‘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.     

Irish Domestic Servants, ‘Biddy’ and Rebellion in the American Home, 1850–1900

This essay looks at the role that Anglo‐American women played in governing their Irish immigrant domestic servants and at the racial and gendered meanings that were attached to servitude. In the second half of the nineteenth century, female Irish Catholic immigrants predominated in domestic service employment in the north‐eastern United States. Newspaper and magazine articles portrayed the home as a site of conflict where Protestant, middle‐class families clashed with Irish Catholic ‘peasant’ girls newly arrived in the US. Employers depicted ‘Bridget’ or ‘Biddy’, the collective nickname given to Irish domestic servants, as insubordinate, unrefined and prone to violent outbursts. While reliant on domestic service for wages, female Irish immigrants understood that service represented racialised labour in the United States and was viewed as an occupation befitting non‐white populations.     

The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race,Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth‐Century American Medicine

Accounts of the easy, painless childbearing of ‘primitive’ non‐white women in comparison to their ‘civilised’ white counterparts were ubiquitous in early modern travel literature. In the nineteenth‐century United States, such narratives were increasingly taken up in medical and scientific literature, catalysing the production of new forms of knowledge about race and bodies. This article analyses several key medico‐scientific theories produced to explain racialised parturient pain and argues that this knowledge dynamically interrelated with both racial ideas and racial practice in nineteenth‐century society. The shifting character of this knowledge implicated changing ways of defining race, including the anchoring of racial identity in the physical body; the role of the physician as an arbiter of racial truth; and the imbrication of gender in racial classifications. Moreover, knowledge produced to explain racialised parturient pain – for instance, about race‐specific sensory physiology, muscular mechanics and skeletal anatomy – circulated within numerous social institutions, among them slavery; gynaecologic and obstetric care; medical experimentation; anti‐abortion crusades invoking the spectre of ‘race suicide’; and eugenic projects. In this way, medical discourse on the gendered body of the parturient was enrolled in the changing articulation of race across the nineteenth century.     

Women,Gender and Migration along a Mediterranean Frontier: Pre‐Colonial Tunisia,c.1815–1870

This paper investigates gendered mechanisms for regulating migrants and migration in a pre‐colonial Muslim state, Tunisia, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the eve of colonialism. Trans‐Mediterranean migration to, and permanent settlement in, nineteenth‐century Tunis, the capital city, constituted a major stimulus for political, cultural and social transformations that endured into the colonial period. Employing diverse documentation, the case study analyses this Mediterranean migratory current of ordinary women and men to test the theoretical literature based primarily on trans‐Atlantic movements, which has emphasised the ‘diversity of social positioning’ for women migrants. The paper argues that for pre‐colonial Tunisia, a state that was both an Ottoman province and a part of the larger Mediterranean world, the system of diplomatic protection represented a critical form of positioning. Moreover, Mediterranean states, both European and Muslim, had a long tradition of controlling the movements of women in port cities. Two distinct historical moments in the settlement of women from the Mediterranean islands in pre‐colonial Tunisia are compared. This approach not only enables an assessment of whether women's movements across international borders can attenuate, if only momentarily, patriarchal authority, but also encourages reflection on how gender explains historical variations in global migratory displacements as well as to what extent colonialism serves as an satisfactory explanatory framework for the gendering of communal boundaries.     

Unattached and Unhinged: The Spinster and the Psychiatrist in Liberal Italy, 1860–1922

This article explores the role nineteenth‐century Italian psychiatric sciences played in shaping attitudes towards adult women who never married. Initially in post‐unification Italy unmarried women were largely invisible, while the bachelor appeared to threaten the newly formed nation's fragile political and social stability. In the last decades of the nineteenth century fears about the bachelor faded, replaced by growing concerns about the social dangers posed by the ‘spinster’. Drawing on writings from psychiatrists, anthropologists, sociologists, on patient records from psychiatric asylums as well as popular literature, this article traces the way psychiatric practice and theories transformed the image of the unmarried single woman.     

