Twentieth-century Women Research Articles

The Roots of a Clear-Cut: Tracing Feminist Orientation and Environmental Legibility in Twentieth Century Women’s Life Writing

The Roots of a Clear-Cut: Tracing Feminist Orientation and Environmental Legibility in Twentieth Century Women’s Life Writing

Recent Works in Twentieth-Century Women’s, Gender, and “New Political” History

This review essay considers three important new books from established scholars of Canadian women’s and gender history: Julie Guard’s Radical Housewives, Valerie Korinek’s Prairie Fairies, and Wendy Mitchinson’s Fighting Fat. Although covering different topics and employing different kinds of approaches, taken together, these three studies highlight the long-standing commitment of women’s and gender historians to embrace interdisciplinary insights and to link the past to the present. This review also suggests that, given the analysis of power and interpretive innovations represented by these three studies, the field of women’s and gender history should be seen as a source of some of the best “new political history.” Finally, considered in light of important historical works that draw on queer theory, fat studies, and the intersections of gender with race, ethnicity, and colonialism, these three books open the door to crucial questions that historians in the field must continue to ask.

The Status of Women in Leadership

The Status of Women in Leadership

Women's words, women's bodies: late nineteenth century English feminisms in the ‘Interview’ column of the Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald (Oct. 27, 1888–Apr. 23, 1892)

ABSTRACT Historians have written extensively on early twentieth-century British women’s suffrage, and late nineteenth century feminisms. Nevertheless, there is still an insufficiency in studies that attend to the textual and visual contents of late nineteenth century feminist periodicals. Non-mainstream periodicals produced by women for women allow us to explore distinctive hybrid modes of gender. They also offer us exclusive access into the everyday experiences, and individual thoughts of actual late nineteenth century women. This article focuses on women’s interviews and portraits published in the Women’s Penny Paper/Women’s Herald, demonstrating that they often combined traditional with more radical emergent signifiers of womanhood in written and pictorial form. This is a journey into the verbal and non-verbal messages communicated through women’s words and bodies, expanding our collective archaeological project of reinterpreting the past from women’s point of view, and the manner in which New Women utilised their choice of words and appearance to gain power.

“These Labourers in the Field of Public Work”: Librarians, Discrimination and the Meaning of Equal Pay

Librarianship has long been recognised as a numerically female-dominated occupation. Despite demonstrating a standard pattern of a sex-segregated labour force, it has suffered neglect in historical studies of women’s work. This article positions Australia’s librarians in the history of white-collar public service workers, and librarianship as illustrative of important themes of twentieth-century women’s labour history. For smart, educated, ambitious women, librarianship offered professional standing, economic security and opportunity for advancement. Strategies of overt discrimination, however, deliberately kept women librarians out of senior administrative positions and confined them to the lower-paying jobs. Librarians in state and municipal libraries worked under public service regulations that established a dual labour market of wages and conditions for clerical and professional workers. Key decisions between 1918 and 1922 explicitly advantaged men in recruitment, wages and promotion, denying women similar opportunities. Studying the history of women librarians sheds new light on the meaning of professional workers’ struggle for equal pay.

‘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.

The Female Artist in Romanian Inter-War Theater

Abstract In Romania at the beginning of the twentieth century women were concerned with the home environment. In an urban environment, however, there had been a re-alignment towards education, women from affluent families having an artistic preoccupation, with them being determined and epochal. Though loved and admired on the stage, the women who embraced an artistic career were not looked upon with total respect by the society as a whole, because they were straying away from ‘their calling’. The opening towards the occident had lit the flame in our womens hearts to reach equality in rights, to occupy a place in society and to fight a prejudice image.

“Your one wild and precious life”: Women on the Road of Ministry

While women continue to engage in ministry in increasing numbers, their presence and activity is an unresolved issue in terms of ecclesial structure and meaning. In the past the effects of the Second Vatican Council and the twentieth-century women’s movement combined to open the door to women’s active engagement. The ongoing foundation of women’s vocation to ministry lies, in the present as always, in the significance of baptism; its theology and ritual are the same for women as for men. In the face of current impasse, the dangerous memory of biblical women in ministry at the origins of the church offers inspiration and hope for the future.

