Eliza’s Babes: Poetry ‘Proceeding from Divinity’ in Seventeenth–Century England

This article examines the poetry and prose meditations in the anonymous 1652 volume Eliza’s Babes: or The Virgins–offering. The article begins by reconsidering Liam Semler’s recent assertion that Eliza was a Parliamentarian and religiously radical, arguing instead that she was a centrist, loyalist Protestant. The article then examines the handbooks to devotion and meditation from this loyalist tradition that helped define Eliza’s understanding of public and private and how these concepts were gendered. In keeping with writers such as Joseph Hall and Daniel Featly, Eliza views her private devotion as on a continuum which leads to public worship, or ‘thanks’ as she terms it. Eliza uses this paradigm of public and private to justify both the printing of her poems and her very unusual theology of marriage, in which she considers Christ her only true husband. The final section of the article considers whether Eliza’s understanding of public and private offers her more ‘freedom’ than other women writers, and concludes that any judgement of her freedom must be carefully calibrated to the religious and political contexts of her book.     

‘The dearest sacrifice’: Catharine Maria Sedgwick and the Celibate Life

Catharine Maria Sedgwick, America’s most respected and popular female novelist of the early nineteenth century, never married. Yet while she chose a life of celibacy, most scholars have argued that her life represented ‘a deviation’ from the more conventional women’s roles she prescribed in her fiction. This article places Sedgwick’s marital decision within the context of several converging influences – her family history, her Federalist upbringing, and most important, her conversion to Unitarianism. Read through the lens of the complementary religious and social principles of Unitarianism and Federalism, Sedgwick’s novels reveal a persistent exploration of several themes – the ability to realize and advance truth, the centrality of character and moral cultivation, and the obligation to serve one’s community. Sedgwick’s exploration of these themes illuminates her choice of celibacy, and her conclusions contain a radical commentary on the appropriateness of marriage for women.     

Fani Popova–Mutafova

The article explores the life and professional activities of Fanny Popova–Mutafova – the most prominent of the few writers of historical fiction in Bulgaria and one of the most prolific and published Bulgarian women authors of the interwar period. Her life spanned two epochs – the ‘bourgeois’ epoch prior to World War II, and that of the communist regime. While she was celebrated as one of the best and most productive writers and intellectuals in Bulgaria before 1944, the communist regime pronounced her ‘a people’s enemy’, held her responsible for ‘Great–Bulgarian chauvinism and fascism’, banned and destroyed her books and ruined her life. The story of her life is embedded in several decades of Bulgarian intellectual life and, besides giving an idea of a woman writer’s existence there at that time, reveals wider sociopolitical and ideological contexts in which various discourses affecting Bulgarian women were articulated.     

Samuel Butler's Sheep

Alice Stopford Green, widow of proto-social and Teutonic nationalist historian J.R. Green, who went on to become an Irish nationalist historian and campaigner, complicates our view of fin-de-siècle women writers. Surprisingly for an amateur historian in an age of professionalization, she took a consciously separatist position, privileging the particular over the general, and defining her writing as both female and Irish.

This article focuses on Stopford Green's 1915 epilogue to her husband's Short History of the English People (1874), and her startlingly anguished periodical article of 1897 from Nineteenth Century, to demonstrate a separatism both bold and self-aware.‘Woman's Place in the World of Letters’ (1897) prefigures Cixous in its call for an écriture feminine. It views women as utterly alien to the established order of this world. Stopford Green at once acquiesces with female essentialisation – ‘woman’ comes in the singular – and undermines it by insisting that woman's true nature is almost never seen. In the ‘Epilogue’ (1915), which updates her husband's narrative to her war-torn present, Stopford Green voices jingoistic rhetoric, but employs unobtrusive asides to distance herself from these calls to imperialism. Through such surreptitious means, she uses her late-husband's popular textbook as the conduit of subversive ideas, both voicing and subverting his English nationalism.     

