First-wave Feminism Research Articles

From suffrage to sterilization: Eugenics and the women’s movement in 20th century Alberta.

In the complicated relationship between early 20th-century feminism and eugenics. Western Canada in general and the Province of Alberta in particular provide a unique case study on the history and practice of the sterilization of the feeble-minded. While feminism strove to enable women to control their own reproductive capacities, eugenics attempted to exert control over the reproduction of certain segments of society. Ironically, these movements exerted a significant influence on one another during their respective inceptions and were inextricably linked for more than 50 years. This paper discusses how misunderstanding and panic surrounding mental illness served to unite feminism with the eugenics movement. Specifically, the paper explores how first-wave feminism adopted a maternal ideology that embraced the role of guardians of the race. How these events unfolded within Western Canada and the role that prominent feminists and women's associations played are reconstructed. Ultimately, it is argued that understanding the role that the feminist movement played in the application of eugenics legislation requires consideration of the importance of maternal feminism in the changing relations between the sexes.Keywords: eugenics, feminism, feeble-mindedness, sterilization, AlbertaFirst-wave feminism1 in Canada had its origins in the late 19th- and early 20th century. Women involved in first-wave feminism began to focus on perceived gender inequalities, and one of the primary goals of the movement was to gain women's suffrage. Seeking to extend their role in society beyond the confines of their homes, women also wished to participate more actively in public life. In particular, leaders of first-wave feminism espoused the notion that women, as mothers, were particularly well-suited for improving society. The necessity of bettering society was espe-cially relevant, given early 20th century social and political changes. Motherhood became a social function for women as they tackled issues of poverty, crime, immigration, and temperance.The paradoxical support of negative eugenics, in the form of sterilization, by early 20th-century feminists has been complex and sometimes embarrassing. Negative eugenics, which included the practice of compulsory sterilization, refers to the breeding out of certain characteristics in the population. Francis Galton ( 18221911 ), a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, is credited with being the originator of eugenics, and originally coined the term in the late 1800s (Galton, 1883, p. 17). Galton was initially interested in improving the quality of livestock. However, following the introduction of Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species and the subsequent pursuit of social Darwinism, he shifted his focus to an interest in improving the quality of the human race (Devereux, 2005). The notion of selective breeding posed the possibility of breeding desirable characteristics into the population. However, selective breeding turned out to be more aspirational than practical. Consequently eugenicists shifted their approach; if it was not possible to improve offspring through pairing up distinguished men and women, it was possible to restrict or prohibit the reproduction of individuals with undesirable characteristics. Furthermore, while eugenics was most frequently used in its negative sense to refer to sexual sterilization, it was also an oblique reference to poverty, social problems, class, and immigration issues.With the joint aims of improving society, both eugenics and first-wave feminism were inextricably linked during their respective formative years. Dowbiggin (1997) argued, imperialism, eugenics and maternal feminism frequently intersected (p. 138), as feminists became deeply involved in the eugenics movement (see, e.g., Black, 2003; Devereux, 2005). Indeed, the breadth of support for eugenics in North America has been well documented by contemporary historians (e.g., Kluchin, 2006). …

