Early Twentieth-century North Research Articles

Kitchen Hinduism: Food politics and Hindi cookbooks in colonial North India

Abstract This article deliberates on the entanglements between politics and the history of food, health, and gender in Hindu middle-class households of early twentieth-century North India, through the genre of printed cookbooks in Hindi. While cookbooks became important nodes through which to construct an ideal Hindu housewife and kitchen, they were also a place where educated, middle-class women’s voices came to be heard, recorded, and published. The article shows how and why cookbooks are an important source for writing gendered social histories of the Hindu middle classes in modern India. Simultaneously, reflecting on the larger politics of food, the article focuses on the social identities embedded in these culinary texts, and the multiple meanings they embodied, as they strengthened gender, caste, and religious boundaries, constructed a past golden culinary age, upheld ayurvedic knowledge, bemoaned the present state of culinary sciences, used food to overcome the malaise of the middle classes, fashioned an ideal Hindu upper-caste palate as synonymous with a vegetarian diet, and imagined a healthy family and a strong Hindu nation through culinary idioms.

Self-Fashioning of a Hindu Political Sanyasi: Muscular Asceticism and Sectarian Freedom in Swami Satyadev Parivrajak’s Autobiography

This essay focuses on the autobiographical writings of Swami Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’ (1879–1961), a prolific Hindi writer, and a charismatic modern-day worldly political ascetic in the early twentieth-century north India. It discusses three central pillars of his ineradicably political autobiography: first, the performance of an exemplary celibate Hindu masculinity; second, the conceptualization of a segmented and exclusionary freedom, unencumbered by the presence of Muslims; and third, his deep antagonism towards Gandhi, and defence of his assassination. Taken together, his autobiography is a critical contribution to the intellectual history and genealogy of sectarian Hindi–Hindu literature, while also showcasing cultivated precursors of a modern, monolithic and militant Hindu nation.

Migration, Kinship and Child Mortality in Early Twentieth-Century North America

AbstractThis article appraises kin availability and migration timing on French-Canadian child mortality in an early twentieth-century North American industrial city. The analysis is based on the exploitation of an original dataset constructed by linking the 1910 census data (IPUMS-Full Count) for Manchester, New Hampshire to Quebec Catholic marriage records (BALSAC) and geocoding census data at the household level (Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps). Our results suggest that the presence of maternal and paternal grandmothers in the city living in different households were associated with reduced child mortality and that French-Canadian women who arrived in the United States as children or young adults experienced higher child mortality compared to second-generation French Canadians and those who migrated at a later age.

Образ Андемиркана в северокавказской драматургии: о неопубликованной пьесе З.П. Кар-дангушева

The dramaturgy of the North Caucasus people remains an unresearched field of modern literary criticism. This article presents the introduction issues of scientific circulation and studying of the unpublished manuscript of the play “Andemirkan” (1943), placed in the RSALA fund by the Ka-bardian ethnographer, folklorist, playwright and artist Z.P. Kardangushev. This paper considers textological analysis and preparation for publication of the manuscript (85 pages with author’s comments and corrections). Analysis of the manuscript’s content makes it possible to present the translation processes of the author’s thoughts into a literary word and to reconstruct the creative history of his literary work. In practical terms, the analysis of the dramatic texts by Z.P. Kardan-gushev on Andemirkan is crucial for the study of the early twentieth century North Caucasian drama and identification of the artistic characteristics in the embodiment of time, place, and dra-matic conflict.

Culinary Codes for an Emergent Nation: Prescriptions from Pak Chandrika, 1926

ABSTRACT Cuisines are never neutral, innocent concoctions, but products of dominant ideologies and power structures. This paper explores culinary codes advanced by popular Hindi cookbooks from the early twentieth century to see how they re-define the kitchen and the culinary world of urban, middle-class Hindu families. Focusing especially on Pak Chandrika, a cookbook published from Allahabad in 1926, the paper argues that these Hindi cookbooks contributed to the residual ground – especially in relation to the intimate, the everyday and the comestible – that potentially fed into the emergent nationalism in early twentieth century north India.

