Lynn Abrams (Glasgow University, Scotland): The Best Men in Shetland: Narratives of Equality and Difference in a Peripheral Society

This paper examines the construction of gender identities in a peripheral society - Shetland - a group of islands off the north coast of Scotland. Shetland is a unique frontier society in Europe battling against an extreme climate, and until very recently an inadequate infrastructure and a narrow economic base. The role of women in that society in the last 200 years is certainly unique in western Europe. Referred to as 'the best men in Shetland', women have been at the sharp end of economic hardship and social transformation. Shetland thus presents a unique example of a peripheral community. The islands have been described as not only `much further away than most people suppose [but] foreign places, much harder, odder and more distinct.' The dominant form of male employment - fishing - was unparalleled for its danger and insecurity, and the fishing-crofting based household left women exceptionally vulnerable. This, allied with a pronounced sex imbalance in the nineteenth century (the ratio of women to men 160:100 at its peak), determined women's experience and shaped the past and present representation of Shetland women. At the same time as gender relations being influenced by a unique confluence of factors in this local context, we might also ask how local identity (in this case Shetland identity as distinct from Scottish or British identity) was, and still is, determined or coloured by gender identities. It is essential to grasp the sense of place and an understanding of distinctive local conditions in order to explain social relations and cultural and political identities. This is no less important when considering the nature of gender relations and more specifically the position and experience of women. According to the anthropologist Anthony Cohen, 'gender roles, both in the domestic and in the economic spheres, are not easily comparable with those elsewhere.' In recent times Shetlanders have been heard to say that 'Shetland society, ancient and modern, had been characterised by egalitarian sex roles, whereas Scottish society was rampant with sexism'. This paper will consider how an understanding of women and gender relations within a environmentally and economically fragile community might point towards ways of analysing the relationship between women's economic position and their status within a particular community. In Shetland the particular economic conditions of the nineteenth century militated against women benefiting from the absence of men and yet in popular narrative women occupy a central place in island history as 'the best men in Shetland'. This positioning of women at the centre of discourses of identity and local difference has been buttressed by the transformation of the Shetland economy in the 1970s with the discovery of oil, the experience of in-migration from the Scottish mainland and the perception that in-comers brought with them a pattern of gender relations based on sexual inequality which threatened to undermine the 'traditional' egalitarianism of Shetland society.

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Darlene Abreu-Ferreira (University of Winnipeg, Canada): The Family Economy, Public Ritual, and Women's Agency in Early Modern Portugal

Whether one is dealing with the early modem period, or with the more recent past, notions about the inevitable subordination of Portuguese women abound. I have read comments to this effect in history books, and I have heard enough innuendos at a number of conferences to know that this stereotype is alive and well. If truth be told, I grew up believing it myself, for as I looked around my neighbourhood in "Little Portugal", in Toronto, Canada, I saw - or at least I thought I saw - much evidence of the macho Portuguese man, and the long-suffering, self- effacing, and seemingly inconsequential Portuguese woman. Indeed, examples of this public display of social roles are not difficult to find. A closer look at the situation behind the scenes, however, away from the glare of the public eye, reveals that relations between Portuguese women and men are often a lot more complex. This was no less true for the early modem period. Through the examination of a number of notarial collections from 17th century Portugal, I propose to show that early modem Portuguese women were actively involved in matters great and small. The records indicate that men dominated the public domain of record keeping, that only men were called to witness the drawing up of legal contracts, and that men hugely outnumbered women in the ability to sign their names. Beyond that, however, any transaction that touched on the family economic unit, the woman was very much present, either in person or in the form of a notarized document clearly showing her agreement and approval. This was true whether the contract involved the selling or buying of property, arranging dowry payments, renegotiating leases, making loans, or settling debts. This was true whether the woman in question was single, married, widowed, or in a nunnery - a lady, market vendor, servant, or farmer. Nor was the woman's agreement a mere formality, for women did not just nod their approval. Either in conjunction with their menfolk or alone, women were the vendors and buyers, the loan makers and the debt collectors, the dowers as well as the endowed. Although my research is in its infancy, findings such as these raise fascinating questions about public ritual, gender roles, and the (mis)representation of the place of Portuguese women in the early modern economic family unit.

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Áurea Adão and Maria José Remédios (Universidade Lusofona e Technologias, Portugal): The Compulsory Education for Portuguese Girls in 1960 – Echoes in the Periodic Press

This communication is based on the work developed in the project on education in the Portuguese periodic press (1945 – 1974) in which the main aim is to give Portuguese researchers a thematic itinerary of sources for the thirty years between the end of the second world war and the 25th April 1974 revolution. This period corresponds to a time of wide transformation in European societies in which economic development and the expansion of the social well-being of people at many levels of society, were accompanied by the development of wider access to culture and education.
However, the Portugal of Salazar kept itself away from this tendency which only began in Portugal from the 1960s on. The periodic press was until the expansion of other mass media (television, Internet) the main instrument for the formation of public opinion. With the rise of “Estado Novo”, ideologically sustained by an anti-liberal thought based on the Catholic religion, the existence of woman is fused with that of the family and only the household chores are reserved to her. She only participates in public life through family affairs and education. A focus on the praise of difference underlines the social construction of education. Co-education is a danger to avoid. It was conceived as the encouarager of moral deterioration, particularly when it was associated with the concept of the equality of women and men. The school curriculum was adjusted to fit in with the social structure from the 1940s. Gradually, however, the mechanism of resistence to social transformation, became inoperative. Consequently, the state's educational policy was forced to change direction. With this communication, we intend to analyse the repercussions of the 1960 Portuguese government measure which extended compulsory female education to four years. At the time, all over Europe women were playing an important role in school education and in society in general. The compulsory period for boys' school education in Portugal had been four years since 1956.

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Oluwakemi Adesina (University of Ibadan, Nigeria): Divorce, Private Sessions of Court and Women’s Rights in the Oyo Division of Colonial South Western Nigeria

In the exercise of the powers conferred upon Native Authorities by Section 30 (2) of the Native Authority Ordinance (cap. 140) the Oyo Divisional Native Authority had considerable power over bride price, divorces, custody of children and debts. However, where the matters of women were concerned, their rights were not only abridged in law but in reality. For instance, the power conferred on the Native Authority affirmed: "Divorce shall only be granted on grounds which seem reasonable to the court." Thus, whether a woman wanted divorce or not was immaterial. A further breech of the fundamental rights of women was the question of private sessions of courts in chiefs' houses to try petty quarrels and divorce cases. This work which adopts the historical approach, highlights the experiences of women in the interface of traditional values and customs, and modern trends of adjudication. A preliminary conclusion reached by the paper is that the ability of women to pursue and protect their rights were severely circumscribed by the inability of colonial authorities to institute certain legal instruments to protect women from traditional values in an exceedingly patriarchal society.

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Oladosu Afis (University of Ibadan, Nigeria): From Eden to Khartoum: Periscoping the Women's History in Sudan in The Early Modern Period

This paper is premised on two propositions, namely (1) that the pre-modern and indeed modern history of women has been that of exploitation and degradation (2) that despite the Islamic texture of the Northern Sudan the history of women in the area in the early modern period was equally un-wholesome. The paper in the introduction does a re-appraisal of the history of women across civilization as a prelude to its inquiry into such words as "al-Amat" and "al-Sayyidat" as they relate to the circumstance of the Sudanese women in the Turkiyyat, Mahdiyyah and the early British era. Aspects of the Sudanese women's private life in the period namely 'al-Khalawat" and "al-Shaykhat" are also taken up for study. Using Fatima b.Jabir and Aishat b.Wud al-Qidal as case studies the paper in the conclusion argues that the circumstance of women in Sudan in the early modern period not only mirrors the history of Sudan but indeed that of humanity.

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Elsie Alexander (University of Botswana): Gender and Changing Family Forms

The changing social position of women in society should be located in the changing structure of the family as the social fabric of society and the foundation of unequal gender and power relations. Existing literature on family and households by different scholars and organizations indicate that there is a paradigm shift away from the traditional family structure based on blood and marriage to a plurality of family forms. The composition, nature of the relationship between members, and functions of the varies family forms have changed overtime as a result of historical forces and the dynamic process of development. This paper will critically assess the implications of the changing family structure and it's impact on the social position and rights of women as regards to access to and control of resources as well as decision - making. The diversity of the family has had an impact on women and men's access to and control of resources and their ability to make independent decisions. The paper will further explore the contradictions existing in society as a result of the fact that customary and general law still bestows on men a superior status placing women in a subordinate position. The existing laws, traditional attitudes and practices assumes that men are heads of households and they have decision - making power and control over resources, including human resources. The paper assumes that patriarchal nature of society has 'been weakened by the changing family structure affecting gender and power relations in modern societies.

