Chinese migrant women as boundary markers in Singapore: unrespectable,un-middle-class and un-Chinese

This article argues that the intersection of ethnicity, class and gender foregrounds the contestation of Chinese-ness in a context of migration in Singapore. I argue that the presence of co-ethnic mainland Chinese migrant women has heightened Chinese-Singaporean women’s anxieties. In lieu of ‘convenient markers’ of language and ethnicity, Chinese-Singaporean women have had to look elsewhere for the production of difference. This article argues that the Chinese-Singaporean woman favourably contrasts herself with the newly arrived mainland Chinese migrant woman in regards to the notion of respectable femininity – the latter being a key marker of middle-classness. Specifically, Chinese migrant women are perceived as unrespectable through charges of excessive materialism and of transgressing the Asian/Chinese family. By emphasising Chinese migrant women’s perceived lack of respectability, Chinese-Singaporean women can (re)establish their own respectable femininity, middle-classness and Chinese-ness.     

‘The Dining Room Should Be the Man's Paradise,as the Drawing Room Is the Woman's’: Gender and Middle‐Class Domestic Space in England, 1850–1910

In the middle‐class home in late nineteenth‐century England, drawing rooms, morning rooms and boudoirs became increasingly associated with women, while dining rooms, studies and smoking rooms were viewed as male spaces. Historians have linked this to the exclusion of women from social power and a male ‘flight from domesticity’. This article questions these interpretations and explores gendered space through advice manuals, inventories and sale catalogues, and autobiographies. While the notion that domestic space should be divided between men and women had considerable cultural purchase, the ways in which this should occur were subject to dispute and limited by the practical contingencies of everyday living. In homes where gendered material culture was present, it exerted a powerful influence on childhood experience and the formation of adult identities.     

Alternative Cartographies of Homelessness: Rendering visible British women's experiences of ‘visible’ homelessness

This article focuses on a group largely ignored by both geographers and feminist scholars of homelessness alike—the growing number of ‘visibly homeless’ women in Britain. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 19 ‘visibly homeless’ women, we delineate between four ‘alternative cartographies’ of homelessness, each articulating quite different gendered homeless identities. The article suggests that whilst it is important to recognise that women too suffer the exclusions of visible homelessness, it is also clear that the experience of visible homelessness differs for different women. Any attempt to respond to the (immediate) needs of such women necessitates a recognition rather than denial of these differences.     

Nationalism,Sports and Gender in Finnish Sports Journalism in the Early Twentieth Century

The aim of this article is to examine through Olympic sports journalism the connections between sports, gender, nation and class in Finland during the period before the Second World War. The relationship between sports and the nationalist project has always been strong in Finland, and it is often considered that the Finns were the first nation to exploit sports for political purposes in such a consistent way. The attention here is focused on gender and class, since these were the two most significant dividing factors in Finnish sports at the turn of the twentieth century. The article concludes that the idea of a Finnish national character can be seen as a gender-specific narrative, as the image of the Finn has been built on masculine determinants and the male sphere of life. This is proved by the fact that women are not required, or sometimes even allowed, to follow national stereotypes and characteristics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sports journalists were nevertheless obliged to conceptualise Finnish women as well through nationalist thinking. This was achieved by contrasting them with foreign women: the 'Other' women functioned as a sexualised background against which it was possible to depict the activities of Finland's own female athletes as pure, feminine, decent and respectable.     

Christianity,Gender, and the Working Class in Southern Dunedin, 1880–19401

This article is a study of the southern suburbs of Dunedin, which during the late nineteenth century became the most industrialized and working class urban area of New Zealand. Analyzing the social composition of fifteen southern Dunedin churches, I question the idea, widely held by New Zealand historians, that the working classes had largely turned their backs on organized religion. In keeping with recent scholarship in the social history of British and Irish religion, I show that unskilled workers were better represented in many southern Dunedin congregations that previous historians have acknowledged and that skilled workers numerically dominated most churches. When women are included in the analysis, working class predominance increases further. Signing the suffrage petition in remarkable proportions, working class Christian women turned the southern suburbs into a world‐leading first wave feminist community. Moreover, varieties of popular Christianity flourished beyond the ranks of active churchgoers. I conclude by suggesting that New Zealand historians need to rethink the old “lapsed masses” and “secular New Zealand” assumptions and to investigate the diverse varieties of Christianity shaping the culture, and their sometimes conflicting this‐worldly meanings.     

