Deconstructing the Myth of the ‘Naturally Sober’ Woman: Historical and Cultural Constructions of Women and Intoxication

This paper reexamines the impact of preparation for childbirth on birth-related attitudes and events. Data were collected from approximately 300 obstetric patients before and immediately following childbirth. These data are used to demonstrate that working class and middle class women (in this study, defined on the basis of highest level of education) who do not attend childbirth classes have different attitudes toward, and experiences during, childbirth. The data also demonstrate that the impact of childbirth education is much greater among working class women than it is among middle class women. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

The Progressive Era, a period of important social and political activism which stretched from 1890 through the end of World War I, now offers a rich, diverse historiography.1 In contrast, the 1920s...

Reviewed by: From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England by Arlene Young Helen McKenzie (bio) Arlene Young, From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019), pp. xii + 220, $29.95 paperback, $110.00 cloth. From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England opens with talk of revolution. Rather than the industrial revolution, Arlene Young charts a transformation for young women, one which slowly granted them a doorway into the professional world. Young [End Page 167] argues that the need for employment and reconceptualisations of professionalism, the middle-class woman, and femininity worked in dialogue through the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on nurses and typewriters, the book demonstrates how demographic determinates, social constructions, and literary representations influenced Victorian middle-class women who worked. Young sheds light on how the rise of the professional nurse and typewriter coincided with and manipulated Victorian "fixations" such as "the Woman Question, the Strong-Minded Woman, the Glorified Spinster, and the New Woman" (13). Young challenges scholarship by Christopher Keep and Katherine Mullin that predominantly focuses on the historical context and wider conceptions of work in the nineteenth century. Instead, she offers a fresh perspective by bringing literary representations into conversation with social and historical material. She warns that imposing modern views hampers understanding of the radical nature of nursing and typewriting in Victorian England. Moreover, Young argues that the demographic imbalance—the higher proportion of women to men through the nineteenth century—is essential to understanding social debates about women striving to work, challenging critics such as Ellen Jordan who downplay its role. Through her analysis of cultural and literary history, Young convincingly demonstrates how this imbalance shaped Victorian society. Young quotes from an 1892 issue of the Woman's Herald to establish the methodology integral to the book: "Ideals of womanhood are largely originated by heroines in real life, and by heroines in fiction, as well as by the unconscious but powerful interaction of these two factors" (4). Real and fictional heroines embody Young's premise that the periodical press and fiction contributed to social change and that the powerful interaction between cultural and literary constructions is integral to book history research. The texts under discussion include prose and fiction by well-known midcentury authors and prominent New Woman writers, as well as vignettes from the Idler, but the study also encompasses writers and periodicals on which there is little scholarship, offering a welcome addition to Victorian literary and social history. The book is effectively structured by pairing historical chapters on the rise of each profession with chapters analysing fiction. Each chapter (re)traces the developments of the nineteenth century, allowing Young to add new dimensions to the revolution rather than simply moving sequentially through the time period. However, as the profession of typewriting did not emerge until much later in the century, there is a slight imbalance of focus between nursing and typewriting, particularly in the number of fictional typewriters. The trope of marriage pervades the book, facilitating effective discussion of the incompatible Victorian constructions of femininity [End Page 168] and professionalism that meet in the figure of the middle-class working woman. In the first chapter, Young scrutinises shifting conceptions of employment, professionalism, and femininity in the context of the Woman Question. Focusing on the midcentury, she argues for the impact of the demographic gender imbalance and explores the burgeoning opportunities for middle-class women's remunerated employment. Further, Young contends that support or criticism for women's employment in the periodical press was not dictated by simple divisions between genres, readerships, and popularity, highlighting the plethora of voices in these debates. The second and third chapters offer valuable insights into middle-class women's path to professional nursing. As Young states, "The transition of the lady nurse from selfless volunteer to trained and efficient professional was anything but smooth" (39). Chapter two charts the historical events and debates integral to the professionalisation of nursing, including the Crimean War and the Guy's Hospital crisis in 1880. The Crimean War was influential in cementing associations...

