Patterns of Modernity in Transnational Perspective

Abstract

Patterns of Modernity in Transnational Perspective Elisa Camiscioli and Jean H. Quataert This issue explores the transnational networks and cultural forces shaping key components of modern women's politics and subjectivity at the end of the long nineteenth century and in 1970s America. It opens with two complementary studies about advocacy of women's sexual freedom and identity. The next two articles address expanding opportunities for women through missionary education and nursing training. The final two are on women's political activism and mobilization in ideological struggles. We also have a new component in our book review section, an essay which compares three digital humanities' collections on the history of women's suffrage in the global context. Broadcasting individual women's sexual desire was a decisively brazen act in the later nineteenth-century Anglophone world—and in East Asia as well. In time, it became an attribute of modern women's identity and a central component of "erotic romantic love." The first two articles explore the cultural politics that surrounded the advocacy of heterosexual intimacy through the life work of two notorious public women whose careers tangentially overlapped. Their self-crafted prominence demonstrates a changing landscape for gender norms in predominantly urban bohemian neighborhoods. Richly sourced and engagingly written, Hilary Hallett's article examines the British author Elinor Glyn, who took her "sex novel" Three Weeks (1907) on tour throughout America in the first decade of the twentieth century. Hallett argues for an "alternative feminist historiography" found in "women's performances" by popular but lesser-known authors. Their celebrity status and cultural glamour "not only challenged orthodoxy" but "shaped popular knowledge," Hallett writes. The author makes a strong case that Glyn capitalized on inherent ambivalences in scandalous talk both to challenge and deny new ideas about respectable married women's sexuality. In this way, she pushed discussion in the mainstream culture to deal more "frankly" and openly with such topics as eroticism, dating, premarital sex, and romantic love. Before the 1920s, Glyn helped make women's heterosexual satisfaction "a subject for mass culture." She was indeed "a mother to the modern girl." Perhaps unsurprisingly, America's "Queen of the Anarchists," Emma Goldman, was a fan of Glyn, calling Glyn's fictional heroine's rejection of monogamy "magnificent," according to Hallett. The importance of sexual liberation to human liberation in "anarchist communist" philosophy takes center stage in the next article on Emma Goldman by Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu. Emma Goldman, of course, is well known in women's history as a tireless [End Page 7] proponent of free love, birth control, and free speech. But Hsu makes new contributions to this literature by addressing the underlying logic of Goldman's philosophy, what Hsu calls her "sexual political reasoning." Goldman integrated European sexology into anarchist thinking to lay bare the political implications of liberated intimacies. Hsu carefully parses the differences between reformers and radicals in the Progressive Era, comparing anarchist thought to progressive feminists' gender assumptions and to those advocating birth control (with its slippage into eugenics). Like Glyn, Goldman also crafted her public persona. She, too, took her message on tour, seeking out new supporters for her philosophy of life, notably the young urban intellectuals, and capitalizing on a "tide of . . . iconoclastic bohemianism." And, through the translation and circulation of her magazine Mother Earth, this commitment to individualism as a "powerful defiance of traditional gender norms" accounted for Goldman's popularity in China and Japan. There was a downside to all this success, however: it diluted the essential socioeconomic and anti-authoritarian messages of anarchism. The next two articles, temporally extending into the first half of the twentieth century, explore other aspects of modern women's increasingly shared life experiences: expanding educational and professional opportunities. But each option was mediated by countervailing cultural and political forces that complicated the workings of the modern. Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa takes us to several educational institutions in the Himalayan borderlands of British India accessible to elite women of Tibet, Bhutan, and Sikkim. Reflecting the growing importance of this area for global commerce, trade long had served as a transnational linkage between the different cultures, polities, and languages of the area. Elite families used the new...