Performing the self : women's lives in historical perspective
1. Introduction: Performing the Self: women's lives in historical perspective Katie Barclay and Sarah Richardson 2. Performing the Self, Performing the Other: gender and racial identity construction in the Nanteuil Cycle Victoria Turner 3. Writing the Self: the journal of Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, 1774-1843 Gillian Beattie-Smith 4. Writing Women's Histories: women in the colonial record of nineteenth-century Hong Kong Jane Berney 5. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon's Travel Letters: performative identity-formation in epistolary narratives Meritxell Simon-Martin 6. 'A notable personality': Isabella Fyvie Mayo in the public and private spheres of Aberdeen Lindy Moore 7. 'The Subject is Obscene: No Lady Would Dream of Alluding to It': Marie Stopes and her courtroom dramas Lesley Hall 8. Body and Self: learning to be modern in 1920s-1930s Britain Charlotte Macdonald 9. Performing the Political Self: a study of identity making and self representation in the autobiographies of India's first generation of parliamentary women Annie Devenish 10. Eve Drewelowe: feminist identity in American art Lindsay E. Shannon 11. Women Activists: rewriting Greenham's history Elaine Titcombe 12. The Changing Face of Exhibiting Women's Wartime Work at the Imperial War Museum Alyson Mercer 13. Concluding Thoughts: performance, the self, and women's history Penny Summerfield
"Walking the Streets in a Way No Decent Woman Should": Women Police in World War I
Shortly after war broke out in the late summer of 1914, people in Britain were witness to what was, for the times, a curious sight. Women, generally in pairs, wearing lettered armlets and darkly colored clothes or official looking uniforms, began patrolling after dark in streets, parks, and railway stations and in towns close to the swelling military encampments where hasty combat training was under way. These were the new women police and patrols of the war years, many of whom harbored an ambition to create a permanent female officer corps that would become indispensable in peacetime. The need for a separate female force to deal with the specific problems faced by women and children in the community was a long-held ambition of both feminist and social purity campaigners. 1 Though it was the 1914-1 8 war that precipitated the appearance of women patrolling the streets, the appointment of paid female searchers and police matrons in the courts increased steadily in the late nineteenth century at a time when around 30 percent of women detained were kept in overnight custody.2 Until this juncture, and in some areas even after the first police matron schemes were initiated, the wife of the local police officer commonly discharged these "feminine" duties, generally without remuneration.3
Allied against sin: American and British responses to venereal disease in World War I.
UNrIL THE twentieth century, venereal diseases presented almost unmanageable problems to Western man. In times of war they took an especially heavy toll, producing as late as the nineteenth century a rate of infection sometimes double that of peacetime. Given the vast movement and dislocation of people and the relaxation in morals associated with war, military leaders had no choice but to resign themselves to the inevitability of rampant infection.1 The First World War, however, promised to be different. By 1914, thanks to August Wasserman's development of a test for syphilis and Paul Ehrlich's discovery of arsphenamine, military and civilian medicine finally had available the means for both identifying and curing syphilis, at least in its early stage. Consequently, as that conflict began, there was optimism that one of the major venereal diseases was at last going to be mastered. Disease prevention, however, involved more than merely knowing how to kill a certain virulent bacterium. In any public health problem, non-medical factors such as organization, education, and methods of enforcement also assumed vital roles. In the case of venereal disease, one had to deal as well with a whole set of cultural and psychological factors. For most of the combatants in World War I, those nonmedical problems thwarted the realization of hopes for disease control. The British, in particular, were not able to organize effectively against venereal diseases until the last stages of the war. That they began to do so then was largely attributable to aid and advice from the Americans, who alone among the warring powers succeeded in making effective application of the new medical knowledge. The reasons for the American success, not all praiseworthy, were nonetheless instructive, for they revealed much about the relative strength of public health forces in Britain and America. They also reflected considerable variation in the value systems of the two countries, which explained better than anything the uneven results attained against wartime venereal diseases.