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Sonia Amin (University of Dhaka, Bangladesh): Raising The Imperial Race: Annette Akroyd And Henry Beveridge's Victorian Home In Bangladesh

Annette Susannah Akroyd was a well educated, young English lady who came to India (Bengal) in the 1870s with elevated ideas of educational reform for local girls. Soon however she gave up her reformist agenda and on marrying Henry Beveridge, civil servant, glided into the role of the quintessential memsahib creating and guarding the Victorian family in Bengal and raising her children. In between this life of complete domesticity, the once liberal Annette turned into a conservative domestic angel, devoting a lot of her talents to oriental scholarship. To date studies ofAnnette (and Henry) have consisted of a doctoral thesis from the USA and a biography of the two by their son William Beveridge "India Called Them". The vast collection of private papers housed in the British Library consisting of at least 3000 letters between Annette and Henry and the family, and some diaries, provide the basis for a study of the household of the couple. I would like to focus on the mode through which the Victorian home was recreated on foreign soil with particular emphasis on the normative and real aspects of bringing up English children in colonial times. The sources would comprise the data collected during a year spent as a research fellow in London. I would like to use theoretical studies on childhood as well to provide the background to the paper.

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Margaret Anderson (History Trust of South Australia): Reading the Silences of Private Life: Women and Declining Fertility in Australia

In common with their Anglo-Saxon sisters in Britain and the United States, Australian women participated in what demographers like to call the nineteenth century ‘fertility transition’. Between the decades of the 1870s and 1880s marital fertility declined sharply in Australia and went on falling. In an earlier study based on the reconstitution of the families born to three cohorts of South Australian women married between 1840 and 1885, I suggested that this quiet revolution in family size was common to women from all classes, in both rural and urban areas, although both the incidence of onset and the extent of decline varied. In this the South Australian families differed from those discussed by Simon Szreter in his most recent analysis of the 1911 ‘Fertility Census’ in Britain. However the cultural basis for controlled fertility has eluded both historians and demographers. This paper suggests that historians should look to changing concepts of family and private life, sexuality and women’s autonomy in this period to seek the explanations that must always evade demographic analysis. In particular it argues that Australian women increasingly asserted their right to be heard in matters previously shrouded in silence.

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Frazer Andrewes (University of Melbourne, Australia): Putting Husbands in the Background? Fashioning Family, Sexuality, and the Modern Woman in 1930s Australia

As part of more general debates about the shape of modern civilisation in Depression-era Australia, considerable effort was expended in defining a self-consciously “modern” womanhood and determining her future development; one writer even went as far as to set out a “one hundred year plan” for Australian women. At a moment in Australia’s history characterised by great uncertainty about everyday life as well as the shape of the future, to seek to understand and define such important concepts as gender and familial relations was to in some ways stabilise an increasingly fragmentary modern world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, the concept of the modern woman was a deeply contested one, and the terms of the debate were broad indeed. Drawing on the discourses of politics, eugenics, popular psychology, science, and even simple sensationalism, commentators in various popular newspapers, magazines, and journals sought to express their visions of the female future, whether this was a cause of optimism or of deep anxiety. In doing so, this debate connected with more international concerns; ideas expounded by the extreme right and left in Europe found their adherents in Australia as well, and as the possibilities of global communication expanded, Australians eagerly availed themselves of the latest information gathered off the wires from around the world. This flux of information and ideas led to a complex examination of the nature of femininity, the place of the family, and the importance of sexuality in an Australian society perhaps becoming more at home in the world. This paper will explore these issues, placing them within the wider debate about modernity of which they were a key component.

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Ana Sofia António and António Teodoro (Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisbon, Portugal): Girls and Their Needlework Teacher: Identity and Development of Female Teachers in Technical Education

The following communication comprises part of the approach to a theme integrated in the research project entitled The Construction of a Teaching Career in Secondary Education (1947-1974). Training, Development, Identities. The Science and Technology Foundation, within the Sapiens 2000 Program, funded this research. The study we are developing starts from the exploration of ideas and understanding of feelings expressed by needlework teachers. By establishing a bond between the professional and personal lives of these women, we propose to analyse their professional growth, as well as to identify decisive stages in their professional performance and their educational beliefs. The framework of the study will be the aims and purposes given to female training courses within the field of technical teaching. In a stereotyped society, a sentimental component is attributed to women that encompasses values underestimated by a masculine point of view. Within this perspective, effectiveness, rational thought and competition are valued. On the other hand, the maternal responsibility that female teachers have encourages them to strengthen the maternal self to the detriment of the adult self. This often promotes an enclosed and conflicting situation, since teachers feel not only unsupported, but also guilty for not being able to find a plausible solution. We think that this study on female technical educators will be important to understand the objectives of female training - the young woman becomes skilled in the public arena so that she can successfully carry out her role in the domestic arena.

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Meg Arnot (University of Surrey Roehampton, UK): Gender, Class and Faith Healing in England in the 1870s

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G. Arunima (Lady Sri Ram College, New Delhi, India): Kinship In The Time Of Religion: Women, Family And Property Rights

In this paper I shall explore the reasons for the abolition of matrilineal kinship and inheritance amongst the Nayars and the Mappilla muslims of Kerala, on the southwestern coast of India. Kerala has always been significantly different from other parts of India as a large section of its population practised matrilineal kinship and inheritance. What is less known is that matriliny was not restricted to the Hindu castes alone, but a small section of the Muslims, especially of north Kerala, also followed matrilineal kinship. Although matriliny was not the mirror opposite of patriliny, it did ensure greater rights and privileges to women. As kinship and descent were traced in the female line, by definition a matrilineal family was composed of kin related to each other through women. Moreover, women continued to have rights in the natal family - whether in terms of residence or access to property, throughout their lifetime. By the latter half of the 19th century residential patterns varied due to factors like marriage, urbanisation or family disputes yet one of the most notable features of matrilineal families was that marriage did not diminish a woman's rights within the natal family. Both in case of the Nayar and the Mappilla women this meant the right to continue living in the natal family home after marriage; a greater right over their children; and ultimately a greater control over their own sexuality. By the early 20th century there was a move in both these communities to attempt an abolition of matriliny. While in part this was motivated by the desire to partition household property, it is significant that the arguments for abolition invoked communitarian identities and religious practices. While the Nayar community bemoaned its backwardness in following 'barbaric' practices like matriliny, the Mappillas claimed that it was anti Islamic. Male reformers in both communities began to take recourse to textual (the Shariat in case of the Mappilla muslims; shastras in case of the Hindus) and legal precedents to argue against what they saw as the 'unnatural' and 'immoral' bases of matrilineal kinship. Here I shall explore the reasons for the emergence of such a discourse in the 20th century, and its power for validating its claims. Moreover, it also forefronted the patriarchal underpinnings of community reordering; with the religious 'cleansing' of the Nayars and Mappillas of such aberrant accretions as matrilineal kinship, and their reentry as 'proper' Hindus and Muslims, came the reordering of these families on patrilineal lines. For women, across community difference, this spelt a steady loss of rights and privileges. However the power of matrilineal privilege could not withstand the pull of community reform, and identity formation, in the 20th century. It is this complex relationship between women, kinship, patriarchy and religious identity that I hope to unravel in this paper.

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Sonya Atalay (University of California-Berkeley, USA): Beyond the Walls of Academia: Anthropology for Indigenous Communities

Only a small number of anthropologists are Native people, although the subjected 'Other' is often Native Americans and other Indigenous groups. In the past, research involving these groups was often conducted with little concern for the repercussions or benefits to the people and Communities under study. However, anthropologists and others in academic fields are increasingly aware of the need to be more relevant and accessible to the communities where they study, live, and work. This paper presents a project that contributes to these endeavors by bridging academic research with popular education. Women's contemporary and traditional domestic practices in Anishinaabeg communities and in Turkish villages are examined and compared through a series of curriculum units and a multimedia CD-ROM. Comparisons of the changing histories of these diverse cultures (Turkey and Native North America) are utilized to encourage critical thinking in areas crucial for contemporary tribal communities such as sovereignty, heritage, culture change and colonization processes. I developed this Public Anthropology project to accompany the academically focused aspects of my dissertation research in an attempt to bring my work outside of the ivory tower and to make it useful and accessible for my own community, and other non-academic audiences.

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Kebonyengwana Balogi (University of Botswana): The Enemy Within: Gender Based Violence in Botswana as the ‘New Threat’ to Women’s Safety in Their Private Sanctuary/Haven

The paper will address the universal problem off gender-based violence in the context of the developing society of Botswana highlighting all its different manifestations. The traditions, culture and attitudes that have for a long time perpetuated violence against women and children both in the `safety' of their homes and the `dangerous' public space will be addressed in order to deconstruct myths pertaining to gender based violence. There is no doubt that officially, gender based violence is not only increasing in magnitude but also in complexity. It is however not clear whether the `new' faces and phase of gender based violence is just an old jackal in new sheepskin. Historically, women have negotiated and renegotiated the atrocities perpetuated by their husbands and partners in their own homes which negotiations in the past mainly submerged/obscured the violence while the modern strategies necessarily expose it. Gender based violence in Botswana and elsewhere has also undergone a profound re-definition both culturally and to a very little extent legally. Thus raising the question whether gender based violence has increased as much as we might appear or merely entering a historical phase. What we are perhaps witnessing is a revelation of an age-old problem that has been comfortably hidden behind the traditional practices of mediation, the complacent attitude within criminal justice and perhaps most importantly unquestioned/ uncontested supremacy of males in the patriarchal society of Botswana with all its implications for women and children in the society. In order to underscore the gender dynamics of this kind of violence, the paper will focus on gender based violence and not the common domestic violence which obscures patterns of victimization.

