female heroism in The Sentinel, often conveyed through detailed depictions of the women she admired, creates a vivid and informed version of feminist history.     

Global feminisms,c. 1870–1930: vocabularies and concepts—a comparative approach

This ‘Viewpoint’ assesses some recent approaches to the study of feminisms across the globe during the c. 1870–1930 period. At a moment when historians are working towards the commemoration of women's partial enfranchisement in Britain in 1918, we consider the intellectual frameworks that most effectively celebrate this achievement whilst also situating the Act within its complex, global context. Reflecting on discussions held at a recent workshop at the University of Oxford, we advocate the effectiveness of a global and comparative methodological approach to question what ‘feminism’ meant to contemporary campaigners. The scrutiny of localised and national issues within comparative and global contexts illuminates the plurality of definitions, vocabularies, and categories relating to feminism that were being used (and rejected) during this era and raises broader questions for the study and practice of feminist history.     

An Experimental Template for Case Study Research

Methods are usually classified as either "experimental" or "observational," a dichotomy that has governed social science research for centuries. By implication, this dichotomization precludes a consideration of experimental strategies in case study work. Yet, we argue that one gains purchase on the tasks of research design by integrating the criteria traditionally applied to experimental work to all research in the social sciences—including case study work, the focus of this article. Experimental research designs aim to achieve variation through time and across space while maintaining ceteris paribus assumptions, thus maximizing leverage into the fundamental problem of causal inference. We propose to capture these multiple criteria in a four-fold typology: (1) A Dynamic comparison mirrors laboratory experimentation through the use of both temporal and spatial variation; (2) A Longitudinal comparison employs temporal variation; (3) A Spatial comparison exploits variation through space; and (4) A Counterfactual comparison relies on imagined comparison. All comparison case study research designs can be slotted into one of these four categories. Moreover, the typology illustrates in a concise fashion the ways in which case study research designs attempt to mimic the virtues of experimental design and the degree to which they succeed. The classic experiment, with manipulated treatment and randomized control, thus provides a useful template for discussion about methodological issues in experimental and observational contexts.