Early Twentieth-century Women Research Articles

Beatrix Potter in Cumbria: Pastoral Pleasures, Classic Commodities, Rural Modernity

ABSTRACT This article claims Beatrix Potter, author of the children’s classic The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), is a woman writer of and for rural modernity whose complex relations to rural and urban places, national and regional identities, fine and commercial arts, raise important questions about the gendering of green places, landscapes, and geographies in constructions of canonical modernism and children’s literature. Analysing research by biographers, rural historians, geographers, art historians, and critics of modernist and children’s literature, it argues that Potter’s acute measurement of the commercial possibilities that lay in the divide between rural real and rural ideal made her one of the most successful women writers of her generation and contributed to the early achievement of classic status of her twenty-three animal Tales (1902–1918). Enlisting close readings of Potter’s words and images in her Tales for an interdisciplinary feminist literary-geographical project, the article situates Beatrix Potter at the centre of studies of rural modernity and rural modernity at the centre of early twentieth-century women’s writing.

Australian and New Zealand Women’s Supernatural and Gothic Stories 1880–1924: Rosa Praed and Dulcie Deamer

ABSTRACT There is relatively little critical work on the supernatural or Gothic stories of late nineteenth, and early twentieth century women writers from Australia and New Zealand. This essay concentrates on supernatural stories by Australian and New Zealand women writers from circa 1880 -1939 specifically Rosa Praed and Dulcie Deamer. Many of the terrors exposed in Australian and New Zealand Gothic and the supernatural derive from disequilibrium when immersed in confusing difference seen as foreign, or indigenous while work by women refuses the fin de siècle demonising of women’s sexuality and intertwines tales of lost children (Rosa Praed: 1851–1935) and domesticity challenged by powerful, but often ultimately punished transformation (Dulcie Deamer: 1890–1972). As women writers fascinated by and engaged in spiritualism and the occult, and as writers of the Gothic and supernatural alongside colonial, indigenous and other histories, Praed and Deamer channel the past, work with the occult, the witchy and the weird, explicitly exploring varied sexualities, foregrounding women’s experiences, challenging conformist roles for women, both themselves and their characters living alternative lifestyles. Their subject matter partly derives from both authors’ interests in spiritualism and their transiting between the Antipodes and Europe (Praed,) or New Zealand, Australia and the Far East/India (Deamer). I discuss the following stories: Rosa Praed “The Bunyip” (1891), “The Ghost Monk” (1908) “The House of Ill-Omen” (1908) and Dulcie Deamer: “As It Was in the Beginning” (1908) “Hallowe’en” (1909), “The Devil’s Ball” (1924).

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ <i>The Story of Avis</i>

Laura Marcus (7 March 1956–22 September 2021)

Laura Marcus (7 March 1956–22 September 2021)

The Woman’s Question: Negotiating Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Women’s Magazines in Malayalam

Women’s questions can be defined as discourses within larger movements that focus on improving the women’s condition and status in society articulated not in partnership with or by women in question but by others who speak for them. The woman’s question was of particular importance in colonial Kerala attempting to ‘modernise’ itself. And many of the debates and discussions contained in women’s magazines in Malayalam in the first half of the twentieth century reflect the centrality of ‘woman’ in the contemporary discourses of reform and nationalism. These magazines were vehicles for the dissemination of ideas and reveal how women in particular mediated the binaries of home/world, tradition/modernity, spiritual/material binaries. The cultural anxieties of a changing society led to women being assigned and defined as constituting the home/tradition/spiritual. However, many of the articles analysed reveal the way in which women of the time critiqued and mediated the cultural anxieties and limitations that marked women’s role and rights within the larger discourses of reform and nationalism.