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Michal Ben Ya'akov (University of Jerusalem and Efrata College of Education, Israel): Widows in the Jewish Communities of Late Ottoman Palestine

Judith Bennett (University of North Carolina, USA): Who's Afraid of the Distant Past? The Rlevance of the Premodern in a Postmodern World

This talk examines how, why, and with what effect women’s history has become so presentist that it is now almost a history of women since 1800. I’ll begin by surveying a variety of evidence to show that, although the historical profession is generally tilted towards the recent past, this trend is especially pronounced in women’s history. I’ll then discuss some of the reasons behind this ever-increasing focus on modern history. And I’ll close with some remarks on the dangers for women’s history (and feminist scholarship, more generally) of a historical vision that does not substantively extend before 1800.

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Deborah Bernstein (University of Haifa, Israel): Undoing the Family: Sex, Family and Social Policy in the Jewish Settlement of Mandatory Palestine

Women are often seen as symbolizing the collective boundaries. Women's sexuality reinforces boundaries by remaining within bounds, yet concomitantly it threatens their solidity by being potentially uncontrollable and therefore ever on the verge of bursting out. The family unit plays a central role in determining and shaping these boundaries. Wife desertion poses both social and theoretical challenges because the family boundary is shattered, yet the symbolic and practical restrictions: of contained sexuality remain in force. The phenomenon of wife desertion was prevalent in Jewish communities for many centuries. Exacerbated in periods of immigration. It reappeared in the new Jewish national settlement in mandatory Palestine in forms both similar to those past and particular to the new circumstances. Two institutional systems and social perspectives shaped social policy concerning, deserted wives. The Jewish religious establishment which focused its concern on the inability of the deserted wife to establish a new family and the ostracized status of any offspring such a married yet deserted woman might have. Religious law and practice strove for one of two goals -either reuniting the family or enabling the women to obtain a divorce. Either way her ambiguous situation was solved either by re-forming the family or by freeing the woman of marital commitment to the deserter, thus enabling her to establish a new family. Unlike the religious authority, for whom the deserted wife created a specific religious problem, the welfare institutions of the Jewish national settlement treated deserted wives as any other single woman and mother. Thus dealing in similar fashion with divorced, widowed, deserted women and with women whose husband was either unemployed or incapacitated. The central issue for the welfare institutions was not the family unit and the containing of women's sexuality, but the deserted woman's ability to provide for herself and her children. Thus all impoverished women, including deserted wives, were similarly encouraged to find employment, at times a difficult task to come by, and were helped in placing their children (to the extent possible) in child care institutions. Thus, the study of the issue of wife desertion in Jewish Palestine highlights an interesting case of immigrant society which manifested both continuity and novelty in its attitude to issues of gender, sexuality and social policy.

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This study focuses on women heads of families in sixteenth and seventeenth century Granada. Thanks to the documentary support of the Padron de 1561 and Catastro d ela Ensenada (1752), I attempt a comparative study of women's demographic, economic and social reality through three centuries. My aim is to establish how many women heads of household there were, the characteristic of the aggregated and domestic economies, the significance of class and ethicity, status and wealth, practices of inheritance in the family units and incomes and configuration. I will also analyze the different strategies adopted by women to avoid poverty or to secure their position and patrimony.

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Uri Bitan (University of Haifa, Israel): Giving Birth to the Enemy: Family Loyalties as Political Loyalties among Women in the Early Islamic Aristocracy.

Early Islamic politics was characterized both by the use of patrilineal kinship group as a major base of legitimacy and loyalty, and by its shifting nature, as alignments and rivalries were created or transformed, and rebellions broke out, sometimes within a few years’ period. Women often found themselves married to the enemy of their agnates, a former spouse or an older son, sometimes giving birth to sons, whose political loyalties were bound to follow their father’s. While more often than not their present spouse was the one in power, many women retained loyalty to somebody else, which reported expressions ranged from symbolic acts of defiance to murder. Some women, on the other hand, apparently took advantage of their desirability among members of the rival lineage to help themselves to better marriage terms. In the proposed paper, I will try to analyze those women ways of coping with “hostile” marriage from the point view of gender relations and family structures and their significance in the political culture of the time and society.

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Grainne Blair (University College Dublin, Ireland): Salvation Army: Ireland

This paper will discuss themes such as how The Salvation Army impacted on women's lives, both individually and for their famial networks. For those who joined it and had to leave their own family networks and replace it with that of the Army's for various reasons, in the South of Ireland those who joined in their home area were often unable to stay and serve there due to the public condemnation. A Salvation Army Female Officer was officially recognised as an equal economic and spiritual contributor to the Salvation Army Family/Officer unit of husband and wife. However often the reality was different and various case histories will be discussed to highlight problems arising as well as the practicalities of many of the women involved. The private life of the Salvationist Army Female Officer was more often than not non existent, she could expect to move home and often country with very little notice, share her married home with other single male officers whilst trying to maintain a semblance of married life, raising her children as well as conducting services and often travelling the length and breadth of the country where she was working depending on her rank, as well as making sure that there was enough food in the house to feed all. Other women left the ranks as they did not marry salvationist officers and therefore could not stay. Many of these had been involved in the early days of the Salvation Army and had fought long and hard on the streets to be allowed to march and preach. Other women were rescued by the Army and rose to become officers themselves. All of these women maintained and defined different family networks amongst themselves as Salvationists and it was often this support and comradeship that helped them endure extremely testing times.

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Ida Blom (University of Bergen, Norway): Sexuality and Public Policies: Prevention of Venereal Disease in Scandinavia, C. 1900 – c. 1950

This paper analyses public policies to prevent venereal diseases from the abolition of reglementation of prostitutes in the1880’s to the middle of the 20th century when antibiotics seriously curbed the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. It highlights the gendered approach to profylactic procedures, especially during crises periods such as the First and the Second World War, and traces characteristics of such procedures also through the early decades of the century and during the inter-war period. It further centers on the importance of different understandings of female and male sexuality for the formulation of public policies as well as reactions to such policies. The problem of how to promote awareness of the dangers of venereal disease without drawing attention to what was perceived as immoral conduct and as a temptation for young people, mostly men, will be discussed with an eye to finding possible parallels and/or polarities between medical and moralistic arguments. Sources are medical journals, parliamentary documents, public health statistics and hopeful also archives from local health authorities. Norway and Sweden will be the main countries included in the analysis, but where possible, comparison with Denmark will also be attempted. Finally, Scandinavia will be seen in a broader international perspective.

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Eileen Boris (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA): On Cornrows and Red Pants, or When Hair Is More Than Hair? Rethinking Discrimination in the U.S. Workplace

Since the 196Os, courts, legislatures, and social movements in the United States have recognized the importance of bodily integrity for the right to earn. Conflicts over appearance on the job, including hair styles, clothes, and personal looks, further has restricted employment opportunities for those considered outside acceptable norms, particularly for their performance of racialized gender. Courts adjudicated conflicts over the braided hair of African American women, earrings and long hair worn by white men, bodily changes in the pregnant, and the demeanor of white women aspiring to higher management. These contests, as ones about sexual harassment, contain multiple subtexts about sexualities, proper womanhood and manhood, and the nature of the workplace. Private aspects of life become social, political, and the object of state contestation. This paper will rethink discrimination law in the workplace, based on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, through a reading of court cases about appearance. These include cases about the age, weight, pregnancy, and marital status of flight attendants, a group of women workers sexualized in "Come Fly With Me" advertisements and whose bodies rather than skills came to represent their profession; cases in which men were dismissed for dress and hair; cases in which women's bodies were judged too old and thus unattractive; cases in which women's bodies had change due to pregnancy. These cases sometimes involved gender transgressions, with gender harboring racial subtexts. Other times, the cases reflect conflicts between womanhood and the ideal of the worker. And some show the conflict between the sexual body and the working body. My data comes from a sample of Fair Employment Cases, cited in the BNA Reporter, from 1968 to 1990. Excluded were cases with no information, that were dismissed on procedural grounds. To this I apply critical race and feminist theories and supplement court data with other historical records, including newspaper accounts and union records.