Review Essays Gender on the Barricades David Barry. Women and Political Insurgency: France in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. London and New York: MacmUlan Press Ltd. and St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1996. 208 pp. ISBN 0-312-12947-5 (cl). Janet Hart. New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance, 19411964 . Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1996. 398 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8014-3044-5 (cl); ISBN 0-8014-8219^ (pb). Glen Jeansonne. Women of the Far Right: The Mothers'Movement and World War II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 288 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-226-39587-1 (cl). Mary Nash. Defying Male Civilization: Women in the Spanish Civil War. Denver, Colo.: Arden Press, Inc., 1995. 261 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-91286916 -x (cl). Temma Kaplan Few men or women engage in collective action, so those who do seem to be similar to one another and different from others in their society. They may be driven by need or outrage, hope or a sense of obUgation. They may feel empowered by God, by social circumstances, by political threats, or by anxiety about how to assure the survival of their families and communities. The significance of women's behavior on the barricades, in the streets, and in committee rooms may vary with their motivations. Although meanings may change from culture to culture and incident to incident, comparing seemingly similar activities in different times and places may reveal, as these four books do, why issues of gender emerge so often during wars—particularly civU wars and periods of domestic upheaval . At such times, women of all classes frequently gravitate to the center of attention, and gender and its dispositions become matters of public concern. One reason is that civü disturbances—deep rifts that sometimes lead to armed struggle—cut to the quick of national identity. The disruptions of war bring women of all classes out of their own public spaces into male domains. Strife makes the economic and political work of provisioning families and providing shelter—the work women, especially poor and working class women, perform in their own neighborhoods—a matter of © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 No. 3 (Autumn) 178 Journal of Women's History Autumn public interest. Middle-class women also assume more authority either as mothers or as feminists when the men of their class or political groups are at war. Once the social networks women maintain come into view and women appear in the spotlight, the continuity of their behavior becomes a matter of pubUc concern. No matter how necessary the changes in women's public life are to sustaining the nation, their assumption of new positions disorients men of all groups because gender hierarchies are usually mainstays of male social identity. Women engaging in collective action either as mothers or as individuals , or both, effectively challenge the need for men to protect women . Sometimes, when the men are busy at war, women activists on the barricades, at the fronts, behind the lines, or in committee rooms deny their own authority and claim to be expressing the interests of groups identified as male. Some women, while fighting for their communities alongside men, also demand recognition as fuU citizens. MaternaUst movements tend to make claims for the collective good rather than for themselves ; many others become feminists, frequently raising questions about female education, employment, or health care. AU four books under review here focus on women's movements that are not overtly feminist. Yet by zeroing in on the collective behavior of women, they all raise questions about the gendered nature of collective action. Three of the books, New Voices of the Nation, Defying Male Civilization, and Women and Political Insurgency, focus on left-wing, largely urban working-class and rural women's movements associated with domestic wars in Europe. Although Women of the Far Right also deals with bitter national strife, it seems at first to be the anomaly since it considers women on the other side of the Atlantic and at the other end of the political spectrum: middle-class, reactionary, white, Christian women who tried to promote Nazi interests in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s...

In 1983 the New York artist Barbara Kruger released a photomontage showing the face of a female model, resting on a grassy background, with her eyes closed and covered by two leaves. Kruger completed the piece by adding the statement, “We won’t play nature to your culture.” In many ways, this image marked a turning point in America’s popular and intellectual response to the issue of the environment. Twenty-one years earlier, in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had launched a new era in the environmentalist movement, prompting many Americans to begin associating their own physical health with that of the environment. But whereas the publication of Silent Spring and the establishment of Earth Day in 1970 contributed to a far-reaching shift in the ways both scholars and laypersons thought about the practical implications of humanity’s physical engagement with nature, Kruger’s statement represented yet another approach to considering this relationship.

Finding Her Voice(s):The Development of a Working-Class Feminist Vision in Ethel Carnie's Poetry Patricia E. Johnson (bio) The effort to recover and reevaluate British working-class women's writing is still in its early stages. One writer who certainly deserves such attention is Ethel Carnie (1886-1962), the first British working-class woman to sustain a long and varied publishing career. This essay will focus on Carnie's earliest publications, three volumes of poetry that appeared between 1907 and 1914, and interpret their themes and developments against the backgrounds of both nineteenth-century working-class poetry and early twentieth-century labor unrest and women's suffrage agitation.1 Carnie's poetic growth across the seven years between 1907 and 1914 is striking. Although she began writing as a factory girl supported by middle-class mentors, her first volume, Rhymes from the Factory (1907 and 1908), barely touches on the realities of working-class life and is largely unmarked by class consciousness or feminist concerns, focusing more on imitations of Romantic odes to Nature and filled with impressive allusions to Greek and Roman classics. Gradually, however, Carnie's poetry begins to reflect both the context she writes in and the influence of earlier working-class poets. When her poetry reaches maturity in her 1914 volume, Voices of Womanhood, Carnie moves from ignoring her working-class background to embracing it with detailed poems dramatizing working-class women's lives as well as poems that critique ideals of art that ignore its basis in class distinctions. Like Ernest Jones and other Chartist poets, Carnie's later poems often employ a collective voice, and, like such working-class predecessors as Scottish poet Janet Hamilton, she writes with a particular awareness of the issues that face working-class women. But Carnie does not merely place herself in the working-class poetic tradition; she revises that tradition through her strongly feminist interpretations of traditional working-class metaphors such as slavery and motherhood that tended to align women with political passivity or, at most, allowed them the virtue of endurance. In fact, I would argue that Carnie's Voices of Womanhood is unique in its careful rereading [End Page 297] of the place of working-class women and their importance to working-class politics as a whole. Carnie is distinctive in her emphatic stress on women's liberation as a necessary component of working-class and human liberation. In Voices, her dramatic monologues bring a remarkable range of working-class women's voices into play, voices which resonate with the words of their foremothers and fathers and yet also strike out on their own, inspired by the women's suffrage and union movements. Further, her collective voices are gender-egalitarian, and, in concert with her socialist background, offer images of a transformed artistic practice that challenges past traditions' reliance on gender stereotypes or class exploitation. 1 As a British working-class woman writer, Ethel Carnie had a unique career, both in terms of its length and its variety. Between 1907 and 1936, Carnie produced three books of poetry, eleven novels—one of which, Helen of Four Gates, was made into a silent film—four books of children's fairy tales, and one novella, in addition to numerous short stories and journalistic pieces. She also edited the weekly newspaper, The Woman Worker, for nearly a year.2 In 1913, Ethel Smyth, the composer of the suffrage anthem, "March of the Women," set two of Carnie's poems—"Possession" and "Song of the Road"—to music, dedicating them to suffrage leaders Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Thus, while a website on Smyth now refers to "the completely forgotten Ethel Carnie,"3 during the first decades of the twentieth century Carnie's work attracted considerable attention. Carnie's work is also significant because of her background and political affiliations. Born in 1886, the daughter of two cotton-mill weavers, she began half-time work in the mill at age eleven and left school for full-time work as a winder at thirteen. Her volumes of poetry usually announce her background with titles such as Rhymes from the Factory and Songs of a Factory Girl (1911), and her...