‘So now tell me what you think!’: Sylvia Lynd's reading and reviewing – The collaborative work of an interwar middlewoman

This article highlights Sylvia Lynd (1888–1952) as an important interwar ‘middlewoman’, arguing that Lynd's professional work and identity as book club judge, reviewer, publisher's reader and literary hostess, had a significant impact on contemporary print culture. It argues that the networks around the Lynds’ set in Hampstead are an important, if overlooked, part of ‘the social spaces and staging venues’ where literary modernism happened (in Lawrence Rainey's influential terms). With a methodology grounded in feminist research and recoveries of early twentieth-century women's diverse contributions to print culture, the core of the essay considers Lynd's work for the Book Society selection committee and the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse Anglais. Making use of publisher's records and other archival sources, including Lynd's unpublished diaries and correspondence, the article sets out Lynd's shared reading and decision-making with Hugh Walpole on manuscripts for the Book Society as a dialogic, collaborative reading practice, placing her work as book club judge as part of a long history of sociable reading practices. The article further explores the textual implications of Lynd's work as book club judge and shows how her editorial interventions made a tangible, documented impact on the pre-publication history of literary texts, in this case George Blake's The Shipbuilders (1935) and Eric Linklater's Juan in America (1931). This work of editorial revisions/censorship is an aspect of the textual interventions of celebrity book club judges that is not well known, and that archival research gives us unique access to.

A Field of their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941 by John M. Rhea

Reviewed by: A Field of their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941 by John M. Rhea Kathi Nehls A Field of their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941. By John M. Rhea. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Pp. 312. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) John Rhea has written a welcome contribution to recent works such as Patricia Loughlin's Hidden Treasures of the American West: Muriel H. Wright, Angie Debo, and Alice Marriott (University of New Mexico Press, 2005) and Shirley Anne Leckie's and Nancy Parezo's Their Own Frontier: Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning the American West (University of Nebraska Press, 2008) that look at the important, though often marginalized, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women academics and intellectuals in the American West. Rhea explores the professional activities of nine women historians of American Indian history between 1830 and 1941. He divides his discussion of women's indigenous histories into two distinct periods, sentimentalist (or pre-professional) and document-driven (or professional). He examines the shared connections between these two groups of women and argues that their professional work, unlike the work of their male counterparts, remained on the margins of the historical profession, thereby leaving the field of American Indian history largely the purview of women scholars. Rhea locates the rise of the post-Civil War professional class of "new women" in an intriguing discussion of the sentimentalist ideas and activism of early nineteenth-century female evangelists and transcendentalists whose influence, the author notes, pre-dated the Seneca Falls convention for women's equality. The remaining first half of the book—indeed [End Page 446] much of the narrative—is devoted to an analysis of Helen Hunt Jackson and Alice Fletcher, two early scholars of indigenous history, who benefitted from their predecessors' achievements but gained significantly more political clout in Washington because of the federal rather than state locus governing U.S.-Indian relations (18). Rhea makes the case that it was Jackson's and Fletcher's proximity to the federal Indian agency, through their humanitarian work, that fostered professional careers straddling the divide between sentimentalist and document-driven scholars of American Indian history (34). He demonstrates that while both Jackson's Century of Dishonor and Fletcher's Indian Education and Civilization gained significant attention, historians dismissed their work as sentimental and naïve. He lays much of the blame for why male historians discounted the women's work on the destabilization of late nineteenth-century racial ideas found in Jackson's and Fletcher's scholarship. He notes that such was not the case for pre-professional male historians such as Henry Adams, Francis Parkman, and others who were neither marginalized in the same way nor found their scholarship held to the standards that resulted in the dismissal of the women's work. The author turns his attention for the remainder of the book to women scholars of indigenous history in the early twentieth century, whose work was more document driven than experiential. He highlights the work of Emma Helen Blair, Louise Phillips Kellogg, and Annie Heloise Abel. This new class of professional women historians faced mounting barriers to matriculation at top universities or, owing to "institutional male chauvinism," were consigned to women's colleges or institutions outside of mainstream academia after completing their doctorates (135). Rhea builds on his thesis that American Indian history became a niche for women as Frederick Jackson Turner's ideas about American exceptionalism, and triumphalism more generally, increasingly influenced how historians framed histories that ignored the indigenous experience. The final chapters chronicle the experiences of the first group of indigenous women writing document-driven American Indian histories, such as Rachel Caroline Eaton and Anna Elizabeth Lewis as well as the better-known Muriel Wright and Angie Debo. Rhea pushes beyond the gender constraints faced by professional women scholars of indigenous history and underscores how broader debates over historical memory, as much as gender, served as an important context for their scholarship and the barriers they confronted. This book deserves the attention of scholars of western women's and indigenous women's history, but will also be of interest to historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial studies and...