Toward an Ordinal Naturalism

Toward an Ordinal Naturalism* Lawrence Cahoone It has been more than four decades since the 1970s, when Ernan McMullin, Marjorie Grene, and John Compton all gave presidential addresses to the Metaphysical Society of America on nature and the relation of natural science to metaphysics.1 A reprise may be in order. What follows is a sketch of a “nonreductive” naturalism, cobbled out of fragments of the American philosophical tradition, that makes full use of the natural sciences. John Herman Randall distinguished three conceptions of metaphysics: the search for the principles of being with respect to which all things are One; the search for the real in opposition to “appearances”; and the search for the generic traits of and relations among all subject matters.2 For the last, metaphysics differs from other inquiries only in its generality. I shall follow that approach. To argue for naturalism or any metaphysical view we need to be able to talk about things in the broadest sense in a language that does not presume the view we defend. One plausible approach is to use a pluralistic language deliberately indeterminate with respect to most, although certainly not all, metaphysical issues. I suggest the most pluralistic language available is a little known product of the American philosophical tradition, objective relativism. When combined with fallibilism, objective relativism allows us to argue that a certain kind of naturalism is best able to account for whatever has been discriminated by it. But the naturalism in question must accept emergence as a [End Page 115] phenomenon in nature. Such a naturalism, based in objective relativism and emergence, can robustly incorporate plausible understandings of the physical, material, biological, mental, and cultural systems and processes of reality, and hence accept evidence from sources as different as natural science, logic, phenomenology, pragmatism, and cultural studies, without claiming completeness or certitude. What follows has two parts. The first presents two hypotheses, objective relativism and fallibilism, to create a least determinate language for discussing things, performing the role of what some might call an ontology albeit without an account of being per se. The second part presents three hypotheses; two describe a metaphysics of emergent naturalism, while the final suggests a more determinate set of concepts for the analysis of nature, a cosmology if you will, that coheres with the former. Together the two parts constitute an ordinal naturalism, a term borrowed from Beth Singer.3 I When remembered at all the term “objective relativism” signifies an approach to values ascribed to Dewey and C. I. Lewis.4 But its original form was much broader. Objective relativism grew out of the explosion of realism in early twentieth-century North Atlantic philosophy, called by Arthur Lovejoy “the Revolt of the Twentieth Century against the Seventeenth.” 5 That explosion arguably invented twentieth-century philosophy, championed as it was by thinkers as different as Franz [End Page 116] Brentano, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, William James, Ernst Mach, G. E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell, as well as the English Realists and American New Realists. They surely differed in what kind of realism they adopted, or what they applied it to: “naïve” or “perceptual realism” (versus representationalism); “metaphysical realism” (versus idealism); “epistemic realism” (versus relativism); and “scholastic” or “logical realism” (versus nominalism). Some of the new realists thought the difference between “real” and “apparent,” “objective” and “subjective,” even “physical” and “mental” could be analyzed as two relational functions of the same objects. Instead of saying that the pencil dipped in water looks bent but is “really” straight, Mach claimed that the same elements “in their functional dependence [on the perceiver] . . . are sensations. In another functional connection they are . . . physical objects.”6 This came to be called “neutral monism,” endorsed by both James and Russell. 7 Objective relativism is a child of neutral monism. Morris Cohen, calling it “neutral pluralism,” explored it avant la lettre during the First World War. 8 Arthur Murphy named it in 1927, while Evander McGilvary, George Herbert Mead, and Mead’s student Charles Morris adopted it.9 It [End Page 117] became part of the mid-century Columbia Naturalism of Randall, Ernest Nagel, Justus Buchler, and Thomas Robischon.10 Morris called objective relativism...