Too much like school: Social class, age, marital status and attendance/non-attendance at antenatal classes

In this richly illustrated study, Carol Mattingly examines the rhetoric of the temperance movement, the largest political movement of women in the nineteenth century.Tapping previously unexplored sources, Mattingly uncovers new voices and different perspectives, thus greatly expanding our knowledge of temperance women in particular and of nineteenth-century women and women's rhetoric in general. Her scope is broad: she looks at temperance fiction, newspaper accounts of meetings and speeches, autobiographical and biographical accounts, and minutes of national and state temperance meetings.The women's temperance movement was first and foremost an effort by women to improve the lives of women. Twentieth-centuty scholars often dismiss temperance women as conservative and complicit in their own oppression. As Mattingly demonstrate, however, the opposite is true: temperance women made purposeful rhetorical choices in their efforts to improve the lives of women. They carefully considered the life circumstances of all women and sought to raise consciousness and achieve reform in an effective manner. And they were effective, gaining legal, political, and social improvements for women as they became the most influential and most successful group of women reformers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Mattingly finds that, for a large number of women who were unhappy with their status in the nineteenth century, the temperance movement provided an avenue for change. Examining the choices these women made in their efforts to better conditions for women, Mattingly looks first at oral rhetoric amongnineteenth-century temperance women. She examines the early temperance speeches of activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who later chose to concentrate their effort in the suffrage organizations, and those who continued to work on behalf of women primarily through the temperance topic, such as Amelia Bloomer and Clarina Howard Nichols. Finally, she examines the rhetoric of members of the Woman s Christian Temperance Unionthe largest organization of women in the nineteenth century.Mattingly then turns to the rhetoric from perspectives outside those of mainstream, middle-class women. She focuses on racial conflicts and alliances as an increasingly diverse membership threatened the unity and harmony in the WCTU. Her primary source for this discussion is contemporary newspaper accounts of temperance speeches.Fiction by temperance writers also proves to be a fertile source for Mattingly's investigation. Insisting on greater equality between men and women, this fiction candidly portrayed injustice toward women. Through the temperance issue, Mattingly discovers, women could broach otherwise clandestine topics openly. She also finds that many of the concerns of nineteenth-century temperance women are remarkably similar to concerns of today s feminists.

In this article, we explore how women in different social classes had differential access to resources and services to enhance their 'wellness'-resulting in classed roles in alcohol consumption. We analyse data from a qualitative study on alcohol by midlife women in South Australia and employ the analogy of a 'toolkit' in order to understand the structural patterning of 'wellness tools'. Bourdieu's relational model of class guides our exploration of women's inequitable opportunities for wellness. Higher social class women had 'choices' facilitated by bulging wellness toolkits, such as yoga, exercise and healthy eating regimens-alcohol consumption was not essential to promoting 'wellness' and did not have an important place in their toolkits. Middle-class women had less well-stocked toolkits and consumed alcohol in a 'compensation approach' with other wellness tools. Alcohol consumption received positive recognition and was a legitimised form of enjoyment, fun and socialising, which needed counterbalancing with healthy activities. Working-class women had sparse toolkits-other than alcohol-which was a tool for dealing with life's difficulties. Their focus was less on 'promoting wellness' and more on 'managing challenging circumstances'. Our social class-based analysis is nestled within the sociology of consumption and sociological critiques of the wellness industry.

This chapter uses the pandemic crisis to explore the social processes that structure happiness and shape fantasies of living a happy life. Considered herein are issues of human potential, gendered and classed possibility and people's differing chances in cultivating a sense of satisfaction in ‘being happy’, despite living through COVID-19. Interviews with 40 Australian women living during lockdown restrictions with varying levels of social, cultural and economic capital are utilised to make sense of women's happiness. Vastly different avenues for achieving a happiness fantasy outside of drinking alcohol were possible for more privileged women than for those in middle and working classes. The classed differences in women's gendered roles in managing emotions (their own and other people's) and their chances to be happy are exemplified in how the changes to the structure of the day that resulted from COVID-19 restrictions did not devastate or cause stress (as we heard from working-class women) or need to be filtered or blocked out using alcohol in order to retain balanced emotions (as we heard from middle-class women) but rather provided an opportunity to celebrate the achievement of their happiness fantasy. We deduce that for those with less agency available to control their chances of living a happy life, prevailing COVID-19 discourse that places happiness within individual responsibility and focuses on personal resilience rather than tending to the conditions for flourishing, is problematic.

