The Commonwealth and the Oath of Allegiance Crisis: A Study in Inter-War Commonwealth Relations

Recent historical treatment of Anglo-Irish relations in the 1930s has overlooked the complex nature of the legal disagreements between the two countries during that period. This article provides an account of some of the fundamental points of legal disagreement between the countries. It explains how differences of opinion as to the structure of intra-commonwealth constitutional relations led to conflict between the British government and that of the Irish Free State, with particular reference to the oath of allegiance crisis. It considers how other commonwealth countries saw these points of conflict. It concludes with a re-appraisal of the roles of Lord Hailsham and de Valera in Anglo-Irish relations, as examples of differing attitudes towards the commonwealth relationship.     

Muscular Catholicism: Nationalism,Masculinity and Gaelic Team Sports, 1884–1916

This article examines the highly gendered nature of the games of hurling and Gaelic football as propagated by the Gaelic Athletic Association from 1884 to 1916 and the relationship of these games to conceptions of nationalism, the body, anti-colonialism, and memories of the Great Famine. Through the discourses surrounding these games, and other facets of the Irish renaissance, a nationalist conception of Irish masculinity emerged which distinguished Irish men from English men, Irish boys and Irish women. In this moment of self-definition, nationalist goals were sought not in parliament or on the battlefield but on the playing fields.     

Battle and Siege Maps of Elizabethan Ireland: Blueprints for Archaeologists?

Abstract

During the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), the English Crown engaged in a series of bloody wars in Ireland. Principally fought against local Gaelic Irish and Anglo-Irish lords, these conflicts paved the way for the plantation and colonisation of the late 16th and 17th centuries. As the fighting raged, surveyors, cartographers and engineers produced maps of key locations throughout the country. These were created principally to aid the military effort, but were also designed to provide interested parties in England with a visual reference for events.

This paper will examine one form of this map production, namely the numerous battle and siege maps drawn throughout the period. It will explore the potential accuracy of the depictions, and suggest methods for correctly 'reading' these primary documents. The importance of critically examining the maps against other primary sources and the topographical landscape will be discussed, suggesting a methodology for how this resource can be utilised by conflict archaeologists. In addition, it will demonstrate through a number of examples how these research techniques can be successfully applied.     

‘I arranged my own marriage': arranged marriages and post-colonial feminism

This article looks at the practice of arranged marriage among women of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin resident in Britain. It examines the conflation of arranged marriages with forced marriages and the assumption that arranged marriages are examples of cultural practices that thwart individual agency. Drawing upon original empirical data, this article will argue that in the practice of arranged marriage, some South Asian women are able to exercise agency while choosing their marriage partner. They adapt traditional arranged marriage practices to navigate their way around strict cultural expectations and to negotiate with their family members the choice of a match that is favourable for them. It provides a corrective account of arranged marriages by challenging the stereotype of the ‘oppressed third world women' and their experiences of such marriages. The article will do this by employing the idea of post-colonial feminism and by highlighting two long-standing issues in feminist debates: the idea of agency and the conception and role of power in the struggle for women's rights. It will make a case for a post-colonial approach to feminism as one way of reconciling feminism with the politics of multiculturalism.     

Embracing the Language of Human Rights: International Women's Organisations,Feminism and Campaigns Against the Marriage Bar,c.1919–1960

This article considers four international women's organisations – the International Council of Women, the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, the International Federation of University Women and the Open Door International – and their campaigns for the right of married women to undertake paid work. It examines how each organisation adopted and engaged with the language of human rights in the late 1920s and 1930s. It is argued that after 1948, precisely because of its formal adoption by the UN, the language of human rights became less usable as a way to make the point that women still faced inequalities, and so other framings became more significant. This article contributes to historiographies on international women's organisations, offers a detailed discussion of their activism against the marriage bar, and challenges the conventional chronology of the concept and language of human rights.     