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Catherine Bosshart-Pfluger (University of Fribourg, Switzerland): The Construction of Motherhood and Its Role During the “Gilded Age” of the Catholic Subsociety in Switzerland (1920-1940)

In 1848, the Civil War in Switzerland (Sonderbundskrieg), during which the protestant and mainly liberal cantons had fought their catholic and mainly conservative counterparts, caused deep cleavages in Swiss society. However, the winners did include the defeated catholic cantons into the new federal state of Switzerland, the catholic cantons were a political minority and had for the period of almost forty years little to say in the political sphere. In reaction to this and to the fear of unsettling economic and social changes (industrialization) the conservative catholic population withdrew into a subsystem of the overall society structured by cultural-ideological and structural-social elements (Altermatt). The conservative catholic elite of Switzerland fought for its cause by using modern means: public communication by founding newspapers, regrouping people by creating associations for different ages as well as different areas of interest. Women played a major role in this scenario and were tried to be instrumentalized in church and social matters. The intended presentation aims at analysing the construction of motherhood and its values by the catholic church, their transformation by the Swiss bishops and by the conservative catholic politicians in the Swiss context on one hand. The second part will go into the reception and response to these images by the umbrella organization of Swiss catholic women and local associations of catholic mothers. I shall focus on a case study to exemplify these procedures. From 1929 on, the Swiss Catholic Conservative People’s party put the protection of the family on its program, initiated a congress on this topic in 1940 and, in 1942, launched a family protection initiative on the federal level. Within these discussions, topics like birth control and motherhood insurance became an issue. The construction of motherhood values by catholic church and catholic conservative party emerges clearly in this discourse. The reception of and response to this from the side of Swiss Catholic Women’s Organization tend to follow the mainstream of the projected images. More ambiguous and diverse attitudes can be found on the basis, i.e. The catholic communities and local associations (interviews).

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E J Brabin (Puddington Village, Cheshire): The Murderess: Sole Practitioner or Partner in Crime?

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Janice Brandon-Falcone (Northwest Missouri State University, USA): Women, Culture and Creativity

The way we tell the story of women in the past reflects a great deal of how we see woman in the present. How are images and stories of women mediated to the general public through museum displays, historic preservation projects, and living history programs? Does the way museums present women in history reflect the state of current scholarship on women, or are women, presented primarily in traditional and subordinate gender roles? This paper will examine just that in a series of visits to museums, living history farms, and historically preserved settings that provide a main source of public access to the stories of women in the past. The question the paper addresses will concern whether traditional gender roles that emphasise women’s subordinate role are the ways that women are presented in our history museums; or whether the public has greater access to images of women engaged in powerful roles, lives of activism and leadership. The study will be regional and concentrate on images of women in Midwestern US museums, living history farms, and what artifacts are chosen for historic preservation. The conclusions drawn will suggest that there are national and international implications in the study, that it is not simply a local study, but rather one that reflects broader values.

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Ciara Breathnach (University of Otago, Australia): The Congested Districts Board of Ireland and the Changing Role of Women in the Rural Economy, 1891-1923

This paper focuses on the gender division of labour in the West of Ireland between 1890-1919. It identifies the main female dominated industries using the sample budgets contained in the ‘Baseline Reports’ of the Congested Districts Board of Ireland (C.D.B.), 1891-1923. Thereafter it argues that the propensity of rural women to engage in ‘paid employment’ depended on whether or not a basic cash income was earned. Victorian reform agencies namely, the Congested Districts Board (C.D.B.), the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (I.A.O.S. founded in 1894), and later the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (D.A.T.I. founded in 1899) have been accused of intentionally displacing the role of women in the rural economy by removing female labour from the fields and replacing it in the home. However, this work asserts that the C.D.B. specifically enhanced existing mechanisms and refutes the argument that the C.D.B. was guilty of enforced housewifery.

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Barbara Brookes (University of Otago, New Zealand): The Sexual Dynamics of History - a Retrospective. The Impatience of Feminist History?

Barbara Brookes (University of Otago, New Zealand): ‘Blank cheque for permissiveness': The Pill, Sexuality and Gender Relations in New Zealand

The oral contraceptive Pill, introduced in 1961, was taken up more rapidly in New Zealand than in any other country in the Western world. At that time one leading physician suggested that 'such a revolution may have greater social significance than votes for women'. New Zealand prided itself on being the first nation state to enfranchise women but in the central areas of private morality, birth control and abortion, New Zealand women were not granted such ready recognition of their autonomy It was not until 1953 that this first birth control clinic was opened in New Zealand. The rapid uptake of the contraceptive Pill in the 1960s, therefore, requires explanation. This paper investigates that question. It also assesses the impact of the Pill on attitudes to female sexuality, analyses the public discourse around the notion of 'permissiveness', and places the debates in the context of wider changes in gender relations.

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Lynn Brunet (University of Newcastle, Australia): Incest and Initiation: A hypothetical model to link post-war Freemasonry, the role of symbolism and the current ritual abuse debate

According to Masonic sources the numbers of men initiated into the Masonic Order in the 1950s in Australia was as high as sixty percent of the male population (Kellerman 1990). These high numbers suggested that many families were influenced by the presence of Freemasonry, but its pledges of secrecy prevented the knowledge of its inner workings being conveyed to non-initiated women and children. In an era of high church attendance the Masonic Order provided a socially sanctioned male-only environment in which men could enjoy evenings away from the wife. However, unlike the more transparent workings of the Church, the Masonic Order existed in many families as a mysterious presence about which questions should never be asked. For the men who had returned from war it provided a secluded environment in which to re-enact the mateship bond and a network of associates in the burgeoning post-war business world. It also provided a context for the traditional enactment of initiation practices that were similar in form to those of male-only secret societies in many archaic warrior cultures. These practices affirmed the experience of the sacred as the group’s engagement with the reality of death and arguably, in the post-war era, provided a symbolic context through which to channel some of the more emotionally traumatic effects of the experience of war. Incest is one way in which repressed trauma is re-enacted across generations. The oral rape of a child, for example, conducted quietly in the family home can take place in a matter of minutes leaving no external scars, but changing the inner life of the child completely. In such an act the child, through shock and trauma, confronts her own death and through dissociation may totally forget the experience until much later in her adult years. If the perpetrator is her father, the consequences, as we know, are massive; many women have carried the burden of their father’s pain in their psyches for most of their lives. But what is different if her father is an initiated man? One Masonic scholar argues that incest, in former times, was a means of passing down the psychic pictures from one generation to the next so that the psychic framework and ‘inner vision’ of the family group remained cohesive (Heindel 1918). This paper will argue that, in the act of rape, the perpetrator and the victim enter a shared liminal space in which a complex exchange occurs. For the initiated man the archetypal images that symbolise his ability to confront death may well provide a positive vehicle for the expression of inner states, but for the child to whom these are passed in terror, these symbols may be toxic and foreign. It will suggest that the symbolism of initiation in Masonic practice shares many attributes with the psychology of trauma as outlined in contemporary trauma theory. In tracing this symbolic exchange the paper will attempt to draw a connection between the current debates about ritual abuse and the experience of incest in the post-war period. Given the secretive and hidden nature of both incest and initiation it is unlikely that traditional historical source material would be readily available and other sources must be pursued. This paper will suggest that the realm of contemporary art may provide some answers to this debate, linking the banal act of rape in the family home to broader cultural practices aimed at reinforcing the dominant white patriarchal order.

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Darcy Buerkle (Smith College, USA): Jewish Women and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Berlin

While approaches to advertising had been evolving since the mid-19th century, Germany in the 1920s saw an increase in the conceptualization of the consumer as a subject who could be both anticipated as a type and addressed as an individual. Weimar Berlin was the site of crystallization for a growing interest in the psychology of advertising: women’s private lives and sexuality were being mined, reconfigured and marketed in the public sphere. This paper will investigate the problem of the Jewish woman as an entity in 1920s advertising texts and visual culture. I will argue that while well-studied post-1933 advertising was typified by the imprint of Nazi ideology, the emergence of images coded Jewish in Weimar Berlin represents a moment that has garnered little attention in its specificity. By focusing on it, I want to make suggestions about the degree to which the image of the New Woman as consumer in Weimar Germany situated Jewish women's spectral desire and thus resulted in historical circumstance characterized by symbolic domination and social death. This development precedes the Nazi takeover which would, of course, capitalize on it. Using visual material and advertising manuals from the Weimar period, my discussion will both assert an invocation of images coded Jewish and female as images that could "sell" and, also, theorize German Jewish women's spectatorship of mass-produced "images of self" in the 1920s and 1930s.

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Amanda Capern (University of Hul, UK): Patriarchy, Property and Power in the EarlyModern English Family

`Patriarchy, Property and Power in Early-Modern England' is a paper that arises out of an ongoing research interest I have in women's control and ownership of land and capital wealth. In another paper I have published ['The Landed Woman in Early-Modern England', Parergon, 19 (2002)] I have argued that women's ownership of land enabled them to exercise considerable familial power. In this paper, I would like to argue that women's co-option of debts in a family could lead to the same. The case study on which the paper is based is that of the Temple family of Stowe in Buckinghamshire, though it is hoped that the research will ultimately lead to a further, wider project on women's pursuit through litigation of family land and wealth. The woman about whom I will mostly talk in the paper is Hester Temple (d. 1656), whose calculation of her husband's huge debts of over £6000 led her in 1625 to seize control of the family finances. Eighty percent of the debts were owed within the family, many of them to Hester herself, and by this means Hester Temple went on to be a controlling influence in her extended family of at least 18 children and many sonsand daughters-in-law as well as grandchildren. In lending money within her larger kin network Hester Temple took on an acceptable social role for a woman but used her role as family financier to subvert the accepted gender hierarchy. The thrust of this paper, then, is to indicate the ways in which control of family wealth (or debts) could serve to undercut the patriarchal model family that existed in conduct books in early-modern England.

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Helene Carlbäck (Södertörn University College, Sweden): ) Radicalism For Different Reasons. Nordic and Soviet Russian Family Legislation in the 1920s.

