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Abstracts
of Papers Presented at the 4th Conference of the Federation:
11-14 August 2003, Queen's University Belfast
Arranged By Surname:
E - K
Sachiko
Egami (Ferris Women’ s University)
Anene Ejikeme (Barnard College, Columbia University, USA)
Katherine
Ellinghaus (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Natasha
Erlank (RAU, South Africa)
Magda Fahrni (Université
du Québec à Montréal, Canada)
Rona Ferguson (Glasgow
Caledonian University, Scotland)
Jill Fields (California
State University, Fresno, USA)
Antonia Finnane (University of
Melbourne, Australia)
Janet
Fink (The Open University, UK)
Mari Firkatian (University
of Hartford, USA)
Erika Flahault (Université
du Maine, France)
David Fleming (University of Oxford,
UK)
Christina Florin (Stockholm University, Sweden)
Françoise Fortunet (University of Burgundy, France)
Anna Gavanas (Stockholm
University, Sweden)
Sashka
Georgieva (Sofia University, Bulgaria)
Paul Gray (Queen's University Belfast)
Judith Green (Queen's University Belfast)
Patricia Grimshaw (University of Melbourne, Australia) and
Renate Howe (Deakin University, Australia)
Lesley Hall (Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding
of Medicine, UK)
June Hannam (University
of West England, Bristol, UK)
Katherine
Holden (University of the West of England UK)
Karen Hunt (Manchester Metropolitan
University, UK)
Yi Hyean-nang (Chuo University, Japan)
Anna Irgra (Carleton College,
USA)
Anya Jabour (University
of Montana, USA)
Shen Jie (Kochi Prefectural University of Women)
Marjo Kaartinen (University
of Turku, Finland)
Deirdre Keenan (Carroll
College, USA)
Jennifer Kelly (Mary Immaculate
College, Limerick, Ireland)
Catriona Kennedy (University
of York, UK)
Liam Kennedy (Queen's University Belfast)
Elizabeth
Kirwan (National Library of Ireland)
Christine Knauer (University
of Tubingen, Germany)
Alicja Kusiak (Adam Mickiewicz
University, Poland)
Stefan Kutzner (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)
Florence Kyomugisha (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee,
USA)
Anene
Ejikeme (Barnard College, Columbia University): The Construction
of Gender Identities in a Colonial Regime
In Nigeria today, boys and young men in Onitsha, Nigeria, like counterparts
elsewhere, eschew domestic chores, labeling these "girls' and women's work."
In the course of conducting oral data collection from elderly male and female
informants in Onitsha, I uncovered a very different attitude with regards to
housework amongst people born at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning
of the twentieth century. Onitsha is an Igbo-speaking community in southeastern
Nigeria. The anthropological literature on Onitsha categorizes the socio-political
system in precolonial Onitsha as a "dual-sex system." It is well-known
that European colonial authorities were not sympathetic to the notion that women
should participate in political authority. In the trials following the Igbo
Women's War of 1929, one o the women's recurring demands was that they should
have political representation. The focus of my paper, however, is not on the
laws which were passed by colonial authorities removing women from "public
spheres" in which they had formerly been active. My paper traces the indirect
ways in which: the whole infrastructure of colonial rule transformed childrearing
practices and gender roles within the family in Onitsha, Nigeria.
Katherine Ellinghaus (University of Melbourne,
Australia): Marrying Outside the Margins: White Women, Interracial
Marriage and Personal Perspectives on the Colonial State
What was it that led a white woman in Australia or the United States at the turn of the last century to choose a life outside the margins by marrying an indigenous man? Elaine Goodale, a white, middle-class teacher and writer with an interest in Indian reform, made the decision to marry Charles Eastman, a Sioux doctor, in 1891 with, she remembered, “a thrilling sense of two-fold consecration.” While her decision meant that she gave herself “wholly in that hour to the traditional duties of wife and mother, abruptly relinquishing all thought of an independent career for the making of a home,” Eastman was not blind to the fact that her marriage was part of the larger project of finding a long-term solution to the “Indian Problem.” Along with her commitment to Charles, she “[a]t the same time...embraced with a new and deeper zeal the conception of life-long service to my husband’s people.” In Australia there was no equivalent humanitarian reform ideology to frame such marriages. Marriages between white women and Aboriginal men were more likely to take place on the fringes of working-class society, such as that which took place between cook and horse-breaker, Rebecca Castledine and Jack Forbes, who married in Bourke, New South Wales, in 1899. Rebecca described her husband as“[a] splendid worker, honest as the day and well-spoken of by all the station people in the district.” “[W]hen he proposed,” she said, “I could see no reason for rejecting him.” This paper stems from a larger, comparative study of white women who married Aboriginal and Native American men. Drawing upon several case studies of Australian and American women who married indigenous men, I examine both their motivations and the implications of their decision. How did social taboos, government policies and imperial ideologies of the United States and Australia impact on the lives of these couples and their children? I argue that their experiences expose connections between public and private, vocation and family, and the way in which an interracial marriage of a most unusual kind – that involving a white woman—can be understood by looking comparatively at the larger context of the colonial state.
Natasha Erlank (Rand Afrikaans University, South
Africa): Black African Attitudes to Sex and Sex Education in South
Africa, 1920-1940
This paper concerns research into perceptions around sexuality - evidenced in this paper mostly by a concern around sex education - amongst Africans in South Africa in the first part of the twentieth century. By the 1920s the shift from traditional to modern society amongst Africans was a tremendous source of concern because of the perceived negative impact it had on the morals and behaviour of African women and children. Black and white lay and clergy members of South Africa's mainstream churches were - given the churches' stress on moral behaviour - particularly involved in local-level discussions across the country about the perceived increase in the immorality of their members, as well as what to provide in the way of sex education for women and children. This was a difficult process for them, given Christian hesitancies both around dealing with the subject of sex and the subject of sex outside of the family. Some of this discussion revolved around the role of initiation ceremonies for black girls and boys, focusing on the degree to which more traditional ceremonies could be altered to include Christian precepts and teachings. Whether, what sort of, and to what extent they ought to intervene in the acquisition of sexual knowledge by young black Christians were questions which preoccupied Archdeacons, African fathers, religious sisters and mother's unions' members. The result of these deliberations included instruction to married couples, young wives, youth groups as well as the publication and distribution of pamphlets on sex education. Recent work on sexuality in Southern Africa, most of it anthropological, has highlighted sexual knowledge in rural areas, while other work has looked at masculinity and sexuality, as well as sexuality and fertility but there is less published work on historical sexualities. The project will contribute to some of the emerging literature on the historical uses and nature of sexual knowledge in the South African past.
Magda Fahrni (Université du Québec
à Montréal, Canada): Family and Privacy in the Midst
of an Epidemic: Montreal, 1918
Among the most exciting recent studies
in the history of women and of families are those that have focused on the public/private
divide. Feminist scholars have demonstrated the shifting and precarious boundaries
between public and private spheres, and the ways in which the two spheres overlapped
and interacted. This paper uses the influenza epidemic of 1918 to explore outside
intervention into the private realms of home and family. Historians of the family
contend that increased state intervention was the major change in family life
over the course of the twentieth century: the 1918 epidemic provides an example
of a moment when this intervention was both intensified and the subject of public
debate. The homes of the ill were opened up to doctors, volunteer workers, and
municipal authorities; the private sufferings of thousands added up to a national
(public) catastrophe. This paper focuses especially on women's place in this
medical and political emergency: as victims of the epidemic; as caregivers,
in their roles as mothers, daughters, sisters, neighbours, volunteers and nurses;
and as the guardians of the homes that were subject to both state and private
intervention in the context of the worst medical crisis of the century. The
paper takes as a case study the city of Montreal, the metropolis of early-twentieth-century
Canada and of its French-speaking, Catholic province, Québec. The city's
population, which included French-speaking Catholics, English-speaking Protestants
and Catholics, and Yiddish-speaking Jews, experienced family, illness, and state
intervention in diverse ways. Canada's early-twentieth-century state was just
beginning to assume new `social' functions, at both the federal and provincial
levels. Medical examinations during the Great War had exposed the poor health
of many potential recruits. In the wake of the war, the federal government established
a national Department of Health. At the provincial level, the Quebec government
adopted the Loi de l'Assistance publique in 1921 and established the Service
provincial d'hygiene in 1922. Municipalities undertook the filtration of water
and the pasteurization of milk. All three levels of government attempted to
deal with serious problems of infant mortality, venereal disease, and tuberculosis.
I would argue that the 1918 influenza epidemic served as a catalyst for much
of this postwar interest in public health. But what did such measures mean for
women? And how did the new state interest in health reshape families and home
life? Finally, what were the gendered implications of long-term responses to
the epidemic, such as calls for better wages or social welfare measures such
as Needy Mothers' Allowances? This paper addresses these questions using a range
of primary sources including government records, the papers of private charitable
associations and religious orders, and obituaries published in the local
press.
