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.     

Womanliness in the Slums: A Free Kindergarten in Early Twentieth‐Century Edinburgh

This paper considers the intersection of Spiritual Motherhood, early childhood education and child welfare in early twentieth‐century Edinburgh. Its focus is St Saviour's Child Garden (SSCG), which opened in the Canongate, in November 1906, part of the Free Kindergarten movement that emerged in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century. The paper focuses on the SSCG's founder Lileen Hardy, in order to trace the development of this new approach to child welfare and women's work in Britain. It discusses her training at the Sesame House for Home‐Life Training in London, her move to Edinburgh, and the network of predominantly women reformers, whose interests ranged from urban reform to medical welfare, she found there. It shows how this network facilitated the founding of the SSCG and discusses the form it took and Hardy's implementation of a modified form of Froebelian praxis. In so doing its concern is to show how Free Kindergarten forms part of a wider history of social welfare and urban reform as well as to the history of early childhood education, and to move attention away from the men usually associated with innovations in Scottish social reform like Patrick Geddes, and onto a group of women who created a women and child‐centred proto‐Welfare State in pre‐First World War Edinburgh.     

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.     

The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth‐Century Australia

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life‐worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life‐trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.     

A Grocer's Tale: Gender,Family and Class in Early Nineteenth‐Century Manchester

This article examines the diary of George Heywood, a journeyman grocer turned small shopkeeper, who moved to Manchester from Huddersfield in 1809. Heywood's modest lifetime ambitions were to own a grocery shop and find a companionable wife. As a lower‐middle‐class man of humble means and limited ambitions, Heywood does not fit the heroic mould of those working‐class diarists and autobiographers of the nineteenth century that have more readily captured historians’ attention. Yet it is precisely this ‘ordinariness’ that makes Heywood's journal important. His smaller‐than‐life adventures are the very stuff of lower‐middle‐class life, and reveal something of a petit‐bourgeois world from which historians and social commentators have traditionally shied away. His diary allows us to glimpse one form of masculine identity that both fits with and complicates our notions of ‘bourgeois’ masculinity in this period.     

The Proliferation of Monism to the East and the Making of the Religion of the Future in Early Twentieth‐Century Korea

This study illuminates the transnational proliferation of monism, a worldview that drew on evolutionary theory to unify both science and religion and ultimately replace traditional religions. Particular attention is paid to how monism was transmitted from Germany via Japan to Korea in the early twentieth century, and how this impacted local endeavours to imagine a religion of the future. A prominent figure in this trajectory was the religious thinker Yi Tonhwa (1884–1950) who endeavoured to use the tenets of monism to transform the Ch’?ndogyo, “Religion of the Heavenly Way,” one of the most prominent religions in Korea at the time, into a universal religion of the future. The result was among the closest to a monist religion the world had seen, although the efforts to align the Ch’?ndogyo with modern scientific thought also deprived the religion of native elements. This would have significant repercussions for the religion as the scientific optimism that had sustained the global monist movement faded away after 1945.     

The Gender of Grace: Impotence,Servitude, and Manliness in the Fifth‐Century West

This essay attempts to stage an encounter between post‐Foucauldian approaches to masculinity in the ancient world on the one hand, and the reading of Augustine of Hippo's idea of Original Sin as a disjunction of the will, put forward in Robert Markus's Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine. Emphasis is placed on Book XIV of the City of God, where Augustine emblematises the result of Original Sin not –pace Foucault – through an image of irrepressible lust, but rather through that of the impotent male, humiliated by his inability to embody his desire.     

Producing Privatization: Re‐articulating Race,Gender, Class and Space

Abstract: This article combines insights into the mutually constituting nature of gender, race, class and space with Marxist analyses that interrogate how social relations both produce and are constrained by institutions to explore waste management privatization in Johannesburg. It argues that the crystallization of racialized, gendered inequalities within bargaining institutions underpinned financial motivations for privatization. The form of privatization varied across the city due to the ways in which the class of the area serviced articulated with the racialization and gendering of capital and labour in these spaces. An array of material conditions and ideologies informed these processes in which workers were active, although not necessarily progressive agents. Focusing on how privatization is produced through spatialized and institutionalized social relations illuminates avenues for struggle hidden from view in both aspatial, ideal‐type feminist political economy analyses and geographic analyses of privatization inattentive to the mutually constituting nature of gender, race and class.