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Lee Chambers (University of Colorado, USA): Securing the Nation: Women Warriors of a Cold War Nuclear Community

Following the Truman administration's decision in 1947 to re-invigorate the nuclear weapons research program as part of its overall Cold War strategy, aggressive recruiting brought to Los Alamos, New Mexico, a new, young group of scientists who made weapons development and testing their lives' work. Not the renowned academicians who had justified the atomic bomb as a scientific exercise and who, appalled at what they had wrought, left Los Alamos to return to academe after Nagasaki, these Cold Warriors committed themselves to the mission that correlated national security with developing America's nuclear capability. The development of a nuclear arsenal, carried on in an atmosphere blended of mission urgency and espionage paranoia that thickened as spy scandals surfaced, exerted enormous pressures on the weapons builders and their families. In the nuclear weapons laboratories, scientists and engineers saw themselves as "Cold Warriors" on the virtual but terrifyingly real front lines of this superpower confrontation. The feeling of playing a crucial role in the nation's security projected outward from the secret spaces of the laboratories staffed by male scientists and engineers into the nearby private and public spaces, enlisting and disciplining women and children. In homes, schools, and churches, they were molded, as one former resident remembers, into "Warrior Families that knew the rules." Nuclear labs' management saw this as a necessary conscription, for these institutions both reinforced and depended upon gendered behavior of a particular kind. Weapons laboratories separated a symbolically female, sheltered, private sphere of employee families from the symbolically male, public sphere of the laboratory workplace, where the concern with science and technology both extended into and reflected the influence of politics and international relations. These symbolically distinct spheres were functionally interdependent, linked by the "warrior" marriage (and family) that helped to ensure the trustworthiness, for security purposes, of the scientist. It also served to spare him the burdens of household management and child care, and provided a "haven" in an axiomatically "heartless world." The laboratory encouraged a definition of woman's role and duty as separate from but complimentary to weapons work. It did so through the geographical separation of the laboratory from the residential community and the organization of family activities that celebrated the stability of the private sphere and its indispensability to the success of the security mission. The wives, largely uncritical patriots, saw it as their duty to support their husbands' mission by assuming responsibility for cultural, recreational, and family life as well as social welfare systems. Despite the essential nature of women's contribution to the Los Alamos mission during the Cold War, we know relatively little about their lives. Unlike the wives of World War II Los Alamos scientists, the Cold War generation of women published little, and has never been the subject of a systematic study. Much of what is known remains impressionistic and statistics hard to come by. Police and residents of the community (gated and fenced until 1957) conspired to conceal domestic violence and family instability. For example, divorce, impossible until Los Alamos reverted from the federal government to the state of New Mexico in 1949, usually took place elsewhere.

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Nupur Chaudhuri (Texas Southern University, USA): A Hindu Wife's Travel to England in Late-Nineteenth Century and Its Impact on Her Private Life

Krishnobhabini wrote profusely about the need for the education of Bengali women. She was a feminist and a nationalist. Das went to London with her husband in 1882. Her husband went there to teach Indian-bound British civil servants about India. She spent eight years in London. She left her five year old daughter with her father-in-law. While Krishnobhabini and her husband were in England, they were informed that the grandfather arranged the marriage of their ten-year-old daughter Tilottoma. This news upset Krishnabhabini. In spite of her belief in women's autonomy she could not stop this wedding. When they returned to Calcutta, they could not see their married daughter. The traditionalist in-laws prohibited their daughter-in-law, Tilottoma, from seeing her parents. Tilottoma became quite sick after she lost her first child at childbirth. At that point her husband decided to marry for the second time. Krishnabhabini insisted that her daughter Tilottoma should leave her husband but she refused to do that. Soon after that she died. Analyzing mother-daughter relationship, this paper shows (a) the ways separation from the mother, Krishnobhabini, at an early age impacted the life of a daughter, Tilottoma, and (b) the ways Tilottoma, the daughter, rejected her mother's feminism and activism.

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Lisa Chilton (University of Prince Edward Island, Canada): Single Female Emigrants and The Construction of An Imperial Family of Women

This paper will explore the construction of surrogate, woman-only families for single British female emigrants between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1930s. During this period, women's emigration societies were established in Britain, along with complimentary reception committees in the colonies, to protect and support women who migrated without their "natural" protectors--fathers, husbands, brothers. By the 1880s, imperially-minded women had established a comprehensive system of female emigrant supervision that was designed to look after single women from the date of their departure from their British homes, to an indefinite period after their settlement at their colonial destinations. In support of this system of female migration management, familial rhetoric was used with great effect. Single women travelers were portrayed in the emigration societies' promotional literature as vulnerable young women who required, and generally desired, parental guidance and protection. The women who managed their migration were represented as mother figures. The middle- and upper-class women who ran the female emigration societies derived a variety of benefits from their work--including a significant degree of power and authority. The logic behind their careful construction of a discourse that was designed to support their work is self evident. More interesting is the fact that single female emigrants were often complicit in the promotion of this discourse. Some of the women who used the services of the female emigration societies clearly resisted the attempts of the emigrators to place them in surrogate familial relationships, complete with the rights and duties of faithful daughters. But many of the women who emigrated under the care of female emigrators embraced their filial roles with enthusiasm. This paper will examine the writing of women who self-consciously wrote back to their British emigrators about their migration and colonial experiences with the knowledge that their letters might be reproduced in the female emigration societies' promotional publications. In my examination of this subject, I will draw upon the writings of Jane Lewis, Angela Woollacott, Seth Koven, Sonya Michel, and others, to contextualise the maternal discourses constructed by the female emigrators. In exploring the response of the 'daughters' of these discourses to their new roles and identities, I hope to contribute to our further understanding of how and why maternal discourses of this sort were, in some contexts, so successful. The single women in this case were of working-class and middle-class backgrounds, and as such would also have fit the image of either the "good time girl" discussed in histories of independent wage-earning women in the city during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Kathy Peiss; Christine Stansell; Carolyn Strange) or the identity of the "New Woman" (Sally Ledger). I will argue that the fact that the single female emigrants identified in my study embraced the roles of dutiful daughters to maternal philanthropists and social reformers does not mean that, unlike these other more independent female types, they looked to replace one form of family dependency for another. Rather, these women were able to manipulate and use this discourse to forge useful relationships with other women in a context where usual networks of support were absent. The role of surrogate daughter could provide a context and identity that was empowering to otherwise unmoored single women.

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Anna Clark (University of Minnesota, USA): The Sexual Dynamics of History - a Retrospective. The Impatience of Feminist History?

See Barbara Brookes

Kirsten Clarke (University of Edinburgh, Scotland): Motherhood as a Political Weeapon in Medieval Cairo: Sayyida Rasad

Sayyida Rasad (11th century) was a Sudanese slave girl brought to Cairo for the seventh Fatimid (Shi’ite) caliph al-Zahir. After his death in 1035, her son al-Mustansir became caliph at the age of seven. According to Fatimid tradition, Sayyida Rasad should have lived a life of privilege within the harem; instead she deliberately maintained a strong hold over her son to win power over the enormous empire. After the death of grand wazir al-Jarjara’i in 1044, Sayyida established herself as regent despite her son being sixteen. The relationship between her and her son continued for at least another twenty years. At times he struggled to be free of her power, at others he connived with her to rid the state of troublesome figures. Eventually Sayyida abandoned her son during the civil war and fled to his greatest enemies, the Sunni ‘Abbasids in Baghdad. This paper studies her use of motherhood as a political weapon, and how far she would sacrifice al-Mustansir to maintain her own power. The curious dynamic in their behaviour towards each other, and eventually the disastrous effect of her refusal to accept the traditional role is also detailed. I also attempt to explain her concept of family within Islam, medieval Egypt and the Fatimid customs, and to answer the question of how far she was what we would understand as maternal today.

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James Collins (Georgetown University, USA): Women in Early Modern France: A New Paradigm

The first generation of scholars working on the history of French women developed a paradigm that suggested a time of troubles for women between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians such as Natalie Zemon Davis documented the decline in women’s wages relative to those of men in the sixteenth century, while Sarah Hanley and others emphasized the growing institutional restrictions against women after 1550. French kings changed marriage laws, subjecting more and more women to the authority of men in their choice of husband, restricted women’s rights in guilds, and generally buttressed the paterfamilial authority. Rulers in England and the German states did essentially the same thing: Merry Wiesner-Hanks’s fine synthesis has made us all familiar with these developments. Even in the 1980s, a few voices in the wilderness suggested that, at least in the seventeenth century, the power of women grew, rather than declined. Pioneering work by Daryl Hafter and Gay Gullickson, among others, established the economic importance of women in many sectors, for both the 17th and 18th centuries. A new generation of eighteenth-century scholars, such as Zoe Schneider, Clare Crowston, Cynthia Truant, or my colleagues on this panel, find that the old paradigm makes no sense. The persistence of the old paradigm of decline has meant that each of them began their work with an assumption that people in their given trade or profession formed an exception to the pattern of decline and disempowerment. Given the unanimity of their findings, however, the time has come to shift to a new paradigm, one that emphasizes female empowerment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This new paradigm must seek to explain the ways in which women manipulated institutions to their own ends, overcame legal restrictions or manipulated the law to their own benefit, and in which they took control of, or became more critical players in, important sectors of the French economy. My paper will seek to lay out one possible framework for such a paradigm.