Rona Ferguson (Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland): The Private and Professional Lives of Nurses 1840-1960 c.1940-1960
The history of nursing in the nineteenth century suggests that for working nurses there was compromise to be made between the professional responsibility to nursing and a personal commitment to family and that, for many, the two were irreconcilable. Although the impact of two world wars diminished the opportunity of marriage for women, this tension between work and family prevailed into the twentieth century; in the forties and fifties convention still divided nursing and private/family life as seen in the requirement of nurses to give up their careers on marriage. In a study of 70 district nurses who began working in Scotland during this time, more than half remained unmarried and childless. Unable to confirm a feminine identity framed by such familial relationships, these women define their lives, in reflection, through a language of nursing care, with the patient community frequently portrayed as a surrogate family. The caring relationship is described as an essential quality of district work at this time, but it draws on a concept of care which has multiple references; material, spiritual and social as well as professional. In doing so it blurs the boundaries between personal and professional identities, between the work of nursing and personal relationships of care. During this period the working conditions of district nurses began to alter, significantly affected by changes in medicine, technology, organisation and social attitudes, and this continued throughout the subsequent decades. With these changes the concept of care became problematic and a new separation of nursing work and private life prevailed. This paper will look at how the term care is repeatedly cited as the essential quality of home nursing and bridge between the private and professional amongst a generation caught up in a transitional time.
Jill Fields (California State University, Fresno,
USA): From Black Venus to Blonde Venus: The Meanings of Black Lingerie
The development of the specialized meaning of black lingerie as particularly erotic raises questions regarding the dynamics of race and sexuality, as blackness and black bodies have for several centuries in Western culture been linked to deviant and particularly lascivious sexuality, while whiteness and white bodies have been associated with sexual purity. The paper briefly notes the multiple and shifting connotations of black clothing, from nineteenth-century meanings as signs of both mourning and male sobriety to twentieth-century meanings as signs of both female sexual sophistication and bohemian opposition. The paper then focuses on the bodies, objects, and discourses of blackness and sexuality, from the much discussed "apron" of the Hottentot Venus in the nineteenth-century to the "cafe au lait" performances by white women in American musical revues in the early twentieth-century, that suggest that the wearing of black lingerie by white women is a practice of racial masquerade. Black lingerie infuses its wearers with the erotic charge of racialized and therefore transgressive sexuality, but one that is safely contained, like blackface, by its temporary nature and removable "skin." The paper ends by discussing the analytic effects of considering both production and consumption in regard to the signification of fashion, as oral histories of retired African American undergarment works report strikingly different meanings of black lingerie constructed on the shop floor from those engendered in the locations and practices of consumer culture. When these workers returned from vacation or sick leave they would find stacks of black undergarments next to their sewing machines left for them by their largely immigrant co-workers because sewing black thread on black fabric was more difficult. At the shop floor, black lingerie was a sign not of eroticism, but discrimination.
Antonia Finnane (University of Melbourne, Australia):
Nationalism, Gender Relations and Weddings In 20th Century China
This paper explores the metamorphosis of wedding rituals in twentieth century China, with special reference to sartorial features. Chinese clothing culture exhibited strong tendencies towards androgeny through much of the twentieth century, most famously during the Cultural Revolution but - more intriguingly - also during the Republican era (1912 - 1949). In general terms, this can be attributed to the growth of a culture of citizenship that recognized women and men as having comparable claims to national belonging. Changes in daily dress kept pace with the growth of nationalism through the early decades of the century, and so did changes in wedding rituals. Unlike daily dress wedding clothes in Republican China consistently showed a high level of gender differentiation, but the instability in styles shows more clearly than daily dress the complexity of cultural choices being made by young people as they juggled issues of national, political, and gender identity.
Janet Fink (The Open University, UK):
Care, Control and Protection in 19th and 20th Century English Family Life
This paper sets up the panel's overall analytic context. It reflects on the extent to which the conceptualisation of women' s involvement in relatlonships of care, control and protection within the family has tended to focus upon the tensions between women' s position in the formal economy and her unpaid role as carer in the home. Drawing upon recent developments in feminist theory, it also illustrates the challenges to assumptions about dependency in relationships of care and protection and the increasing significance given to issues of control and power within the relations between care-giver and receiver. However an over-emphasis on women, as wives and mothers, in such theorising is shown to have elided the complexity of familial relationships of care and control in both the past and the present. This complexity is then drawn out through the three case studies which foreground different sets of relationships - between mothers and fathers, between siblings and between unmarried men and women and their families. These studies problematise expectations of what care, control and protection means in the context of family life and illustrate how assumptions, images and experiences of these issues are constructed in different ways at different times and for different family members.
Mari Firkatian (University of Hartford, USA):
Struggling for Each Other: the Stancioff Family at Work
Nadejda Stancioff was the eldest of four children. Her father was a diplomat and she and one other sister also joined him in his work, their brother Ivan eventually became a diplomat and their mother, the Countess Anne de Grenaud, was mistress of the robes at the Bulgarian Court at the end of the nineteenth century. One of the first women diplomats in all of Europe, Nadejda rose to unusual prominence in the Bulgarian diplomatic service. She was the first woman to be appointed first secretary of a Bulgarian embassy; in fact hers was an appointment, which was a first for women in general. It was highly unusual for a backward, unenlightened country, recently turned independent to place a woman in such a prestigious post. At the peace conferences after World War I, Nadejda had the rare opportunity of being one of a handful of women serving in an official capacity. One has only to visualize a photograph taken at the Neuilly peace talks of the entire Bulgarian delegation, virtually all male, with Nadejda Stancioff in the center of the group of thirty men, the delegate with fluency in several languages and the Prime Minister’s personal interpreter and secretary, to comprehend some of the power and importance of this woman’s life. She saw no barrier between her family and private or professional lives. Her ambitions, on every level were linked with the future economic integrity of her family. In her correspondence and journal entries she incessantly articulated the concern, the motivations, and the plans for assuring that the ‘collective’ survived and thrived. It is a constant theme in her life and in that of her siblings. Due to the unique nature of their family relationships these six people, but especially the women, managed to live and work as a highly effective network of enabling partners. Each individual, and again especially the female members of the family, was instrumental in helping to elevate the others in their professional lives as well as their personal lives. They literally aimed to advance each other’s careers and at the very least facilitate beneficial and farseeing marriage alliances. What makes this family unique is not just their extraordinary willingness to support each other and advise each other. They worked for their collective benefit throughout their lives; there was no separation between family and private life. The decisions they made, personal and professional, were measured by their utility to the economic well-being as well as other benefits to the family unit. When she gave up her diplomatic career she married, perhaps with calculated purpose, a man with an enormous personal fortune. A lord, whose financial security would be a support to her parents in their old age. There is no question that the marriage was one of convenience although it grew into a relationship of mutual respect and admiration. In the course of a lifetime Nadejda Stancioff Muir lived with the purpose of being an economic and an emotional support to her parents and siblings, it would not have occurred to her to live otherwise.
Erika Flahault (Université du Maine, France):
Le Regard de la Presse Sur les "Femmes Seules" en France de 1900
à nos jours.
Des sujets sur les "femmes seules" apparaissent périodiquement
dans la presse française depuis la fin du 19ème siècle,
et plus régulièrement depuis les années soixante-dix. Nous
nous intéresserons ici, d'une part à la presse d'information générale,
nationale ou régionale, adressée à tous mais pendant longtemps
lue essentiellement par des hommes; d'autre part à la presse féminine
née à la veille de la seconde guerre mondiale sur le modèle
américain et définie par Martine Cote-Colisson comme "une
presse d'avant garde, résolument moderne, adressée avant tout
aux femmes jeunes, aisées, aux consommatrices" (Femmes: désir
et peur de libération vus à travers la presse féminine
et féministe. Université de Caen, Thèse de doctorat,
1980, p 207). Nous nous interrogerons sur la représentation que ces deux
types de presse donnent des "femmes seules". Tout d'abord, de quelles
femmes s'agit-il, le modèle de femme évoqué est-il semblable
d'une presse à l'autre et d'une époque à l'autre? Quels
discours se dégagent de ces articles et quelles images de ces femmes
les presses générale et féminine proposent-elles à
leurs lecteurs et lectrices?
Un bref rappel historique nous permettra de situer ces propos dans un contexte
plus large, puis une analyse comparative du regard respectif de la presse générale
et de la presse féminine sur la figure de la " femme seule "
nous montrera que la perception sociale de ces femmes n'évolue guère
et qu'elle présente, d'un type de presse à l'autre, de profondes
similitudes.
Dans un premier temps, nous soulèverons le problème de la définition
même du sujet, de ses imprécisions et de ses fluctuations.
Dans un second temps, nous verrons qu'au-delà des évolutions langagières
et des phénomènes de mode, les "femmes seules" inspirent
toujours un sentiment mêlé de crainte et de commisération.
Et si la presse féminine semble, au premier abord, plus réceptive
à ces modes de vie atypiques, elle rejoint finalement les poncifs de
la presse générale. On y décèle le même penchant
au misérabilisme et on y retrouve aujourd'hui encore, sous des formes
à peine différentes, les thèmes essentiels du discours
familialiste du siècle dernier: la maternité inéluctable
et la nécessité d'une différenciation marquée des
sexes.