THE SHIFTING DEMAND FOR HOUSING BY AMERICAN RENTERS AND ITS IMPACT ON HOUSEHOLD BUDGETS: 1940–2010*

From 1940 to 1960 across 20 large U.S. cities, rental housing's price fell, renters’ incomes rose, rent's share in household budgets fell, and, as expected, renters’ real housing consumption increased. From 1970 to 2010, rental housing's price increased, renters’ incomes decreased, but, unexpectedly, renters’ real housing consumption increased. We find neither demographics nor housing supply factors account for the anomalous post‐1970 increase in renters’ housing consumption. We conclude that after 1970 there was a nationwide increase in renters’ preferences for housing consumption. With incomes falling, renters increased housing consumption by decreasing consumption of other necessities including food, clothing, and transportation.     

The Company Owns the Mine but They Don't Own Us: Feminist Critiques of Capitalism in the Coalfields of Kentucky in the 1970s

This article examines women's involvement in the Brookside Mine strike of 1974, which captivated US audiences and provided women with an unprecedented public platform to challenge the class and gender system undergirding coalfield capitalism. During the strike, female kin of miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, started a club to support striking miners and their families and to organise picket lines; they were joined by women from across the region and country. With the strike as their foundation these women generated a women's movement that revealed the specific ways class and gender inequality shaped their lives, defined by the heavy‐duty care work characteristic of the coalfields. This article argues that the Brookside women's support of striking miners was fundamentally about gendered class inequality: the denigration of working‐class, female caregivers alongside the devaluing of men's labour. Using collective memory and individual experience as their interpretive devices, the Brookside women forged a class‐conscious feminism. In it they exposed the traumas of coalfield capitalism, shone a light on women's unpaid care work (one of the foundations of corporate capitalism) and destabilised the gender and class hierarchies that defined coalfield communities.     

The Swedish journal Morgonbris on political violence in Finland 1917–1918

Women participated actively in the Finnish Civil War in January 1918–April 1918. The radicalization of the Finnish Social Democratic Party and the embracing of a revolutionary discourse sent tremors also to Sweden. In this article, I investigate how the Swedish Social Democratic women’s journal Morgonbris addresses women’s political violence in the period surrounding the Russian Revolution in March 1917, the October 1917 Bolshevik takeover and the following Civil War in Finland early 1918.

Morgonbris did not shun from reporting or debating women’s political violence, however, as this article shows there is a great discrepancy between how different acts of violence are understood in the greater discourse. Some violence, and especially some acts of violence committed by women, is clearly framed as more legitimate than others.     

"De-humanised females and Amazonians": British wartime fashion and its representation in Home chat, 1914-1918

Popular representations of the fashionably dressed female body between 1914 and 1918 were highly contradictory and, as this essay will show, were sharply delineated in Home Chat, one of a growing number of relatively new women's magazines which addressed the needs of an expanding skilled working-class and lower-middle-class female readership. Aiming to provide women with practical advice about all aspects of their daily lives, from the traditional concerns of fashion and beauty, marriage and children, to the more contentious issue of women's aspirations beyond the home, Home Chat was uniquely placed to reflect shifting gender and class relations.     

Erotic Modesty: (Ad)dressing Female Sexuality and Propriety in Open and Closed Drawers,USA, 1800–1930

When middle–class women began to wear drawers in the early 1800s, they were feminised by fabric, ornamentation and an open crotch. Incorporating open drawers into respectable women’s dress within a framework of ‘passionlessness’ constructed female sexuality as both erotic and modest. Crotch construction figured in the twentieth–century struggle to establish modern boundaries of women’s sexual propriety. The accepted sexual and moral meanings generated by open– and closed–crotch undergarments reversed as women increasingly chose to wear closed drawers during a period of women’s greater public presence and feminist activism. The transition from open to closed drawers reveals not only the power of clothing as a medium of significance, but how women’s struggles for autonomy interact with resistant social forces to reconfigure gender distinctions.     