PEGGY PIGGOTT: WOMEN AND BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGY (1930–1945)

The 2021 film, The Dig, stimulated much interest in discovering more about Peggy Piggott, the archaeologist who first ‘struck gold’ at Sutton Hoo. Piggott was a leading British prehistorian, who produced over sixty published works for the field. Here we examine her early life and career, her training with the Curwens and the Wheelers, her marriage to Stuart Piggott, and her recognized expertise that led to her joining the Sutton Hoo team in 1939. During WWII, she established the modern standard for barrow excavation, and in 1944 was recognized by the Society of Antiquaries for her ‘devotion to the study of archaeology’. Piggott provides a lens through which we consider the careers of 1930s women archaeologists – those factors enabling access to archaeology (class, wartime opportunity) and factors that limited progress (lack of a degree, marriage).     

MARRIAGE MIGRANTS AS EMIGRANTS

This article examines the emigration dimension of marriage migration in Asia by focusing on remittances received by parents from daughters who married and migrated abroad. Based on a study of 250 migrant-sending households in Vietnam with a daughter living in an Asian country as a ‘foreign wife’, the analysis provides empirical evidence that emigrant spouses make substantial financial contributions to their natal families through remittances. A multivariate analysis of the determinants of remittance-sending shows that a woman's characteristics and living conditions abroad largely determine whether or not she remits, while the relative poverty level of her natal family has limited influence. Findings call for a broader conceptualization of ‘women who marry foreigners’ or ‘foreign brides’ as emigrants who contribute to the social development of their sending countries.     

Transcending Gender Roles,Crossing Racial and Political Boundaries: Agnes Hill’s Fight for her Inheritance in German Southwest Africa

ABSTRACT

Agnes Hill, the unmarried daughter of a British landowner and farmer and his mixed-race wife, was living a ‘white’ farmer’s life in the colony German South West Africa. In 1908, she was suddenly classified as ‘native’, due to the enforcement of radical racial legislation in the German colony degrading the offspring of mixed-race people as ‘bastards’. The new classification would have had dire consequences for the whole family, especially in respect to their landownership. However, Agnes fought for her family, with the support of solicitors and – as a daughter of a British father coming from the Cape Colony – with the help of the British consul residing in the German colony. She finally succeeded in securing the estate for the family, even if she was an unmarried woman in a predominantly patriarchal settler society. Using mainly material from the court cases, the article traces Agnes Hill’s fight for the Hill inheritance, thereby investigating various crucial issues of colonial societies. It points at the changing boundaries between ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ and the ambiguity of racial classifications. The article argues that women such as Agnes Hill could play a significant role in colonial settler societies and were able to transcend gender-role boundaries.     

Food on the Borderlands: Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary and the Kentucky Home Front, 1860–1862

The diary of Johanna Louisa ‘Josie’ Underwood (1840–1923), the daughter of Kentucky lawyer, politician and plantation owner Warner Underwood, portrays what happened to many elite households in Kentucky during the American Civil War (1861–1865), especially with its depiction of food as a scarce, and thus increasingly valuable, resource. Spanning the first two years of the conflict, Josie’s diary is essentially a war narrative written by a well-educated, articulate, outspoken, Unionist woman from a slave-owning family who was barely out of her teens when the fighting began. As she reveals through her entries, her state and in particular her hometown of Bowling Green, was a ‘hotbed of political and military action’, and at the centre of this ‘hotbed’ of activity was food. Often historians think about wartime hunger as a function of the later years of the war, but as Josie’s diary elucidates, food scarcity was an immediate and constant issue. Consequently, food became an important commodity in the borderlands during the war, especially in occupied cities like Bowling Green, where it was a vital, yet elusive, military and civilian resource which, when accessed and controlled, functioned as social currency and a political symbol of power, especially for women.     