Lucretia Anne Flammang (US Coast Guard Academy): Refiguring Sexual Politics: Josephine Butler and Representations of Women's Bodies in Victorian England
In 1864, the British Parliament passed the first of the three Contagious Diseases Acts, which authorized the State to investigate and monitor the sexual practices of prostitutes, who were primarily lower- and working-class women. By 1870 an opposition movement had emerged with Josephine Butler (1828-1906) as its most prominent leader. A gifted orator and brilliant polemicist, Butler knew that to pressure Parliament to repeal the Acts, she had to demonstrate broad, mass support for her position. Given the predominant late-Victorian view of prostitutes as carriers of disease and contagion, Butler realized she would succeed only if she first recuperated for her audiences the character of prostitutes. Because women's character in general was bound discursively to Victorian anxieties about women's bodies, throughout her texts, Butler consistently sought to reverse and undermine representations of women as the locus of sexual and moral corruption. This paper will examine the strategies Butler employed and their effect on the movement to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts and more broadly on early feminism. The simplest strategy Butler used merely reversed the discourse about the site of social and familial corruption. In Butler's polemics women were the victims of men's uncontrolled sexual desire. Through their selfishness, Butler claimed, men introduced disorder and disease in both the public and private spheres. This argument only presented half the picture, however; Butler also had to represent women's bodies in opposition to men's bodies. Here she had more difficulty because of the persistence of the virgin/whore dichotomy in the culture. Her writing about the lives of prostitutes and saints directly commented on this dichotomy. When writing about prostitutes, Butler tended to focus on their spirituality and their souls, thus deflecting audience attention from prostitutes' bodies. When writing about saints, particularly in her 1878 biography of Catherine of Siena, Butler embodied these historical figures traditionally represented as almost wholly ethereal. In the biography of Catherine, for example, Butler describes the saint's sexual development but collapses Catherine's sexual desire into a desire for motherhood. This conflation of bodily desires permitted Butler to sanitize Catherine's sexuality with the Victorian construction of permissible female desire. Butler thus represented an unproblematic female sexuality that was contained and ordered by motherhood. These arguments had important political consequences for Victorian feminists. As women engaged in public rallies, meetings, and campaigns, they regularly stood fully embodied before their audiences, many of whom were men. When they repudiated the cultural representation of women's bodies as dangerous and impure, they not only challenged common beliefs about prostitutes but also sought to establish their own moral character. The paper recognizes problems with Butler's position, for she does not conceive of an acceptable sexuality expressed outside the bonds of familial relations; to be pure, sex had be domesticated. Nevertheless, in the 1870s, Butler was one of the very few women who argued publicly that men's and women's sexuality was a political issue. Her campaign helped to shape the polemics of other feminists engaged in transforming the discourse about women's sexuality for decades to come.
David Fleming (University of Oxford, UK): Trials of Courtship: Family Discourse and Marriage in Early Eighteenth-Century Ireland
The paper proposes to examine the familial relationships of an Irish gentry family in the early eighteenth century and specifically the ties that bound mother to son and sister to brother. These relationships are examined in the context of marriage and the desire of all concerned to find a `suitable' bride for the family's heir. The O'Hara family of Co. Sligo was one of the only families of Gaelic origin to have survived the various Irish land upheavals and settlements. By the turn of the eighteenth century the O'Hara's were recovering from the latest conflict: the Williamite Wars (1689-91) and its subsequent land settlement. It is the concept of survival and continuation, engrained in almost all eighteenth-century landed families that contributed to a unique set of familial relationships. This concept was manifested in the pursuit of a `proper' marriage or in other words a matrimonial arrangement that fitted the social and financial status of the family. Within this context two particular, but intertwined relationships emerged within the O'Hara family. On the one hand there was the relationship between Kean O'Hara and his mother, Lady Rose Peyton, and on the other, between Kean and his sister, Mary Aldworth. The paper will firstly track the family's attempts to find a bride for Kean over a period of over ten years, and secondly attempt to explain how and why his mother and sister played a dominant (if not overarching) role in those efforts. Secondly, the paper will attempt to examine the mentalité of the individuals concerned and specifically the often fraught relationship between mother and son. The conclusions of this case study, I will argue, may further our understanding of marriage in eighteenth-century Ireland and particularly the role played by women in that process. The paper may add to the excellent and revealing studies already done by a number of scholars, including APW Malcomson and Toby Barnard.
Christina Florin (Stockholm University, Sweden):
Men as Strategy. Private Affairs as a Swedish Way to Suffrage
The purpose of my paper is to show how women in the suffrage movement tried to establish a political position without institutional means for power exercise. They used strategies which were common in the traditional society - they created networks - alliances with men in power, personal friends, husbands, brothers, relatives, colleagues etc. And they combined these strategies with more modern methods -organising, meetings, speeches, writing in news-papers, petitions, bills etc. But men were not only a strategy but also "the enemy". The struggle for suffrage was also a cruising between friends and enemies, between informal and institutional networks. I will describe the problematic meeting between men and women in different arenas in the family in the political party in the news-paper world in Men's organisation for Women's suffrage in the social movements. At the end I will comment on personal relations as "capital" and the personal as the political.
Gabrielle Fortune (University of Auckland, New Zealand): War Brides: Love and Immigration
At the end of World War 2 almost 4000 women arrived in New Zealand as the wives and fiancées of New Zealand servicemen they had met in Canada, Britain, Europe and the Middle East. War brides, as they became known, discovered that marriage to a New Zealand serviceman was something of a ‘package deal’ that included migration. In the course of researching the history of war brides it became apparent that migration was inextricably bound up with the decision to marry. This paper examines the repercussions of marrying a New Zealand serviceman during World War 2.
Lyndon
Fraser (University of New Zealand ): Irish Women’s Networks on
the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island, 1864-1922
This paper explores the ethnic incorporation of Irish women on the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island from 1864, when the gold rushes began, until the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922. It reports some preliminary findings from a much wider study of Irish ethnicity in the region during this period. My central argument is that these newcomers did not choose ethnic solidarity as a means to pursue their goals and, for most, an ethnic or religious category sufficed in an environment where local communities, churches, trade unions, kinship ties and non-ethnic political parties had far more social relevance. The small-scale structure of West Coast localities, the relative economic homogeneity of its inhabitants and the absence of entrenched anti-Irish élites militated against the rise of sectarian animosities and the maturation of intensified ethnic consciousness. As a consequence, Irish female migrants did not construct and sustain informal social networks based on 'principles of ethnic categorisation' in which they distributed resources and channelled interaction among group members. Theirs is a complex story characterised by successful adaptation and the rapid disappearance of ethnic boundaries, rather than conflict and defensive unity.
Rita Garstenauer (European University Institute,
Italy): Leisure and the Professional Existence of Eastern Alpine
Peasant Women
In East Alpine agricultural societies in the 20th Century, leisure gained meaning in the first place in connection with fundamental social and structural change of agriculture. I am interested in the occurrence, perception and practice of leisure in these societies. In this paper I am focusing on the experiences of peasant women. This approach faces two major difficulties. Firstly, for the social and historical circumstances of agriculture throughout the whole century, the term leisure appears to be inappropriate. Secondly, among all the positions in the social system of an east Alpine farm household, the farmer’s wife’s (or widow’s) position was most comprehensively committed to her profession. In order to obtain an applicable research term, I replaced leisure with a cluster of topics that can be perceived as distinct from professional agricultural labour. These topics are official leisure, festivals and religious feasts etc., individual projects and private relations, illness, injury and childbirth. The analysis of four autobiographies written by peasant women at the end of the 20th century using this set of distinctions shows several inversions of the usual spatial associations with the private and public sphere connected with the topos of the house. The house - site of the professional labour of these peasant women - becomes a place of publicity of its own. The predominance of professional agriculture renders personal relations within the household professional relations as well. Certain partial forms of public apart from professional labour gain a high degree of privacy, and outdoors appears to be the most private site of all.
Nuala Gaughan (University of Oxford, UK): The Popular Woman Novelist Writing Social History?
The last third of the nineteenth century was a hey-day for the writing of popular novels by women, among whom were some talented Irish candidates. These included Annie Keary, May Laffan, Rosa Mulholland, F. Mabel Robinson, whose fictional women were placed in the context of the historical conjuncture constituted by Famine, Fenianism, the Land League and the Plan of Campaign, and acted within these historical spaces. The paper will examine the parameters of action or thought accorded by these women writers to their female characters, attempting to establish to what extent some form of agency might have been possible in this period immediately preceding a more recognisable women’s movement. Particular attention will be paid to how the novels were perceived within ideologically identifiable sources - the Dublin nationalist newspapers (The Nation, The Freeman’s Journal) or unionist proponents (Dublin Evening Mail, The Irish Times), and London literary journals of various political sympathies. The paper will propose that whilst the novels were pitched at a popular level they also contributed at a more serious level to an understanding of how women with agency (writers) sought to represent what roles women might have in a social order under severe strain.