Coming of Age: Law,Sex and Childhood in Late Colonial India

This article revisits child‐marriage legislation in colonial India between 1891 and 1929 to re‐envision the ‘child’ as a subject constituted by laws governing sex, rather than as an a priori object requiring protection from patriarchal sexual norms. Focusing on the digital construction of the child in the twentieth century, this essay introduces a new angle from which to examine recent conclusions regarding child‐marriage reform in India. By drawing attention to an understudied figure, this article demonstrates the ways in which the problem of the child might transform understandings of the nation and its women; the universe of rights and the location of culture and the place of age as number in the formulation of legal subjectivities, colonial governmentality and humanitarian accounting in late colonial India.     

Changes in the Foot Binding Culture: The Female Body and Politics in Regions Governed by the Communist Party of China during the Anti-Japanese War

Since 1949, Chinese mainland historians and creators in film and television, novels, and reportage have continued to shape the heroic image of female groups in the base areas of the Communist Party of China (CPC) during the Anti-Japanese War. They participated in production, women’s mobilization, and reconstruction of the rural political order “like men.” They pursued the equality between men and women, marked by freedom of marriage, and also participated in regional guerrilla warfare to combat the Japanese puppet army “as men.” However, in the remote villages of north China at the end of the Qing dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, it was not common for women to unbind their feet. In wartime, most women over twenty years of age were forever left with the “three-inch golden lotus” (sancun jinlian) feet. The damage of the war accelerated their acceptance of the CPC’s emancipation concepts and policies and presented them with an opportunity to actively implement them. The experience of survival drastically changed traditional aesthetics, ideas, and customs related to women. Physical and psychological changes occurred as a result of the war; women began to go out of their homes to participate in the work of the Women’s Salvation Association and the Youth Salvation Association, and a group of women achieved marriage equality between men and women in the form of “divorce her husband” (qi xiu fu). Due to pressure, women carried more physical and mental responsibilities, faced insufficient advocacy for their rights, and the aesthetics and mentality of womanhood underwent change.     

Notes,Bibliographies, and Documents

John Cudahy, Eamon de Valera, and the Anglo-Irish Negotiations in 1938: The Secret Dispatches to Washington; Raymond J. Raymond     

Problematic Conjugations: Women’s Agency,Marriage and Domestic Violence in Indonesia

Abstract:

This paper examines women’s experience of domestic violence within marriage in Makassar, South Sulawesi. It analyses the meaning of marriage for men and women, the roles of men and women within marriage, shifts in marriage practices – particularly the shift from arranged to “love” marriage – and unequal gender positions within marriage. We discuss some salient issues in the “margins of marriage” in Indonesia: polygyny and constructions of masculinity that condone the practice of polygyny/affairs, and attitudes towards divorce, particularly for women. We then examine women’s perception of the causes and triggers of domestic violence as revealed by fieldwork data, using the lens of women’s agency. Our findings are that women perceive that their expressions of agency – for instance in challenging men’s authority, moral righteousness and adequacy as breadwinners – are the most common triggers for male violence within marriage. Finally, we discuss the difficulty for women of escaping domestic violence, thereby getting some purchase on the relative capacity of women to resist, deflect or deal with the violence.     

‘Partner in his Calamities’: Pastors' Wives,Married Nuns and the Experience of Clerical Marriage in the Early German Reformation

This essay examines what factors led the first clerical wives to marry former Catholic clergy and nuns to marry in the first decade of the Reformation in Germany and seeks to explain the difference that social class, geography and gender made in those decisions. In contrast to the later Reformation, when pastors married same or higher social status women, the majority of women who married former priests and monks during the 1520s were often lower or, in the case of nuns, significantly higher social status than their husbands. Women married clergy for a variety of reasons that were counterintuitive to typical marital strategies for economic security and social networking, since clergy had neither in the 1520s. While sharing a common experience, clerical wives' reasons for marriage to a pastor varied greatly depending on class, local decision about the Reformation and numerous personal factors. Using a variety of sources including letters, civic records, court testimony and published pamphlets, this article demonstrates that these women did exhibit a limited agency that ultimately helped shape larger social and political acceptance of clerical marriage.     