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Mary Conley (College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, USA): Mothering the Royal Navy: Agnes Weston, Sailors’ Homes, and Relief to Naval Wives

Nicknamed “Mother of the Navy”, Agnes Weston (1868-1918) was considered by contemporaries to be the Navy’s equivalent to Florence Nightingale. Weston did not innovate the idea of naval temperance or sailors’ rests, yet she holds a prominent place in the history of missionary work for seamen. It was rare to find a woman in such authority within a philanthropic organization, but it was certainly more unusual that Weston attained such status through her service to an all-male Navy. Despite her own lack of children, Weston exerted her moral influence as an ‘imperial mother’, nurturing naval boys and men in the fleet to be “Christian, temperate, and true” whether afloat or ashore. Naval philanthropists intended to transform the naval man and his family into respectable members of British society and to make the British naval man worthy of his role as both husband and defender of the British Empire. This paper will focus on middle-class British female philanthropists and missionaries, like Agnes Weston, who relied upon “charitable domesticity” to regenerate the physical and moral condition of both the naval man and his family. Agnes Weston, a middle-class single woman, devoted the better part of her life, from the time she was twenty-eight in 1868 until her death in 1918, to improving the moral and physical welfare of naval seamen. Agnes Weston not only offered herself to be the sailor’s friend when he was in port, but also to be “like a mother” to naval ratings. Weston was able to maneuver in the navy, a man’s world in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, because she had promised that she would “speak to the lads just as if she were their mother. Weston’s Sailors’ Rests were part of a growing number of sailors’ homes, established in the Victorian period to provide seafarers on leave with inexpensive board and lodging. Sailors’ homes, often run by a religious mission or a church, enticed sailors by offering them “ a home away from home.” As Frank Prochaska has suggested, “the home, the very fountain of the nation’s life, was the most invigorating image in the philanthropic world and was commonly raised to the metaphor.” Like other sailors’ homes, Weston’s rests, which were free from drink, attempted to keep the sailor “free from all that could harm him” and to instill in the sailor virtues of thrifty, sobriety , and respectability. Weston boasted that many naval seaman had “never forgotten the Sailors’ Rest, that was a second home to him when he was a boy.” In her publications, Weston comforted herself and her readers with letters received by mothers of naval men who assured Weston “of the good that their sons have gained by coming to the Sailors’ Rest.” In addition to Weston’s efforts in establishing Sailors’ Homes for men, middle-class women in English port towns, often wives of naval officers, led charitable projects in Edwardian Britain in which they ministered to both the naval man and his family (visiting naval men’s homes, teaching naval wives needlepoint and instructing these wives to become better mothers). For example, the Royal Naval Friendly Union of Sailors’ Wives (RNFU) was an autonomous organization established in 1905 by officers’ wives to offer relief and support to the wives of non-commissioned naval men. By advocating “friendly and mutual helpfulness” between wives of officers and non-commissioned men, the RNFU sought “to encourage one another to maintain the dignity of the their position, as wives of those who are serving their country afloat, more especially under the trying circumstances of long and frequent separation from their husbands; cheering each other by mutual sympathy.” Through mutual benevolence, the union hoped that it could pass virtues of morality, respectability, and domesticity from one class to another. Other programs, like those led by Agnes Weston, encouraged Christian fellowship and temperance among naval families. In 1895, Weston estimated that five hundred sailor wives belonged to mothers’ meetings in Portsmouth and Devonport. These diverse forms of outreach agreed that moral reform began within the home. By inculcating domestic virtues of thrift, cleanliness, and motherhood, these various programs intended to create respectable naval families. The activities of Weston and naval officers’ wives in reaching out to the wives and families of non-commissioned men were consistent with Victorian philanthropy’s emphasis on domesticity, respectability, and self-reliance. The work of the RNFU and by Weston’s organizations contributed to the redefinition of naval philanthropy in the late Victorian period. By the turn of the century, naval philanthropy served not only the naval man but also assisted his family. As Frank Prochaska has argued, through the rhetoric of Victorian domesticity, “the state itself became the family fully extended, in need of moral regeneration based on familial virtue.” As the RNFU attempted to build a relationship between the families of commissioned officers and non-commissioned ranks, its philanthropic endeavors also redefined the Navy as an extended family, hierarchical but intimate, rather than as a distant and imposing institution. While the efforts of the RNFU and of Weston intended to relieve individual naval families, these women also constructed a vision of motherhood and family dedicated to both Navy and Empire.

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Aodhan Connolly (Queen’s University Belfast): Virgin, Fornicator or Fantasy: The Sexuality of Women in The Ballad Collection Samuel Pepys

This paper will examine the differing depictions of women’s sexuality in arguably the best ballad collection of the seventeenth century, that of the civil servant and diarist Samuel Pepys. By examining these ballads I hope to show the sexual norms that women were expected to conform to both before and after marriage. There will also be an examination of how those who flaunted these social rules were depicted and of the portrayal of women as sexual fantasy figures in ballads and bawdy drinking songs to heartfelt declarations of love.

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Hera Cook (University of Sydney, Australia): 'Friction under Emotional Circumstances' ? Dr Joan Malleson and Interpretations of Female Sexuality among English Women in the Birth Control Movement

Dr Joan Malleson (1900-1956) belonged to the Worker's Group for Birth Control in the 1920s. A letter from her to the New Statesman and Nation in 1934 was the first move toward the founding of the Abortion Law Reform Association, in which she played a major role and which constantly emphasised that working-class women were denied access to the safe medical abortions that middle-class women were able to purchase. However by the 1930s, she was also working for the Family Planning Association running sexual problem clinics. Following WWII, she contributed to international debates on the defining of female sexual response and wrote an advice manual for couples with sexual problems. Alongside Michael Balint of the Tavistock Clinic, she had set up training sessions for doctors who were dealing with sexual problems. However from the late 1960s, feminists resoundingly rejected the interpretation of female sexuality as more emotional, more monogamous and focused on vaginal orgasm, which was central not only to Malleson's work but also to that of other English birth control workers such as Mary Macaulay and Helena Wright. This paper considers Malleson's life and asks why a woman who was so insistent on the need for women's control of their fertility interpreted female sexuality in such apparently limited terms?

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Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch (University of Paris, France): African Women and Colonialism

Women's history and gender relations were especially ignored both by African leaders and by colonizers. Therefore women's status and evolution is yet to be discusse. Did they dramatically suffer from colonization, or was an emerging female emancipation made possible by westernization? The answer is complex, because women¹s conditions were extremely varied, according to their residential (urban or rural) areas, their social status, and previous gender¹s relations. Everywhere, social pressure and individual emancipation impacted differently. I will give some examples and propose a few answers.

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Christopher Corley (Minnesota State University, USA): Family Law and Female Agency in Early Modem Burgundy

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Catherine Cox ( University College Dublin, Ireland): Women, the Family and Confinement of the Mentally Ill in the South East Ireland

Traditionally, the majority of historiography concerned with the role of the lunatic asylum in eighteenth and nineteenth century society has tended to focus on them as instruments to facilitate `the social control of deviants'. Michel Foucault's analysis, as extrapolated in Madness and Civilisation' and The Birth by the Clinic published in France in 1961 and 1963 respectively, is key to this approach. A central part of this narrative is the suggestion that women were particular victims of a patriarchal society and the emerging psychiatric profession. The evidence from the main mental asylum in the south-east of Ireland, Carlow Lunatic Asylum, suggests that the circumstances surrounding the confinement off patients were much more complex. Elaine Showalter argues that women were regarded as more vulnerable to insanity than men. In Carlow asylum, women came to form the minority of committals as the century progressed. The identifying agent of their insanity was not, as suggested by Showalter, the psychiatric profession, but the family in which they lived prior to admission. Within that family, no one patriarchal figure appears to dominate the decision to commit female members; mothers, wives and sisters are willing to attest in a court of law to the insanity of a female relative. These women acted with sufficient independence and self-confidence to approach the relevant parties to ensure the committal of their husbands, offspring, parents and siblings. This central role of women was maintained after the Great Famine, displaying few signs of the restriction of women to the domestic sphere in post Famine Ireland. The different authority under which women were committed to the asylum informs us of the assumptions made about the nature of female insanity. In Carlow asylum, significantly more men than women were committed under the Dangerous Lunatic legislation. Committal under this act required the display of violence. Women were more likely to be committed by the authority of the board of governors of the asylum, violent displays was not a prerequisite. It is possible that - in the overcrowded conditions of the asylums - men and women were required to fulfil certain assumptions about the differing nature of insanity between the genders. This favoured female patients who were committed before their illness had progressed to the violent state. The evidence from Carlow asylum therefore forces a re-assessment of the nature of female insanity, the circumstances surrounding and the role of the family in the committal.