Anna Gavanas (Stockholm University, Sweden):
Domesticating Men: Century-Long Dilemmas of U.S- Fatherhood Politics
Throughout the 20th century, there have been waves of attention to fatherhood in U.S. family politics in response to changes affecting men's social and economic positions in families. In recurring campaigns by family "experts" and reformers, the "maleness" of fathers' family involvement has been carved out in terms of breadwinning, discipline, play, "role modeling" and "protection." These features have been cast as particularly "male" parenting characteristics, in complementary relation to notions of motherhood and femininity. Contemporary attempts to domesticate men into "responsible fatherhood" Build upon the opposing tendencies of 19th century white and middle-class fatherhood discourse. On the one hand, fathers withdrew from their homes into the marketplace, and on the other hand, fathers were increasingly encouraged by "expert..." and refonner5 to get more involved with their children. Since mothers had come to symbolize the home, male domesticity became problematic, calling into question a father's masculinity and maturity. Since the mid-1990s, the self-proclaimed "Fatherhood Responsibility Movement" has managed to establish fatherhood at the center of U.S. national politics. This movement claims that fathers have become marginalized in "the family," with catastrophic societal consequences- Increasing rates of female-headed households as well as shifting conditions for work, family formation and care have allegedly contributed to the redefinition of "the family" into "mother and child" According to the Fatherhood Responsibility Movement, fathers are thus marginalized and "the family" has become "feminized." In response to this perceived situation, the Fatherhood Responsibility Movement seeks to reestablish the necessity of men in families, constituting fatherhood as specifically male in differentiation from the feminizing connotations of family involvement. However, by "masculinizing" fatherhood, proponents of "responsible fatherhood" engage a century long dilemma that is at the heart of constructing particularly male versions of parenthood: how do yout masculinize domesticiry and at the same time domesticate masculinity? The Fatherhood Responsibility Movement deals with this dilemma by converging on three longstanding and overlapping arenas for masculinization: heterosexuality, sport and religion. Simultaneously, these arenas are longstanding sites for competition and contestation between asymmetrically positioned constituencies of men.
Sashka Georgieva (Sophia University, Bulgaria): Extra-Marital Sex In Bulgarian Medieval Law
The paper examines the secular and canon law regulations concerning sexual crimes such as adultery, fornication and illicit sex in general. These laws reveal an interesting side of Medieval Bulgarian public and state policies on women and sexuality, private life and the family. The basic sources are the so-called Judicial Law for Laymen, the Slavic Ecloga and the Apostolic canons adopted by the Ecumenical councils. The paper shows that the laws dealing with the problems of illicit sex did not treat men and women on an equal basis: for example every married woman engaged in illicit sex was considered to have performed adultery (i.e. The worst crime), regardless of whether her partner was married or single, but a married man was considered to have committed adultery only if he had engaged in sex with someone else's wife. If he had had sex with a single woman, his act was defined as fornication (which was a lesser crime) no matter that he himself was married and no matter that both pastoral and theological literature, even canons, unanimously stressed on the reciprocal obligation of fidelity as one of the main gifts of marriage and its indispensable ingredient together with sacramental grace and the blessing of progeny. According to Balsamon - one of the interpreters of Apostolic canons – adultery was that crime which resulted in the offense and infliction of harm on another person. And, if a sexual relationship between a married man and a single woman qualified as fornication and not as adultery, this means that there was not offense of the legitimate wife. As for the behaviour of the unmarried woman, it is not discussed at all. If the woman was married, however, her act automatically qualified as adultery because her husband had been dishonored. Obviously the concept of dishonored wife did not exist in the Middle Ages. Our medieval legislature requires that only a woman should keep her husband's honour. The impression that fidelity, imposed on both husband and wife, was more binding for the woman, is confirmed by other laws concerning sexual relationships with someone else's fiancée, penalty laws against sexual crimes committed by men against virgin women and girls. Penalties themselves too confirm the same impression. At the end of the paper an attempt at presenting a rational explanation of the medieval laws concerning illicit sex is made. Probably medieval lawmaker's concern for the sexual behaviour of married women derived from the fact that the birth of illegitimate children in the family may bring in its destruction. Besides, the legal postulate that a married woman should not divorce the husband who had betrayed her has a rational explanation, too: in this way the woman was not deprived of the male support she needed. On the other hand, nothing rational could be said about the fact that medieval law did not persecute the dishonored husband who had caught his wife in an act of adultery and killed her on the spot. This postulate could only be explained through the male domination in medieval societies.
Jeremy Goldberg (University of York): Women, Family and sexuality: Problematising the Domestic in Later Medieval England
This paper seeks to explore the implications of a number of culturally significant
historical trends that apparently intersect in the context of later medieval
English urban society and in particular the artisnal and mercantile household.
These trends may be identified as the emergence of variously: the nuclear household
system; a distinctive ‘late' marriage regime; a culture of ‘conjugality';
and, finally, the search for privacy within the household. In exploring these
trends, it is immediately apparent that women played a pivotal role. In particular
this paper purposes to focus on the identity of wives of artisans and merchants
as economic partners, as household managers, and as consumers. Did women's spending
power influence and shape patterns of household expenditure and consumption?
Did, for example, women demand higher standards of material comfort or of privacy?
How did the role of married women as mothers and as mistresses of adolescent
servants impinge on gender relations? How far did women help create a bourgeois
ideology of the domestic? Such questions take us close to the central themes
of the conference and may hence encourage a degree of comparative and cross-cultural
analysis.
Eleanor
Gordon (University of Glasgow, Scotland): Not Always Angels: Motherhood
in Britain c. 1840-1914
Discourses of motherhood and domesticity played an important role in structuring middle-class women's lives and identities in the nineteenth century. However across the middle-classes the meanings and experiences of both varied significantly. Whilst women may have been defined by the home, the family and motherhood, not all were confined by it. Women of the lower-middle classes, with little or no domestic help would have found that much of their time and energies were consumed by the tasks of child-rearing and housekeeping. The time and money available to prosperous middle-class women extended their world beyond the home and enabled many to enjoy travel, widely socialise, attend balls, dinners, theatre and participate in the public sphere of philanthropy. However, prosperity and material circumstances alone do not explain how dominant ideas of motherhood and domesticity were interpreted and practiced. Family culture, the family life cycle and the predilections of the women themselves were also important influences on how the middle-class woman conceived her role. Middle-class women were more than the products of domestic discourses or material circumstances.
Paul Gray and Liam Kennedy (Queen's University Belfast): Single Mothers in 19th Century Ireland
The Parish of Kilrush in Clare was notorious for its suffering in the wake of famine and eviction in Ireland during the mid-nineteenth century. However, the paper examines a less well documented phenomenon in the parish, namely a surge in births outside marriage in the decade or so after the Great Famine. The phenomenon is placed within the context of some other Clare parishes and the role of the Union workhouse examined. Finally, some details from Indoor Relief Registers of single mothers, who utilised the workhouse during the 1850s, are used to provide interesting and poignant cameos of individual lives.
Judith
Green (Queen's University Belfast): Noblewomen as Peaceweavers
in England after 1066
It was as part of a bigger debate about change and continuity in English history
after 1066 that historians began to turn their attention to the position of
women, specifically of royal and noble women, because outside their ranks virtually
nothing is known. Some have queried whether 1066 was a significant date in the
history of women (Stafford), whilst others have considered their roles in constructing
and transmitting the memory of events (Van Houts), in legitimising title to
land (Searle), or office (Keats-Rohan), or as agents in a process of acculturation
(Thomas). This paper offers a contribution to this debate by suggesting that
we need to think in terms of different experiences for women from different
backgrounds. Intermarriages were relatively few for women from the greatest
families, more common in the northern counties and in the lower levels of the
aristocracy. In the towns the social context was different again. How does this
evidence relate to what else we know of women’s experience in the aftermath
of invasion ? Some suffered rape; others, to avoid that fate, took refuge in
the few existing nunneries. We should not be too ready to see a process of acculturation
between Normans and English as happening too early or painlessly. Elite Normans
at any rate may well have conceived of Englishwomen not as ‘peaceweavers’,
but as members of a vanquished people. It was outside this circle that ‘rank
and file’ Normans who had arrived in England as young and unmarried males
are more likely to have contracted marriages with English brides, and in so
doing began the process of eroding ethnic distinctions. Concepts of ‘Englishness’
and ‘Normanness’ in the first century after 1066 thus have to be
treated with caution.
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Patricia Grimshaw (University of Melbourne, Australia)
and Renate Howe (Deakin University): Migrant Women Workers and Families
in Postwar Australia: Two Social Surveys
The rise of mother's employment has been one of the major post-war social trends yet the impact on family relationships and children in terms of the quality of child care, education and labour in the home.has not been widely studied. This paper first takes up these issues in relation to the experience of immigrant working mothers, most with young children, whose work helped fuel the industrial boom that followed the Second World War. The paper revists an extensive Commonwealth Government funded survey of Southern European migrant working women conducted in the 1970s, looking at ways in which work shaped the gender division of labour, childcare arrangements, the education of children and the development of ethnic communities. Second, the paper considers the differing though equally difficult situations of migrant women following the decline of factory based manufacturing industry in Melbourne. A recent survey of Vietnamese women home workers in the clothing and textile industry raises similar issues in relation to the impact of mothers' employment on children and family relationships despite the significant advances in multiculturalism, regulatory legislation, and health and welfare provision. Both surveys indicated that most mothers worked to ensure the economic survival of their families. This paper will focus on the shaping of their experiences through a turbulent period in relation to gender, ethnicity and race as the impacts of globalisation transformed Australian history.