"I Am Not a Women's Libber Although Sometimes I Sound Like One": Indigenous Feminism and Politicized Motherhood

"I Am Not a Women's Libber Although Sometimes I Sound Like One"Indigenous Feminism and Politicized Motherhood Sarah A. Nickel (bio) Indigenous women were essential to the twentieth-century Indigenous political movement in British Columbia, yet their roles have often been marginalized in the scholarship of Indigenous politics and in the public imagination. Existing literature obscures women's political involvement by depoliticizing women's work, focusing on sensational moments of action, or collapsing women's politics within the broader narrative of male-dominated political organizations, rendering women's activities invisible.1 The result is that early twentieth-century women's organizations like the British Columbia Indian Homemakers' Clubs (later the British Columbia Indian Homemakers' Association [BCIHA]) and the British Columbia Native Women's Society (BCNWS), which were heavily involved in community and provincial politics through the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), are regularly viewed as non-political "women's groups." Conversely, 1970s political debates about the patriarchal membership provisions of the Act to Amend and Consolidate the Laws Respecting Indians (Indian Act) appear politically dominant and feminist but are decontextualized and divorced from the work that came before. This polarization of women's activities creates a false dichotomy of invisibility and hypervisibility. In fact, I argue that Indigenous women's politics in British Columbia suffers from "Indian Act myopia," which erases the long and complex history of female activism and undercuts deep understandings of the Indigenous movement. Specifically, it undermines how Indigenous women between the 1950s and 1980s consistently enacted real and important political changes using their unique positions and experiences with colonialism and gender discrimination. This dichotomy also imposes a linear narrative of feminism [End Page 299] that does not accurately reflect the noncontinuous and contextually contingent nature of Indigenous women's practices.2 Here, I address this political shortsightedness through the intersections of gender and politics and evaluate women's activities in their own associations, in male-dominated organizations such as the pan-Indigenous UBCIC, and in other political channels. I foreground Indigenous women's own conceptions of their political identities but also recognize that individuals can sometimes express political ideologies implicitly, and this does not necessarily negate their politics.3 Attending to the ways in which Indigenous women situated and articulated their political identities, I argue that Indigenous women's organizations between the 1950s and 1980s were not only highly political but also explicitly, strategically, and sometimes problematically tied to Indigenous understandings of motherhood and family.4 Members also used Indigenous feminism (as needed) to bolster their political demands, but this was not always explicit or consistent. To make this argument I use Indigenous feminism, oral history interviews, and archival materials to trace BC Indigenous women's politics from the 1950s, when women mobilized their roles as mothers and community caretakers to seek better conditions in their communities, to the more openly feminist debates regarding citizenship and sovereignty in the 1970s, and finally to the Splatsín te Secwépemc child welfare bylaw and Indian Child Caravan in 1980.5 I explore how women's organizations drew on and later co-opted settler state attempts to manage Indigenous motherhood, which allowed women to explicitly politicize mothering to achieve better community conditions. Later, members activated these political tools to redirect the Indigenous political movement by questioning the UBCIC chiefs' decisions and political legitimacy. At times, Indigenous women drew on feminist discourses to confront patriarchy inside and outside of their communities, but they continued to privilege ideals of motherhood and sometimes visibly muted feminist ideals to achieve their goals. Although women's political strategies, alliances, and identities fluctuated across time and space, Indigenous motherhood, which focused on family and community well-being, remained a central yet flexible concept grounding and propelling women's political activities. Despite a strong body of literature on Indigenous women's politics, we still know very little about how Indigenous women formed their political identities, developed political communities, and strategically [End Page 300] leveraged their disadvantaged gender and racial positions to achieve political change. In recent years, scholars in the United States and Canada have reexamined Indigenous women's activities and discovered the deeply political nature of women's social work, but...

