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
Feminising Empire? British Women's Activist Networks in Defending and Challenging Empire from 1918 to Decolonisation
ABSTRACT This article addresses female activism spanning the Empire and creating interconnected networks linking the local and global dimensions of Britain's imperial mission in an era of increasing uncertainty. The transition from empire to commonwealth and, ultimately, independence was marked by anti-colonial challenges from within Britain and in the colonies and threats to empire from international developments post-1918. This era also witnessed a more proactive role for women as both defenders and critics of empire who had an influence on shaping a new discourse of welfare and development, purportedly a ‘feminisation’ of empire. Continuities existed between female activism pre- and post-1918 but also significant differences as the late imperial era witnessed more nuanced and diverse interventions into empire affairs than the ‘maternalist imperial feminism’ of the era before the First World War.
The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism
The outbreak of war in August 1914 brought to a halt the activities of both militant and constitutional suffragists in their efforts to gain votes for women. By that time, the suffrage campaign had attained the size and status of a mass movement, commanding the time, energies, and resources of thousands of men and women and riveting the attention of the British public. In early 1918, in what it defined as a gesture of recognition for women's contribution to the war effort, Parliament granted the vote to women over the age of thirty. This measure, while welcome to feminists as a symbol of the fall of the sex barrier, failed to enfranchise some five million out of eleven million adult women. When war ended, feminists continued to agitate for votes for women on the same terms as they had been granted to men, but organized feminism, despite the fact that almost half of the potential female electorate remained disenfranchised, never regained its prewar status as a mass movement. By the end of the 1920s, feminism as a distinct political and social movement no longer existed. This was due to the impact of the war on cultural perceptions of gender. Feminists' understandings of masculinity and femininity became transformed during the war and in the immediate postwar period, until they were virtually indistinguishable from those of antifeminists. As I have argued elsewhere, prewar British feminists regarded their movement as an attack on separate-sphere ideology and its constructions of masculinity and femininity.