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Béatrice Craig (University of Ottawa Canada): Crossing The Boundary: Religion, Politics and Gender among Northern France Industrialists

Historians of nineteenth century France agree that after the Revolution, religion became increasingly feminized. This reinforced the concept of religion as a private matter, which should not interfere in the public sphere. Ironically however, this feminization of religion may have helped women move into the public sphere. In his survey on France and Women in the nineteenth century James mcmillan for instance concluded his discussion of women’s religious activities in those terms. The doctrine of separate spheres implied that women were restricted to the private sphere, but in practice, through the Church, whether as the saintes soeurs of the congregations or the femmes fortes of the confraternities and charitable organizations, women gained access to the public sphere. (p. 55) This perspective implies that the private and public spheres were realities in the lives of middle class women; through religion, women expanded the boundaries of their sphere, creating a feminine enclave into the other one. But although charity or educational work allowed lay and religious women to step out of domestic sphere, they did not enter the public one on the same terms as men. Politics, and in the case of middle class women, the economy remained out of bounds. One should not however assume that the Church or lay people envisioned spheres which were necessarily segregated along gender lines- or even that they shared our concept of a “public” sphere. The example of the men and women of the Vrau family, a xixth and early xxth family of industrialists from northern France shows that neither the Vrau, nor the high ranking Churchmen with whom they associated saw a clear boundary between what we call the public and the private spheres. Praying and running a factory were political acts, whose purpose was to re-establish the Church as the foundation of civil society- as the ultimate public institution. One consequence of this outlook is that at Vrau’s, the women ran the factory so that the men could pray. The intensity of their religious feelings made them unusual – their indifference to what we have come to consider as nineteenth century gender norms were not however.

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Virginia Crossman (Staffordshire University, UK): Viewing Women, Family and Sexuality through the Prism of the Irish Poor Laws

This paper will examine the treatment of women and children under the Irish poor laws in the nineteenth century. How did poor law functionaries regard the family and how far was it possible to maintain family relationships within the workhouse? The gendered nature of workhouse organisation and relief distribution will be evaluated, and the way in which concepts such as respectability and independence shaped women's experience of the poor law system. Particular attention will be paid to the debate over the need for a system of moral classification within workhouses, a system that was largely predicated upon a woman's expression of sexuality. It will be argued that while Irish guardians sought to impose a punitive regime on those perceived to be immoral or non-respectable, the Local Government Board refused to permit this beyond a certain point. Finally, the paper will assess the extent to which the admittance of women onto Irish poor law boards from 1896 led to changes either in official responses to poverty or in poor law administration.

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Rachel Cunningham (University of Birmingham, UK): Patriarchy and Victorian Society: An Examination of the Relationship between Power and the State Regulation of Prostitution

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Gail Cuthbert Brandt (University of Waterloo, Canada): Weaving Identities, Framing Community: Women in the Quebec Cotton Textile Industry in Quebec, 1930-1951

This paper will explore the main conference themes of women, family, private life and sexuality through an examination of the lives of French-Canadian working class women employed in the primary cotton textile industry of Quebec. Based on a larger study (1891-1951) that examines continuity and change in the industrial labour performed by women, their workplace activism, family lives, and community involvement, this paper will focus on the experiences of two cohorts of female factory operatives, namely those born between 1915 and 1934. By studying the intricate interconnections that existed among paid labour and unpaid work, female sexuality, family roles, and social activities, it will examine how class, gender, ethnicity, religion and culture defined the contours of these women’s experience and social identities. More specifically, the paper will focus on the question of the social construction of the female wage earner as construed by parents and husbands, church and state, textile companies and unions, and the women themselves. Much of the research material used to generate this paper comes from lengthy oral interviews conducted with more than eighty female textile workers. Their testimony provides fascinating insights into evolving attitudes toward family, work, workplace activism, social relations, and sexuality. I will argue that, while many similarities existed between the attitudes and behaviours of the members of the two cohorts highlighted in this paper and those of previous cohorts of female textile workers, there were some notable differences. These changes presaged the profound sociological and ideological shifts in Quebec society that we have come to associate with the “Quiet Revolution” and the emergence of a secular, modern society. Comparisons will also be made to the experiences of women textile workers in England, France, Japan and the United States.

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Mary E. Daly (University College, Dublin, Ireland): Marriage, Fertility and Women’s Lives in Twentieth-Century Ireland

This paper examines the question of marital fertility, or family size in Ireland from approximately 1900 until the 1960s. By the 1930s the marriage rate in Ireland was the lowest in what we would now term the developed world, but family size was among the highest. Yet while much has been written about Ireland’s low marriage rate and late age of marriage and their impact of the lives of women and men, much less attention has been devoted to marital fertility. I propose to look briefly at this topic under the following headings: 1. A brief description of marital fertility, by occupation, religion and social class, and changes over time. 2. An examination of the available evidence regarding family limitation in twentieth century Ireland. 3. The impact of large families on health, poverty and economic welfare, and the burden that they imposed on parents, and on older siblings, and how this was undoubtedly a factor in Ireland’s lack of marriages and late age of marriage. 3. The failure by the Irish state or the catholic church to face up to the consequences of large families. Indeed the adverse consequences of large families appears to have been a taboo subject: it attracted little attention in the debate over children’s allowances, and it proved to be the most divisive topic addressed (or not addressed) by the Commission on Emigration (1948-54). 4. What the slow decline in family size, and the slow take-up of family limitation might indicate about the relationship between Irish husbands and wives. Although this paper draws on quite an extensive range of evidence, many parts of the analysis are necessarily speculative, raising more questions that are answered.

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Joy Damousi (University of Melbourne, Australia): 'The Foundation of Good Citizenship': Female Medical School Inspectors and the State, 1900-1914.

This paper explores various aspects of school inspection during the early twentieth century in Australia. In particular, it examines school medical inspection as an extension of mothering and parenting. The tasks and duties that were associated with inspecting children aimed to train parents to become 'experts'. The duties of the medical school inspectors it is argued, involved a delicate balance of science and social work, promoting a form of scientific mothering. The interest in the physical as well as the intellectual development of the child is made official policy in 1908 with the appointment of medical inspectors in state educational departments. A growing concern with 'school hygiene' was a precursor to the eugenicist arguments that later dominated child guidance literature. Related to this point is a second theme that is concerned with an examination of the very tools of inspection - that is - statistical evidence. It could be argued that for female medical school inspectors, statistical gathering represented an entry into the masculine world of hard facts, evidence and scientific legitimacy. Finally, by way of conclusion, I argue that in attempting to act as a 'scientific parent', and in promoting a 'rational', 'scientific state', we can see how school medical inspection was a precursor to the scientific motherhood movement which gained ascendancy during the inter-war years. Through an examination of the work of Victoria's first female medical school inspectors - doctors Mary Booth and Jane Greig - it is evident that medical inspection of schools combined science and maternity and numbers became a legitimising aspect of the female medical inspector's work. Inspection increasingly became a modernizing enterprise that allowed women the opportunity play a leading role in this endevour.

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Krassimira Daskalova (St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, Bulgaria): Female Sexuality and Prostitution in the Balkans: The Bulgarian Case (19th - Early 20th Century)

Gender history in the Balkans is still in its initial phase, placing the emphasis on women’s merits in the literature and art, but also in “national tasks”, and until recently in some of the Balkan states (East-European) – in the “building up of socialism”. “Social history” there, as part of “general history”, is underdeveloped. The historical scholarship in the Balkans is predominantly traditional, i. e. it is mostly a platform for the political elite. Thus, even after the great development and acknowledged influence of feminism and women’s/gender studies, and especially of women’s/gender history, on the modern humanitarian paradigms in other parts of the world, women have no historical existence for the majority of the researchers in the Balkans. Even in today’s latest versions of “history”, written in the Balkans, women (and gender relations) remain (to cite Lucien Febvre) “those, who have no right of history”. When represented in the history narrative, women appear to be only natural beings, permanently immersed in their biology and sexuality unlike men, who belonged to the cultural realm. In the nineteenth century there was a overwhelming consensus that women were inherently different from men (something that Thomas Laqueur called a “two-sex model”); that women and men are two fundamentally distinct creatures, bearing different organs that imply divergent behavior and talents, completely different abilities and potential, sexuality including. Female passionlessness, for example, emerged in juxtaposition to an active male sexuality. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century sexuality, however, was a highly contested arena. Debates and cultural exchange around dangerous female sexualities can be found in almost every national tradition, in the Balkans including. My presentation is going to restore those “hidden from history” debates about female sexuality and prostitution in Bulgaria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I will follow the opinions of “abolitionists” and their opponents; of medical doctors, intellectuals, bureaucrats, feminist activists, and prostitutes themselves, trying to reveal the double moral standards of the society. I will show those debates within the larger context of Bulgarian and Balkan modernization (westernization, europeanization), in which there occurred a decline of the “collective charisma of the Occident” (in Andrew Janos’ terms). They will be related to the new (20th C) discussions about the “native” and “foreign”, “peasant” and “urban”, “local” and “universal”, “traditional” and “modern”. When possible comparisons will be maid with other European societies, as well.