Instantiating Vision at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary

This article examines the how the educational ideals of Mary Lyon, founder of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, were instantiated in the built environment of the seminary she founded in the early nineteenth century. It is an exploration of how Lyon's vision of place contributed to the creation and transformation of gendered lives for middle‐ and lower‐class women from rural New England. While working within the restraints of a male‐dominated social and economic climate, Lyon both conforms to and resists the accepted gender roles that expected women to be subservient and obedient. Intent on changing the nature of women's educational and professional lives, Lyon refashioned notions of what it meant to be dependent yet dedicated to developing a life of the mind. Specific attention is given to how the built environment of the seminary served to further inculcate Lyon's belief in order, routine, and familial harmony all in the service of educating young women in preparation for both domestic and professional lives.     

Labour's True Man: Organised Workingmen and the Language of Manliness in the USA, 1827–1877

This essay examines the language of manliness that both marked and shaped nineteenth‐century mainstream labour activism during a formative period of craft bastardisation, class formation, and movement building. It sketches the logic and meanings of manliness embedded in labour newspapers, journals, addresses, and trade‐union proceedings from the period. The analysis recovers a persistent, complex, and problematic racialised and gendered/classed language central to skilled white workingmen's collective self‐identification. Assimilationist in thrust, it beckoned workingmen to an ambivalent double identity defined as much by manly character as by class characteristics. Thus it both facilitated and limited labour activism and class consciousness.     

Holy Weddings,Unholy Marriages: Christian Spouses and Domestic Discords in Early Colonial Lesotho, 1870–1900

In the Lesotho Archives in the capital Maseru, lies unreferenced, scattered files containing testimonies of Christianised BaSotho couples embroiled in marital litigations in the last third of the nineteenth century. Reading these testimonies in relation to one another, and engaging in an in‐depth qualitative examinations of the narratives embedded in the texts offers a rare opportunity to explore the texture of conjugal relationships among Christianised spouses in this period. The compelling picture that emerges is one of extreme instability of Christian marriages. We behold here conjugal lives teeming with conflicts and intrigue. Adultery accusations and spousal violence punctuated the conjugal lives of these spouses in unexpected intensity. This study concludes that after over half a century of missionising the BaSotho, evangelical missionaries seemingly had had little impact on the texture of BaSotho conjugal relations. The rampant “adultery” and spousal abuse that seemingly plagued these Christian spouses were expressions of pre‐Christian patterns that were manifestations of gendered conflicts.     

‘The land and its people’: reflections on artistic identification in an age of nations and nationalism

From the late eighteenth century onwards, increasing numbers of visual artists came to identify with their nations and with the homeland and its people. This development was strongly influenced by growing national cultural support and regulation of the arts by academies, art schools, museums and art markets in Western Europe. On a subjective level, the Rousseauan movement of a ‘return to Nature’, Herder's espousal of vernacular cultural self‐expression and, above all, the widespread Romantic cult of authenticity, were potent influences on the inner self‐identification of visual artists after 1800, and were manifested in the novel importance accorded to landscape and rural genre painting in Western Europe. Here I consider the role of national sentiment, the ‘return to Nature’ and the cult of authenticity, first in landscape paintings by Paul Sandby, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable in early nineteenth‐century Britain, and then in the rural genre paintings of Jean‐Francois Millet and Jules Breton in nineteenth‐century France and Josef Israels, Anton Mauve and Vincent Van Gogh in the later nineteenth‐century Netherlands. Their work reveals how nineteenth‐century visual artists became inwardly identified with the ‘land and its people’, and how they in turn contributed, especially through prints and engravings, to the dissemination of national imagery and a cultural nationalism.     

„Fremde Körperwelten”︁. Russische Anthropologie und Medizin im kolonialen Diskurs des ausgehenden Zarenreiches

?Exotic Bodies”?: Russian Anthropology and Medicine in the Colonial Discours of Late Imperial Russia. In the nineteenth century Russian anthropologists adopted Western theories on the biological superiority of the white man in order to justify Russian colonization at the Asiatic periphery. After the Great Reforms the imperial process of acculturation was discussed in the context of modernization that also touched the institutionalization of colonial medicine. Whereas Russian armchair anthropologists were operating with racial idioms, physicians as practitioners on the colonial spot were not receptive to the ideology of “white man's burden”. From experience with the socioeconomic backwardness of Russia's Asiatic periphery physicians stood up for the vital rights of the indigenous population in the colonial Public Health. With deep respect for indigenous medicine Russian physicians were not advocates of Russian colonial expansion and racial discrimination that made them different to their Western colleagues. On the basis of Russian nineteenth century medical literature and Siberian archival sources this paper outlines the critical reflections of Russian physicians on Tsarist colonialism     