Editors' Introduction

Editors’ Introduction Judith Plaskow and Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre From its beginnings, the JFSR has striven to be a serious academic journal that at the same time is rooted in and serves women’s activism in the academy and beyond. As our mission statement says, the editors “are committed to rigorous thinking and analysis in the service of the transformation of religious studies as a discipline and the feminist transformation of religious and cultural institutions.” While we hope that this commitment is evident in every issue of the journal, the current volume perhaps illustrates especially well the ways in which critical scholarship can open up new directions for activism and reflection on activism can strengthen scholarship. The fall issue is always the time that we have the pleasure of announcing the Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholar Award recipients, a project that itself contributes to the feminist transformation of religious studies by nurturing the next generation of feminist scholars. This year’s first place goes to Ally Kateusz for her article “Collyridian Déjà Vu: The Trajectory of Redaction of the Markers of Mary’s Liturgical Leadership” and second place goes to Amy L. Allocco for “From Survival to Respect: The Narrative Performances and Ritual Authority of a Female Hindu Healer.” Allocco’s article appeared in the previous issue (29.1) as part of a special section, Illuminating Women’s Religious Authority through Ethnography. Articles submitted for the award go through the normal review process and then, if accepted, are sent to a subcommittee of the board that reads and ranks them. Thanks to Kwok Pui Lan, Sylvia Marcos, and Miranda Shaw for serving on this year’s selection committee, and congratulations to the winners. All the articles in this issue point to new directions for activism and/or feminist scholarly investigation. Meredith Minister, in her article “Religion and (Dis)Ability in Early Feminism,” draws on contemporary disability theory to show how Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth’s views of equality participated in the marginalization of people with disabilities prevalent in their time. Building on a significant body of work that has analyzed and critiqued the racist and classist rhetoric of many first-wave feminists, Minister points out that ableism has not been subjected to the same feminist scrutiny. She begins her essay with a discussion of the physical health movement and its impact on the ways that people in the nineteenth century thought about embodiment, health, [End Page 1] and illness. In line with the movement’s thinking, Minister says, Stanton argued for women’s innate intellectual, moral, and physical equality with men while assuming that those who are more capable in all these areas are more valuable human beings. Interestingly, Sojourner Truth, despite the ways she challenged racism and classicism in the feminist movement and despite her having a disabled hand, also accepted the idea that more productive members of society have more value. Contemporaneous photographs of Stanton and Truth buttressed their arguments by seeking to present them both as capable women, which in Truth’s case, involved hiding her disfigurement. Minister concludes by calling on feminists today to attend to ability as an important dimension of intersectionality and to develop new theological anthropologies that do not equate productivity with value. Fatima Seedat’s article, “Islam, Feminism, and Islamic Feminism,” seeks to create a space for gender-equality work within Islam by interrogating what she sees as the too-easy identification of such work with something called “Islamic feminism.” Taking off from Asma Barlas’s critique of Margot Badran’s insistence on using the term “Islamic feminism,” Seedat asks whether it is possible to theorize sexual equality using an alternative paradigm. On the one hand, given the hegemony of the European intellectual tradition, she says, it is almost inevitable that Muslim attempts to improve the quality of women’s lives will be identified with feminism. On the other hand, this label does not necessarily meet the needs of scholars who want to develop new understandings of sex difference in non-Western and postcolonial cultures without erasing the productive differences between Muslim women’s struggles for equality and those in other traditions. The problem, Seedat suggests, is that when...

Mightier than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America (review)

