Style and Subversion: Postwar Poses and the Neo–Edwardian Suit in Mid–Twentieth–Century Britain

This essay examines the emergence of the Neo–Edwardian look in postwar London. It traces a network of styles which took their meanings from the immediate environment and from broader social, economic and cultural trends, and suggests that the arising connections between place, class and gender identities provided an important precedent for the reinvention of London as a centre of fashion innovation in the 1960s. Utilising contemporary sociological accounts and the content of trade periodicals, this reading challenges some of the more reactionary interpretations of Neo–Edwardianism which have dominated the established literature and refocuses the attention of the fashion historian on the sartorial activities of young men.     

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.     

Religious Reforming Currents in Sixteenth‐Century Italy: The Spirituali and the Tridentine Debates over Church Reform

The history of religious reform in sixteenth century Italy has been the subject of much scholarly debate in recent decades, as well as uncertainty about how best to conceptualise the period, so indelibly marked by epoch‐changing events, such as the Protestant Reformation (from 1517) and the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Reforming currents in Italy were swept along by these events, and indeed appear to have been overwhelmed by them. Commonly, these currents are explored for their theological nature and especially their heterodox, even Protestant, character. Less well studied is their role in the debates over organisational church reform. It is here that we can discern the tenacity of these currents well into the Tridentine period. This article explores key protagonists of reform, known as the spirituali, with particular reference to the humanist bishop, Ludovico Beccadelli, and his role in the debate over episcopal residence. Through an analysis of his contribution to this divisive debate at the Council of Trent, the article seeks to shed light on a strand of the spirituali that was both resilient and prominent in the battle for the future direction of the Catholic Church.     

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.     

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.     

The Difficulties of Gender in France: Reflections on a Concept

This article examines the cultural and institutional resistance to the use of gender as a category in French historiography. In France, history, and, more specifically, women's history, has not really assimilated the openings offered by the problematics of the construction of differences, nor the logical consequences of the use of gender. Cultural differences are partly responsible for this, and the polysemic nature of the word genre may add to the confusion. With a few exceptions, women's history in France is reluctant to engage in a historical analysis which would take into account the founding role of hierarchy and of relations of power and difference which are central to gender.     

The Queen – A Middle–Class Tragedy: The Writing of History and the Creation of Myths in Nineteenth–Century France and Germany

This article is an interpretation of historical narratives written by nineteenth–century German and French historians (among them Johann Gustav Droysen and Jules Michelet) about the French Revolution and the biographies of notable queens. Central to this historical narrative are Marie–Antoinette of France, Louise, queen of Prussia, and Elizabeth, empress of Austria. The text is concerned with the process of transforming the executed queen of ancien régime France into the image of the nineteenth–century bourgeois ideal of women and monarchy. Thus the essay is also about the creation of myths and about male bourgeois and middle–class fantasies.