The thesis unites class and gender with an intersectional approach and connects to rhetoric theory, and thus brings new perspectives into the subject of history in general and the field of labor history in particular. Its subject, Agda Östlund (1870–1942), belongs to a category of politically active working-class women who have often ended up in the shadows in representations of the history of the Swedish labor movement. In its approach, the the- sis thus contributes both new empirical knowledge and new theo- retical perspectives to the research field. The overall question has been the following: How did Östlund shape her political career rhetorically, from the fight for voting rights to her final work in Parliament? I have treated this question from different perspecti- ves in the five articles that make up the major part of the thesis. The thesis evaluates a selection of rhetorical situations at different moments in Östlund’s rhetorical career. A key concept is ‘rhetorical situation’, in which the elements of rhetorical prob- lems, audience and restrictions are included. I have traced Öst- lund’s political career, which ran from joining the party in 1903 and leaving Parliament in 1940 and searched for sites of tension or focal points during her rhetorical career. During this time, the Social Democratic Party transformed from a small to a large party, becoming by the thirties a government party that formed coalitions and made economic settlements. Correspondingly, Östlund’s audience changed as the party grew and gained more influence. Sometimes I study her up close, sometimes from a dis- tance, to see her from different perspectives. The material I have worked with is her journalism, a campaign speech and parliamen- tary debates. The latter constitutes a large amount of material from her nearly twenty years as a Member of Parliament. Three out of five articles are about parliamentary debates. In the struggle for suffrage, I focus on Agda Östlund’s appear- ances and her journalism in the Social Democratic women’s movement’s magazine Morgonbris and the speech she gave at a suffrage meeting at the Auditorium in Stockholm in the spring of 1917. It is the only manuscript that has been preserved from her many appearances during her long political career. The problem during the suffrage struggle can be described as a field of ten- sion regarding the relationship between class and gender. Social Democratic women felt that they were treated badly by the men in their own party. They were met with disinterest when they wanted financial support for their activities and when they ran for municipal council assemblies for the first time, at a time when only three of the party’s one hundred and fifty-three members were women. They also had a problematic relationship with the bourgeois suffragettes. Landsföreningen för Kvinnans Politiska Rösträtt, LKPR, (The National Association for Women’s Politi- cal Suffrage) pushed a line that meant that working-class women would risk being excluded by a constitutional reform that did not change the general suffrage provisions. An international Social Democratic women’s conference took a position against any collaboration with the bourgeois women’s movement. In Swe- den, the Social Democratic women agreed on a compromise: in the first instance, they would pursue the suffrage demand from within their own organizations, while also allowing those who wanted to participate in predominantly bourgeois suffrage asso- ciations to do so. While others abandoned LKPR, Östlund chose to continue collaborating with them. For Östlund and her female party colleagues, it was about striking ideological, organizational and strategic balances in the fight for voting rights. She acted as an agitator in a field of tension between the male labor movement and the bourgeois suffrage movement. Here there was a class conflict among suffragists, and a gender conflict among social democrats. Here there were ideo- logical cracks and contradictions that she, as an agitator in differ- ent contexts, had to deal with in different ways to get her message across. The message had to be angled in different ways, and so too the description of the problem. The discrepancies in her rhetori- cal strategies reflected the polarization and contradictions in the patriarchal class society. As a leading figure in the Social Democratic women’s movement, she invoked a socialist class struggle, rhetoric replete with vivid imagery, irony and sarcasm, to awaken political consciousness among working-class women. Mean- while, as a subordinate speaker in the public political arena, she used a low-key rhetorical strategy. Östlund experimented with a double persona in her political rhetoric, adopting two different roles or masks: the Amazon and the mother. During one and the same speech in front of a mixed audience, she alternated between the role of mother and Amazon. Even in the 1921 election, when women could vote and run for parliament for the first time, the campaign was characterized by a site of tension between class and gender, and this time the question was how the parties’ candidates would reach out to a new audience, namely women. The motif of home was a recurring one in the election speeches, and I believe that it was part of the rhetorical strategy of the speakers to reach out to female voters. In the suffrage movement, the women of the bourgeoisie con- nected the home with the bourgeois nuclear family which had to be defended against the emerging socialism. When Per Albin Hansson appeared in Stortorget in Stockholm in September 1921 to speak in the election campaign, he used the folkhemmet (‘folk- home’) motif for the first time. It was no coincidence. There was a battle over the home and the idealized home motif became a way for him to appeal to a new group of voters. In Hansson’s meta- phor there was a nationalist rhetoric that conveyed the image of the Social Democrats as a people’s party instead of a class party. He later called his vision Folkhemmet (“the People’s Home”) in a famous speech in a Parliamentary debate in 1928. He was Prime Minister of Sweden from 1932 to 1946. Agda Östlund also appeared at the same election meeting. Something that distinguished her speech from Per Albin Hans- son’s was that she did not speak of an idealized abstract home, but instead described a starkly concrete, realistic working-class home that characterized by overcrowding in a time of housing short- ages. She spoke directly to the working-class women who lived in these homes, and to convince them she also needed to be con- crete. Many working-class women lived in difficult circumstances. But in parallel with this starkly concrete image of the inadequate urban working-class home, she also conveyed the image of the home as utopia and as a metaphor for a social ideal. She spoke of a longing for a home which lies as a memory – the dream of establishing an original form of community in the form of a home in modern society. From a rhetorical point of view, these two contrasting uses of the home functioned as a way of illustrating Social Democratic ideology by using the home as both a concrete aspect of everyday existence and as a social ideal. Östlund’s first speech in Parliament in March 1922 can be described as a fragile and delicate rhetorical situation because she spoke for the very content of her own proposal on tuberculosis care and against it, – following the line of the committee, of which she herself was a part. This was the first time a female member took the floor in Parliament. It was important for her to find a speaking position to reach out with her message. At the time of her speech, Sweden was governed for the second time by a Social Democratic government. The Social Democrats were still marked by internal conflicts after the party explosion in 1917 and lacked both organizational and political stability. In her speech, she highlighted the class injustice when it came to the care of tubercu- losis patients, arguing that the state should take responsibility for arranging suitable work for patients discharged from sanitoriums so that they would not risk getting sick again. The working class suffered to a greater extent from tuberculosis and found it more difficult to complete rehabilitation. After Östlund appealed for a quick solution to the issue, she concluded with the words: “Mister Speaker! I therefore have no claim!” In her speech, she used the mother’s role as a persona, connected tuberculosis care to the home and the everyday envi- ronment, and highlighted class injustice. Through the mother’s role, the class perspective became a question of humanity. It was important for her to adapt to the Parliament procedure to find a speaking position, but at the same time do it in a new way through the issue – the class perspective on tuberculosis care – and how she did it, through the role of mother. In the debate over the proposal for gender-identified ballot papers in the 1922 referendum on alcohol prohibition, the rhe- torical problem was marked by male opposition to women’s suffrage. The debate could be described as the meeting between two topos, or figures of thought, namely male supremacy and equality, in a historically formative period when the meaning of democracy was under negotiation. In the debate, the idea of male supremacy was expressed in the small (and for the men, often not even noticeable) formulations that made women invisible: when, for example, a Social Democratic member said, “as gentle- men know”, when a conservative member said “gentlemen” and when a liberal member spoke of a citizen having “his right”. Sev- eral presumed authority by virtue of