Reviewed by: Mightier than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America Cynthia Wachtell (bio) Mightier than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America. By David S. Reynolds. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. Pp. 329. Cloth, $27.95; paper, $17.95.) No doubt, most Civil War buffs are familiar with the oft-told anecdote concerning Harriet Beecher Stowe’s encounter with Abraham Lincoln in December 1862. Meeting in the White House in the wake of the bloodbath at Antietam, and within weeks of what would be the Union’s defeat at Fredericksburg, the lanky president is supposed to have said to the diminutive authoress, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” In Mightier than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America, David S. Reynolds makes no effort to either verify or dispute this tale. “Whether [Lincoln] actually said it is moot,” he argues. What matters, according to Reynolds, is that in Lincoln’s era “many claimed that Stowe had brought on the Civil War” (x). Yet to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin simply as the work that ignited the great war, Reynolds contends, is to fail to fully credit the “most influential book ever written by an American” (xiv). Stowe’s work—serialized in the National Era from the summer of 1850 to the spring of 1851 and first published in book form in 1852—was astoundingly powerful in its own day. Northerners, formerly hostile to the cause of abolitionism, were won over by the novel’s antislavery message. Southerners, finding themselves suddenly on the defensive, penned angry anti-Stowe poems and proslavery [End Page 600] novels. But the impact of the novel endured long after the end of slavery. Uncle Tom’s Cabin can be credited, Reynolds claims, with everything from prompting the virulently racist and reactionary film The Birth of a Nation (1915), to fueling the “proletarian spirit behind the Russian Revolution” (174). (The novel, originally considered too incendiary in a land that depended on the labor of 22 million serfs, was banned in Russia until 1857; after the ban was lifted, sixty-seven separate editions were published before the czar abdicated his throne in 1917.) Reynolds is interested in Stowe’s novel both as a text and as a cultural force, and his thoroughly researched exploration of all matters related to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is impressive. He traces the novel’s long publication history both in America and abroad. He examines the mid-nineteenth-century material culture spin-offs (puzzles, chinaware, handkerchiefs, and numerous other “Tomitudes”). He illuminates the complex sequence of the novel’s many adaptations for stage and screen. Many of the details Reynolds uncovers are fascinating: Frederick Douglass requested to pose as Uncle Tom for a ceremony at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. A Yiddish version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin staged in 1900 at a Jewish theater in Chicago had Uncle Tom reading from the Talmud. Judy Garland appeared in blackface as Topsy in Everybody Sing (1938), a year before The Wizard of Oz. To ponder these three facts alone is to begin to realize the far-ranging reach of the novel. Reynolds also explores the cultural, religious, and political influences that inform Stowe’s novel. The cultural phenomena, for example, include “visionary fiction, biblical narratives, pro- and anti-Catholicism, gender issues, temperance, moral reform, [and] minstrelsy” (87–88). Reynolds examines each of these and contends that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was so well received because Stowe expertly weaves together these many popular cultural threads. Reynolds is an unapologetic fan of Stowe’s book. He defends it retroactively against New Critics (many early practitioners, he points out, were misogynist southerners), first-wave feminists (“The novel isn’t nearly as conservative as Ann Douglas suggests in [her 1977 book] The Feminization of American Culture”), and all other detractors (45). In 1949 the African American novelist James Baldwin labeled Uncle Tom’s Cabin “a very bad book.” Not surprisingly, Reynolds rejects Baldwin’s “blinkered critique.” He counters that Stowe “invested blacks with beauty and power to a degree that no other pre...

Cherchez la femme: Women and Values in the Francophone World

This collection of essays, some of which are written in English and some in French, is wide-ranging but coherent. The period covered extends from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. Geographically, essays span metropolitan France, New Caledonia, Haiti, Algeria, and Québec. The editors admit that their definition of ‘values’ cannot be pinned down to a single concept, since their aim is precisely to engage with multiple perspectives, taking in aesthetic, linguistic, cultural, and social values. The contributions focus on some of the ways in which women have destabilized the established order and/or introduced new values, as well as how women have been used to support male-dominated perspectives. Following the editors' Introduction, the volume is divided into four sections, which serve to organize the essays around the themes of feminisms, established values, the body, and life writing and identity. The Middle Ages are represented by two essays on Christine de Pizan (Kate Robin, Marcelline Block) and one on Claude de France (Lidia Radi). These belong to the second section, which also includes essays on the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries: here, Adriana Bontea is concerned with women and knowledge; Cécile Champonnois looks at travel correspondence, while Sarah Ruddy explores the figure of the suffering woman in French oratorio. Two essays on early twentieth-century texts by Rachilde (Adeline Soldin) and Natalie Clifford Barney (Chelsea Ray) concern these authors' respective relationship to reformist first-wave feminism, while Michèle Schaal enquires whether the work of Virginie Despentes at the other end of the century can be considered as a French third wave, and Raylene Ramsey shows how the work of Déwé Gorodé engages at once with Pacific identity, a woman-centred world, and the postcolonial cause. For her part, Katie Billotte explores how the media responded to the deaths of three Haitian feminists in the 2010 earthquake. The remaining essays in the collection deal with late twentieth- and twenty-first-century women's writing, with Laurie Corbin's essay on women's autobiography also including Colette alongside Marguerite Duras and Assia Djebar. Poetry is the topic of two essays on the body — on Marie-Claire Bancquart, and on Geneviève Guétemme's photographic collaboration with Béatrice Bonhomme. In the same section, Áine Larkin shows how the anorexic ballet dancer's body in Amélie Nothomb's Robert des noms propres relates both to fusion with and disidentification from the mother; and Erika Fülöp studies Nothomb's jouissance of writing across a range of texts and interviews. In the last section, the portrayal of obscenity in recent women's writing from Québec takes the family as a common target (Lucie Lequin) and Amy Allen Sekhar explores author Sylvie Germain's ethical dialogue with Lévinas through the motif of doubles and twins. Adrienne Angelo's essay on Nathalie Rheims's poetics of mourning closes the collection. The individual essays are all strong, being appropriately theorized, well contextualized, and well written. It makes for an even collection, and together the contributions offer valuable historically and culturally grounded insights into women's voices and creativity, and into women's resistance to and reworking of the values that impinge on their lives and experiences.