Vernacular Sexology from the Margins: A Woman and a Shudra

This article centres on the Hindi sexology writings of a woman, Yashoda Devi, and a Shudra, Santram B.A. In the context of an efflorescence of vernacular sexology literature in early twentieth-century North India, it explicates how their writings moved along different registers, whereby they envisaged a heterosexual ethics that relied on utopian and dystopian descriptions of modernity. Sexology in Hindi, particularly when construed from the margins, reified, constructed, destabilised and questioned sexual norms. The article argues that while largely operating within reformist sexology frames, their writings at times punctured dominant upper-caste, male-centric authority and created frictions in normative equations. Together, their writings contribute significantly to creating a vernacular archive of sexual sciences in India.

About the Authors

Previous article FreeAbout the AuthorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreEliza Butler is a core lecturer in art history at Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D. Her research centers on the intersections of landscape, natural history, and material culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America. Her writing has also recently appeared in Winterthur Portfolio.Maggie M. Cao is the David G. Frey Assistant Professor of art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America (2018). Her research focuses on the intersections of art with histories of technology, natural science, and economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Sophie Cras is a maître de conferences (assistant professor) in contemporary art history at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne, with a special interest in intersections between art and economics. Her first book, The Artist as Economist: Art and Capitalism in the 1960s, will appear in an English translation from Yale University Press in 2019.Michael D’Alessandro is an assistant professor of English at Duke University. His articles have appeared in The New England Quarterly, Studies in American Naturalism, Mississippi Quarterly, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. Currently, he is working on a book project titled “Staged Readings: Contesting Class in Popular American Literature and Theatre, 1835–1875.”Chris Dingwall is a lecturer at Oakland University and author of Selling Slavery: Race and the Industry of American Culture (forthcoming). He recently co-curated African American Designers in Chicago: Art, Commerce, and the Politics of Race, an exhibition held at Chicago Cultural Center.Diana Seave Greenwald is assistant curator of the collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford, where she also earned an M.Phil. in economic and social history. Her book Painting by Numbers: Economic Histories of Nineteenth Century Art is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.Diana L. Linden is an independent scholar. Her book Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene (2015) was selected as a finalist by the National Jewish Book Awards. She was the co-editor of The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (2006). Her work has also appeared in Prospects and American Jewish History.David McCarthy is a professor of art history at Rhodes College. He is the author of The Nude in American Painting, 1950–1980 (1998); Pop Art (2000); H. C. Westermann at War: Art and Manhood in Cold War America (2004); American Artists against War, 1935–2010 (2015); and numerous essays about American art of the mid-twentieth century.John Ott is a professor of art history at James Madison University and author of Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (2014). His current book project is “Mixed Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration, 1931–1954.”Alex J. Taylor is an assistant professor and academic curator in the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. From 2014 to 2016, he was the Terra Foundation Research Fellow in American Art at Tate. He is currently completing a history of corporate art patronage in the 1960s.Anne Verplanck is an associate professor of American studies at Penn State, Harrisburg. She is writing “The Business of Art: Transforming the Graphic Arts in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which explores such areas as entrepreneurship, innovation, and marketing to more fully understand the interplay of economics, social forces, and art.Alan Wallach is the Ralph H. Wark Professor Emeritus of art and art history and professor emeritus of American studies at the College of William and Mary. His publications include studies of Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School, and art museums in the United States. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Art Volume 33, Number 3Fall 2019 Sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707480 © 2019 by Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Domestic Anxieties, Recalcitrant Intimacies: Representation of Servants in Hindi Print Culture of Colonial India

This essay presents a social history of power relations between domestic workers and their employers by examining the representations of servants in a wide array of Hindi print literature, including didactic manuals, popular magazines, reformist writings and cartoons, in the early twentieth-century North India. Exploring possibilities within repertoires of representation, it navigates how a contentious discourse around servant and employer developed in the Hindi print sphere. The essay links the portrayal of servants with changing class, caste and religious dynamics, in which print intersected with material circumstances to shape the hierarchical relationship between servants and employers. While imaging ‘ideal’ servants, the Hindi vernacular was also infused with their negative counterparts and anxieties around personal interactions between mistresses and servants, taking its cue from quotidian life and caste–community relations of the time. Increasing assertion by Dalits and growing antagonism between Hindus and Muslims left its imprints on portrayals of subordinate-caste and Muslim servants by dominant castes and classes. The vernacular straddled these domains of distance/desire and hate/love in the servant–employer relationship.