Reasons for leaving: The effect of conflict on English landholding in late thirteenth-century Leinster

In 1297 a parliament was convened at Dublin one of the main purposes of which was to defend more effectively the borders of the English lordship of Ireland. The conquest of Ireland had never been complete. Several of the pre-conquest kingdoms survived beyond the effective edge of the English lordship and elsewhere the actions of conquistador and settler had pushed the native Irish up into the hills. Consequently, the settler population in many parts of Ireland lived in close proximity to areas under Gaelic control. This was not a particular problem in the eastern province of Leinster until the 1270s when the Irish of the Wicklow mountains began to raid settler manors. It has recently been suggested that the effects of this ‘Gaelic revival’ and the legislation passed at the Dublin parliament to deal with its effects led several English lords to cut their landholding ties with Ireland. This article questions how important a factor conflict actually was in the decision-making processes of such English lords by examining their withdrawal from Ireland in a wider context. It concludes by pointing out that withdrawals from a landholding community were not necessarily negative in their effect or cause.     

The changing relationship between education and marriage in the United States, 1940-2000

In 1940, when gender specialization was high, there was a negative relationship between education and marriage for women. College-educated women were least likely to be currently married and most likely to be never married. Declines in specialization were accompanied by a transition in this relationship. By 2000, when gender specialization was low, there was a positive relationship between education and marriage for women. College-educated women were most likely to be currently married, in part because they were more likely to stay married or remarry after divorce or widowhood. This transition occurred earlier and more completely for black women than for white women. These changes suggest that the relationship between education and marriage is shaped in part by the gender-role context.     

Anglo-Irish Relations, 1939-41: A Study in Multilateral Diplomacy and Military Restraint

‘This study bridges two gaps, one in the historiographyof Anglo-Irish relations between 1939 and 1941 and the otherin International Relations (IR) theory. Anglo-Irish relationsduring the Second World War have been the subject of numerousstudies focusing upon the bilateral nature of that relationship,but it was subject to serious multilateral considerations—theCommonwealth and the US. At moments of danger between the twostates, it was not the balance of a bilateral relationship,but rather of a broad multilateral structure which set the paceof British policy-making. This restrained British military planningagainst Eire. The history of Anglo-Irish relations in this periodpositively links the conduct of multilateral diplomacy withthe absence of the use of force. From the standpoint of IR theory,this provides a useful ‘hard’ case for how/why multilateralismmay matter. It also illustrates several of the deficienciesin IR theory, not least the Whiggish assumption that integrationor globalization follow a linear progression (against whichstands the equally Whiggish notion that interstate relationsare eternally cast). This article seeks to demonstrate thata somewhat wider appreciation of history makes it possible toreconcile multilateral diplomacy with many more traditional‘realist’ concerns.’     

Land as fictitious commodity: the continuing evolution of women's land rights in Uganda

In sub-Saharan Africa, colonial influences have altered traditional practices as a way to manage that which Polanyi labeled as ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labor, and money. Land has now become a highly marketable commodity and an intrinsic part of the global economy. Over the past century, Uganda's land rights have evolved from communal rights to that of male-dominated, individual ownership practices that have excluded women. Despite constitutional provisions, which confer title of both a deceased husband's property rights and equal rights to property within a marriage to a wife, postcolonial patriarchal tradition prevails. This article examines historical changes in land rights in Uganda and discusses the impact of shifts in land rights from communal ownership to individual tenure, altering power structures and attempting to create marketable land title. The Ugandan women's movement's opposition to policies and implementation of laws that exclude women has been unable to facilitate the required changes in unbiased access to land rights, despite apparent victories in revisions to the letter of the law. Situated within contemporary interpretations of tradition and pressures of market demand, this article shows that women's access to landownership and use are restricted by misinterpretation of traditional law and a lack of enforcement of contemporary legal rights. To illustrate the impact of a lack of access to land, this article examines an empirical case study of widowed subsistence farmers in southern Uganda. Women in Uganda continue to lose ground, quite literally, decreasing the possibility of gender equity in terms of land.     

Reasons for leaving: The effect of conflict on English landholding in late thirteenth-century Leinster

In 1297 a parliament was convened at Dublin one of the main purposes of which was to defend more effectively the borders of the English lordship of Ireland. The conquest of Ireland had never been complete. Several of the pre-conquest kingdoms survived beyond the effective edge of the English lordship and elsewhere the actions of conquistador and settler had pushed the native Irish up into the hills. Consequently, the settler population in many parts of Ireland lived in close proximity to areas under Gaelic control. This was not a particular problem in the eastern province of Leinster until the 1270s when the Irish of the Wicklow mountains began to raid settler manors. It has recently been suggested that the effects of this ‘Gaelic revival’ and the legislation passed at the Dublin parliament to deal with its effects led several English lords to cut their landholding ties with Ireland. This article questions how important a factor conflict actually was in the decision-making processes of such English lords by examining their withdrawal from Ireland in a wider context. It concludes by pointing out that withdrawals from a landholding community were not necessarily negative in their effect or cause.     