Fiona Hackney (Falmouth College of Arts, UK): The Agony & The Ecstasy: Sexuality and the Problem Page in Women’s Magazines 1919-1939
A defining feature of the problem page (or agony page as it came to be called
in the 1930s) was to address the wants and needs, and this came to include sexual
needs, of its readers, offering them advice and guidance; a “service” that,
in this period, was not readily available elsewhere, particularly to women.
Sexology, psychoanalysis, and the work of Birth Control campaigners such as
Marie Stopes, resulted in an increasingly open debate about female sexuality
in the 1920s that was reflected on the pages of popular women’s magazines. These
debates were framed differently, according to the ethos of each magazine and
the composition of its target readership. Modern Woman, a monthly aimed at educated
middle-class professional women and housewives, employed the feminist and social
campaigner Leonora Eyles to edit the problem page in the 1920s. Alongside a
preoccupation with career opportunities for women, Eyles included questions
about contraception and how to plan a family, while the ethics of family limitation
were discussed in a specialist magazine feature written by the Rev. Dick Sheppard.
During the 1930s discussion became rather less frank and advice more conservative
in Modern Woman, however, the new colour weekly Woman published letters on a
wide variety of sexual matters, including sex before marriage, extra-marital
affairs (for wives as well as husbands), in addition to the ubiquitous scenario
of the single (often working) girl and the older married man. The intention
of this paper is to explore some of these debates, as they were framed in and
disseminated through, popular women’s magazines of the period.
Dianne Hall (University of Melbourne/Queen’s University
of Belfast): Space, Place and Gender Among Irish Migrants in Colonial
Victoria
This paper will examine Irish migrant communities in newly formed towns and rural areas of nineteenth century Victoria and analyse how these colonial spaces were gendered. This will involve analysis of how women from very different backgrounds in Ireland responded to their new environments, and how they replicated, undermined or re-negotiated their previous experiences of female space and place into the new world.
Dianne Hall (University of Melbourne/Queen’s University of Belfast):
Words as Weapons: Women and Slander in Late Medieval Ireland
This paper will analyse reports of slander in late medieval Ireland. Slander was a particularly gendered crime where the perpetrators and victims were often women and the accusations were public attacks on private behaviour. This means that accusations of slander provide a good indicator of the boundaries of women’s private behaviour in a time when there are few sources for lay women’s private lives.
Lesley Hall (Wellcome Library for the
History and Understanding of Medicine, UK): 'A Survival... Of Stoning,
Branding, Mutilation' Stella Browne's Fight for Abortion Law Reform in Britain,
1912-1955
In the scrapbook kept by Janet Chance, one of the founders of the British Abortion Law Reform Association (1936) and an early advocate of this measure, there is a chronology of the history of British laws on abortion and the struggle to amend them. Between 1861 (the Offences Against the Person Act), and the early 1930s, when women's organisations began to pass resolutions demanding access to legal and medically safe abortions, there is one line: 'STELLA FIGHTS ALONE'. During a period when even birth control was a contentious issue, and its pioneers almost unanimously posited it as a beneficent alternative to the epidemic prevalence of illegal abortion, Stella Browne (1880-1955) publicly and loudly argued for safe legal abortion as essential to any meaningful birth control programme. In evidence to a Government committee investigating the subject, she admitted that she herself had undergone abortion. She did not simply regard it as something to be granted to the unfortunate in desperate circumstances but as something which should be available to all women on request. While actively campaigning to reform the legal situation, she argued that doing this would enable medical research into better methods, and in fact foresaw the introduction of safe reliable chemical abortifacients and improved contraceptives. Throughout her career she critiqued a medico-scientific establishment which produced ever more devastating weapons of war while neglecting research into means of easing women's reproductive burdens. Stella Browne's fight for abortion law reform was rooted in her tripartite commitment to feminism, socialism (she was very aware that better-off women had demi-legal access to safe abortion denied working class women) and individualism. This paper positions her in the context of the politics of reproductive choice in early twentieth century Britain and of the survival of a militant feminism in the interwar period.
June Hannam (University of West England, Bristol,
UK): `Undisturbed by Love Affairs': Labour Women, Family and Sexuality,
1918-39
In 1932, writing of the Labour Party's chief woman officer, Marion Phillips, Ellen Wilkinson MP said that `she poured into the socialist movement the creative energy which other women have given to husband and children'. Margaret Bondfield, the first woman cabinet minister, claimed in her autobiography that in the 1890s, when she was a trade union organiser, she `lived for the union ... Undisturbed by love affairs.. .1 had no vocation for wifehood or motherhood but an urge to serve the union -an urge which developed into a sense of oneness with our kind. Such statements were so common among women involved at a national level in the Labour Party between the wars, and so many of them remained unmarried, that Brian Harrison suggests that they were married to their Party. Harrison does not expand, however, on what this meant for the women involved and how it affected both their views of themselves as political agents and their personal lives. Margaret Bondfield, for instance, was positive about the way in which she valued the `love of comrades and friends' and believed that this was a neglected source of emotional satisfaction compared to a wife's love for her husband. A friend of Ellen Wilkinson's suggested that she was `so anxious to put the world to right that love affairs had to wait'. And yet although Ellen, along with other young women of her generation, including Lucy Cox, a prospective MP, may have been `wedded' to the Labour Party, they were not prepared to join, in Beatrice Webb's words, `the old order of irreproachable female celibates', and had intimate relationships with men outside marriage. We have long been aware of how familial imagery was deployed in other contexts and for different purposes outside the family, in particular by women engaged in philanthropy in the nineteenth century who used prevailing views about women's superior morality and caring qualities to legitimate their social action. Little is known, however about the extent to which women who were active in mixedsex politics after the vote was won in 1918 used familial ideas and vocabulary to make sense of their political activism and how far they viewed their politics in gendered terms. This question is usually approached through the eyes of male labour leaders who, in their support for women's suffrage, viewed women as `agents of family moralisation' because of their maternal qualities. Women did not necessarily see their political agency in the same way. Margaret Bondfield, for example, disagreed with the argument that there was a distinct women's view in politics. On the other hand she was motivated by Christian beliefs and aimed to realise a set of moral principles by working through the individual, the family and political action. While her outlook was shared by other women influenced by Victorian ideas, such as Edith Picton Turbervill MP, who campaigned against the sexual abuse of women in Malaya in the 1920s, younger women did not draw their inspiration from religion but still used a familial vocabulary to frame their politics. This paper, therefore, will explore the complex and differing ways in which a group of Labour women mps, and prospective mps between the wars, drew on familial imagery and language as a way to make sense of their political agency. It will also draw attention to differences (in particular of generation) in the ways in which unmarried women who devoted their lives to political action dealt with their own emotional and sexual needs. The focus will be on women's own views as expressed through autobiographies, letters and novels.
Jeremy D. Hayhoe (University of Maryland, USA): Paternity Disputes in Eighteenth-Century Burgundy
The early modern era in European history has come to be seen as a period marked by more or less successful attempts by elites to impose “civilized” behavioral norms on ordinary people. Particularly of interest to historians has been the way in which women frequently became the focus of a new discourse of social submission as people increasingly learned to equate the family and the commonwealth. Records of criminal trials have proven useful for historians investigating the ways in which social elites worked to impose behavioral and especially sexual norms on ordinary women. This paper moves away from criminal judicial records, and makes use of two types of civil court records in an attempt to understand attitudes toward female sexuality and especially to understand how women interacted with the law in Burgundy during the second half of the eighteenth century. These records are declarations of pregnancy before a notary or judge, and civil disputes over child support. Together these sources suggest that young women who engaged in premarital sex were provided a surprising amount of protection by the legal system. The jurisprudence practiced in Burgundy’s local courts accepted the testimony of the woman in naming the father, and automatically assigned a lump sum payment for the costs of the delivery, as well as regular payments for the child’s upkeep to majority, and sometimes a payment of money for the harm done to her honour (by refusing to marry her). Furthermore, there were ways of ensuring the collection of child support – a high percentage of those languishing in the prisons of the province were there for failing to make their regular child support payments. And finally, the testimony of witnesses in these civil disputes reinforce the idea that there was little public shame attached to premarital pregnancy as long as the couple subsequently married.
Myrtle Hill (Queen’s University Belfast):
Family Life at Dohnuvar
Originally from in County Down in Ireland, missionary Amy Carmichael established a unique religious community in the Tinevelly district of south India in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Despite it rapid expansion (600 members within 40 years), the Dohnuvar Fellowship was structured and run on the pattern of family life, with Carmichael as ‘Amma‘. This paper explores the gendered, cultural and theological dimensions of that family, in the context of Carmichael’s own background and with reference to her prolific writings, which provide a fascinating insight into the nature of late nineteenth-century female evangelism.
Katherine Holden (University of the West of England
UK): Unmarried Family Carers in Mid-20th Century England
Using extracts from interviews, this paper analyses the dynamics of caring relationships between unmarried men and women and their sick and elderly relatives in mid-20th century England. During this period the care of parents in old age was most often undertaken by unmarried daughters, but this territory could also be claimed by unmarried sons. Looking through the overlapping lenses of gender, age and marital status, case studies will demonstrate the changing and sometimes contradictory ways single people identified themselves as family carers over a life cycle and show how issues of protection and control were played out in caring relationships. The extent to which the concepts of dependence, independence and interdependence are useful in this context is discussed while oral history methodologies are shown to be particularly valuable m the illumination of unmarried carers' identities and subjectivities.