Yiddish Poetry and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium 1900–1970

Yiddish Poetry and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium 1900–1970

Bundling, Reprinting, and Reframing: Serial Practices Across Borders

ABSTRACT This article explores the circulation of periodical material between metropolitan and regional locations in early twentieth-century North America. It asks how the globalized consumer technology of the household magazine was being taken up outside of cosmopolitan centers through the framework of local, regional, or national concerns. For example, mainstream Canadian monthlies such as The Western Home Monthly and Maclean's frequently engaged with, or re-used, content and formats taken from New York publications. To understand these transnational publishing dynamics, we argue, it is crucial to attend to the material practices of magazines. The article analyzes several such practices, including both editorial and sales strategies. We look at the reprinting or reframing of complete features and of excerpts from other periodicals. We examine the simultaneous serialization of novels in American and Canadian publications, using a case study of Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese. And we offer the first critical discussion of “bundling,” whereby US and Canadian titles were packaged together as a single subscription. It argues that the affordances of seriality, particularly timeliness and increased circulation through decreasing prices, allowed editors to redeploy metropolitan print materials for a regional readership eager to imagine themselves as participants in the new project of modernity.

Women's Voices, Men's Lives: Masculinity in a North Indian Urdu newspaper

AbstractLiterary journals and newspapers aiming to reform the religious beliefs and domestic habits of women were common in early twentieth-century North India. Although most readings have focused on how these texts reflected male legislation of women's behaviour, we should look at Muslim reformist literature to understand male experiences; this investigation offers new insights into an emergent middle-class identity defined more by manners than birth. Readings of a previously little-researched Urdu newspaper, Madinah, and its women's section offer new insights on male experiences of reformism, characterized by profound ambivalence. Playfulness emerged in some reformist descriptions of women's voices, channelling the influence of rekhti. Ultimately Madinah cultivated pride in Islam's strict division of gender roles and conversely threatened men with shame for failing to regulate uneducated women. Descriptions of powerful, Ottoman women warriors were framed to incite men to acts of bravery, using reports from Europe as cautionary examples of the over-indulgence of women. While the newspaper offered outlets for men to express curiosity about women's experiences, ultimately reformist literature limited expressions of pleasure. Male ambivalence regarding the implications of the reformist project remained embedded in writing about women.