A Female-Male Net Nutrition Comparison Using Differences-in-Decompositions: Late 19th and Early 20th Century Social Feminism and Women's Suffrage

When other measures for economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, the body mass index (BMI) is a biological measure that reflects current net nutrition. This study uses a difference-in-decompositions framework to analyze how women’s BMIs varied with the advent of early 20th century social feminism. Late 19th and early 20th century US economic development improved the relative status of women relative to both men before and after the transition to social feminism. Twentieth century women’s BMIs were higher than 19th century women relative to men with the rise of social feminism. The primary source of female-male across-group variation was height and nativity, indicating there was net nutritional progress for women relative to men associated with changing cumulative net nutrition. The primary source of female-male within-group variation was nativity and socioeconomic status, indicating there was net nutritional progress relative to women born before the transition for women born after the rise of social feminism association with socioeconomic status.

Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics by Heather Milne

Reviewed by: Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics by Heather Milne Angela Hume POETRY MATTERS: NEOLIBERALISM, AFFECT, AND THE POSTHUMAN IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NORTH AMERICAN FEMINIST POETICS, by Heather Milne. Contemporary North American Poetry Series. University of Iowa Press, 2018. 278 pp. $80.00 paper; $80.00 ebook. Heather Milne’s Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics argues that “experimental and innovative” poetry by Canadian and American women published in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century takes seriously the potential for poetry to be a site for political engagement and protest (p. 11). Milne suggests that conceptual or procedural, appropriative, erasure, collage, and documentary poems all perform “complex forms [End Page 471] of [political] critique” through their forms and composition strategies (p. 5).What distinguishes this body of work in particular, Milne argues, is its investment in matter and mattering; innovative feminist poetry foregrounds the body and material environments often through the materiality of language itself. Milne makes the point that while a Canadian feminist poetics movement emerged in the 1980s, Canadian women’s poetry of recent decades has been largely overlooked by critics. Today, both Canadian and American women’s experimental poetry “circulate and function transnationally” (p. 27). Canadian poetry in particular has committed itself to tracking global capitalism’s transnational flows of information, commerce, and migration and, moreover, “reject[s] the nation as a colonial construct” (p. 26). Thus, Canadian and American women’s poetry should be read together. This poetry requires a transnational literary critical approach, Milne argues, but one that accounts for how the countries “have distinct histories of settlement, colonization, and independence as well as distinct systems of governance and democracy” (p. 198). Throughout the book, Milne models what such an approach to feminist poetics might look like. Notably, she decenters poetry by United States authors from the outset; five of the six poets Milne discusses in part one are Canadian. Milne’s chapters provide detailed, careful readings of “experimental” texts. By attending closely and facilitating greater access to contemporary forms of poetry by women that have been marginalized in the United States especially, Milne extends the literary critical tradition of scholars such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Lynn Keller, who have taken seriously the project of reading twentieth and twenty-first century women’s poetry for its form, as opposed to reading for its content exclusively. Throughout Poetry Matters, Milne applies language and concepts from an eclectic group of contemporary theorists—including Rosi Braidotti, Jodi Dean, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Timothy Morton, Ann Cvetkovich, and Sara Ahmed—to illuminate the poetry. But some of her sharpest insights are those she arrives at through her own skillful close readings. For example, in a discussion of Margaret Christakos’s What Stirs (2008), which critiques the fetishization of the maternal body, Milne shows how the poet uses fragmentation, repetition, and wordplay to convey the ways in which primary attachments, especially the attachment to the mother’s breast, condition “a dialectic of gratification and frustration” that also characterizes the “insatiable drives” of contemporary capitalism (p. 57). Poetry Matters is organized into three two-chapter sections. This structure adds to the book’s accessibility and navigability. In part one, “Economies of the Flesh and Word: Biopolitics and Writing the (Posthuman) Body in Late Capitalism,” Milne explores how Jennifer Scappettone, Larissa Lai and Rita Wong, Margaret Christakos, Nikki Reimer, and Rachel Zolf use [End Page 472] “strategic embodiment” to critique neoliberal, biopolitical, and late capitalism (Milne invokes all three) (p. 47). Part two, “Poetic Matterings: New Materialist and Posthuman Feminist Ecopoetics,” considers how the New Materialist “ecopoetics” of Yedda Morrison, Marcella Durand, Rita Wong, and Evelyn Reilly decenter human agency in the process of reimagining the material world. Part three, “Geopolitics, Nationhood, Poetry,” reads Juliana Spahr’s, Claudia Rankine’s, and Dionne Brand’s post-9/11, post-United States-invasion-of-Iraq poetry. Then it turns to poems by Rachel Zolf, Jena Osman, and Jen Benka, which challenge national and colonial discourses and identities. All of the poets in this part, Milne argues, mobilize documentary...