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Leonore Davidoff (University of Essex, UK): Care and the Power Dynamics of Late Nineteenth Century Sibling Relationships

This paper discusses the relationships of siblings as carers to each other, a topic which has been much neglected by historians. The dramatic fall in the British birth-rate in the late 19th and early 20th centuries reduced the involvement of siblings in familial care. By the mid-20th century, the average family size for all strata was two to three children, but pre-1870 the age gap between the oldest and youngest children in larger families could be as much as twenty years ( with death of a parent and remarriage bringing step-siblings into the family it could be even greater). In the late 19th century young adu1t siblings within households were given some rsponsibility for babies, toddlers and young children. However, these responsibilities would vary according to gender (as well as age). Unmarried daughters who remained at home would be expected to do direct child care; boys would do some 'chi1d minding' and guiding younger siblings but would also be expected to contribute to their financial support where necessary. Eldest children in particular would act as surrogate parents when necessary . In middle-class families, boys would more likely to be absorbed by their education either at boarding or day schools where sisters were available at home to teach younger children. The gendered dynamics of these sibling relationships in terms of power, influence, care and control will be illustrated by two case studies, one middle and the other working class.

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Anna Davin (London, UK): The Sexual Dynamics of History - a Retrospective. The Impatience of Feminist History?

See Barbara Brookes

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Gayle Davis (University of Edinburgh, Scotland): 'Every Baby a Wanted Baby'?: Family Planning Policy in later Twentieth-Century Scotland

This paper is based on the preliminary findings of a Wellcome-sponsored research project entitled 'Health, Sexuality and the State in Scotland, 1950-1980'. The paper will examine one particular area of sexual policy-making in post- WW2 Scotland - family planning policy. In 1967, the same year as abortion was partiaily-legalised in Britain, the NHS (Family Planning) Act established that local health authorities could provide birth control advice or supplies. However, by 1970, only 2: of the 56 Scottish local authorities - that is, Aberdeen and Inverness - were providing a full and free family planning service. And it was not until the Heath Government's 1973 NHS (Reorganisation) Act that this became a mandatory part of health provision. The paper compares and contrasts central government policy and legislation with developments at the local level, using Aberdeen and Glasgow as case studies. In particular, using two key medical figures - Dugald Baird of Aberdeen and Ian Donald of Glasgow - it will illustrate how, within Scotland, family planning policy differed substantially depending on locality. Baird moved from Glasgow in 1937, disgusted by the treatment of women and the depressed economic conditions he witnessed there. Despite being a member of a traditionally conservative medical profession, Baird began to take an active interest in policy-making, and - under his influence - in 1946 Aberdeen Town Council accepted responsibility for the previously voluntary Family Planning Clinic, decades before it was publicly approved or legislation provided for it. Thus two decades before the 1967 legislation, Baird was providing a comprehensive abortion and family planning service for the women of Aberdeen. Glasgow provides a striking contrast to Aberdeen's famously liberal approach, Ian Donald epitomising anti-contraception feeling in the City. A committed member of the Scottish Episcopal Church, he was one of the most vocal British opponents of the 1967 Abortion Act, and abortion for social reasons. He objected strongly to the widespread availability of contraception, linking it to the wider moral debate over the so-called 'permissive society' and its accompanying social evils. He exerted considerable pressure on the Glasgow medical scene, and created a very restrictive service for the women of Glasgow in this area. Thus, despite the two cities being relatively close geographically, exhibiting similar social conditions - including a depressed economy and poor housing - and being located within an identical legal framework, the 1950s and 60s witnessed dramatically different practical interpretations of family planning policy in these two cities. The paper will explore the differing family planning policies found in these cities, and reasons to account for them. The paper will also make more tentative observations on whether or not family planning was 'medicalised' in this period in Scotland.

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Jacqueline de Vries (Augsburg College, Minneapolis, USA): New Women, New Religion: Representations of Faith and Doubt by three Fin-de-Siècle Feminists

The New Woman has become for us an iconographic figure of women’s new public possibilities in the 1880s and 1890s. Practically clothed, physically fit, politically minded, intellectually curious, she openly challenged prevailing notions of feminine behavior. Sometimes appearing in fictional form in Victorian popular novels and the periodical press, at other times in human form in debating clubs, settlement houses and public squares, the New Woman gained notoriety for her breech of the carefully calibrated Victorian public/private divide. As scholars have already explored, the New Woman’s public reputation was complicated: she was perceived by some of her contemporaries as a beacon of moral regeneration and by others as a figure of social degeneration. Her actions and attitudes left a wake of questions about the benefits of strict Victorian moral standards and the advantages of traditional Christian values. New Women – whether fictional or actual – were, of course, more than just public figures. They often maintained complicated private lives, fraught with difficult familial and romantic arrangements, and hard choices about loyalties and commitments. Recent scholarship has told us much about New Women’s struggles to transform gender and sexual relationships, both in public and private, but much less about the beliefs – and the ideational frameworks – that underpinned their search for new identities. While we can only know what they choose to reveal, many New Women said a lot – both in public and in private – about religion and the ways it was typically practiced by their contemporaries. In the hands of some New Women, Christianity was portrayed as a potent collaborator in the ongoing oppression of women, a flawed system to be rejected or, at the very least, reconceived. For others, Christianity provided hope and a set of possibilities for imagining greater equality and justice. This paper explores the ongoing dialogues conducted by three New Women about issues of faith, doubt, belief, and religion, and places those discussions within the wider context of late Victorian religious faith and practice. Two of the New Women in this paper – Mona Caird and Evelyn Sharp – give us glimpses of their religious beliefs and attitudes in their published and unpublished writings. We follow the shifting attitudes of the third figure – the fictional Vida Levering – on the pages of Elizabeth Robin’s popular suffragette novel The Convert. Through this juxtaposition of sources containing both personal representations and fictional constructions, we can begin to understand the multivalent contributions of religious discourse to the construction of the New Woman, as well as the hitherto unexplored impact of New Woman on emerging attitudes towards religion in the new century.

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Marion Deane (University of Ulster, Northern Ireland): The 'Birth Tales' of Cuchulainn

There are a number of different versions of the ‘Birth-tales’ of Cuchulainn, the mythological hero of the Ulster Cycle in early Irish literature. These mythological tales give narrative expression to certain legal principles drawn from 8th century law tracts, and throw light on contemporary attitudes to birth and mothering. Early Irish lawyers believed that the order that exists in the natural world formed a paradigm for appropriate conduct for humans in the community, and they formulated their laws accordingly. The tales express the belief that the status of a son must be protected by law. Legislators drew up regulations for his inheritance, based on the status of his mother’s union with his father. In a society which permitted polygamy, it was only as a primary wife, belonging to the first and top grade of a hierarchically based system of ten ‘sexual unions’ or marriages, that she could be deemed of appropriate status to mother the hero. Through a series of pregnancies, births, infancies or abortions, the status of the ideal mother is seen to be posited on the belief that, like any seed in vegetal nature, her fertility too must be appropriately husbanded and managed.

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Colleen Denney (University of Wyoming, USA): The Business of Representation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon Negotiates Victorian Respectability

This paper will use Mary Elizabeth Braddon as a case study of how Victorian working women represent themselves in images and professional correspondence. My assumption, based on extensive study of visual and written evidence, is that professional working women maintain an outer shell of respectability as a key attraction in their arsenal of survival in the business world. This preservation of normalcy does not, however, prevent them from being seen as commodities. Art historians have neither examined Braddon’s visual presence, nor its implications in terms of her efforts at respectability in public image and personal correspondence. Hence, I am interested in how she packages herself as commodity while maintaining her businesslike aura. In a series of unpublished letters between Braddon and the editor of the Fortnightly Review, T.H.S. Escott (1879-1885, British Library Manuscript Collection), she negotiates the commission of an essay on Zola. Braddon’s dialogue with Escott configures a specific set of business dealings, as she operates within the man’s world of publishing while also trying to retain her respectable identity. But, Braddon must tread softly through the business of representation. I argue that the letters reveal a struggle over gender shifting, identity, and the danger of disclosure which compete with Braddon’s intellectual interests. In turn, how she chooses to represent herself to this editor in fact mirrors her visual presence in such portraits as William Powell Frith’s Mary Elizabeth Braddon, aged 29, 1865 (National Portrait Gallery, London). Specifically, for this conference, this study addresses issues surrounding the economic function of the family and women’s contribution to it. In her fierce determination to protect her respectability in this correspondence, Braddon’s real uneasiness also mirrors her anxiety over possibly compromising her future capability of supporting a large family.

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Megan Doolittle (The Open University, UK): Mothers and Fathers and the Law in Mid-Nineteenth Century England’
This paper examines the gendered differences between the constructions and capacities of mothers and fathers in their roles as protectors of their children over the second half of the nineteenth century in England. Case studies drawn from legal disputes within (mainly) middle class families over custody and education of children will illuminate the shifts in the law and practice wherein women gradually gained formal rights over the care of their children and the means to maintain them, firstly through a series of legislation, including the Custody of Infants Acts, the Divorce Acts, the Guardianship of Infants Acts, and the Married Women ' s Property Acts. The changes in the constructions of motherhood and fatherhood will be traced through public debates and how these were played out in the courts, where the meanings associated with the protection of children became a significant feature of family and social conflict.

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