their position as experienced politicians, and made claims that were unsubstantiated and in fact prejudiced against women, claims based on the understand- ing that women could not think for themselves and that they had been misled. Outside the Parliament, a political network of women dem- onstrated, and Agda Östlund highlighted them in her speech. They are protesting because they believe civil rights are in dan- ger, she said. She questioned one of her male party colleagues, Arthur Engberg, who believed that the issue should be about consideration of the rights of different groups. She asked what would have happened if women instead of men had been the primary consumers of alcohol and men had to take all the con- sequences of the women’s abuse. Her conclusion was that men would then have introduced an alcohol ban a long time ago. She suggested that they thought about that matter before deciding that the prohibition issue would primarily lie with those who consume alcohol. The 1938 abortion law became one of Agda Östlund’s last battles. The rhetorical problem was characterized by the fact that the Social Democrats had been a government party since the beginning of the thirties and had begun cooperation with the Agricultural Party through the crisis agreement. As for the abortion issue, it had become part of the population issue that characterized the entire political debate. Just a couple of years earlier, fifteen hundred organizations with a total of a quarter of a million members had united around a call demanding more extensive abortion rights. During the mobilization, public opin- ion turned. The discourse or problem formulation changed. The problem surrounding the population question gained more and more attention after Alva and Gunnar Myrdal published their book Kris i befolkningsfrågan, ‘Crisis in the Population Question’ (1934), in which they used the discussion to launch redistribution policies and left-wing politics. But they failed to gain support for properly expanded abor- tion rights. By the time the issue was taken further in the Popula- tion Commission, it had become instead a rather watered-down bill. In the debate on abortion law, there was a consensus that the population issue was important. This was something that everyone had to relate to. The culmination of the abortion debate was a compromise within the framework of the population issue. Several emphasized the importance of cooperation and compro- mise to find a solution. The main point of view in the debate was rational arguments on population policy which meant that soci- ety could not afford an overly extended abortion right. A rhetorical strategy among male members was to contrast the good woman who was synonymous with reproduction and who made sacrifices and took responsibility for the survival of society with the bad woman who showed disinterest in the home and family and did violence to her own maternal instinct. Another rhetorical strategy among male members was to make invisible the role of men themselves when it came to unwanted pregnan- cies. Another rhetorical strategy was to talk around the class issue, for example by describing all women as too comfortable in mod- ern society. In fact, class was a central issue in the debate because the legislation struck the working-class woman hardest, forcing her to try to have an abortion on her own or engage the help of a quack, with possibly fatal consequences. Women from the middle class could get by with money and connections. It was only Agda Östlund who gave an image of the woman that went beyond reproduction. When she abstained against a section in the bill which stated that underage women, who had often been self-supporting for many years, would not be allowed to express themselves in decisions about abortion, the image of the woman emerged as an independent individual who had the right to self-determination. When she spoke about the abor- tion issue, she also spoke about her political career. On several occasions she had tried to get the issue on the agenda. In 1921, after a high-profile court case, the Social Democratic Women’s Association, where Östlund was a member of the board, wrote to the Minister of Justice and demanded a change in the law. In 1928, a delegation from Sweden attended the Socialist Women’s International in Brussels and made a statement in favor of abor- tion rights. In the following year, she submitted a proposal for a change to the abortion law. The proposal was rejected. A small step forward can be as important as a big one, said Agda Östlund, referring to the fact that the law gave the right to abortion for women with faltering health and many children. While she stood up for how she believed politics should be con- ducted, she also expressed disappointment that progress had not gone at the pace she had hoped. As a symbol of reformism, she herself became the subject of debate here. In the abortion debate, she was revealed in the role of the primal mother or tribal mother and as a symbol of women’s long struggle. She tried to build trust in the audience by emphasizing precisely her long experience as a politician when she argued for the necessity of compromises. A female communist said that Agda Östlund, as a representative of working-class women, should have had more say in the abortion issue. She also described Östlund as the most beautiful female figure in the Swedish labor movement. But when it came to the abortion law, Östlund had failed, she added. The rhetorical devices that Agda Östlund used during her political career were about different personas, or forms of appearance or roles. It was about the Amazon, the mother and the primal mother. She also used the home motif. The low-key and logical argumentation was recurring. She often made use of literary and historical references. The trick of reversing per- spective was also something she used several times, for instance in the debate about distinguishing between male and female votes in the referendum on alcohol prohibition. This shift in perspective became also a way of relating to the thought figure of male supremacy. By shifting perspectives and asking what would have happened if women instead of men had been chief consumers of alcohol, she made visible a norm in the debate. The low-key and logical style can be seen as a common thread throughout her career. It can also be linked to her tactical sense. She chooses to cooperate with the bourgeois suffrage move- ment because she believes it can benefit the cause. She supports the abortion law because it is, after all, a small step forward. In her texts in Morgonbris, she gives expression to a practical way of looking at politics that marked her when she was involved in building the Social Democratic women’s movement. It is about organization, education and persistent, hardworking, patient, dutiful work in politics and social movements. In my thesis, I have shown the relationship between class and gender in various rhetorical situations during Agda Östlund’s political career. Previous research lacks this intersectional per- spective on class and gender which I believe is crucial to under- standing this period. While previous research mainly focused on organizations – for example the position of women within Social Democracy, women as collective actors in local politics and male strategies to exclude women from political parties after the right to vote – I have traced Agda Östlund and her interaction with other actors and in this way, I have been able to describe the rela- tionship between class and gender in new ways. Previous research has shown how popular movements shaped the forms of politics and also their use of language, which was toned down. By adopting a rhetorical perspective that focuses on the socio-political context of speech and thus differs from previ- ous research on rhetoric in the labor movement and the women’s movement, I have been able to contribute new knowledge and qualify, develop and nuance this image. One such example is vot- ing rights research. It is true that unlike British and American suffragettes, Swedish suffragettes did not break windows or burn buildings, but they certainly did organize themselves, write agen- das and demand the floor. The results in my thesis show, how- ever, that Agda Östlund’s rhetorical strategies varied depending on the situation she was in. As a leading figure in the Social Dem- ocratic women’s movement, she used a socialist class struggle rhetoric to awaken political consciousness among working-class women, while as a subordinate female speaker in the public politi- cal arena, on the contrary, she used a low-key rhetorical strategy. The situation determined which rhetorical devices she chose from her palette. The biographical approach differs from previous biographies about women in the labor movement, for example Gun- nela Björk’s about Kata Dalström, Malin Arvidsson’s about Nelly Thüring and Gunnel Karlsson’s about Ulla Lindström. My thesis does not depict Agda Östlund from the cradle to the grave but consists of several rhetorical situations where I study her interac- tion with other actors based on the relationship between class and gender. I study the interaction between Agda Östlund and her surroundings to understand both her and her surroundings. My biographical approach also differs from, for example, Kirsti Niskanen’s biography, where the social democrat Karin Kock becomes an exponent for studying the gender construction of the scientific community and especially the science of econom- ics. Agda Östlund is not just a tool or a prism, but is interesting in herself, but of course in relation to her surroundings.