Why the World Matters: Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of New Beginnings

Hannah Arendt’s philosophical project is an untiring attempt to argue that the world with all its failures and weaknesses does and should matter. Refusing to succumb to the destructive tendency within modernity, she cultivates creativity, action and responsibility. One way to appreciate the originality of Arendt’s philosophy of action and new beginnings is via her reading of two thinkers who were part of what she terms, “the great tradition.” If most commentary deals either with Heidegger’s influence on Arendt‘s thought or with her Augustinian origins, my aim is to trace Arendt’s lifelong conversation with both thinkers. It is in her doctoral dissertation on St. Augustine that she begins to distinguish herself from Heidegger’s understanding of the world, Dasein, and care. Without arguing that her work on Augustine is a hidden key to understanding her philosophy of new beginnings, an appreciation of Arendt‘s lifelong debate not only with Heidegger but also with Augustine enriches our understanding of why philosophy should pay more attention to the world, rather than try to escape from it .     

‘Mɔn’ (to marry/to cook): negotiating becoming a wife and woman in the kitchens of a northern Ghanaian Konkomba community

In this article, I consider the kitchen as domestic space that is at once gendered and gendering in its construction and use by women as they negotiate their social position across the life course. Deeply rooted patriarchal values structure Konkomba society in northern Ghana, and a woman's role is to be a wife, to prepare food in support of her husband's family and community. Although the normative definition of woman's role in society stems from a clear-cut division of labor between women and men, a woman must negotiate her social position and ability to fulfill these labor obligations; she becomes a woman and wife by working to gain access to and control over resources and labor. I explore the shifting dynamics of women's work and social position across the life course, emphasizing the transition from young woman to woman-as-wife-as-cook in her husband's community. These negotiations take place in the kitchen – a fiercely feminine space in which a woman becomes a wife when she earns the right to place hearth stones and prepare a ceremonial ‘first meal’ for her husband and his community.     

‘Halt! Be Men!’: Sikelgaita of Salerno,Gender and the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy

This article examines the career of Sikelgaita (1040–1090), wife of the Norman conqueror of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, as a means of understanding the impact of the ‘other’ Norman conquest of the eleventh century. Sikelgaita is unusual in that she has left images in narrative sources both within and well beyond the confines of southern Italy. She is also well documented at a local level. Both types of material combine to reveal her crossing gender boundaries in titles she used, the way in which she managed property, her legendary presence alongside Robert on his campaigns and, more speculatively, in organising a campaign of written propaganda to ensure the succession of her son to his father's patrimony in preference to his half‐brother by Sikelgaita's predecessor as Robert's wife. Her history raises the problems of women's access to written texts, their conscious shaping of their own identities, their conflicting loyalties between natal and marital families, and the need for competing male heirs to prove themselves against a prevailing notion of masculinity in a period when one aggressively masculine group, the Lombards, was being supplanted in power by another, the Normans. As such, it demonstrates that the lives of so‐called ‘exceptional’ women continue to have a value to historians of gender in the middle ages, and can often demonstrate the patriarchal boundaries which even they could not cross.     

Challenging Hegemonies through Connecting Places,People and Ideas: Jan Monk's contribution to international gender geography (with particular reference to Spain)

The main goal of the paper is to study Jan Monk's contribution to the development of international gender geography, in particular in Spain. Our aim is also to explain the experiences and numerous connections among places, people and ideas that she has been weaving to foster international scholarship and, in this way, how she has challenged hegemonic approaches in feminist geography. Jan Monk comes originally from the Southern hemisphere and therefore she is well aware of the extent to which ‘Northern’ (or Anglo-American) ways of seeing the world define concepts, theories and ideas in geography (and also in feminist geography). Being an ‘insider’ and an ‘outsider’ as well as her sensibility to the important of place has permeated Jan's contribution to international gender geography.     