Lois Huneycutt (University of Missouri, Columbia,
USA): Family and its Presentation in Two Redactions of the Life
of St Margaret of Scotland
The “Life of St Margaret of Scotland,” is a text which contains the claim that it was written at the command of Matilda of Scotland, queen consort of England from 1100-1118, in order that she might learn from the example of her mother, queen of Scotland. Long-studied because it contains personal anecdotes and essential information for historians of the family, the text also contains ambiguities and problematic passages that have long troubled scholars. Derek Baker argued that the established text of the “Life” was written later than a condensed version that survives only in a fourteenth-century copy, a position which I have rejected. The recent discovery of an early copy of the manuscript Madrid (Biblioteca del Palacio Real, II. 2097, fols. 26-41v) has only complicated matters, for this version contains even more problematic passages, including a completely rewritten genealogical section. In this paper, I will explore the differences in the presentation of family between the established text, known from manuscripts, the truncated version that Baker used, and the Madrid text. The key differences in the text revolve around the presentation of family – Margaret’s role as wife, mother, daughter, and bearer of royal lineage. I will argue that the established version of the text stresses family in a way that would have been meaningful for Margaret’s immediate family members: daughters, grand-daughters, sons and grandchildren, but that afterward, her genealogy and the personal passages were manipulated in order to make her a more acceptable candidate for canonization. This will allow me to explore, in a way that is rare for the medieval world, the process of self-presentation for public consumption and how it differs in a text created primarily for personal use.
Karen Hunt (Manchester Metropolitan University,
UK): When The 'Private' Becomes Public: Gossip, Gender and Socialist
Politics
Gossip has a peculiar role in policing the boundary between the public and the 'private'. This paper examines a particular case - The Belt Case (1899) - where gossip about an unsuitable relationship between a comfortably-off widow in her late forties and a younger married working-class man led to the loss of one man's job, to a woman losing her prestigious role at an international women's conference, to a slander case involving the wife of a future British Prime Minister and to years of bad feeling between two British socialist women. The purpose of the paper is to consider the ways in which gossip between political activists can affect a woman's reputation and her subsequent political practice. The paper asks whether such gossiping is gendered and whether it necessarily has gendered outcomes so doing the paper raises broader questions for the Belt Case exposes anxieties about the boundary between the public and the 'private' and the extent to which socialists ought to police this territory.
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Yi Hyean-nang (Chuo University, Japan), Sachiko
Egami (Ferris Women’ s University), Shen Jie (Kochi Prefectural University
of Women), Chikako Kato (Yokohama National University): Woman/Mother's
Model in East Asian Countries in the Process of Making the Nation-state
It has been clearly proved that the model of the mother was stressed in the
process of making the nation-state in western countries. Is it possible that
we find the same situation in east Asian countries? In east Asian areas China
had great influence on such countries as Japan and Korea until the mid nineteenth
century. Morals, both of the public and the private, in every country were based
on Confucian culture, which commonly forced women in the three countries to
be obedient to fathers when they were unmarried, to husbands when married, and
to the eldest sons after their husbands' death. On the other hand, real models
demanded for women and gender discourse were different among these nations.
East Asian countries started to build their nation-states in the face of advancing
western powers from the late nineteenth century. The political environment became
very different in the three countries. We intend to discuss the following issues
from the following comparatively perspectives what model of the people was created
in the process of forming the modern state by the independent movement as well
as by the government the relationship of a model between man and woman; gender
discourse; an influence of Confucian culture and western culture; the model
of housewives and unmarried women required by the domestic and foreign, that
is, the western market of capitalism; what role policies for women in Japan
played in colonized Korea and parts of China.
Anna Irgra (Carleton College, USA): Marriage
as Welfare: Anti-Desertion Reform in Early Twentieth-Century New York City
Marriage is the foundation of a successful society" declares the opening
statement of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, the
founding document of a new welfare policy for poor families in the United States.
Marriage, modern Americans believe, is no longer a matter of money but rather
an affair of the heart. So why would an act to address poverty begin with a
credo about marriage? How did marriage become such a central concern of welfare
policy? The by now almost axiomatic assumption that marriage belongs in any
program of welfare reform has a long history, stretching back to the early twentieth
century. Concerns about marriage and poverty intersected in progressive Era
reforms designed to combat men's desertion of wives and children. Deserted women
occupied a liminal category; neither widowed nor unwed, they were "husbandless
wives." Like other female welfare clients who were sorted according to
their intimate relationships with men, deserted women were incorporated into
the heterosexual matrix of welfare classification. The de6ire of welfare reformers
to anchor deserted women in the category of "wives" reveals a larger
commitment to using marriage to contain women's poverty. My paper will focus
on anti-desertion reform and its effects on a particular population of poor
women as they encountered the welfare system in a particular time and place:
deserted Jewish women in New York City in the first few decades of the twentieth
century. Jewish agencies Played a leading role in making desertion a focus of
family and welfare reform. Working with their non-Jewish peers, Jewish social
workers and lawyers participated in creating an anti-desertion system that consisted
of special domestic relations courts, laws, and welfare policies. They built
the National Desertion Bureau, a model legal aid agency, to track down Jewish
deserters and return men (and their paychecks) to families. Jewish family reformers,
anxious to keep new immigrants off the public welfare rolls and thereby forestall
immigration restriction, turned to marriage as an avenue for public responsibility
for their community's poor.
Anya Jabour (University of Montana, USA): "That Vexed Riddle Self': Girls' Private Writings in the Nineteenth-Century American South
As a teenager, Georgia resident Gertrude Clanton reflected often on the purposes of a journal in her own diary "A Journal is intended for the outpouring of thought and the expression of ones inmost feelings," she declared In the nineteenth-century American South, many young women echoed Clanton's views on the purposes of the popular pastime of diary-keeping. A diary was, as South Carolinian Grace Elmore expressed it, "a true index of my inner life" Alice Ready's diary began with the proclamation. "This book contains the innocent outpourings of a child’s heart" Ann Webster Gordon resolved in 1860 "to keep a journal of my thoughts & more especially of feelings" As the sacred repository for "thoughts and feelings," girls' private writings also served as a means to self-exploration and self-understanding Within the pages of their diaries, young women in the nineteenth-century American South struggled with what one called "that vexed riddle Self." By revealing, examining, and sometimes censoring their thoughts, southern girls also developed a sense of "Self' an identity separate from, although enmeshed in, the family. This paper examines the private writings of girls and young women in the nineteenth-century American South as avenues to self-exploration, self-understanding, and self-assertion in a society that encouraged women to seek their identity only within the context of family, kin, and neighborhood. It also looks at the "vexing" problem of creating a sense of personal identity without rejecting familial roles Thus, this paper takes as its central problem the relationship between women's private lives and the family This paper also addresses the historiography of private life, women's history, and the history of the family by using girls' private writings both as a window into young women's experiences and as a form in which girls exerted control over their own lives.
Marjo Kaartinen (University of Turku, Finland): Women and Private 1500-1750: Challenging Our Concepts
In my paper I will discuss the concept of private as a tool in the study of early modern women. The dichotomy of public and private is widely regarded as a part of our self-understanding and culture: they are among the concepts with which we read ourselves, our lives, and the world around us. It is commonly accepted that the heyday of the ideology of public and private was in the nineteenth century, in the birth of the modern individual and the modern way of life. This ideology was based on the patriarchal notion that women were subjected to men, and it suggested a strict gendered division: men were of the public world, while women occupied the private. In our culture this division has been so generally. Accepted that it occasionally escapes us that the division is cultural. The dichotomy between public and private is not essential to culture per se. I wish to point out that the term private is not always historically completely valid. If we read private (or public), we must do so with utmost caution; the lines are more than porous, and in many places they are non-existent. Furthermore, even if not directly fighting against it, historians should at least be aware of the patriarchal structures of society in order to be able to understand the ways in which the past society was constructed. Therefore, I will propose 1) that public and private are concepts of our culture and should not be used as analytical tools when we explore the premodern culture, and 2) that renouncing these two is a positive political act speaking against the blind acceptance of patriarchal norms, as well as speaking for the feminist standpoint that both women and men of the past should be given an equal voice. Even though my first proposition is hardly original, it is still somewhat radical to historians. I will discuss the first proposition at length, with examples of early modern English elite women's own texts, and then return more briefly to the second one, because I believe that the Feminist standpoint will be quite self-explanatory after we have discussed the first proposition.