Women’s Musical Agency and Experiences in Vernon Lee’s Music and its Lovers

Among the case studies included in Vernon Lee’s last book, Music and its Lovers (1933) one finds an intriguing alliance between gender and the experience of listening to instrumental music. A respondent identified only as “The Suffragette” directly ties her feelings about music to her activism, noting that “I recognize in music some definite emotions pertaining to a crowd…the growl I have heard in crowds at suffrage meetings” and later writing about Brahms that “I think I can distinguish in music secondary sex attributes.” Lee notes that the Suffragette, while untrained in music, appears perceptive in linking instrumental music to her personal experiences. While prior research on Music and its Lovers (Towheed 2010 and 2013; Mahoney 2015) has focused primarily on Lee’s sources and questionable scientific practices, this article examines the repertoire and accounts of listening submitted by some of Lee’s female participants. Although Lee’s respondents and ultimate theories of musical emotion cut across gender, her lengthy excerpts from her own experiments center women’s experiences as listeners with valuable observations into the musical experience. In collecting case studies from within her own social circle of women artists and intellectuals, Lee preserved an important archive of early twentieth-century women’s thoughts about specific types of music, especially when it comes to composers traditionally associated with masculinity (Brahms and Beethoven) and sexuality (Tchaikovsky and Wagner).

“A Cosmic Shoulder for the Public to Lean Upon”: Gertrude Gordon and the Rise of Women Journalists

ABSTRACT From 1900 through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the 1920s, women journalists were making great strides in newsrooms and the public sphere. Gertrude Gordon, who was born Gertrude Kelley, was one of the newswomen whose work changed public perceptions of women's roles and abilities. As Pittsburgh's first sob sister and the first woman to earn a byline at a Pittsburgh paper, Gordon's reportage made her a figure that others revered and honored as courageous. This article uses Gordon's published writings, letters to the editor and other ephemera reacting to Gordon's articles, and archival evidence to show how Gordon framed women's lives and work. In addition, this article shows how her stories moved audiences to engage with issues important to early twentieth century women and to imagine new roles for women.

Visiting on the Air: Radio Homemakers and the Professionalization of Domesticity

An unusual kind of community existed between early twentieth-century women radio broadcasters in the American Mid-west – known as radio homemakers – and their listeners, one that depended on mutual trust. Radio homemakers established this trust via the concept of “visiting,” where the broadcasters used the familiar notion of informal social interaction to establish an ostensibly intimate relationship with their audience. Through playing with their listeners' understanding of visiting, radio homemakers made public the professionalization of domestic work that emerged from the Progressive Era's home economics movement. Because their shows primarily addressed domesticity, radio homemakers linked the conventions of domestic work to modernity through the technology of radio, drawing attention to women's frequently invisible household work.

“Creation Through Translation” in Early Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction: On a Literary Trend in the Initial Stages of Cultural Exchange Between China and the West

In the 1910s, the trend of “creating through translation” emerged in fiction by female Chinese writers. This concept, similar to that of “covert translation,” introduced by the contemporary Western translation theorist Juliane House, sprang up from the early stages of new literary forms that developed in the context of changes in early modern Chinese literature. The works of female Chinese authors were influenced by the plot, characters, and narrative techniques in Western literary works from which they consciously or subconsciously took inspiration, passing from the imitation of foreign novels to “creation through translation.” The arrival of this phenomenon is closely connected to the increased dissemination of Western knowledge and to a wider circulation of foreign novels among female writers in China. When reading and translating foreign literature, female authors transposed, filtered, and rewrote it into new texts that featured local elements. Ideologically and artistically, the practice of “creating through translation” provided enlightening guidance for modern women’s fiction in that it broadened the means of learning from Western literature, proving beneficial to China’s literary and cultural development. The same trend appears in early vernacular poetry during the May Fourth era, from which it can be traced further back to scholarly texts of the early modern period, such as Wei Yuan’s Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms (Haiguo tuzhi 海國圖志) or Wang Tao’s Report on the Franco-Prussian War (Pu-fa zhan ji 普法戰紀). Also Liang Qichao’s writings on Western thought and culture, for example, his Notes on Rousseau (Lusuo xue’an 盧梭學案), are written in a similar form. The emergence of “creation through translation” therefore evidently represents both a conscious, active effort by a generation’s intellectual elite to seek knowledge and truth from cultural exchange between China and the West, and a new exploration and practice under Western influence that had a positive impact on China’s literary and academic history, in that it broadened cultural/academic perspectives and stimulated the development of Chinese literature and culture.