‘The Gospel of Health’: American Missionaries and the Transformation of Ottoman/Turkish Women's Bodies, 1890–1932

This article explores an overlooked aspect of American missionary modernisation efforts in the late Ottoman Empire: the attempted transformation of women's bodies. By the late nineteenth century, American missionary women and Ottoman government officials both viewed Ottoman women's bodies as a visible reflection of the empire's weaknesses, yet also as central to its survival and revival. The transformation of women's bodies from ‘uncontrolled’ to ‘robust’, they believed, was a prerequisite for a modern society. Through a close reading of missionary reports, correspondences and student memoirs, this study traces the development of physical education, hygiene and recreational sports at the missionary‐run American College for Girls (ACG) in Istanbul. Over time, the female teachers at the ACG partnered and collaborated with male Ottoman/Turkish government officials to implement these courses at girls’ schools across the region. While the government endorsed physical education as key to national progress and regeneration, the ACG educators framed it as a mode of international, feminist self‐empowerment. In reality, the missionaries continued to assert their own Western superiority and advance Orientalist notions through the education courses. By highlighting the shifts in women's body ideals, curricular development and nationalist rhetoric, I argue that women's bodies must be studied as a crucial site of missionary and republican reform.     

Unearthing Women's Anti‐Mining Activism in the Andes: Pachamama and the “Mad Old Women”

Women play an important role in social activism challenging the expansion of extractive industries across Latin America. In arguing that this involvement has been largely unrecognised, this paper explores Andean Peruvian and Ecuadorian women's accounts of their activism and the particular gendered narratives that the women deploy in explaining and legitimising this activism. These discussions contribute to understanding the patterning of grassroots activism and making visible the gendered micro‐politics of resistance and struggle around natural resource use, as well as to understanding the gendered and strategic ways in which women contest dominant discourses of development.     

‘Writing’ Black Womanhood in the Early Cuban Republic, 1904–16

This article explores the intersection of race, class and womanhood during the early years of the Cuban Republic. It focuses on the writings of elite women who published in the black press between 1904 and 1916. While legal reforms and the expansion of the educational system facilitated new gender expectations, racial ideologies positioned upper‐class white women as the standard of ideal womanhood. I argue that elite women of African descent employed modernising gender norms in order to counter anti‐black racism and to affirm their identification with upper‐class whites. In particular, they published articles that promoted the dominant values regarding marriage, education and public comportment. They disparaged unmarried unions and the practice of African cultural traditions among the labouring poor. Elite black women's writings drew from the model of the enlightened caretaker also to engage broader debates regarding feminism and black civic unity. Yet their emphasis on ideals that promoted white superiority helped reinforce the anti‐black tenets of Cuban citizenship they hoped to undermine. By analysing elite black women's articles, poetry and letters, the article demonstrates the importance of understanding how women of African descent forged an intellectual trajectory, and thus contributes to the historiography of gendered racial ideologies in Latin America and the Caribbean.     

The significance of maternalism in the evolution of fromm's social thought1

During his years as a member of the Frankfurt School, Erich Fromm developed a strong interest in the idea that there were distinctive male and female character orientations. Drawing on the positive evaluation of matriarchy made in the nineteenth century by the Swiss anthropologist J. J. Bachofen, Fromm argued that a “matricentric” psychic structure was more conducive to socialism than the patricentric structure which had predominated in capitalism. His interest in maternalism and his opposition to patriarchy played an important part in his rejection of Freud's theory of drives and in the development of a humanistic ethics in which love plays a central part. The idea of a gendered humanism is central to Fromm's social thought, although there is a danger that the over‐emphasis of sex‐based character differences unintentionally re‐opens the danger of the kind of sexual stereotyping which he resolutely opposed.     