Love's Unlimited Orchestra: Overcoming Left Melancholy Via Dubstep And Microhouse

Anyone considering the contemporary state of left-wing thought in the Western world will have run across the trope of melancholia. Having seen perhaps its finest moments in the anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, the post-war European left quickly found itself marginalised in the reconstruction phase and increasingly vilified as cultural consensus and American oversight replaced the Axis with the Soviet Union in the role of grand enemy. Faced with the unappealing choice between liberal, Western capitalist democracy and what was, by then, the undeniable totalitarianism of the nominally communist Eastern Bloc, the utopian impulse at the centre of the left-wing project found itself increasingly unsustainable over the course of the post-war era. The effects of this historical turn are wide-ranging, and not easily assimilated into a straightforward narrative of doleful resignation. Indeed, this erosion has been strongly contested both intellectually, as left-wing theorists have struggled to come to terms with the failures of these events to effect radical political change, and physically, in events such as the May 1968 student revolts in Paris, the resurgence of leftist terrorism in their aftermath and the protests, strikes and activist projects that continue to broadly define the left today. Nevertheless, the waning of consensus and direction accompanying this loss of utopian impulse, previously provided through a teleologically-oriented Marxist economic critique, looms large in post-war conceptions of the Western left. More recently, such utopian considerations have arisen again, ironically alongside the very collapse of capitalist democracy's Soviet enemy, albeit in a quite different form: the promise of a tolerant, cosmopolitan multiculture where differences predicated on identity are accommodated without recourse to economic transformation. Yet here, too, a certain kind of 'post-ideological' utopianism has foundered, its celebration of the heterogeneity engendered by the global expansion of capitalism seemingly no match for the homogenizing global flow of capital itself. Diagnosing this conjuncture in the British context, cultural theorist Paul Gilroy relates the impasse to both previous left-wing losses and a nascent really existing globalism: That lapse is closely associated with the defeat of the Left and the retreat of the dissenting social movements with which its fate was intertwined. Those movements pursued forms of internationalism that went beyond any simple commitment to the interlocking system of national states and markets ... That hope has faded away in the era of actually existing internationalism which has perversely created a political environment where cosmopolitan and translocal affiliations become suspect and are now virtually unthinkable outside of the limited codes of human-rights talk, medical emergency, and environmental catastrophe. (1) When considered in relation to earlier internationally-minded left-wing movements, particularly socialism and first-wave feminism, we can thus discern a trajectory, albeit one that, if still dialectical, is so only negatively, tracing the progressive defeat and loss of successive left-utopian visions. Gilroy does not align these failures with 'left-wing melancholy,' the formation first identified by Walter Benjamin in his review of Erich Kastner's poetry, (2) preferring instead to argue that the failures of cosmopolitanism in Britain lie in its inability to fully come to terms with both the loss of its imperial status and the implications of its colonial past. Nevertheless, for him too, the effects of this most recent lapse on the possibility of a new international left-wing movement are both wide-ranging and, as the title of his book, Postcolonial Melancholia, suggests, understandable through the trope of melancholy. Gilroy locates the effects of this melancholia not only in a thwarted heterotopia that still bears the effects of institutionalised racism, but in the aggressively compensatory recourse taken by the white working class to the language of nationalism and xenophobia. …