SYLVIA D. HOFFERT. Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights.

Alva Vanderbilt Belmont was an ambitious transatlantic socialite, the mastermind behind the gilded architecture of Marble House in Newport, Rhode Island, and the overbearing mother-of-the-bride at the 1895 wedding of her daughter Consuelo to the Duke of Marlborough. In this engaging biography, Sylvia D. Hoffert emphasizes Belmont's financial and political contributions to the early twentieth-century women's suffrage movement. Hoffert views Belmont, a latecomer to women's rights, as engaged in a lifelong and very public “process of self-making” (p. ix). Like her involvement in the design of Marble House, Belmont constructed her image as a celebrity socialite and used her star power to benefit the National Woman's Party (NWP). Yet, as Hoffert shows, Belmont's contributions came at a steep price for both the suffragist cause and for individual activists. In reconstructing Belmont's belated but wholehearted conversion to feminism, Hoffert examines the complex relationship between previous biographers and their shared subject. Belmont made three aborted attempts to publish a memoir, hiring two writers with ties to the suffrage movement. In the midst of her own marital and professional troubles, Sara Bard Field traced Belmont's incipient feminism to her girlhood, when she first recognized male privilege, and emphasized Belmont's willingness to endure scandal in order to divorce her adulterous first husband, William Kissam Vanderbilt. Belmont's devotion to suffrage began after the death of her beloved second husband, Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont. In 1909, she attended a meeting of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in London. Belmont admired the radical tactics of English suffragettes and soon grew disillusioned with the conservatism of the National American Women Suffrage Association. In a short biography, Doris Stevens, Belmont's secretary, companion, emissary, and fellow NWP member, portrayed Belmont as a practical activist interested in results. In the last years of Belmont's life, with the help of a new secretary, she produced a memoir that focused on her marriages and her life as a socialite. None of these portraits entirely pleased Belmont, and none of them made it into print.

Transnational connections in early twentieth-century women teachers’ work

Using a transnational framework, this paper focuses on four graduates of Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC) for nursery school teachers in London, United Kingdom, in the early to mid-twentieth century. Firstly, I explore GHTC’s progressive ideals and highlight ways in which its principal, Lillian de Lissa, encouraged students to “think internationally”. She was especially proud that a handful of students from countries such as China, Turkey and Canada studied at Gipsy Hill. These included Nevin Nouri and Bek Keng Chui, whose experiences are explored in the second section of the paper. Likewise, British graduates “who carried Gipsy Hill to the ends of the earth” featured prominently in the college magazine, the Gipsy Trail. Finally, I examine reports from Marjorie Sanders and Barbara Boal for the ways in which they represented their lives and work overseas to readers of the Gipsy Trail. Together, de Lissa and GHTC graduates constructed the college as a progressive educational institution whose influence transcended national boundaries. However, they exposed a range of social divisions in their portrayals of people and places “in the uttermost parts of the earth” in the process of articulating their ideals.