Place and the Politics of Virtue: Clerical work,corporate anxiety,and changing meanings of public womanhood in early twentieth-century Montreal

Women's entrance into corporate offices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provided a focus for debate about changing meanings of public womanhood in the 'Modern' city. Working in the financial district, in the heart of downtown, women in clerical professions challenged formulations of respectability which posited public, urban space as threatening to female virtue. Yet the corporations for which these women worked traded quite literally on their reputations, and as such had a great need that their employees of both sexes be understood as respectable and upstanding citizens. Drawing on the popular press and employee files from a selection of key corporations in early twentieth-century Montreal, I examine how women's presence in, and use of urban space was mediated through ideas about 'respectability'. I submit that both corporations and women seeking clerical employment drew on ideas about respectable womanhood based in expectations of corporeal control and sexual restraint, even as these ideas were changing.     

Gender,Caste and Matchmaking in Kerala: A Rationale for Dowry

The matrilineal castes of northern Kerala consider dowry demeaning and resort to it only in ‘exceptional’ circumstances. In local discourse, dowry is transacted when women are considered ‘old’ by the standards of the marriage market, where over‐age is a condition reached usually on account of what is considered a deficit of a normative conception of femininity. Dowry is practised openly only by poor and socially vulnerable households, as the relatively affluent could mask dowry with hidden compensations. This article explores the ways in which gender mediates matchmaking and generates a residual category of women for whom dowry is openly negotiated. Open negotiation on the margins of the marriage market expose the terms of exchange in ‘respectable’ society, where matchmaking strategies reveal the emphasis placed on conjugality and on caste in the social construction of women's interests and identity. Up to the mid‐twentieth century, matrilineal women derived their identity from their natal families. The political economy of marriage in Kerala brought a new emphasis to bear on conjugality and on caste, which generated new restrictions on women and produced a rationale for dowry.     

都市现代性的性别地理——女性主义地理学的史前史与未来方向

运用历史地理唯物主义和女性主义地理学视角,建立奥斯曼在19世纪巴黎“创造性破坏”的城市规划和空间生产,与第一波女权运动的知识联结,推导女性主义地理学的史前史及其未来方向。研究发现,巴黎都市现代性的形成,使性别问题一开始就与阶级问题构成交叉关系;表现为“城-郊”二元结构及其在家庭私人空间、城市公共空间、拱廊街为代表的阈限空间等展现出来的有关资产阶级沙龙女性、工人阶级贫困女性和都市漫游者的三种不同形态的性别地理,以及表征主义和革命行动的两种性别政治。都市现代性的性别地理研究,为反思生物本质主义的性别体制、关注“后人类”未来基于赛博格、数字媒介城市和星球城市化的人地关系的性别研究,提供了未来方向。     

‘A rancour and a passion would be introduced into politics’: Perceptions of the Woman MP in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Britain*

On 21 November 1918, the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act was passed, which enabled women over the age of 21 to stand for parliamentary election. Unlike women's suffrage, there was no sustained campaign to allow women to sit in parliament. However, this does not mean that the issue was ignored in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This article traces perceptions of the woman MP in the pre-1918 period and offers the first detailed exploration of the topic. It argues that although discussions on the matter were not widespread like women's suffrage, there is value in examining these lesser-known debates. This article studies the parliamentary candidacy of Helen Taylor in the 1885 General Election, in addition to how male politicians, the press, suffrage, and anti-suffrage organisations engaged with the idea of women sitting in parliament. Women's supposedly emotional nature played an integral role in how contemporaries approached the subject of women MPs. Indeed, women's emotions, and more specifically their passionate temperament, were often used to discredit their political capabilities and portray women as emotionally, intellectually and physically inferior to men.     

Employment and Training Alternatives for Non‐College Women: Do Redistributive Policies Really Redistribute?

Employment and training programs aimed at women and men without 4‐year college degrees address the needs of the majority of the working population. Noncollege women tend to hold lower‐paying jobs with fewer opportunities for advancement, compared with the opportunities noncollege men have. One type of policy seeks to increase the numbers of women in occupations where men hold most of the positions, or “nontraditional occupations for women” (NTOs). Since many NTOs require a college education, do such policies improve noncollege women's economic self‐efficacy? Is there a link between holding a nontraditional occupation and earning significantly higher wages? This study establishes that, indeed, these programs provide access to jobs that are linked to higher earnings. Such policies redistribute earnings opportunities to noncollege women successfully, and therefore improve the economic efficacy of noncollege women.     