ANTI-ESSENTIALIST FEMINISM VERSUS MISOGYNIST SEXOLOGY INFIN DE SIECLEVIENNA

As the foundational contributions of thefin de sièclesexual science movement to research on sexuality continue to be fleshed out, new avenues of understanding this important movement will continue to emerge. This essay uncovers the explosive intersection of early sexual science and strains of first-wave feminism in Vienna and charts the emergence of anti-essentialist feminism from this intersection. The first section offers an interpretation of how the discipline of sexual science emerged from medical criminology and how these origins contributed to the misogynist inflection of early sexology. The essay then chronicles the intersection of first-wave feminism and this misogynist sexual science. The central argument is that feminists’ encounters with sexual science dialectically produced an anti-essentialist variant of feminism. This microscopic interpretation of historical context, it will be argued, provides a new vista from which to view the larger tableau of modern European, especially Austrian, intellectual history.

Running From Elections: Indian Feminism and Electoral Politics

The first wave of feminism in India was closely connected to electoral politics, while the second wave turned away from party politics. This resulted in a growing marginalization of feminist concerns from the public agenda. There is a strong relationship between movement success and electoral engagement. This article reviews the history of feminist interventions in electoral politics and demonstrates that early victories for women depended on their participation in party politics. I argue that the creation of the autonomous women's movement has had a diminishing effect on women's progress in recent years. A number of paths remain available to the women's movement to engage with political parties and political leaders. Staying outside the electoral arena has not served Indian feminism well.

Debating Individualism and Altruism: Gertrud Bäumer, Ellen Key and the ethical foundations of modern life

This article deals with the reception of writings by Ellen Key (1849–1926) by the moderate group of German middle-class feminists, especially Gertrud Bäumer (1873–1954), in the pre-World War One period. For both Key and Bäumer, gender was a central category in their vision for the future. Despite their agreement about the ultimate aim (gender equality), they held divergent views on a number of issues. Bäumer's criticisms of Key's work were not, however, primarily directed at her ideas about female emancipation. Rather, her discussion focused on the complex relationship between the individual and society. This article argues that the disagreement between Key and Bäumer concerning the relationship between the individual and society was anchored in their diverging views about the role of religion in ideological debates at the time. More generally, it suggests that researchers should pay closer attention to religious concerns among first-wave feminists and to the role that religious divergences played in feminist debates.

Feminists Differ in Second and Third Waves

Feminists Differ in Second and Third Waves

"Making Her Own Way": The Individualization of First-Wave Feminism, 1910-1930

Scholars of the women's movement often postulate that it dissipated after winning suffrage in 1920, but empirical studies about the movement's post-victory transformation remain scarce. We use the first wave of the women's movement to explore the conditions under which movement frames change during periods of decline. Drawing on political opportunity theory, we hypothesize that waning political and cultural opportunities for collective action should lead to a rise in individualist frames. To that end, we examine how a prominent movement organization's use of collectivist versus individualist frames changed over time. We conducted a systematic analysis of 1,735 articles from the feminist publication The Woman's Journal, spanning the pre- and post-suffrage period (1910-1930). Our analyses generally support the political opportunity framework, suggesting that trends towards individualization emerge during periods of diminishing political and cultural opportunities, which in turn challenge movements' ability to galvanize constituents for collective goals.

Feminism, War and the Prospects for Peace

It is generally accepted in IR that before the 1980s there was little or no feminist theory in IR. Yet, there were feminists in IR prior to the 1940s who had their own particular take on global politics. This article seeks to reassess the ideas and impact of IR's first-wave feminism by concentrating on the works of one particular writer: Helena Swanwick. While not the only feminist writing on international affairs in the period, Swanwick is interesting both because of her earlier involvement in the feminist and suffragette movements, and because she constructed a clear analysis of the problems of security that was based on her suffragette experience. In the 1920s she gave sound reasons for opposing ‘League wars’ against aggressor states, but in the late 1930s this led her to support appeasement. Despite this, her criticisms of both collective security and the pre-1914 international anarchy are an interesting corrective to both the realist approach that emerged after the 1940s and the supporters of a tighter League system in the 1920s and early 1930s. It is also an indication of the extent to which a feminist agenda had been part of mainstream IR before 1939.