An IntervIew wIth Maria DiCenzo, London AprIl 2011

Dr Maria DiCenzo is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada).1 Her research focuses on feminist media history, particularly late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women’s print media and social movements, as well as twentieth-century British political theatre. DiCenzo has published widely on the late Victorian and Edwardian feminist periodical press, and she has also provided thoughtful and provocative commentary on the development of feminist media history and its relations to the broader field of media history. Her latest book, Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), co-authored with Dr Lucy Delap (St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, UK) and Dr Leila Ryan (McMaster University, Canada), further considers the methodological and disciplinary debates currently shaping feminist media history. Through several case studies the book also highlights and builds on the complexity of early feminist media: its representation and debate of a range of feminist discourses and tactics for the emancipation of women; and, further, how these publications engaged with wider public issues and consequently the general press, therefore adding to our broader understanding of press history. As such, the book is a valuable attempt to address new directions and ways of breaking away from the marginalization or ‘separation’ of feminist (and women’s) media history. Hence, the book works as a good starting point for further engagement and discussion about the field.

The modern period: menstruation in twentieth-century America

The Modern Period examines how and why Americans adopted radically new methods of managing and thinking about menstruation during the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century women typically used homemade cloth diapers to absorb menstrual blood, avoided chills during their periods to protect their health, and counted themselves lucky if they knew something about menstruation before menarche. New expectations at school, at play, and in the workplace, however, made these menstrual traditions problematic, and middle-class women quickly sought new information and products that would make their monthly periods less disruptive to everyday life. Lara Freidenfelds traces this cultural shift, showing how Americans reframed their thinking about menstruation. She explains how women and men collaborated with sex educators, menstrual product manufacturers, advertisers, physical education teachers, and doctors to create a modern understanding of menstruation. Excerpts from seventy-five interviews-accounts by turns funny and moving-help readers to identify with the experiences of the ordinary people who engineered these changes. The Modern Period ties historical changes in menstrual practices to a much broader argument about American popular modernity in the twentieth century. Freidenfelds explores what it meant to be modern and middle class and how those ideals were reflected in the menstrual practices and beliefs of the time. This accessible study sheds new light on the history of popular modernity, the rise of the middle class, and the relationship of these phenomena to how Americans have cared for and managed their bodies.

Gender, professions and discourse: early twentieth-century women's autobiography

Analyzing ninety professional women's autobiographies from 1900-1920, the first part of this book concentrates on the endeavours of groups such as headmistresses, doctors, nurses, artists and writers to record their own lives, while the second part examines frontispiece photos, prefatory marginalia and the role of silences in autobiography.

Gender, Professions and Discourse: Early Twentieth-Century Women's Autobiography. By Christine Etherington-Wright.

In her classic 1985 study, Independent Women, Martha Vicinus identified the ‘passion for meaningful work’ as an animating force in the lives of single, middle-class women in Victorian and Edwardian England. To break out of forced redundancy and find uses for their talents was the ‘sacred center’ of these women's hopes and dreams: ‘It was a means out of the garden, out of idleness, out of ignorance, and into wisdom, service, and adventure’ (p. 1). Since the publication of Vicinus's pioneering work, the struggles of middle-class women to lead active, useful lives outside the domestic sphere have engaged the attention of numerous historians. We now know a great deal about the battle to secure access to higher education and the professions, about the efforts of nurses and midwives to reform and raise the status of their respective occupations, about the campaigns to win equal pay for women teachers, and about the obstacles and opportunities confronting female servants of the central and local state. Borrowing from feminist sociology, many scholars have been concerned to lay bare the gendered foundations of professional identity, to show how the ostensibly neutral principles of disinterested service and impartial expertise were, in reality, infused with beliefs about sexual difference, and how perceptions of professional knowledge and skill were frequently shaped by the gender of the individual demonstrating them. Their work reveals how prevailing ideologies identifying femininity with religiosity, philanthropy and, most crucially, motherhood, served to structure professional identity differently for women.