Sold People: Traffickers and Family Life in North China by Johanna S. Ransmeier

Reviewed by: Sold People: Traffickers and Family Life in North China by Johanna S. Ransmeier Gilbert Z. Chen (bio) Johanna S. Ransmeier. Sold People: Traffickers and Family Life in North China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. ix, 395 pp. Hardcover $49.95, isbn 978-0-674-97197-4. It is almost a truism among scholars of Chinese studies that precommunist China used to have “one of the most largest and most comprehensive markets for the exchange of human beings in the world.”1 Most scholars tend to treat the sale of people as a mere manifestation of a broader social dysfunction such as famine or prostitution. Few, as Johanna S. Ransmeier has told us, however, have actually analyzed trafficking as a phenomenon in its own right, and attempted to show the nature of such a phenomenon with detailed examples and with a lucid explanatory framework. That is precisely what the author accomplishes in this book. At the highest level of abstraction, the book asks and answers how human trafficking was carried out and evolved, and how the state and ordinary people understood and dealt with it in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North China. It is a welcome and important addition [End Page 182] to the growing literature that has been revising our conventional picture of the regime of the Chinese family as stable and self-contained.2 As Ransmeier informs us, scholars are, by and large, split in their opinions regarding the thorny question of defining slavery: some advocate the position of slaves as property, whereas others interpret slavery as one particular form of power relationship. The China case, the author contends, shows that the above-mentioned two theses can be complementary rather than antithetical in a concrete historical context, that is, Chinese slaveholders exerted a combined force of proprietary relationships and power in relation to the sold people. Furthermore, contrary to the general historiography of slavery which underlines that slavery has caused the demise of the family, Ransmeier reminds us that in China the sale of people not only tore families apart, but, more crucially, reconstituted them. The rationale behind such a seemingly counterintuitive proposition is Ransmeier’s main argument of this well-researched book, namely, “Chinese families were transactional families” (p. 2). The author argues that with a few exceptions such as childbirth and death, exchange (whether monetary or material in nature) and mediation (offered either by a local intermediary or professional broker) were always present in the movement of people from one household to another. Women and children were readily understood by ordinary Chinese families as transferable, being expendable in a crisis situation or desperately pursued in another. Following this line of thought, Ransmeier proclaims that “family boundaries were more permeable than traditionally appreciated” (p. 4), thereby adding significant new weight to the revisionist argument that has been gaining currency. In this context, China’s transactional families constantly approached traffickers due to the shortage of reproductive and domestic labor and diminishing numbers of marriageable young women resulting from female infanticide and skewed sex ratios, and consequent anxieties over male offspring. Although other revisionist historians like Matthew Sommer have recently emphasized that poverty-stricken families throughout the Qing readily traded a wife’s sexual and reproductive services for survival, Ransmeier, based on the close reading of Qing and Republican judicial and police archives as supplemented by contemporary newspapers and early twentieth-century sociological investigations, demonstrates that trafficking, rather than being a last resort of the desperately poor as usually assumed, was instead routinely accepted and expedited by ordinary people and local communities as a conventional means to tackle everyday concerns like a cuckolded husband’s efforts to get rid of his adulterous wife. Put another way, in many cases, when people decided to sell their family members, “they made a rational economic decision” (p. 150). This discourse of “no other choice,” Ransmeier writes, was actually generated and perpetuated by the Qing judicial system. Although the Qing code outlawed many forms of the sale of people, it also incorporated [End Page 183] important modifications that sanctioned the trade in people in a wide spectrum of situations including the commonplace practice of exchanging bride price for wives...

Genealogies of the Dalit political: The transformation of Achhut from ‘Untouched’ to ‘Untouchable’ in early twentieth-century north India

The essay documents the unprecedented transformation of the term Achhut in the Hindi literature from an adjective describing a quality ‘untouched, [and] pure’ to a noun referring to an untouchable person or caste and characterising them as impure. Using Hindustani and other language dictionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, prominent Hindi-language journals of the period, such as the Nagari Pracharini Patrika and Sarasvati, and the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha political and literary activism, I will trace the history and politics of the Dalit movement in the early twentieth century that may have created a new meaning of this category. In particular, I investigate the role that the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha movement, through its publication and politics, may have played a key role in proactively constituting a new meaning of the term Achhut. I also highlight the role of Nirgun Bhakti traditions, their locations in Dalit mohallas , as crucial to the articulation of the Dalit political in North India.

Spirits of Transnationalism: Gender, Race and Cross-Correspondence in Early Twentieth-Century North America and Europe

Gender & HistoryVolume 27, Issue 1 p. 151-170 Article Spirits of Transnationalism: Gender, Race and Cross-Correspondence in Early Twentieth-Century North America and Europe Beth A. Robertson, Beth A. RobertsonSearch for more papers by this author Beth A. Robertson, Beth A. RobertsonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 March 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12105Citations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume27, Issue1April 2015Pages 151-170 RelatedInformation

Race, gender, and the exotic in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees

Focusing on Canadian author Ann-Marie MacDonald’s critically acclaimed Fall on Your Knees (1996), this essay argues that the figure of the Arab in the novel represents an ethnic otherness whose strategic exoticization exposes a highly racialized and gendered early twentieth-century North American culture, one that has historically been informed by a latent, economically motivated exoticism. It is in fact this underlying exoticism that has persistently structured the experiences of several generations of racial and sexual minorities in North America and relegated those minorities to the margins of social life. MacDonald’s novel thus deserves renewed attention precisely because it traces critically the historical continuum along which exoticist constructions of race and gender have shaped the experiences of many immigrants in North America. Only by attending to the cultural politics of the exotic, I want to suggest, can we open up discourses of race and gender to productive and transformative cultural critique.