Psychoanalytic Historicism: Shadow Discourse and the Gender Politics of Masochism in Ellis, Schreiner, and Haggard

Recent psychoanalytic theories have the historicizing potential to rearticulate discourses relegated to the shadows of institutional and popular psychosocial knowledge. In particular, they can illuminate a shadow discourse secreted in the history of gender politics: a form of masochism that produces political solidarity by mobilizing narcissistic gratifications. Such solidarity derives from masochism's ability to idealize perceptions about collective power—a process legible in first-wave feminism and in the jingoistic imperialist ideals of masculinity that opposed it. This essay argues that feminism has lost sight of a nonsexual form of masochism vital to its own history that could energize its ongoing political projects. Recent relational psychoanalysis emerges as a fertile source for techniques of reading that produce revisionary historicist interpretation. Moreover, reactivating psychosocial dynamics obscured by the historical conflation of masochism with sexuality can reconnect feminism and other political movements with important strategies they may have prematurely disavowed.

From First-Wave to Third-Wave Feminist Art in Israel: A Quantum Leap

Feminist art is currently thriving in Israel after having come a long and curvy way. Although early twentieth century Zionism promoted gender equality in the spirit of first-wave feminism, the movement never gathered the momentum needed for it to develop into second-wave feminism. While its influence could be seen in the art of the 1970s, particularly in the United States, feminist ideology remained absent from the work of women artists in Israel. This state of affairs continued until the 1990s, when a turning point occurred. The article shows the influence of second and even third-wave feminism on Israeli women's art. It also considers the reasons for lack of a distinct category of feminist art prior to the 1990s, as well as the conditions and features of its emergence, using the case of American feminist art for comparison. The article demonstrates that although Israeli women artists were initially slow to develop a second-wave feminist ideology, it took them less than a decade to make a quantum leap into the next theoretical and practical stage. Within a decade and a half, Israeli women artists caught up with their colleagues overseas and are now creating cutting-edge, relevant, and contemporary feminist art.

Victorian ‘Anti-racism’ and Feminism in Britain

Towards the end of the nineteenth century some individuals, such as the African-American Ida B. Wells, began to write about the close connections between racial prejudice and the politics of gender within the emerging civil rights and feminist movements. The historical geographies of such debates in Britain, debates that challenged racial prejudice within Britain, the British empire and in other parts of the globe, are relatively underexamined. Our knowledge of the extent to which these debates became aligned with first-wave feminist ideas is also limited. This article highlights one of the women, Catherine Impey, who was key to an emerging British discussion that critiqued racial prejudice in the British empire. Her journal, Anti-Caste, in which these discussions were aired was read by early feminists such as Wells and Isabella Ormston Ford. However, although Impey was supportive of some issues associated with the feminist movement, such as the demand for female suffrage, she is absent from feminist historiography. Through the example of the anti-caste movement, this article considers the extent to which the early feminist movement in Britain aligned itself with forms of prejudice beyond those of gender, and how the overlapping of such debates might have determined the extent to which Catherine Impey played a part in the emerging women's movement.

Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing (review)