A prospective study of 59 first-time mothers-to-be was conducted. The women were interviewed twice, towards the end of their pregnancies and again after the birth of their babies, to determine their satisfaction with the quality of the birth experience. Measures of preparation for childbirth, satisfaction with information, social support, expected pain and health locus of control were taken at time 1, and measures of preparation for childbirth, social SUPPOK, reported pain, symptoms of stress, reports of the baby's behaviour, and satisfaction with the birth experience were taken at time 2. Working-class women felt they had been less well prepared than middle-class women and they were less satisfied with the information about childbirth. Middle-class women felt better supposed by their partners, family and neighbours than did working-class women. Working-class women were more likely to attribute both health and illness to chance than were middle-class women, and they were less satisfied with the b...

Reviewed by: Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement by Premilla Nadasen Simon Black Premilla Nadasen, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015) Within a short period of time, Premilla Nadasen has established herself as one of the most important historians of the US labour movement writing today. In Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement and her previous book Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005), Nadasen explores how class, race, gender, culture, and the law constitute the meanings of the work [End Page 285] of social reproduction and the ways in which working-class women of colour have disrupted these meanings, defining this labour as work, the home as a workplace, and in the case of domestic workers, claiming a right to organize as workers. In doing so, Nadasen's scholarship centres a working-class Black feminism long marginalized in male-centric histories of the civil rights and labour movements, and in middle-class white women's histories of the women's movement. Household Workers Unite is a narrative history of African-American domestic-worker organizing and activism. The book focuses in on the period between the early 1950s and late 1970s when "domestic workers established a national movement to transform the occupation." (3) While Nadasen draws on a range of sources, including government reports and journalistic exposes, it is the oral histories of African American women activists – brilliant organizers like Geraldine Roberts, Dorothy Bolden, and Josephine Hulett – that anchor the book. These women tell their own stories about the meaning of their labour, their desire to be viewed as a worker, and the fight to transform their occupation. As working-class African American women, their stories connect to the broader struggle for Black liberation, highlighting the racial exploitation of domestic labour, and are a form of activism, "a strategic way to make sense of the past as well as the present and to overturn assumptions about domestic workers." (3) Anchoring the book in stories "not told about domestic workers, but stories that domestic workers articulated themselves" (3) serves a political purpose. As Nadasen notes in the book's introduction, mainstream media narratives around domestic work cast these workers as victims, disempowered and without agency. The narrative of victimization denies domestic workers' agency and marginalizes not only contemporary domestic worker organizing but a rich history of collective action stemming all the way back to 1881 when African American laundresses in Atlanta formed a Washing Society and went on strike for better wages and working conditions, effectively shutting down the city. While the 1930s witnessed another wave of domestic worker organizing, New Deal labour legislation failed to treat the home as a workplace and denied household workers coverage under basic labour protections, including the right to a minimum wage and the right to organize and bargain collectively. These gendered and racialized exclusions were mirrored in social policy, as the white male industrial worker and his caregiving wife became the model around which labour law and the welfare state were constructed, denying African American women and other women of colour full citizenship. This is the legal and historical backdrop for the rise of a national domestic workers' rights movement focused on ending the exclusion of domestic workers from employment protections institutionalized in the New Deal. Yet prior to the emergence of a national movement, Nadasen tells us that organizers like Dorothy Bolden in Atlanta and Geraldine Roberts in Cleveland were cutting their political teeth in civil rights struggles. Unlike the middle-class, male leadership of that movement, the likes of Bolden and Roberts were working-class women with little formal education. They experienced the realities of white supremacy not only in public spaces, but also in the homes of their white employers. Yet domestic workers resisted, playing a pivotal role in some of the earliest civil rights campaigns, including the Montgomery bus boycott. They raised money by cooking and selling food, and [End Page 286] mobilized other household workers in support of the campaign. And they stood...