The “Sordid Story” of an Unwanted Child: Militancy, Motherhood and Abortion in Elizabeth Robins’ Votes for Women! and Way Stations

ABSTRACTThis article reconsiders representations of the militant suffragette in two texts by the radical writer Elizabeth Robins: Votes for Women! (1907) and her collection of political speeches and articles, Way Stations (1913). Her plea for twentieth-century women writers to create new roles for women outside those of wives and sweethearts can be read in relation to the creation of her “exceptional” suffragette heroine, who thrives on her singleness in her 1907 play. Focusing particularly on the taboo issues of abortion and unmarried motherhood, the author considers the ways in which Robins developed the fallen woman on stage narrative in the early twentieth century, and how childlessness is shown to be both necessary and problematic for the suffragette heroine. The author also reassesses Robins’ complex commentaries on militancy and “quiet propaganda” in her suffrage speeches and pamphlets.

Queer Media Studies

I just wrote a book on queer media studies, but I never fully understood how I got started on it until I sat down to write this piece.1 In retrospect, I see the questions that started it off and the research that provided me with jumping-off points more clearly. The scholars whose work I sought to model were located in feminist media studies. My book is a good example of how queer media scholarship is informed and contoured by work in feminist media studies insofar as it relies on the conceptual logics and unconventional archives that characterize that body of work. What follows is a story in reverse. I chart how my own research in queer media studies owes a tremendous debt to feminist media studies, working backward to identify overlaps and tensions between the two. From there, I underscore why the gaps and overlaps between queer and feminist media studies are so useful for rigorous analysis of sex, gender, sexuality, and media culture. In my book, I parse out the feelings of freedom, belonging, and transcendence that contemporary cinema, television, and online media make available to audiences comprised of sexual minorities. The book is heavily informed by Lauren Berlant's work on twentieth-century women's culture in The Female Complaint (2008).2 I am most moved …

Chow Chop Suey: Food and the Chinese American Journey

Book Review| April 01 2018 Chow Chop Suey: Food and the Chinese American Journey Chow Chop Suey: Food and the Chinese American Journey. By Anne Mendelson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. xx + 330 pp. Notes, glossary, bibliography, and index. $35 (cloth). Alice McLean Alice McLean University of the Pacific, San Francisco Alice McLean has authored the books Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women’s Food Writing, Cooking in America (Routledge, 2011), and Asian American Food Culture (Greenwood, 2015). She teaches courses on food writing, food in literature, and American appetites at the Master of Arts in Food Studies Program at the University of the Pacific, San Francisco. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2018) 37 (3): 118–120. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.37.3.0118 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Alice McLean; Chow Chop Suey: Food and the Chinese American Journey. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2018; 37 (3): 118–120. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.37.3.0118 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Forbrugerfeminisme – uddrag fra Den éndimensionale kvinde

Where have all the interesting women gone? If the contemporary portrayal of womankind were to be believed, contemporary female achievement would culminate in the ownership of expensive handbags, a vibrator, a job, a flat and a man. Of course, no one has to believe the TV shows, the magazines and adverts, and many don’t. But how has it come to this? Did the desires of twentieth-century women’s liberation achieve their fulfillment in the shopper’s paradise of ‘naughty’ self-pampering, playboy bunny pendants and bikini waxes? That the height of supposed female emancipation coincides so perfectly with consumerism is a miserable index of a politically desolate time. Much contemporary feminism, particularly in its American formulation, doesn’t seem too concerned about this coincidence. This excerpt from Nina Power’s One-dimensional woman is an attack on the apparent abdication of any systematic political thought on the part of today’s positive, up-beat feminists.

Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage

Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage

Sara Pennoyer: Twentieth-century retail and advertising executive and her creation, Polly Tucker, Merchant

Abstract Twentieth-century American retail and advertising executive Sara Pennoyer gained varied fashion industry experience during the course of a long career, which included stints as promotion director at Harper’s Bazaar, advertising copywriter, buyer, fashion reporter and even novelist. In the 1930s and the 1940s, Pennoyer served as sales promotion manager, and later vice president, for New York specialty store Bonwit Teller, where her novel in 1937, Polly Tucker: Merchant, and the related campaign were a highlight of her career. Pennoyer’s work was grounded on a firm foundation of writing ability, paired with a creative ability to connect to consumers. Near the end of her career, Pennoyer headed her own advertising agency. Sara Pennoyer was one of the now little-known twentieth-century women who forged a fruitful career path in the American retail industry.