Reviewed by: Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing Scott Banville (bio) Krista Lysack , Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), pp. x + 238, $26.95 paper. Krista Lysack's central thesis is that shopping, including a whole range of behaviors from window shopping to shoplifting, provides women with agency and is the impetus for a number of subversive behaviors. Thus, despite the conventional Victorian and to a degree modern conventional wisdom, shopping does not enslave women, but rather offers up opportunities and sites for women to construct subversive identities and to critique dominant ideologies about the nature of identity qua identity. Lysack makes good use of Michel De Certeau's concept of consumer "poaching," wherein rather than being dictated identities and behaviors, consumers invent or construct new identities and alternative behaviors through the creative and subversive use of mass-produced consumer goods. Only two chapters make extensive use of Victorian periodicals. Scholars and students may be disappointed by Lysack's method in Chapter 2, "Lady Audley's Shopping Disorder," as many of her citations, including ones supporting broad generalizations about the nature of Victorian periodicals and their responses to women shoppers, come secondhand. While many of Lysack's assertions about the ways in which Victorian periodicals characterized women shoppers are not new, her use of secondhand sources calls into question her ability to make such claims and more important does not add anything new to our understanding of Victorian periodicals. Chapter 5, "Votes for Women and the Tactics of Consumption," provides the most sustained and direct analysis of the role of periodicals in shaping cultural phenomena. Lysack deftly shows how the Women's Social [End Page 336] and Political Union (WSPU) deployed both its periodical Votes for Women (1907-12) and its shops to further the Union's goal of gaining the vote and with it political agency for women. Lysack convincingly argues that by imitating and co-opting the for-profit periodical and shop, the WSPU subverted the idea of shopping as a wholly commercial and possessive endeavor. As the capstone to her argument that women shop not to possess but rather to know others and themselves, to critique the dominant ideology of essential character, or for aesthetic reasons, the chapter on the WSPU and Votes for Women shows how shopping, the owning of shops, and the editorial control of periodicals could be used for subversive political purposes. Lysack argues that Votes for Women became "[a]n extended political advertisement for first-wave feminism" (141). Moreover, the WSPU used advertising in other periodicals and also made advertising space available to outside commercial business to exert influence on what the WSPU saw as important allies: shop owners and other business people. On the whole, Come Buy, Come Buy provides an interesting and compelling reevaluation of the role of shopping in the Victorian period. Chapter 5, with its excellent use of periodical source material, will be of the most interest to scholars working in periodical studies. Scott Banville University of Nevada, Reno Scott Banville Scott Banville teaches in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of "Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday: The Geography of Class in Late-Victorian Britain," which appeared in VPR in the summer of 2008, as well as other articles and book chapters on Victorian popular culture and the novel. He is currently working on a book on Victorian literary and popular culture representations of the lower middle class. Copyright © 2010 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Help Black College Women Reconcile Hip‐Hop's Misogyny

Help Black College Women Reconcile Hip‐Hop's Misogyny

Disorienting the Furniture: The Transgressive Journalism of Alfonsina Storni and Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Drawing on the journalistic prose of two major literary figures of early-twentieth-century Argentina and the U.S., this article breaches cultural, national, and geographical frontiers by comparing the discursive gestures through which Alfonsina Storni and Charlotte Perkins Gilman re-appropriate for themselves the canonical genre of essay-writing to advance their feminist agendas. By undermining the presuppositions underlying so-called feminine publications of their time, both women carry out an intriguing disarticulation of the classic private/public divide that empowers their female readers to conceive of female subjectivity in new and innovative ways. Almost a mythic figure in the world of Latin American letters, Alfonsina Storni has achieved world renown as Argentina’s most famous “poetess of love,” thus obscuring her substantial contributions to Argentinean periodical literature. Even though Charlotte Perkins Gilman has become one of the most influential figures in the history of American First-Wave Feminism, that reputation is largely founded on her feminist fiction and her book Women and Economics, while her journalistic accomplishments have received considerably less attention. The transnational dialogue between these two writers conjured up in this article unearths this more or less neglected corpus to reveal the ways in which both subverted traditional definitions of gender through a transgressive use of discursive spaces heavily coded as “feminine” by patriarchal ideology.

“Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?”: The trans Atlantic Crusade against the Slave Trade and Slavery

This article addresses the contributions of black and white men and women in Europe and the United States to the propaganda campaigns instrumental in the abolition of the trans-Atlantic trade in Africans and the antislavery movements of Great Britain and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The ideas and words of literary figures in the service of eliminating slavery are the focus of this study. The impact of the ideology addressing women's moral responsibilities regarding the issue of slavery and the participation of women antislavery activists on the rise of the first wave of feminism is also addressed.