Anne Macpherson’s From Colony to Nation intends to recuperate the critical if not always consonant roles that working- and middle-class women played in labor organization, ethnic mobilization, and the forging of an antiracist, anticolonial, incipiently feminist nationalist movement in Belize (formerly British Honduras) during the six decades preceding independence in 1981. The author usefully situates these local struggles within the broader sweep of analogous movements elsewhere in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the British Empire. In so doing, she underscores how the race- and gender-inclusive anticolonial popular culture of Belize informed the nationalist movement as it emerged within a broader wave of strife that swept through Britain’s colonies in the 1930s. The resulting reform policies, characteristically dedicated to containing social unrest and directing political evolution in the late British colonial era, paradoxically created new space for working- and middle-class women to act upon that process in innovative (if sometimes contradictory) and previously unacknowledged ways, a process this book proceeds to theorize.The monograph is based upon a thorough reading of a variety of archival sources together with published primary and secondary materials, and over one hundred ethnographic interviews with political actors, NGO staff, and social commentators, all carried out by the author as a participant-observer during repeated fieldwork installments over the period 1988 – 96. The author bases her assessment of the evidence in a broad, indeed illuminating knowledge of historiographic, anthropological, cultural studies, postcolonial, and feminist theory.Macpherson crafts a meticulous and creative interrogation of the pertinent documentary evidence and ethnographic material to present a comprehensive account of women’s roles as political actors in the emergence of an independent Belize. While clearly written and agreeably jargon free, From Colony to Nation is too exhaustively documented for the casual reader, the undergraduate course, or the graduate seminar; indeed, a more judicious editing for length would not have detracted from the author’s overall argument. This title will primarily interest the comparative social historian, cultural theorist, political sociologist, or scholar of Belize.From Colony to Nation draws upon salient feminist and postcolonial historiography, using new evidence from Belize in comparative fashion to address prevailing debates on the nature of popular political mobilization in Latin America, the Caribbean, and beyond. Macpherson crafts a careful reinterpretation of Belizean history. She does not hesitate to critically engage the Belizean canon (e.g., Peter Ashdown, Cedric Grant, Nigel Bolland, Assad Shoman), even as she extends the insights of antecedent feminist anthropology carried out there (e.g., Peta Henderson and Ann Bryn Haughton, Virginia Kerns, Irma McLaurin, Richard Wilk).Macpherson argues that gender, understood as “a power relationship between men and women as well as a field constitutive of race and class hierarchies and political, particularly state, power” (p. 6), is structured by the matrix of social relations even as it acts upon it. She also demonstrates how working-class women, and black women in particular, played a fundamental role in conditioning the ultimate failure of colonial hegemony in Belize. As elsewhere in the British Caribbean (and contrary to claims made by subaltern studies scholars of Africa and Asia), “The gendered moralism of the colonial state in Belize and other modern colonies . . . and not its intrinsic colonial character, is most salient in explaining the failure of its hegemonic project” (p. 14). Colonial officials were invested in prevalent notions of gendered, sexualized, imperial European racism, which imputed an irascible resistance to domesticity that in turn rationalized the denial to women of full popular political participation. While a proud notion of black womanhood emerged in Belize at least by the time of political crisis in the 1930s, paradoxically, Macpherson argues, black women were those primarily responsible for creating the multiracial, incipiently nationalist coalition from which the small white minority in this ethnically diverse polity was largely excluded.Belizean political history and emergent nationalism are thus revealed as explicitly gendered processes in which women have been central, deliberate, and determinant actors. Macpherson shows subaltern women activists to be adept at adapting to, negotiating with, reframing, manipulating, and resisting colonial power, while middle-class women, recruited to the government’s reformist program, organized to exert their own mediating influence upon the unfolding political process in the run-up to independence.Macpherson steers adeptly between easy tendencies to idealize, to make heroic the political resistance of subordinated actors, or to discount them as largely indifferent to politics. Likewise, the author rejects a polarized view of middle-class women activists as either uncritically complicit in the colonial project or dedicated to its radical reform. In the spirit of Philippe Bourgois’s landmark Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation, Macpherson brings an innovative, unapologetically revisionist perspective to her project, offering the first work to theorize the political subjectivities of women in Belize and thereby significantly raising the theoretical stakes of the historiography of Central America’s understudied Caribbean coast.