A gilded cage? Help and control in early Norwegian social policy

Between 1902 and 1972, Norway was the only country in Western Europe in which cohabitation without marriage was forbidden by law ("the concubinage clause"). Thirteen years after his arguably repressive clause was written into the criminal code, the Children Acts were introduced, giving Norwegian children born out of wedlock stronger social rights than in any other country at the time. Norway thus granted strong protection for children born outside marriage while extramarital sex in itself-in some circumstances- was forbidden. How can this paradox be understood? It has been argued that the Children Acts presupposed the concubinage clause, that the silk glove of the welfare state was only made possible by the iron fist of criminal law. This article studies the political debates preceding the two provisions and argues that both grew out of a particular understanding of the relationship between men and women. Extramarital sex was seen as something men did to women; thus, it could be argued that strengthening women's position in relation to that of men would lead to less immorality. Both the concubinage clause and the Children Acts were seen as means to this end.     

Women endangered,says world population report

This report highlights key points from the UN Population Fund's "State of World Population 1997," which focused on women's right to choose in matters relating to reproductive health. The report documents global progress toward achieving reproductive rights for women and recommends more funding for reproductive health care and family planning and increased efforts to promote gender equality and individual rights. International agreements protect: the right to reproductive and sexual health throughout the life cycle; voluntary choice in marriage and childbearing and the means to determine when to have children; equality and equity in all spheres for men and women; and freedom from sexual violence and coercion. When these rights are denied, the result is maternal mortality (a death every minute). There is a lack of access to contraceptive services that affect 350 million women. Unsafe abortions are performed on 20 million women, of whom 70,000 die. There is a lack of access to sex education and services for teenagers that results in HIV infections and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). 1.5 million die from HIV/AIDS related causes, and another 1 million die from reproductive tract infections and STDs. Teenagers represent about 50% of the 333 million new cases of HIV and STDs that occur each year. Female genital mutilation is performed on 120 million girls and women, and 2 million are at risk each year. 2 million girls aged 5-15 years enter the commercial sex trade each year. The report documents the suffering from anemia and malnutrition and complications from pregnancy.     

SOCIO-ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF AGE AT FIRST MARRIAGE OF THE ETHNIC TRIBAL WOMEN IN BANGLADESH

This paper examines the socio-economic determinants of age at first marriage of the ethnic tribal women of Bangladesh. Cox proportional hazard regression analysis was applied to the data set containing 792 observations from four different tribal communities compiled on the basis of a household survey. The singulate mean age at marriage (SMAM) of the women, and mean age at first marriage for females, were found to be 21.8 years and 18.9 years, respectively, which were much higher than those at the national level. Findings revealed that woman's educational attainment and pre-marital work status significantly delayed the timing of marriage. Parents’ economic status and respondents’ birth order had the most significant effect on marital timing. The multivariate statistical analyses also identified several variables as important determinants of marriage timing for the tribal women, including ethnic identity, childhood place of residence, father's literacy and father's survival status. The findings of the study may provide a clue to the rising age at first marriage of the disadvantaged indigenous women.     

U.S. marital disruptions and their economic and social correlates, 1860-1948

A new estimate of U.S. marital disruptions shows an increase in desertions relative to divorces after 1900. Desertions were the more volatile component of marital disruptions because of their greater responsiveness to general economic conditions. Large marriage cohorts, formed in the years of economic expansion, disrupted in greater numbers: an increase in the marriage rate by 10 per 1,000 unmarried women raised the proportion of disrupted marriage by 7.3 percentage points. Conversely, during years of recession, many poorer couples were discouraged from marriage; smaller marriage cohorts with more resilient marriages were formed and their lifetime marriage disruption rate was lower.     

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).