Linda Kealey (University of Fredericton, Canada): Gender and Health on the Margins of Empire: The Construction of Identities in 20th Century Newfoundland
An island off the East coast of Canada, Newfoundland was an independent Dominion within the British Empire until bankruptcy and political instability in the 1930s caused this fisheries-dependent country to accept a British-appointed "Commission of Government" to run its affairs. Well into the 20th Century the island was dependent on the cod fishery and the production of salt cod which required women's (and children's) labour in the processing of the fish. As folklorist Hilda Chaulk Murray noted in her 1979 study of a small fishing outport, women were "more than 50 percent". This emphasis on women as anchors of the community has been echoed in sociology as well (Marilyn Porter, 1993). Other writers however have emphasized the overall patriarchal structure of social, economic and gender relations in the context of colonialism and an underdeveloped state (Cadigan, 1995; Neis, 1993). This paper examines the discourse on gender and regional identities in order to explore these contested views. The particular lens used here is the discourse related to health and health care which clearly articulates assumptions about place and gender. Using scientific articles, memoirs, papers, letters and other sources generated by health care providers and medical scientists in particular, the paper explores colonial and gender assumptions and discourses noticeable in medical/health sources in 20th Century Newfoundland. As an outpost of empire, Newfoundland attracted the attention of medical scientists who tackled questions of diet and disease on the island within a colonial discourse, suggesting the need for outside experts. Similarly the medical personnel of the Grenfell Mission which served Northern Newfoundland and southern Labrador operated within an imperial framework, commenting negatively on local populations. These comments conveyed gender expectations as well, in particular contrasting local healers with health professionals such as nurses and doctors. The latter frequently used the discourse of "civilizing" to describe their work. The paper analyzes the scientific and medical discourse of the period between World War I and the immediate post-war period (which marked a significant change politically and economically when Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949 and as the fishery modernized ). Through this analysis some conclusions can be drawn concerning the construction of regional and gender identities and the question of the patriarchal features of Newfoundland society.
Deirdre Keenan (Carroll College, USA): Potawatomi
People and Irish Immigrants
My current project attempts to tell the stories of two peoples—my Irish immigrant ancestors and the Anishinaabe people who once lived on the land my ancestors claimed. My maternal ancestors left Ireland in 1824 and 1849 and were among a flood of Irish immigrants who settled in Michigan during the years of forced American Indian removals. What struck me about the stories is how one group of people devastated by colonization could later participate in the colonial displacement of others. So I began to trace the stories, of my Irish ancestors in Ireland, of the conditions of their emigration and resettlement (my great-great grandmother died at sea during the Atlantic crossing), of the Potawatomi people before white settlement and then afterward during the removals. I have been tracing the paths of our ancestors—the Irish and Anshinaabeg even as they continue to cross today. My presentation will address issues of cross-cultural work and focus especially on the challenges of reconstructing stories through archival documents, through absences of records (women’s experience—of women settlers and especially of Anishinaabe women—has historically been elided from written records), and through personal interviews, with Sydney Martin, a Potawatomi woman whose people never left the Michigan Territory. I will also suggest how the conditions of private lives and the needs of the family operate within an ideology of absolution and forgetting in the context of colonization.
Jennifer Kelly (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick,
Ireland): Equality and Resilience? Lower Class Women in Nineteenth
Century Leitrim.
This paper is the product of research into the Ribbon secret society in Co. Leitrim 1836-1846. The study used crime as a lens through which to view the activities of the secret society and the mentality of the communities which allowed such societies to exist in their midst. Women figure prominently in the study, not as the main characters in the Outrage Papers, one of the main sources for the study, but rather as peripheral characters interacting with the informal codes and practices of the community. The economic and social position of lower class women in nineteenth century Leitrim was often a very lonely one. These women needed to show a remarkable amount of resilience to survive this, often against direct local opposition. This paper looks at how they coped with this position in rural society and examines the opposition that some women faced in their local communities. The power of some women in rural society in the nineteenth century is examined, e.g. Why certain widows enjoyed the protection and assistance of local secret society gangs while others were considered ripe for extortion and terror. Was this related to the number of adult sons that a widow may have had? The involvement of women in Ribbon crimes is discussed: were there 'Ribbonwomen' in nineteenth century Leitrim or were they simply appendages to the male society? Female employment, and its regulation by the community, was a very important aspect of local economy, allowing the Ribbon society to treat its female victims in much the same way as their male counterparts with regard to the levels of violence used in individual attacks. In addition, the social relationships of women came under the scrutiny of the local communities. The importance of marriage in nineteenth century Leitrim is all the more evident when one considers the extent of crimes which surrounded it: abductions involving complicated patterns of intrigue; breach of promise, with some men coming to claim their `property' regardless; successive marriages which complicated the lines of inheritance; pregnancy outside matrimony; not to mention the often unhelpful existence of children from previous unions. Co-habitation was also frowned upon, while equally, men who did not support partners with children were subject to the anger of the community, as well as of the women themselves. This paper will address the manner in which women handled these complex relationships and discuss whether their equality and resilience were as well developed as the local codes and practices they were expected to conform to.
Catriona Kennedy (University of York, UK): 'A Snare for the Feet of the Protestant’: The Prohibition on Catholic-Protestant Intermarriage in Eighteenth-Century Ireland
Amongst the 'Laws for the suppression of Popery in Ireland' passed by the Protestant Irish parliament during the eighteenth century were a series of laws aimed at preventing Catholic- Protestant intermarriage. In 1792 the prohibition on intermarriage was lifted, prompting one opponent of the measure to decry mixed marriages as, 'a snare for the feet of the protestant; which holds out an appearance of favour to the women, but cruelly fetters the man.' Whilst the author of this pamphlet argued that such marriages could only result in domestic feuding and bitterness, Edmund Burke, a long time supporter of Catholic relief, saw Catholic-Protestant intermarriage as a crucial means by which to unify a sectarian and divided society. According to Burke the laws on marriage were the most barbarous of all the penal laws, completing 'the Scheme for making the people, not only two distinct parties for ever, but keeping them as two distinct species, in the same Land. One of the most significant ways in which women have been implicated in national projects is as reproducers of national/ethnic boundaries through restrictions on sexual and marital relations. This paper will suggest how the legal codification of religious endogamy figured women's role in the construction of the 'Protestant nation' in eighteenth century Ireland. It will explore the perceptions of women's role as transmitters of property and as bearers of religion which underpinned these laws. Drawing on contemporary political pamphlets, press and parliamentary records, I will consider the discourses on women, marriage and family which shaped debates on the penal laws, with particular reference to the Catholic Relief Bills of 1782 and 1792.
Paul Gray and Liam Kennedy (Queen's University Belfast): Single Mothers in 19th Century Ireland
The Parish of Kilrush in Clare was notorious for its suffering in the wake of famine and eviction in Ireland during the mid-nineteenth century. However, the paper examines a less well documented phenomenon in the parish, namely a surge in births outside marriage in the decade or so after the Great Famine. The phenomenon is placed within the context of some other Clare parishes and the role of the Union workhouse examined. Finally, some details from Indoor Relief Registers of single mothers, who utilised the workhouse during the 1850s, are used to provide interesting and poignant cameos of individual lives.
Phil Kilroy (Society of the Sacred Heart, Ireland): Mirrors of Society: a Study of a Post-revolutionary Community of Women in Europe and the Americas
This paper will examine one of the many of communities of women which sprang up in France in the wake of the revolution. In this case: Les Dames du Sacre-Coeur (now called the Society of the Sacred Heart), initiated by Madeleine Sophie Barat in 1800. In the history of this group we get a window into the private and public life of women in the early 19th century, because the Society of the Sacred Heart offered a public service of education, out of a very specific model. This was rooted in France of the Ancient Regime, and drew women from the aristocratic and higher bourgeois classes, and from the lower, artisan class (to which Sophie Barat belonged). This model was mirrored both in the religious community itself and in the schools of the Society. In the schools the Society offered education of the higher classes (in boarding schools) and the lower classes (day schools), on the same property, but in distinct, separate buildings. Correspondingly, in the living quarters of the community, the women of the higher classes and lower classes also lived separately. These class distinctions were expressed in the terms used: choir religious for those of the higher classes and that of coadjutrix (lay) sister for those of the lower classes. Clearly the model for living and education was essentially counter-Enlightenment and counter-Revolutionary in tone and inspiration. With this sharp focus Sophie Barat and her companions presented and lived out a profoundly conservative model of education which proved to be remarkably popular and spread rapidly in Europe and the Americas. Its very conservatism was innovative and coherent and this had its own appeal and persuasion. The system was also the focus of profound struggles within and without the Society of the Sacred Heart, especially with spheres of governance and personal relationships, and the sphere of public/private often became painfully blurred. The paper will explore the major figures in this model of education for women in the early 19th century. It will also draw out the implications and tensions within the two-tier social system, of rich and poor, both in the community and in the schools, and how these defined, confined and ultimately frustrated the two social groups. Women from the highest echelons of society in France, Russia and Italy lived with women from the lower, artisan class, and women from the emerging middle classes often straddled both classes in the community. All struggled, in different ways, to acknowledge Sophie Barat as the leader. Thus, the Society of the Sacred Heart was a mirror of the upstairs/downstairs class consciousness in society generally, which had not been much disturbed by the Revolution, despite the rhetoric and romanticism of the time.