In her 1961 autobiography, Olive Higgins Prouty reflected that [t]he feature of most interest about Stella Dallas is, I think, number of its reincarnations. First serialized for nearly two million readers of American Magazine in 1922 and published in book form in 1923, Prouty's poignant tale of class hierarchy and maternal sacrifice went on to become a 1924 stage play, a 1925 silent an Oscar-nominated 1937 film starring Barbara Stanwyck, and a long-running radio soap opera. Indeed, Stella outlived her creator, reappearing in a third film starring Bette Midler in 1990. Yet to Prouty these adaptations, filled with melodrama and sentimentality, were something of an embarrassment: How much better if Stella had never emerged from covers of a novel. Certainly adaptation of Stella to stage and screen and finally radio did not help me to acquire kind of reputation I desired (Pencil Shavings 156). It is doubtful, however, that avoiding mass media would have spared Prouty from being, like so many popular and critically acclaimed women novelists of 1920s and 1930s, relegated to dustbins of history by a masculinist, modernist establishment. (1) Arguably, Stella and her creator have been remembered only because of these adaptations: while novel went out of print for nearly four decades, 1937 film remained in circulation and was elevated to canonical status by feminist scholars in 1980s as an exemplary woman's film, a powerful alternative to Hollywood's male gaze. Only since its 1990 reprinting as part of a literary cinema classics series, illustrated with stills from has Prouty's novel gained a modicum of scholarly attention. (2) My concern here is less to establish Prouty in canon than to examine what novel and its reincarnations reveal about evolving discourses of class, taste, and cultural hierarchy in America. The adaptation and reception history of Stella Dallas provide a particularly valuable case study not only because Prouty's comment so clearly exposes intense anxieties centered on boundary lines of literature and mass culture but also because Stella's story is so explicitly and centrally concerned with issues of taste and class distinction. In all versions, Stella Dallas depicts in excruciating detail difficulties faced by a working-class woman who marries above her station. Rather than living happily ever after, in Cinderella fashion, Stella quickly alienates her husband with her flashy dress, coarse manners, and lowbrow tastes, and they separate. Although daughter of this mistaken marriage grows up beautiful and refined, it soon becomes clear that Stella's hopeless vulgarity threatens her daughter's social chances. (3) When Laurel loyally refuses to leave her mother to live with her father and his elegant new wife, Stella drives her away, destroying girl's respect by pretending to love a boorish alcoholic whom Laurel loathes. Stella ends up alone and anonymous, but glowing with maternal pride, standing in a dark, rainy street to glimpse through a distant window spectacle of her daughter's new life (in novel, her debut; in films, her wedding to a wealthy young man). Even after being reunited with her married daughter in radio serial depicting the later episodes in life of Stella Dallas, Stella continued to struggle to reconcile her devotion to Laurel with what program's announcer daily described as the differences in their tastes and worlds. (4) The long popularity of this tale suggests that American mass culture throughout first half of twentieth century--particularly those genres created by and for women--was far more attuned to, even obsessed with, intricacies of class distinctions and barriers than usually acknowledged by our myths of America as a classless society. Yet, as story was repeatedly reinvented in new periods and media, we can observe significant shifts both in ways that class distinctions are defined and in degree of sympathy given to Stella's aspirations. …