The saturated world: aesthetic meaning, intimate objects, women's lives, 1890-1940

The Saturated World: Aesthetic Meaning, Intimate Objects, Women s Lives, 1890 1940 explores the way middle-class American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries added meaning to their lives through their domestic amusements leisure pursuits that took place in and were largely focused on the home. This pathbreaking study by Beverly Gordon demonstrates that these women elaborated on their everyday tasks and responsibilities by transforming them into playful, emotionally satisfying amusements. In doing so, they cultivated a heightened, aesthetically charged saturated state and created self-contained, enchanted worlds. Gordon explores a variety of female leisure activities of the era, including scrapbooking (collage making) party giving, dress-up, dollmaking, and collecting. Each chapter serves as a case study, and taken as a whole, the chapters provide a holistic overview of late nineteenth and early twentieth century women s saturated worlds. In challenging the dismissal of domestic amusements, Gordon seeks to redress the assumption that women s domestic activities were of less value than work done outside the home. In The Saturated World, Gordon seeks to restore women s agency to defy the assumption that women were passive pawns who acted only out of a lack of choice or power. Women chose these pursuits on their own, Gordon argues. She contends that they were operating out of a different paradigm of culturally invested meaning, based on domestic rather than workplace values. This did not in any way diminish their achievements. Richly illustrated, The Saturated World is an unusual combination of women s history and material culture analysis that offers fascinating insight into women s leisure activities. It is an ideal book for students of American studies, women s studies, material culture, and popular culture.

A Feminine Approach to Favour in Two Novels by Machado de Assis

IN Machado de Assis's short story, Teoria do a father explains to his son, on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday, how to become a medalhao--a title once used to refer to a person of great importance who wields influence. In the course of the story it becomes clear that the father is indifferent to his son's choice of profession. Instead, his primary concern and advice is that his son achieves success in any reputable field by securing the of those that have already earned their high position and reputation. In establishing this model of the medalhao, Machado introduces the reader to a character-type, present in much of his work, that relies upon the of others in order to obtain social, political, professional, or financial advantages. The typically wealthy and powerful bestower of is often motivated by acts of flattery and deception on the part of the aspiring medalhao, who often appears to be conferring some form of of their own. In Teoria do the lesson that the father teaches is that his son should achieve social, political, professional, and/or financial success by procuring the of those that have already done so. Missing from Teoria do medalhao is instruction for Machadean female characters who aspire to the advantages made possible by the of wealthy and powerful benefactors. As a result of societal limitations placed upon them, these nineteenth and early twentieth century women characters do not have access to the appearance of power and success through careers or politics, as men do. As a consequence, female characters must use the tools available to them in order to procure while seemingly bestowing it. This investigation proposes that beauty and charm are tools that are used strategically by Machadean women characters to secure positions of power and influence, or merely to achieve the appearance of such. A close reading of two of Machado de Assis's novels, Dom Casmurro and Quincas Borba, supports this assertion by revealing their female protagonists to be adept at both bestowing and garnering favour. In his critical essay, Misplaced Ideas, Roberto Schwarz declares favour in Brazilian society to be a quasi-universal social resulting from a heritage of slavery (22). Schwarz proposes that prior to and after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, there existed a class of free men who in reality were not free, but dependent upon the of the upper class. These free, yet dependent, individuals were known as agregados. According to Schwarz the relationship between the agregado and the elite reflected the relationship between all Brazilians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: The field of ideological life is formed by these two classes, and it is governed, therefore, by this relationship. Thus, under a thousand forms and names, formed and flavoured national life, excepting always the basic productive relationship which was secured by force. was present combining itself with more or less ease to administration, politics, industry, commerce, the life of the city, the court, and so on ... (22) Although it is implied in Schwarz's statement, Favour was present everywhere, the critic excludes from his investigation the mention or examination of the presence of this relationship of dependence and in gender relations. Instead, he seems primarily concerned with the presence of as a mediation device between social classes that extends itself to political and professional spheres. In his study, Dependents Play Chess, Sidney Chalhoub extends the ideology of dependence and to include women: In the world as construed by such ideology, a world dreamed of, the worth of any one individual is measured by the web of personal relations to which he or she manages to belong. There is no social place outside the formally and customarily instituted forms of hierarchy, authority, and dependence. …