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Elizabeth Kirwan (National Libraryof Ireland):
Writing the Relationship of Frances Power Cobbe and Mary Lloyd
This paper concerns difficulties encountered in writing about Frances Power
Cobbe's thirty-four year relationship with her life-partner, Mary Lloyd. Frances
(1822-1904) was born in Co. Dublin, spent most of her active life in London
as author, journalist, feminist campaigner and anti-vivisectionist, and she
died in Wales. This paper considers the reluctance of historians in Ireland
to deal with nineteenth-century relationships that are regarded today by many
of us as lesbian. In Irish historical writing heterosexuality seems to be unquestionably
the automatic default. Recording relationships that were lesbian in Irish history
and discussing their vital importance to one or both of the couple involved
seems to be novel. This paper also looks at the FAQs of the writer of women's
history in Ireland - the 'evidence' for lesbian relationships, the problems
of identifying lesbian relationships historically, and the use of any term of
identity currently. Simultaneously issues of censorship on the part of the subject,
her literary executors and her family heirs face the women's history writer.
Finally, while separate panels such as this enable the presentation of research
findings on a subject whose primary relationship was lesbian the question remains
as to why this space is separate from the main conference proceedings.
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Christine Knauer (Nurtingen, Germany): “''To Safeguard the Values of God, Family and Country" Phyllis Schlafly and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) A Question of National Identity and Security
This paper deals with the question why a female politician opposed the ratification
of a constitutional amendment that was intended to improve the status of women
in society. Earlier research has not thoroughly evaluated Phyllis Schlafly and
her fight against the ERA, even though historically she was one of the most
influential antifeminist activists. Researchers interpreted her opposition to
the ERA as a "conflict over the American family" or a fight over the
definition of "womanhood" and "manhood" caused by her religious
fundamentalism. Furthermore, they predominantly made a clear break between her
work as a national defense and security expert and her antifeminist opposition
to the amendment. However, they missed an important element in Schlafly's struggle
against the ERA: the amendment and the consequences she associated with it were
foremost a question of national identity and security for her.
This paper demonstrates the close connection between Schlafly's construction
of gender and family and national identity and security. Though her religious
fundamentalism was the foundation for her construction of American national
identity, it did not dominate her argumentation against the amendment. Foremost,
her reasons for fighting the ERA lay in her insistence on traditional gender
roles in family and nation and her interpretation of the ERA as a threat to
the American nation. Furthermore, when considering her opposition through the
concept of national identity and security, a break no longer exists between
Schlafly's political commitment to national defense and her fight against the
ERA. Rather, her opposition to the amendment represents a continuation of her
quest for national security on another level and was part of the attempt to
establish a national identity she identified as historically American. In a
time of national instability and insecurity, Schlafly was striving for a "national
renewal" that required the revival of the "nuclear family" and
traditional gender roles.
Alicja Kusiak (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland): Between Worship
and Education: Women and Sexuality in Polish Historiography and Historical Novels
in the Nineteenth-Century
In my paper I will discuss the representations of women in Polish historiography, historical novels, and art of the nineteenth century. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, many works about women had appeared in Polish historiography as well as in art and literature. The political situation of the country in that period (the partition, lack of independence, and, in the second half of the century, the need to protect the national identity) strongly influenced the national ideology. The Polish intellectual elite elaborated certain ways of presenting women from the past. Most importantly, certain women were effectively turned into national icons and their stories were elaborated into national myths. Thus happened with the queens Wanda (ancient period), Hedwig d’Anjou (14th century), and Barbara Radziwill (16th century), whose images were widely used as the allegories of the history of the nation. On the other hand, the political elite needed women’s support to fight the efforts of the Prussian and Russian governments to undermine Polish nationalism. Women as a social group thus played an important political role in maintaining the national identity since Polish culture was entirely excluded from the so-called public sphere. Many novelists and historians wrote histories of Polish noblewomen, giving contemporary middle-class women their historical roots. Henryk Sienkiewicz and Jozef I. Kraszewski are most noteworthy in this respect for propagating female virtues like fidelity, courage, devotion to the country, etc. All of these women’s representations, moreover, were deeply rooted in sexual contexts (virginity, free / marital love, and rape, etc.). Women thus became both the subjects of national history and its consumers. In my paper I analyze their representations on two levels: 1) as icons, which relates to the politics of creating the national myths; and 2) as models of conduct, which relates to the politics of creating and stimulating desirable patriotic models for women. My analysis will be based on works by A. Mickiewicz, H. Sienkiewicz, A. Felinski, (literature), Z. Kaczkowski, K. Wójcicki, A. Rolle (history), J. Matejko, S. Siemiradzki, (art).
Stefan Kutzner (University of Fribourg,
Switzerland): Family Policy in Switzerland: Substitution of Parenthood
and "Rediscovery" of an Old Model of Life Arrangement
In comparison to other industrialized states in Europe, family policy in Switzerland is underdevelopped. Especially for families in the lower income segments the economic situation is often precarious because the income of a worker (factory, construction) or a lower employee (restaurant, trade, services) is not sufficient to pay the needs of a family. Family subsidies are low in Switzerland and for mothers the opportunities of working are very restricted. One of the reasons for the difficult access for mothers to the labour market is that the school system does not take into account that some families need two incomes and that a preschool system (kindergarten, day care etc.) hardly exists. However the problem of poverty risks for families is acknowledged by several political actors (parties, trade unions etc.). Thus, the possibilities of a poverty preventing family policy are discussed in mass media and political debates. - Two different measures play a role in the current discussion: first the increase of subsidies for families, second the development of a family supporting public educational preschool which allows or facilitates families to earn a second income. This second measure is often combined with measures for reducing the discrimination of women in the labor sphere. Especially two parties, the liberal party (FDP) and the socialdemocratic party (SPS) demand a family supporting educational system. Their main argument is the improvement of access to the labor sphere for women. Insofar, these two parties represent the actual trend for establishment of the double income household. The image is, that educational functions should be delegated to a professional education system. These political parties do not encourage the division of house work and occupational work between men and women, they prefer the integration of women (especially mothers) in the working sphere by delegating private functions to professional or public services. Against this background this paper examines the implicit images of the roles of mothers in relation to their children. The material base will be the family programs of several political actors. By using sociological methods (Max Weber's "Verstehende Soziologie") it can be shown that the two political parties who fight for equality between men and women orientate themselves according to a model of life arrangement which has its origin in the values and practices of the bourgeoisie of the first half of the 19th century. The contemporary model of equality, then, is only a modification of a model which existed 150 years ago: in the bourgeoise households the domestic works were carried out by servants, for the education of the children house teachers and other educational persons were hired. The parents were to a great extent relieved of domestic and educational functions. The difference to the current model is that women are no longer engaged in caritative, religious or other public services but in the professional area. In both models the personal relationships between parents and their children in general are reduced to a legal responsability. With regad to women: motherhood only exists as a formal responsability, not as a personal relationship. Or parenthood is seen as in impersonal relation between adult educators and children to be educated. It is an interesting phenomenon that nowadays the policy of equality between men and women combined with family policy is orientated towards a model that excludes the affections and personalities that characterizes the relationship between parents and their children. That means that the actors who encourage equilizaty between men and women in the working sphere tend to subordinate the private, especially the family sphere, to the needs of the working sphere. Liberal and socialdemocratic family policy in Switzerland does not aim to encourage the fathers to foster a more personal engagement with their families; rather it has the aim of substituting the educational functions of the parents by professional educators.
Florence Kyomugisha (University of Wisconsin
Milwaukee, USA): What the Women's Worlds 2002 Congress Meant to
Uganda
Being the first African country to host the Women's Worlds 2002 made Uganda very proud and increased her visibility and recognition internationally. This created an opportunity for Uganda to show the world how she had transformed from a dictatorship (1970s & early 1980s) that suppressed women, to a Uganda that makes women's empowerment in the political, social and economic sectors, one of her priorities. It was especially important for me, as a Ugandan finishing my academic degree outside the country, to be able to return and reflect first hand on the changes that have transpired. Most Ugandan women never get a chance to travel outside Uganda. The one week congress created an opportunity for cross-cultural interaction between Ugandan women and women from other parts of the world. Ugandan women got a chance to exchange ideas and experiences with women from all over the world, which enhanced their understanding of their similarities and differences in issues that affect women. The Women's Worlds 2002 created an opportunity for Ugandan women academicians, politicians and activists to network, and hopefully, it facilitated a process of collaborations with women from other parts of the world. Ugandan women's were encouraged and strengthened in their determination to deal with challenges they are faced with as women. One of the foremost questions the conference addressed was the role of women in the family. As mothers, wives, aunts, grandmothers and caretakers, Ugandan women's responsibilities and reproductive work in the family are very labor intensive, very demanding and time consuming. The impact of HIV/AIDS and guerilla warfare on the families has exacerbated the situation of women's reproductive work. In addition to being responsible for their immediate families, women are becoming more and more responsible for the larger extended families. As a result many women do not get a chance to leave their families for conferences. The hosting of WW2002 in Kampala provided many women with an opportunity to participate in an international women's conference and be able to share their experiences (as mothers, wives and caretakers) with women from other cultures and other parts of the world. Conference discussions generated information and ideas that Ugandan women need to be able to demand government policies that will promote gender equity and will cater for practical gender needs for women as wives, mothers, aunts and caretakers. (Ugandan women delegates and the Ugandan media passed on the information to the many women who were not able to attend the conference).