Exploring subject positions and multiple temporalities through an Iranian migrant mother's family photograph albums

In this article, I draw on a research study of one Iranian migrant mother's generation of selves through her material configuration of her personal photograph albums and through our verbal reading of her photographs. The research engages in a visual-material feminist ethnographic approach, and is informed by the work of Gillian Rose and the understanding that family photographs are a means by which women negotiate subject positions. In this article, I discuss an unexpected finding of my research, the significance of multiple temporalities in a migrant mother's production of selves. The photo album practices of the participant mother of this study, ‘Parvin’, depart from the common social convention of mothers arranging their photograph albums to chart family growth following the model of milestones occurring over linear developmental time. Parvin does not limit herself to linear developmental time, but rather she mixes up photographs in her post-migration family albums to generate multiple temporalities woven together by an enveloping ‘mixed’ time. Drawing on both Julia Kristeva and Homi Bhaba's theories of temporality and the subject, I suggest that Parvin produces subject positions for self and family through a continual interweaving of a multitude of pasts into the present and through a subsuming of milestones within cyclical family time. Further, I suggest that through her generation of multiple temporalities, Parvin produces the subject position of ‘accommodating mother’. Finally, I highlight the potential afforded by considering the temporal and the spatial together in studies of migrant identity.     

Probability and certainty in seventeenth-century england. a study of the relationships between natural science,religion, history. law,and literature

Enlightenment optimism over mankind's progress was often voiced in terms of botanical growth by key figures such as John Millar; the mind's cultivation marked the beginning of this process. For agriculturists such as Arthur Young cultivation meant an advancement towards virtue and civilization; the cultivation of the mind can similarly be seen as an enlightenment concept which extols the human potential for improvable reason. In the course of this essay I aim to explore the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘cultivation’ through botanical metaphor. By using the recurring motif of the mind's cultivation as a site from which to explore enlightenment views on female understanding, I investigate how far concerns with human progress extended to the female mind.

I examine the language of botany and cultivation in texts by authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld alongside that of Rousseau and Millar. Wollstonecraft's appropriation and subsequent inversion of the conventional cultivation metaphor, for example, demonstrates her desire to draw attention to society's neglect of women's educational potential by substituting images of enlightened growth with those of luxuriant decay. By pushing this analogy further she indicates how society has cultivated women rearing them like exotic flowering plants or ‘luxuriants’ where ‘strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty’. I discuss the antipastoral rationalism which enables her to unmask the false sentiment behind this traditional metaphoric association between women and flowers arguing that such familiar tropes are the language of male desire and are indicative of women's problematic relationship to culture.     

The polis and the res publica: two Arendtian models of violence

The influence of the ancient Greek world on Hannah Arendt’s thought is well documented, yet her interest in the politics of the Roman Republic is often considered less central to her work. This paper explores Arendt’s analysis of both these political worlds, with a particular emphasis on what this comparison can tells us about her understanding of the role of violence in politics. Arendt has generally been understood to structurally exclude violence from the political, in part due to the claims she makes in her later essay ‘On Violence.’ Yet in her portrayal of Roman politics, and her preference for this political system above the Greeks’ (in certain respects), a genuinely political engagement with violence can be discerned. The paper claims that this particular case study indicates the framework of the vita activa, set out by Arendt in The Human Condition, should be reinterpreted, particularly insofar as ‘fabrication’ or ‘work’ here appears as something that is legitimately part of the political, and incorporates within it some forms of violence. The claims that violence is structurally anti-political, this paper concludes, are temporally specific to a twentieth-century context, rather than constituting a foundational ‘rule’ of political practice for Arendt.     

‘There Is Graite Odds between A Mans being At Home And A Broad’: Deborah Read Franklin and the Eighteenth‐Century Home

From 1764 to her death in 1774, Deborah Franklin lived in ‘their’ new house without husband Benjamin. The correspondence between them reveals several ambiguously gendered constructions of that house – ideologically, materially, and architecturally. Deborah was ‘homeless’ legally and conceptually. Her household variously consisted of her mother, her adopted son, her daughter, relatives, guests, boarders and servants – she permanently assumed the role of head of the household. His household consisted of his landlady, Widow Margaret Stevenson, and her daughter Polly – he could not assume his role as head of household. Moreover, as Deborah wrote to her husband about turning the house into a fortress during a raid on it during Stamp Act crisis, he wrote to her about the household goods; as she talked about politics, he discussed familial matters. Their permeable, even ambiguous, masculine and feminine roles reconstructed the meaning – and thereby symbolised the gendered complexity – of the early American white middling and elite eighteenth‐century home.     

