"Pictures with a purpose": the birth control debate on the big screen

In the first half of the twentieth century, birth control advocates used the mass media to reframe contraception from a private, secret matter to an acceptable part of life fit for public discussion. Although their campaign began in print, they quickly embraced the more far-reaching medium of film to deliver their message. This article argues that birth control advocates circumvented the Comstock Act in the early decades of the twentieth century by taking up this new medium as part of a long-running strategy to publicize the birth control movement. Their efforts shaped both the public debate on the topic and the development of motion picture censorship.     

"Constrained by Zeal": Women in Mid-NineteenthCentury Nonconformist Churches

In the nineteenth century, women discovered that nonconformist churches provided a third, intermediate sphere between private and public life in which they could find a variety of roles. Churches provided a supportive environment where, as "Angels out of the House" they found an extension of their role in the home. In some cases, however, they clearly moved beyond that to the public sphere. Women taught in Sunday schools, visited the poor and sick, distributed tracts, were instrumental in fundraising, led Methodist class meetings, prayed with other women, and some even preached. Despite the importance of women within Nonconformity, and the significance of religion in many women's lives, few historians of either Nonconformity or women's history have concentrated on women's lives within these churches. This paper seeks to add to our limited knowledge of their activities within the "intermediate sphere" in four denominations.     

Religion and the cultural public sphere: the case of the Finnish liberal intelligentsia during the turmoil of the early twentieth century

The political public sphere is at one and the same time both public, and private and religion operates in both the public and the private spheres in the modern way of life. This article approaches the dynamics between the cultural and the political public sphere from the point of view of religion; how the cultural intelligentsia developed its worldview fuelled with attitudes towards religion in times of political turmoil. The case study, based on the empirical analysis of cultural periodicals and societies around them, concerns the Finnish liberal intelligentsia in the early twentieth century. The first decade of the 1900s was a particularly important period of formation for the Finnish public sphere; the societal turmoil highlighted the importance of cultural periodicals in defining what was important for the national public sphere. The case of religion is an illustrative example of it, particularly from the point of view of the liberal intelligentsia of the era.     

Communities,work and public/private sphere models

Based on a study of women's work in the Canadian community of Kitchener‐Waterloo over a century, this paper identifies community work as conceptually separate from domestic and traded work. Using case examples from the study, the paper analyses three propositions associated with public/private sphere models, drawing upon the theoretical work of Carole Pateman and others. The paper proposes a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between women and work which includes community work as a third sphere. It suggests that re‐theorising the relationship between women and work is necessary in order to overcome the limitations and inherent contradictions of conventional public/private formulations and in order to acknowledge the nature and extent of involvement in civil action.     

Women's policy networks and the Infanticide Act 1922

This article examines the reason for the passage of the 1922 Infanticide Act, arguing that it owes much to the influence and work of women's policy networks. Historians have disagreed as to why the Act was passed with relative suddenness in the early 1920s, at a time when infanticide was generally considered a much less pressing social issue than it had been in Victorian England. Moreover, several Bills brought between 1908 and 1913 proposing that the law on this subject be amended so that women who killed their newborns no longer faced the death penalty had all failed. Importantly, the roles of juror and lay magistrate had become open to women in 1920, following the passage of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919. The public interest generated by a case of newborn murder tried at the Leicester Assizes in 1921 (particularly amongst women's organizations, including the suffragette group the Women's Freedom League) led several leading women with political connections to push for a change in the law. Without the pressure these women could bring to bear on civil servants and politicians, attempts to bring in new legislation on infanticide would have been postponed well into the twentieth century.     

Rooms of Their Own: Public toilets and gendered citizens in a New Zealand city, 1860‐1940

Differences in the provision of public toilets for men and women point to the gendering of citizens. In the later nineteenth century, provision of public toilets in the city of Dunedin centered on the management of male bodies as the meaning of 'public decency' was transformed, while women were catered for as consumers. By the beginning of the twentieth century, when provision for women became a public issue, it was debated in terms of women's special character as citizens. The bodily and spatial characteristics of public and private were renegotiated around this issue: as women became more public, toilets became more private. This article draws on debates about the sexed and gendered body in public space, maternal citizenship, the civilising and modernising of landscapes and bodies, and shifting conceptions of privacy and public.     