The Woman’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada (review)

Reviewed by: The Woman’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada Valerie J. Korinek The Woman’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada. Janice Fiamengo. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Pp. 256, $60.00 cloth, $25.95 paper The Woman’s Page is essential reading for anyone interested in feminism, social activism, journalism, and English-Canadian cultural histories between 1875 and 1915. Literary scholar Janice Fiamengo offers an exceptionally sophisticated analysis of the motivating forces that drove six English-Canadian female journalists and fiction writers Agnes Maule Machar, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Pauline Johnson, Kit Coleman, Flora MacDonald Denison, and Nellie McClung to create distinctive public voices and literary personae. Those familiar with first-wave feminist histories, and with late-nineteenth / early-twentieth-century work on the social gospel and activism, will be familiar with the individuals included in this collection. Initially, in the scholarship of the seventies and eighties these women (albeit to varying degrees) were revered as icons of women’s ‘herstory,’ as women who forged unconventional career paths and received widespread public acclaim. Within the past fifteen years that view has been displaced, as we’ve become increasingly familiarized with the darker side of these formerly uncomplicated icons of first-wave suffrage and activism. Appropriately tough questions have been raised about their imperial, religious, and class-based motivations [End Page 791] for national transformation. Now, in this new work, Janice Fiamengo asks that we once again reconsider these women’s accomplishments and take a middle path between these two schools of thought. While Fiamengo acknowledges the significant work of Canadian gender and social historians (and in particular the interest in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century religiously inspired social and political activism), she indicates that substantial work remains to be done if we are ever to comprehend the ideological diversity and goals of this ‘generation’ of activists. In particular, though many of the authors she analyzes have been the beneficiaries of dedicated biographies (notably Coleman, Johnson, and McClung), she laments the insufficient attention paid to their work. Thus, Fiamengo’s aim in this monograph is to offer a detailed appraisal of their work, one that pays particularly close attention to their religious, social, and political world views, and then to assess why works by these authors were so popularly received. In successive chapters, each woman receives a dedicated analysis of her magazine and newspaper publications. The range of materials collected, many of which have been astonishingly erased from our memory despite their popularity at the time, demonstrates the tremendous diversity and vitality of much of this writing. Some real gems have been uncovered here, and in the published excerpts the women’s writing fairly leaps off the page, at turns humorous, provocative, scholarly, or heart-rendering. Fiamengo is a skilled writer, and her ear for the cadences of the women’s writing, combined with a shrewd assessment of what will capture a modern reader’s attention, makes for a lively book. For example, readers are treated to excerpts from Sara Jeannette Duncan’s scathing social commentaries on Toronto ‘society,’ to flashes of Kit Coleman’s wit and intelligence as she rebukes the more clueless of her readers, and, finally, to glimpses of Nellie McClung’s evident joy at skewering the pomposity of male politicians. However, The Woman’s Page is not content merely to restore and analyze the women’s journalistic output; instead the book illustrates the interactions among the authors, texts, and reading audiences. In so doing, it moves us beyond the usual academic specialized reading, providing glimpses into the real world experience of reading these ‘women’s pages.’ It is clear that the most skilful writers really connected with their audiences, became well-loved public figures (particularly Coleman and McClung), and very cleverly knew how to translate their own religious, political, and social views into eagerly consumed texts. In only one case, the chapter on Flora MacDonald Denison, does Fiamengo showcase a writer whose literary skills lagged behind her [End Page 792] message of radical suffrage goals, with the result that Denison’s columns were more leaden than those of the other writers. Given the muted engagement with readers (no such evidence...

Apprehending possibilities: Tracing the emergence of feminist consciousness in nineteenth-century New Zealand

This article analyses the processes by which women in the nineteenth century developed feminist subjectivities. Focusing on the first wave of feminism in New Zealand as a case study, it is argued that the development of a feminist consciousness was a necessary precursor to involvement in the women's movement. Two key phases in the process of the politicisation of women are identified. The first phase involves exposure to competing and contradictory formulations of what it means to be a woman. A key site identified for this phase is in the newspaper columns specifically targeted for a female readership. The second phase involves the opportunity to apprehend the possibilities for changed gender relations based on a politicised collective female identity. This opportunity was afforded through activism around the Contagious Diseases Prevention Act prior to the formation of a formal women's movement.