Overcoming ‘Simply Being’: Straight Sex,Masculinity and Physical Culture in Modern Egypt

This article considers the specific deployment of gender and sexuality in interwar Egypt against the general backdrop of a universalising colonial modernity, which since around the middle of the nineteenth century aimed at producing a repeatable subject everywhere. It examines the magazine Physical Culture as an artefact of that colonial modernity and as a watermark of an ineffable style of performing gender and sexuality – a culmination of nearly five decades of historicising Egypt and of exercising Egyptians. That the cultivation of healthy and desirable bodies was constrained by Egypt's asymmetrical location in a global economic and political order constituted by colonialism was a well‐established fact of social life by the end of the 1920s; consequently, the problem of the modern subject in Egypt was posed in terms that were not exclusively nationalist and examined in terms that were keenly attuned to circulations of global cultural forms and discursive practices. In the resulting process of subject formation, a gendered and sexualised other was also produced, as a de‐formation, wherein the terms of its prior being would no longer be intelligible.     

Views and Commentaries: What Difference Does Feminist Theory Make?

This discussion explores what difference a feminist perspective makes in our understandings of the past in two ways. The first section examines to what extent feminist research questions were asked in the preceding papers by Lu Ann De Cunzo, Eleanor Casella, and Susan Piddock. The second section shows what difference feminist theory has made in asking new questions that have produced new gendered understandings of the global historical context of these papers. As a whole, this discussion shows how feminist theoretical approaches change our understanding of the lives of historic women and men in nineteenth century reform institutions within their larger gendered cultural context. While the introduction to this volume presents the broader ungendered historical context, this discussion focusses on the gendered cultural context that was foundational to the gender relationships embodied in the arrangement of architectural spaces and material culture at the sites in the preceding three papers.     

“sche hungryd ryth sor aftyr Goddys word”: Female Piety and the Legacy of the Pastoral Programme in the Late Medieval English Sermons of Bodleian Library MS Greaves 54

The pastoral programme guiding the content of most Middle English sermons had a gendered side effect: it encouraged treating female parishioners as individual souls rather than emphasising the subordinate status of women. A close study of Bodleian Library MS Greaves 54, a fifteenth‐century pastoral manual containing two sequences of Middle English sermons, shows how these sermons reached out to women through gender‐inclusive language, pastoral directives that regarded women as distinct from men, and didactic narratives that both encouraged female participation in devotional activities as well as highlighting women as exemplars for all Christians. Thus Greaves 54 models how Middle English sermons could have appealed to ordinary women and affected their piety, even to the extent of encouraging the extreme devotional behaviour of Margery Kempe.     

“And They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love”: Exploring the Role of Christian Love on Maloga Mission, 1874–1888

This article investigates the power, and the politics, of Christian love on the Australian settler‐colonial frontier through the case study of two evangelical missionaries, Daniel and Janet Matthews, during their time at Maloga Mission (a non‐denominational mission to the Aboriginal people of the Murray River which they founded on its northern banks in 1874). Whether protested in private missives, professed in public tracts, or proclaimed to their assembled audiences, Christian love played a vital role in the both the secular justification, and the sacred sanctification, of the Matthews' mission. Yet in practice, the operation of this emotion was complex. Through an exploration of the role of Christian love in the life of Maloga mission and its missionaries, this article will show how the intricacies of its formulation, expression, reception, and reciprocation make this a crucial if often overlooked concept for the study of mission history, and specifically, in this case, the study of nineteenth‐century settler‐colonial missions.     

Proving One's Manliness: Masculine Self‐perceptions of Austrian Deserters in the Second World War

While important work has been produced on discourses of masculinity and the normative masculine ideals in nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Europe we know very little about the actual experiences and self‐images of individual men. This article, largely based on oral history interviews with former deserters, analyses the gendered identities of Austrian men who were recruited to serve in the Wehrmacht and who later deserted. Deserters were brutally persecuted in the Third Reich and denounced as ‘traitors’ and ‘cowards’. The glorification of martial masculinity in Nazi Germany played a crucial role in the defamation of deserters, whose manliness was called into question. Based on Connell's theory of hegemonic masculinity, the article aims to establish the actual influence of dominant ideals of masculinity. It investigates how these deserters perceived themselves as men and how they negotiated their gendered identities in interaction with their surroundings. The analysis reveals the considerable influence of the hegemonic ideal of ‘hard’ masculinity, which was far greater than the impact of the rather short‐lived ideal of martial masculinity. But it also demonstrates the contradictory nature of gendered identities and gives valuable insights into the selective appropriation of masculine values.