Female Political Agency Research Articles

Competition between female sociopolitical organizations in Liepāja and political agency: the case of the Commission for the Promotion of Women’s Welfare in Liepāja of the Latvian Women’s Association (1927–1937) II

The paper aims to analyse the second “block”, mentioned in the statutes of one of the most popular female sociopolitical organisations, the Latvian Women’s Association, with a case of its branch of Liepāja city – Commission for the promotion of women’s welfare in Liepāja – female political agency. The paper continues research published in 2021. In interwar time, female success at the elections in the Parliament of Latvia (Saeima) was related to unifying in the “Common female list”. Predictably, in the second most significant cultural and political centre, Liepāja, massive competition for the members and influence in society of the most significant organisation could be observed, and female organisations were not an exception.

Villette, Female Political Agency, and the French Revolution of 1848

Abstract This essay reads Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) as a response to questions about women’s public agency that were raised by the French Revolution of 1848, in which women played prominent roles. The actress Rachel, the inspiration for Villette’s Vashti, became the most notorious female activist of the Revolution when she performed La Marseillaise in support France’s Second Republic. As I demonstrate, Brontë engages directly with Victorian journalistic accounts of these performances. Here, and in other episodes focused on women leaders, such as ‘Madame Beck’ and ‘The Cleopatra’, Brontë seeks to expose the linguistic and iconographic conventions around female political power that diminish women’s agency in the process of representing it. Brontë’s awareness of the pervasiveness and intractability of these conventions explains the novel’s final scepticism about women’s ability to exercise political power. Although Villette’s protagonist, Lucy Snowe, indulges in fantasies of political power, she satisfies these fantasies not in the public realm but in a politicized private realm, where she re-enacts Napoleonic-era political conflicts with her imperious lover, M Paul. My aim in analysing Brontë’s engagement with 1848 is to understand Villette’s politicization of romance. For Brontë, I argue, women’s exclusion from the political is tantamount to their exclusion from history, and Lucy’s strategic political re-enactments function as both critique of and compensation for this exclusion.

On Female Political Alliances: Sor María de Ágreda's Communities of Letters

In early modern Spain, women formed alliances among themselves and materialized female communities through which they could have an active political life. Studying these communities of and for women allows us to revise the narrative of power at the time, traditionally presented in male terms. The case of María de Ágreda (1604-1665) and the communities of letters that she built around a regular correspondence with religious, nonreligious, noble, and royal women, is particularly interesting for the analysis of female political alliances, since she established well-known ties with important figures across the country, and mobilized significant networks of influence throughout her life. This analysis will help us redefine what female political agency means in early modern Spain and reconstruct its history.

Deflowering the voting virgin: Piety, political advertising, and the pleasure prerogative

ABSTRACTIn this essay, the author examines political advertisements that employ the tropology of sex and romance in order to promote voter participation. The ads appear initially to be humorous attempts at “perspective by incongruity,” disrupting U.S. political culture by seeking to activate otherwise disengaged young women as a formidable political constituency. Although the ads challenge standards of political propriety, they leave intact the pieties of postfeminism and patriarchy which govern political dialogue on both the left and the right. Furthermore, the ads foster a “pleasure prerogative” which conflates female political agency with romantic engagement, (hetero)sexual consummation, and consumer consciousness. By valorizing the instant gratification of fleeting contact with the ballot box over the subdued satisfaction of a long-term commitment to deliberative democracy, these ads ultimately are corrosive to democratic culture.

Gendering Political Agency in the Maghreb

Gendering Political Agency in the Maghreb

For a Long Century of Burgundy. The Court, Female Power and Ideology

For a Long Century of Burgundy: The Court, Female Power and IdeologyOn the evidence of the recent publications under discussion here, historians are beginning to break free from the constraints of the traditional chronological boundaries applied to Burgundian history, and are finding new and valuable ways of exploring political culture either side of the divide that was once thought to have been created by the events of 1477. But progress remains uneven: we know more about the court, the centre of political life, before 1477 than we do for the period that came after; with honourable exceptions, we know more about female political agency and power after 1477 than we do about the period before; and we know too little, still, about political ideologies, a burgeoning area of interest which has much to yield.

Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II. Studies in British Art 18 (review)

Reviewed by: Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II. Studies in British Art 18 Will Pritchard Julia Marciari Alexander and Catherine MacLeod, eds., Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II. Studies in British Art 18. New Haven and London: Yale Center for British Art and The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2008. 268 pp. + 60 illustrations. This volume has a complicated ancestry. Its grandsire was the exhibition, Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II, mounted first at the National Portrait Gallery in 2001 and then at the Yale Center for British Art in 2002. That show begat both a splendid catalogue and a pair of accompanying conferences, one in London and one in New Haven. Some of the nine essays in this collection (which appears to mark the end of the Painted Ladies franchise) were first presented at those conferences. Readers may be forgiven for mistaking this book for the Painted Ladies catalogue: the two are roughly the same size, have the same editors and the same publisher. Each shows a Lely countess on the dust jacket, and each opens with an essay by Kevin Sharpe (the former with one on "Politics, Society and Culture," the latter with another called "Aesthetics, Sex and Politics"). Both volumes are handsomely produced and lavishly illustrated. Despite the similarities, however, this volume is far from redundant. While the Painted Ladies catalogue was more solidly art historical in focus, Politics, Transgression and Representation casts its net more widely and aims to "stimulate thinking across traditional disciplinary boundaries" (xi). Scholars of the Restoration, the editors maintain, have been slow to cross these boundaries and the field has "remained relatively compartmentalized, particularly with regard to the visual arts" (xi). This claim is perhaps debatable; boundary-crossing works by Joseph Levine and James Winn come to mind. (And, more generally, the claims that representations are political and that politics is representational are more or less articles of faith in contemporary criticism. One would be more surprised nowadays to find a collection of essays that tried to cordon off the political from the aesthetic.) Nonetheless, this collection certainly bears out its editors' claim that the Restoration age is "one of the richest for the study of the intersection of politics and culture" (xix), and it will surely please and instruct students of the period, whatever their disciplinary affiliations. Part of Yale's Studies in British Art series, the volume is dedicated to the late Sir Oliver Millar, and the editors characterize the essays it contains as "rang[ing] from the type of document- and object-based art history of which Sir Oliver was [End Page 64] such a notable exponent, to more theoretical analyses that reflect developments in recent decades" (xiii). And while they hasten to add that "[t]hese approaches are not mutually exclusive" (xiii), the essays that follow do begin to sort themselves into two categories. Some pose relatively straightforward and finite art-historical questions: were the Windsor Beauties portraits commissioned or conceived as a single set, or how were women depicted in seventeenth-century popular prints? Others make the visual arts less central to their proceedings, relying instead on written documentary evidence to address such historical topics as how Charles II's court was perceived by the populace or the extent to which women at court exercised political power. Rachel Weil, the historian who treats this last subject, modestly suggests in conclusion that her broader topic—"[t]he complex interplay between female political symbolism and female political agency"—calls for "the joint efforts of art historians, literary scholars, and political historians working together" (189). The volume as a whole mounts this collective effort and shows some of the dividends that such an effort can pay. Within the "joint effort" of the volume as a whole, there are individual essays which deliver on the promise of cross-disciplinarity, essays that are not only flowers in an inter-disciplinary bouquet but that are also themselves hybrids. Susan Shifrin's discussion of various portraits depicting Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin as Cleopatra or Diana instructively places visual iconography alongside verbal depictions of the duchess (and of Cleopatra and Diana...

Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Regeneration Narratives

"Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Regeneration Narratives" historicizes and theorizes the complexities of fin-de-siecle "women's literature"--fiction by and about women that highlights and explores the social relations of gender. Attending especially to the involvement of this literature in the textual mediation of scientific discourse, I ask: if some of the greatest anxieties over cultural progress or degeneration in this period were organized around theories of heredity, what kinds of pressures, urgencies, or appeals were placed on motherhood? How did women-authored narratives react to or participate in the generation of these appeals? Charlotte Perkins Gilman's fiction exemplifies a mode of reaction and participation I call "eugenic feminism": the use of eugenics for a feminist agenda articulated on behalf of perceived socio-sexual problems. Gilman deploys this agenda to construct "regeneration narratives" that respond to fears of degeneration by foregrounding the cultural primacy of women and their reproductive status. In so doing, she helped instantiate and inform a new version of liberal humanism in which the mother acts as ideal civic progenitor. By representing eugenic ideology as the source of this ideal, she racializes the language of feminism. Thus her regulatory fictions of sexual responsibility operate as both fantasies of white female political agency and norms that manage female sexuality.

Elizabeth Poole writes the regicide

This article explores some of the possibilities for female political agency afforded by discourse of religion in revolutionary England. Focusing particularly on the proceedings of the General Council of the Army between 28 December and 5 January 1649, it attempts to demonstrate how one woman, the Baptist Elizabeth Poole, could subvert masculinist regicidal discourses surrounding the trial and execution of Charles I through subtle and purposeful manipulation of Old and New Testament figures and tropes. In spite of recent historiographical work which has dismissed Poole as insignificant, insane and politically illiterate, this article brings Poole's own texts to bear on the selective official reports made by the Council's secretary, William Clarke, thereby enabling a more finely nuanced picture of female political agency to emerge