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...

H. D., <span class="strike">Imagiste</span> Synesthete

H. D., Imagiste Synesthete Allyson Demaagd In 1895, German physician Max Nordau published Degeneration, a book containing scathing remarks about the prevalence of smell, taste, and touch in literature. These senses, Nordau proclaimed, belonged to an "epoch anterior to man" and were the purview of beasts, not of respectable writers (503).1 Nordau found synesthesia, or "joint perception," equally worthy of condemnation ("synaesthesis").2 Writing that featured synesthesia—such as plays where lines were paired with perfumes, colored lights, or musical notes—was evidence of social decline, of "moral insanity, imbecility, and dementia" among writers and their audiences (Nordau viii). While Degeneration predicts that the valorization of synesthesia and the lower senses will end with the advent of the twentieth century, sensory experimentation in writing persisted.3 This article concerns itself with one such sensory-rich, twentieth-century novel, H. D.'s roman à clef HERmione. In HERmione, H. D. confronts and contests the sensory norms upon which Nordau, and society at large, rest their biases and aversions. In HERmione, synesthesia is not reductive but productive: through it, H. D. destabilizes distinctions between high and low, normal and abnormal, human and nonhuman. Similarly, in HERmione the lower senses are not degenerative but generative: they offer new ways of sensing and new modes of being through which H. D. subverts the sensory status quo. To understand how HERmione troubles sensory norms, we must first understand traditional sensory classifications. Cultural historian Constance Classen, who specializes in the history of the senses, explains that in the West the senses have long been gendered, typically to the detriment of women. Traditional sensory narratives divide the senses by gender and afford men privileges that women are denied. Such narratives associate men, for instance, with the privileged senses of sight and sound, which are in turn associated with reason. These "distance" senses have been perceived to enable men to engage in [End Page 166] "'distance activities,' such as traveling and governing" (66). In contrast, smell, taste, and touch, the "proximity" senses, have been imagined to confine women to the home, since these so-called lower senses are inherent in household duties (66). Smell, taste, and touch are often conceived of as being more embodied than sight or sound and, in this way, more befitting women, whose minds have long been considered less developed than men's. Heteronormative narratives, by reinforcing gender binaries, reinforce these so-called sensory norms. Such narratives suggest that coupling men with women results in the perfect balance of reason and emotion, pragmatism and sensuality. In the twentieth century, women's increasing social mobility and political agency put pressure on these narratives. Once-contained female bodies—with their smells and sounds, and the threat of their touch—were more public, more visible, and more contaminating.4 As twentieth-century women transgressed traditional sensory categories, they demanded new sensory identifications. Modernist writers played a central role in rethinking sensory paradigms and reimagining the senses. In Modernism: A Cultural History, Tim Armstrong acknowledges the work of H. D. and Virginia Woolf as evidence that "a heightened sensitivity to sensation is central to modern experience" (90). Likewise, Ralf Hertel, who studies literary depictions of the senses, notes that "[i]n the modern period, with its technical extensions of the senses and its overflow of stimuli, perception itself becomes the focus of literary investigation" (176). Such investigations are the subject of modernist criticism, much of which fruitfully attends to the privileged senses of sight and sound.5 More recently, however, modernist scholarship, such as Abbie Garrington's Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing, reflects an interest in the less-studied, lower senses. Garrington examines how "modernist texts—literary, scientific, philosophical and journalistic—return with unprecedented alacrity to the haptic experiences of the human body" (50). Touch, Garrington claims, is central to the modernist experience, an integral means by which modernist subjects come to know themselves and their worlds. In reclaiming touch's centrality, Garrington refashions the "base sense," as Aristotle called it, as a foundational sensory modality, "a scaffold on which the other senses are built" (18).6 " To study touch," she proclaims, "is to study the whole body in its carnal, fleshly reality" (19...

To the Question of the Crimean Period of Life of the Ukrainian Activist Kharytynа Pekarchuk and Her Participation in Armed Protection of the UPR (1894—1920)

The article deals with the biography of the extraordinary public and military activist Kharytyna Pekarchuk (1894–1973). She became the first twentieth-century woman to receive a Ukrainian state award. The article examines her life from her birth in Simferopol to participation in the armed defense of the UPR in 1918–1920, including the First Winter campaign of the UPR Army in 1919–1920.

"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...