‘The Party Hack,and Tool of the British Government’: T.P. O'Connor,America and Irish Party Resilience at the February 1918 South Armagh By‐Election

The common view of Irish electoral politics for the 1916 to 1918 period is one of major decline for the traditional nationalist representatives, the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), and the meteoric rise of the newly reconstituted Sinn Féin party; culminating in the latter's overwhelming victory at the December 1918 general election. By examining the February 1918 South Armagh by‐election campaign, this article argues that the Irish Parliamentary Party, which won the contest, was much more resilient than is often acknowledged. Through detailed analysis of election pamphlets, newspaper articles, private correspondence and committee minutes, it considers the significance of the grass‐roots strength of both in the form of their local organisations, the role of the Roman catholic church, and the election strategies of the two parties; in particular Sinn Féin's vilification of the IPP member, T.P. O'Connor, who was in America at the time of the contest.     

From Madonna to Marx: Towards a Re‐theorisation of Homelessness

Homeless people, so the story goes, are regularly excluded from spaces of consumption because they offend customers. For a significant portion of homelessness scholarship, such exclusion is the point of departure for subsequent analysis. Others, by examining homelessness within these consumption spaces, theorise that anti‐homeless policies and attitudes emerge because homeless people cannot or have not properly consumed (e.g. nice clothes, housing). This article, conversely, argues that homeless people's “offensiveness” derives from their relation to production (rather than consumption), from their class position. Homeless people's spatial incongruity, specifically, originates in their apparent unproductivity, their violation of the capitalist law of value and its ideological justifications. This historical materialist analysis is not only more revealing, it also positions homeless people as a working class faction in need of political organising rather than an abstract population in need of pitiful charity.     

From Tobacco Revolt to Youth Rebellion: A Social History of the Cigarette in Iran

Focusing on the cultural influence of the cigarette, this paper synthesizes a wide range of evidence to argue that the cigarette was a fundamental primer for Iran's encounter with modernity, especially as understood in the context of western influence. Applying the dramaturgical theories of sociologist Erving Goffman, it is argued that the cigarette is an instantiation of the “sign-equipment” of modernization used to refashion the identity and subjectivity of Iranian men and women. This refashioning has occurred in three distinct periods. In the first period (1860–1930), cigarette smoking was a habit adopted by the Persian elite in an attempt to mediate the encounter with European colonial figures. In the second period (1930–70), cigarettes were leveraged by Iranians who wished to be seen as upwardly mobile. In the final and contemporary period (1970–present), cigarettes have become ubiquitous among the adult population, but smoking itself has become the act of youth rebellion as experimentation occurs at increasingly young ages.     

Metropolitan Colonisation and the Reinvention of Place: Class Polarisation along the Cessnock‐Pokolbin Fault‐Line

This paper examines the emergence of a sharply delineated socioeconomic and sociocultural fault‐line between Cessnock's former coal towns and the immediately adjacent Hunter Valley Wine Country, centred on Pokolbin. We provide evidence that divergent culturally‐related class identities act as mutually reinforcing constraints on reciprocity between job‐deficit former coal towns and the job‐surplus wine country. We relate this to a consideration of time‐space dimensions in the interdependencies between the class and place identities of Cessnock and Pokolbin. These identities have been influenced by metropolitan colonisation, with the markedly differentiated absorption of these two locales into the enlarged metropolitan population‐work‐welfare‐housing‐leisure agglomeration. Further, we propose that the former coal towns and the wine country can both be seen as place‐specific representations of wider class‐related changes within Australian society. Our interpretations are founded on three current research directions: first, the role of culture as a critical intervening variable in class identities and actions; second, the current flux in class formations, most notably the loss of self‐identity and solidarity in the working class and the emergence of a new middle‐class sector dedicated to self‐realisation and self‐fulfilment; and third, recognition of class formation as a geographical process.