Salesclerks, sexual danger, and national identity in Egypt, 1920s-1950s

This article investigates change and continuity in anxieties about shopping during the first half of the twentieth century in Egypt to argue that department stores and their salesclerks became critical sites for enacting and challenging new notions of sexuality and citizenship. Retail innovations, such as commission pay, display, free entry, and large commercial staffs, became understood as sexual and moral problems because department stores blurred the boundaries between classes and were public spaces where unrelated men and women could mix. These concerns about sexuality in the 1920s were recycled and amplified in the late 1940s and early 1950s when salesclerks again came under scrutiny during debates over citizenship and ethnicity. I argue that the particular way this latter debate was barnacled by the concerns of the 1920s helped to delineate the broader society's reaction to the challenges of defining Egyptian nationality.     

Vessels of progressivism? Tasmanian state girls and eugenics, 1900-1940

In the early twentieth century the notion of state children as a "burden on the state", born of a liberal bourgeois philanthropic tradition, was gradually replaced in Tasmania by a modernising notion of intervention in the name of national efficiency. Eugenic principles can be shown to have influenced child welfare ideas and laws, notably the Tasmanian Mental Deficiency Act (1920). However, despite public debate and legislative changes, the bureaucrats in charge of state children maintained their liberal philanthropic practices. In many cases the Children of the State Department clashed with the Mental Deficiency Board. State direction of children was also frustrated by children's agency. Girls were the target of many eugenicist (and liberal evangelical) reforms, but they resisted attempts to control their sexuality and make them "useful". In Tasmania, the modernising impetus of progressive arguments was offset by bureaucratic stasis, and the agency of the subjects.     

Fashioning the American Man: The Arrow Collar Man, 1907–1931

This essay is about the Arrow Man, one of the most successful advertising images in early twentieth–century America, and a visual representation of the New Man. The Arrow Man was created by a noted artist, J. C. Leyendecker, to sell the Arrow collar, a new version of detachable collars, a wardrobe staple for most US men and all but working–class men in Britain and Europe since the 1840s. The Arrow Man’s story is part of the transformations in masculine ideals and physical appearance, heightened by the new visual and consumer culture. He carried messages of men’s self–management of appearance and public performance from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, where it changed from a mark of European gentility into that of the typically American white–collar man. His story is part of fundamental shifts in the US: new occupational and social class configurations and emerging American popular culture.     

Women's and Children's Quarters in Golden Gate Park,San Francisco

This paper explores the mythic domesticity encoded in the Children's Quarter in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. The play area, opened in 1888, represented a new genre of gender-specific public space developed in urban parks in the late nineteenth century. In welcoming women to the public domain of the urban park, gendered spaces such as the Children's Quarter signified a complex response to changing class and gender identities in the nineteenth-century city. Imposing a domestic structure on women's public presence, the Children's Quarter modeled a middle-class domestic ideal, affirming women's essential association with the private sphere even as it welcomed them to the public sphere of the urban park.     

Women and the Nationalisation of Literature: Text and Image as Parallel Narratives with Multiplied Meaning in a Hindi Periodical (1927–1941)

The early twentieth century is a period in colonial Indian history marked, among other things, by nationalist explorations of what was commonly described as the upper middle‐class, Hindu high caste ‘woman's question’. In the process, gender roles and responsibilities in public and private spheres were being contemplated and negotiated in oral and written forms. This essay explores the text‐image combinations and relationships in a mainstream Hindi literary periodical published in North India in the 1930s. It focuses specifically on the gendered visual narrative that emerged from this periodical's engagement with the role of women in the Hindi public and private spheres. It argues that through the combination of text and image, the reader of the Hindi periodical Sudha was presented with verbal and visual messages that were deeply embedded in debates on literary and cultural nationalism.     

The influence of betterment discourses on Canadian Aboriginal peoples in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Based on government archival sources, fieldwork and the historical perspectives, experiences and oral histories of Aboriginal peoples, this paper argues that late nineteenth and early twentieth century Indian policy, and more specifically the File Hills farm colony, was deeply influenced by betterment discourses. The presumption of this discourse was that Aboriginal peoples, who clearly were not vanishing as promised, could be transformed into something approaching white settlers by reshaping, controlling, and managing their environments, both private and public, and by altering their genetics and morals. While the betterment discourse and the File Hills colony have each been the focus of research, no one to our knowledge has focused on the importance of betterment thought in the establishment and application of Indian policy and its significance for the File Hills colony.     