Sites of Memory in Hindustani Music: Yusuf Ali Khan and the Sitar Shops of Lucknow

In late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century North India, musical instrument shops served as important meeting places where musicians overturned the feudal hierarchy of the royal court, forging bonds of camaraderie across social, musical and familial lines. This article explores the alternative socio-musical world of the instrument shop through a study of the sitar shops of Lucknow, focusing especially on the life of Yusuf Ali Khan, an influential but largely forgotten sitarist who was also a renowned instrument maker. Positing that dominant spaces and places of cultural production (such as the royal courts) shape our historical understandings, the article argues that minor sites of memory (such as the sitar shops of Lucknow) offer counter-narratives of Hindustani music history that illuminate unexpected dimensions of the larger tradition.

An ice-free Arctic Ocean: history, science, and scepticism

ABSTRACTOver the last three centuries, geographers, oceanographers, geophysicists, glaciologists, climatologists, and geoengineers have shown great interest in Arctic Ocean sea ice extent. Many of these experts envisaged an ice-free Arctic Ocean. This article studies three stages of that narrative: the belief in an ice-free Arctic Ocean, the potential for one, and the threat of one. Eighteenth and nineteenth century interest in accessing navigable polar sea routes energised the belief in an iceless polar sea; an early twentieth century North Hemispheric warm spell combined with mid-century cold war geostrategy to open the potential for drastic sea ice loss; and, most recently, climate models have illuminated the threat of a seasonally ice-free future, igniting widespread concerns about the impact this might have on Earth's natural and physical systems. This long narrative of an ice-free Arctic Ocean can help to explain modern-day scepticism of human-induced environmental change in the far north.

On the Causes and Dynamics of the Early Twentieth-Century North American Pluvial

The early twentieth-century North American pluvial (1905–17) was one of the most extreme wet periods of the last 500 yr and directly led to overly generous water allotments in the water-limited American west. Here, the causes and dynamics of the pluvial event are examined using a combination of observation-based datasets and general circulation model (GCM) experiments. The character of the moisture surpluses during the pluvial differed by region, alternately driven by increased precipitation (the Southwest), low evaporation from cool temperatures (the central plains), or a combination of the two (the Pacific Northwest). Cool temperature anomalies covered much of the West and persisted through most months, part of a globally extensive period of cooler land and sea surface temperatures (SST). Circulation during boreal winter favored increased moisture import and precipitation in the Southwest, while other regions and seasons were characterized by near-normal or reduced precipitation. Anomalies in the mean circulation, precipitation, and SST fields are partially consistent with the relatively weak El Niño forcing during the pluvial and, also, reflect the impacts of positive departures in the Arctic Oscillation that occurred in 10 of the 13 pluvial winters. Differences between the reanalysis dataset, an independent statistical drought model, and GCM simulations highlight some of the remaining uncertainties in understanding the full extent of SST forcing of North American hydroclimatic variability.

“Innocent, not ignorant”: oral recall of sexual knowledge and conduct by early twentieth century north Queensland women

Social changes during the early twentieth century inspired concern about the sexual knowledge and conduct of young people, particularly young women. While there are many records of the opinions of social activists involved with the so-called sex debates, open discussion on sexual topics aroused such discomfort that frank accounts are rare from ordinary people involved in the social transformations of the period. A small number of such accounts are held in the North Queensland Oral History Project at James Cook University, where the recordings of a group of elderly women, undertaken in the 1980s, show that these women entered adolescence and adulthood with little or no understanding of their bodies or the possible outcomes of sexual activity. Stories of ideas and experiences on these matters are particularly important to historians and highlight the need for oral history facilitators to provide settings that promote frank disclosure. In analysing the content and circumstances of the oral accounts concerned, this article supports prominent theories about the disclosure of socially sensitive subjects and provides insights into early twentieth century sexual knowledge and attitudes in North Queensland.