Pan-Indigenous Encounter in the 1950s: ‘Ethnic Dancer’ Beth Dean

From 1950, ‘ethnic dancer’ Beth Dean made her living on a lecture-demonstration touring circuit of the dance traditions of Australia, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and North America. To assert her expertise, she claimed to have studied Māori and Australian Aboriginal cultures for a number of years. This article investigates how Dean’s didactic performances drew on American traditions of ethnic dance to present apparently authoritative representations of Indigenous cultures, supported by Adult Education Boards in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia and national arts organisations. I argue that Dean exploited the symbolic potential of ‘corroboree’ as a performance of intercultural communication to establish her authority to speak about and perform Australian Aboriginal dance.     

Auctoritas as sanctitas: Balthild's depiction as ‘queen-saint’ in the Vita Balthildis

This paper assesses the representation of Queen Balthild of Neustrian Francia in her seventh-century Vita as a new kind of saintly figure, a ‘queen-saint’ rather than as a traditional saint-queen. Balthild made herself unpopular among certain factions of the Frankish nobility during her son's minority by interfering in Church matters. In particular, she compelled bishops to grant episcopal exemptions to monasteries and promoted her own, unpopular, candidates to Neustrian dioceses, leading to her identification as a ‘modern-day Jezebel’ by her enemies, and her banishment to the monastic community at Chelles. Modern scholarship on Balthild, led by Lynda Coon, has assumed that Balthild's biographer was keen to erase from popular memory her actions as queen, actions which could be interpreted as inappropriate behaviour for a saint, and that the Life reflects this by emphasising Balthild's more stereotypical saintly behaviour as a nun once she had retired to Chelles. However, it will be argued that, rather than underlining her humility, the author of the Vita Balthildis was in fact keen to show that her interference in Church matters should be seen as contributing to her identification as a saint, by stressing that her autonomous and authoritative use of her power was actually a positive attribute.     

Hien's shed: (re)framing images of female immigrant home-based clothing workers

Campaigns in support of home-based clothing workers (or ‘outworkers’ as they are more commonly known in Australia) deploy powerful images of the exploitative underside of fashion. The migrant woman huddled over her machine has become the quintessential image of campaigns directed against this exploitation. This article engages critically with the politics of such image-making. By examining how frames simultaneously shrink and magnify the image produced it raises questions about what these images exclude or expel and whether and how this matters. It also offers an alternative frame of the female immigrant outworker – an up-close portrait of Hien, a Vietnamese woman who works at home sewing clothes in her suburban shed. The article introduces Hien through a condensed collection of her self-narratives, before moving on to consider how a trade union and community-based movement against outworker exploitation mobilised images of suffering and injured Vietnamese women to promote its cause. It asks how these images speak for and represent women like Hien and suggests that their political ‘success’ relies to some extent on the women being ‘unseen’ and made to ‘unspeak’. Finally, through the metaphor of space, it proffers an expanded dimension to the already framed images invoking Hien's shed as a space that both produces and disciplines her: ultimately, a ‘transitional space’ between the external and internal worlds that shape and constrain her.     

‘She is but a Woman’: Kitty Byron and the English Edwardian Criminal Justice System

In 1902, Kitty Byron stabbed her cohabitee, Reginald Baker, on a public street. Though her murder was premeditated, and she was of a lower class than her married lover, Byron gained the sympathy of the press and public, primarily due to the gender failings of her partner. Based on the legal records of the Home Office and newspaper reports, this case study illustrates the limitations of the criminal justice system in dealing with women's violence, especially in an age of increasingly sensational press coverage. The courts showed surprising sympathy to a ‘fallen’ woman, but at the cost of simplifying her story, confirming misogynist stereotypes and underestimating the danger she posed.