Pocketing the Difference: Gender and Pockets in Nineteenth–Century Britain

This study situates pockets as significant gendered objects in the dress and lives of men and women in the period from the 1790s to 1914. Using surviving examples and a diverse range of visual and documentary sources, it examines the role of pockets in the consumption of personal possessions and money, and explores how pockets occupied a special place in relation to the body and its gestures. By revealing differences in the way men and women used their pockets, the study concludes that pockets embodied change and complexity within the consumption of fashion and the construction of gender.     

Reflections on Gender and Status Distinctions: An Analysis of the Liturgical Textiles Recorded in Mid–Sixteenth–Century London

This paper considers the relative significance of social standing and gender in parish life within early modern London, and how this was expressed via their liturgical textiles up to 1552. The data are drawn from the 1552 parish inventories that recorded these textiles and the other appurtenances of worship. Vestments worn for communion, robes for boy choristers and the range of textiles associated with birth, christening, churching, marriage and death are evaluated to see how far they reveal distinctions between men and women, adults and children, rich and poor, laity and clergy. A range of differences can be seen, as can the way in which social and gender considerations interlink.     

The Unusual Case of ‘Mrs Sherlock’. Memoir,Identity and the ‘Real’ Woman Private Detective in Twentieth–Century Britain

Despite a huge popular and literary interest in detective fiction and an extensive academic literature on the history of policing, there have been very few studies of the history of private detectives/investigators. The work of women investigators has proved to be even more marginal. Histories of women and work have tended, for obvious reasons, to concentrate on mainstream industries, occupations and professions rather than the unusual or the unique. Focusing on the memoirs of Annette Kerner, published in the early 1950s, this article examines the range of opportunities that investigation created in the first half of the twentieth century, analysing the interaction of professional, gender and class identities. It highlights, firstly, women's ‘professional’ commitment to an exciting and challenging area of work, exploring their relationships with other occupational groups including women police. Second, it considers how disguise and masquerade presented opportunities for urban exploration and the crossing of traditional boundaries of gender and class. Investigative work developed, historically, at the same time as detective fiction and it has been deeply affected by fictional portrayals. The cultural mantle of ‘the female Sherlock Holmes’ was a hard inheritance to shake off and it suffused women's public presentations of themselves.     

Gender,Nation and the Politics of Dress in Twentieth‐Century Philippines

This paper examines the politics of dress in twentieth‐century Philippines, exploring the imbrication of dress, politics and gender. It argues that there was an inherent tension between Western Dress/Filipino Dress in the period as the contrast between these two types of dress came to represent opposing political and gendered identities. The visual categories of Western Dress/Filipino Dress did not always 'naturally' correspond to not nationalist/nationalist, powerful/disempowered, modern/traditional, or even other/self. The gendering of costume mirrored men's and women's positioning in the political axis of the nation as the status of 'bearer and wearer of national tradition' shifted from women to men once the colony became an independent nation‐state.     

Womanliness in the Slums: A Free Kindergarten in Early Twentieth‐Century Edinburgh

This paper considers the intersection of Spiritual Motherhood, early childhood education and child welfare in early twentieth‐century Edinburgh. Its focus is St Saviour's Child Garden (SSCG), which opened in the Canongate, in November 1906, part of the Free Kindergarten movement that emerged in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century. The paper focuses on the SSCG's founder Lileen Hardy, in order to trace the development of this new approach to child welfare and women's work in Britain. It discusses her training at the Sesame House for Home‐Life Training in London, her move to Edinburgh, and the network of predominantly women reformers, whose interests ranged from urban reform to medical welfare, she found there. It shows how this network facilitated the founding of the SSCG and discusses the form it took and Hardy's implementation of a modified form of Froebelian praxis. In so doing its concern is to show how Free Kindergarten forms part of a wider history of social welfare and urban reform as well as to the history of early childhood education, and to move attention away from the men usually associated with innovations in Scottish social reform like Patrick Geddes, and onto a group of women who created a women and child‐centred proto‐Welfare State in pre‐First World War Edinburgh.     

Imagining the Beloved: Gender and Nation Building in Early Twentieth‐Century Hebrew Literature

This article traces the gender dimensions of Zionist nation building by examining literary texts written in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It offers a gender‐oriented analysis of a range of canonic and marginal literary texts and their historical contexts, and pays special attention to the ways in which literary production in general, and in Hebrew in particular, became an essential component in the effort to create an image of a ‘New Hebrew Man’. This highly gendered image was a central foundation of the Zionist project of nation building in Europe, and in the Jewish community in Palestine. Hebrew poems, stories and novels produced and sustained the symbolic economy of gender of the Zionist cultural project. At the same time, I argue that some Hebrew writers resisted the overt and implicit ideological demands of this project by calling attention to the internal contradictions inherent in the feminine figuration of the nation and the attempts to transform Jewish masculinity.     

The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth‐Century Australia

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life‐worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life‐trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.