Democratization and museum policy in South Korea

ABSTRACT

This article examines the two distinct historical policy paths taken by the South Korean government in the late twentieth century towards the democratization of museums. One was based on the creation of a museological public sphere as an extension of the political democratization movement of the 1980s. This demonstrated the potential to become a valuable component of the wider incipient national public sphere within which civic subjects could discuss their individual and collective historical memories. However, despite this potential, a museological public sphere failed to influence the general trajectory of national policy regarding the democratization of museums that had been in development since the early 1980s. This other policy path towards cultural democratization was triggered by the award of the Seoul Olympics in 1981. It was based on public participation and entitled the ‘cultural Olympics’. An important strategy of the cultural Olympics was the construction of a new institutional infrastructure to expand the public right to enjoy culture. This path facilitated an increasing entanglement with neoliberalism in 1990s. Finally, the 1997 IMF crisis furthered the association between a superficial idea of democratization through institutional expansion and the practices of neoliberalism, a trend which continues within South Korean museum policy today.     

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.     

试论《语丝》时期江绍原的“天癸观”研究

在民俗学研究中国化的早期阶段,江绍原是最先引进国外人类学方法系统研究中国礼俗迷信的拓荒者,他对中国人“天癸观”的研究特别引人注目。当时处于民俗学运动中心的江绍原在成为《语丝》周刊主要撰稿人之后,开始扩大范围征集有关月经的礼俗迷信材料,取得了一定的成绩。尽管后来他计划写作的《血与天癸》不幸夭折,但他在月经礼俗迷信研究方面的大胆尝试具有深远的学术影响。     

Public Domesticity during the Indian Reform Era; or,Mrs. Jackson is induced to go to Washington

White middle-class American women were heavily involved in lobbying for and implementing Indian reform legislation during the late nineteenth century. The General Allotment Act mandated the break-up of reservations and imposed upon Native peoples the twinned institutions of private property and male-headed families in the hopes that they would assimilate to American 'civilisation'. White women thus appeared to be imposing their own gender norms on others as they sought to inculcate the characteristics Native people would need for American citizenship. They negotiated this paradox of imposing classed, gendered and racialised hierarchies in the name of equality through spatially articulating hierarchies of race, class and gender. Rather than appeal to the conventional liberal dichotomy of public and private, the author reads these activists as authorising their political activity through the dualism of civilised and savage. The latter spaces produced oppression, which was understood as the inability to participate in politics as much as exclusion from participation in politics. It was the maternal duty of white middle-class women to civilise people, thus delivering them from oppression, through transforming the spaces in which they lived.     

Caboonbah: The Archaeology of a Middle Class Queensland Pastoral Family

Pastoralism was the mainstay of the developing economy of Queensland. The men and women who owned the pastoral properties were mainly from upper and middle class English and Scottish families. One such family, the Somersets, occupied Caboonbah, a pastoral property in the Brisbane Valley of Queensland in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Excavation of the rubbish gully associated with the homestead provided material evidence of how this family adhered to the tenets of middle class family life while living in an isolated rural area and contending with the fluctuating fortunes of life on the land.     

"The very model of modern urban decay": outsiders' narratives of industry and urban decline in Gary, Indiana

In the eyes of many, the steel city of Gary, Indiana, entered a period of decline in the middle of the twentieth century. The once great city was seemingly racked by job loss, crime, racial division, or moral decay. Which of these caused the decline of the city depended upon the perspective of the story's teller. Each narrative of decline contained a different moment where the city went wrong and it began to decay. For some it was the moral decay of the 1950s, for others it was the rise of black power and politics in the 1960s, for still others it was the white backlash against civil rights in the 1970s. Some saw a microcosm of America, some saw a dangerous cauldron of race and ethnicity. The source of decline and the origins of the urban crisis were largely in the eye of the beholder. The stories people chose to tell about Gary mattered because for much of the twentieth century, Gary was at the center of American narratives about industrialism. These were outsider narratives of decline read onto the Indiana steel city because Gary represented larger debates. People read onto Gary their changing expectations and anxieties about industry and industrial spaces. This article traces the changing attitudes outsiders held toward Gary from the middle of the twentieth century through the period of deindustrialization at the end of the century and examines American narratives about deindustrialization and urban decline.     

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.