June Hannam

‘The Victory of Ideals Must Be Organized’: Labour Party Women Organizers in the Inter-War Years

Abstract This article examines the work of Labour Party women organizers and their activities at a regional level in the inter-war years. It looks at their role in building up the womens sections, in providing education and training and in taking part in electoral campaigning and asks to what extent their methods of organizing were gendered. It argues that the women organizers played an important part in persuading women in the home to become active in the Labour Party and that politics was relevant to their daily lives and would broaden their horizons as women.

Women as Paid Organizers and Propagandists for the British Labour Party Between the Wars

This article contributes to recent debates about the complicated ways in which women involved in the interwar British Labour Party negotiated their political identities through an examination of the activities and aims of a neglected group, the paid women organizers. It suggests that although they accepted the importance of womens work within the home, the organizers did not see womens lives as confined by domesticity. Instead, they argued that women in the home had the potential for collective political action. The article looks at the campaign for pit head baths to highlight the attempt by the organizers to develop a politics around issues such as dirt that concerned women in their daily lives. It was difficult to persuade the Labour Party to take these questions seriously, and the organizers experienced constraints as well as opportunities that came from their paid role, but it is argued here that they did carve a career that was woman-focused and sought to give women in the home a voice.

International Dimensions of Women's Suffrage: ‘at the crossroads of several interlocking identities’[1]

Abstract This article surveys recent suffrage histories in a range of countries across the world with a focus on the neglected period of the interwar years. It asks what the suffrage movement would look like if viewed through the eyes of women from outside Britain and North America and to what extent it was possible for women, despite their differences, to identify with other women both inside individual countries and across national boundaries. It is suggested here that a comparative approach encourages us to take a fresh look at key features of the suffrage movement and to question conventional wisdoms.

Heartland and periphery: local, national and global perspectives on women's history

Abstract The articles in this special collection were first presented as papers at the Womens History Network Annual Conference, held at the University of Bath in September 2000. In selecting a theme for the conference, it seemed particularly important, at the start of a new millennium, to be as inclusive as possible and to reflect the most recent developments in the field of womens history. Conference participants were encouraged to question definitions of what is heartland and what is periphery in womens history and to explore the complex interrelationship between them at a local, national and international level.

L’Europe Des Femmes. XVIIIe –XX1e Siècle

‘accomplished philosopher’, but rather a consequence of an easy to lose control mobbing, a quite common practice in Alexandria’s streets of that time. His conclusion outlines the response to Hypatia’s murder, namely the death of a culture concerning a ‘common, nonconfessional, purely contemplative philosophical pursuit’. The last two chapters are dedicated to Hypatia’s legacy. Chapter 9 discusses ‘The Memory of Hypatia’ (121–134) with reference to ‘Ecclesiastical Histories and Chronicles’, the ‘History of Philosophy’, ‘Byzantium’, as well as the ‘Egyptian Historical Tradition’. In chapter 10, Hypatia is regarded as ‘A Modern Symbol’ (135–147), well debated since early modern times, both as a ‘lady of such rare accomplishments’ and ‘no one special’. Listing a few earlier examples that sadly ‘overshadowed the depth and power of her mind’, and later modern radical intermedial adaptations by visual artists, who wished to attract contemporary readership, and commercial success, Watts shows that Hypatia’s myth reception is concerned with religious extremism and social decline. Finally, by ‘Reconsidering a Legend’ (149–155), the author recapitulates the socio-political highlights that shaped Hypatia’s environment and stresses what makes her remarkable: the quality of a person and a philosopher she was. In vigorous language and compendious narration, the author offers a competent historical macro-analysis of Hypatia’s world, life, teaching, socio-political engagement, and posthumous legacy. Although concise digressions and extensive endnotes facilitate the reader when needed, the book demands some previous knowledge. Written in a moderate style, the book is no feminist manifesto for women in science. Watts emphasises on pragmatic and significant challenges a woman intellectual operating in education faced, and he treats Hypatia equally to any other intellectual, only making adequate references to her gender when it comes, for instance, to the fact that ‘[her] gender made her ineligible to host most civic posts’. The author accomplishes his aim, in that he demonstrates that Hypatia is memorable neither for her gender nor for the horrible death she suffered, but rather for what she was and achieved, as a constant philosophy practitioner, teacher, patron, networker, host, advocate, counsellor ...

Women and the Vote: a world historyJAD ADAMS

are marginalized. Even more inexplicably, strong, inspirational women who stood against the grain of socio-cultural norms like Pandita Ramabai, Rukhmabai and many other late-nineteenth-century women from Maharashtra are not even mentioned. Nationalism, moreover, was not the only route to empowerment and public rights: so were Left movements in India and Pakistan. While Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hussein’s astounding writings are extensively discussed, Adams does not cite the political work of Muslim women, whether in anti-colonial struggles—and Gail Minault’s study of Bi Amman is classic—or in the Pakistan movement which certainly helped their enfranchisement in Pakistan. Even though for Europe and for China, Adams has a fair and sympathetic account of the links between socialism and women’s rights, he omits that entirely for India. Unlike the sections on western feminism, broader strains of emancipatory politics remain sparse. A very serious omission is the work of untouchable Dalit leaders like Phule, Ambedkar and Periyar who did much more for gender reform than did Nehru or Sarala Debi. These, however, are minor quibbles, as I said, and the volume is a landmark contribution to a global history feminist politics.

The Women's Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1866–1928 RYLAND WALLACE

posthumous) essay. Of course, historians of women and gender have long been attentive to the varying salience of gender in combination with other markers of identity and hierarchy. It is an insight which was routinely made in the seminal publications of feminist scholars such as Jane Rendall, Linda J. Nicholson, Nancy Fraser and Susan Bordo in the late 1980s and early 90s. However, continuing to pursue such perspectives, as indicated here, is certainly critical if we are to develop analyses which allow for multiple trajectories and temporalities in addressing issues of chronology. In a similar vein, the insistence of two contributors, Padma Anagol and Lynn Abrams, that foregrounding women’s voices and agency allows us to disrupt traditional historical narratives, is to draw on what has long been a central tenet of women’s history. Nonetheless, these two essays are particularly persuasive in making their claim. In Anagol’s case this includes a thoughtful assessment of the specific cultural and political circumstances in which women’s voices are occluded, as well as offering a persuasive argument of the need for new approaches to periodisation in the context of modern India. The frameworks of nationalist and imperial histories, she observes, have blinded historians to the longer roots of female civic participation. Abrams, in a heartfelt essay, occasionally overplays the significance of her case study. However, her suggestion that the research of gender historians creates ‘a patchwork of contiguous and sometimes competing histories which may be resistant to overarching narratives of continuity and change’ remains a thought-provoking formulation. In contrast to Abrams’s upbeat tone, Judith M. Bennett, in common with some of the other American contributors, seems rather disenchanted with the current state of scholarship as she urges feminist historians to embrace a wider chronological range. Whilst none of the essays focuses specifically on masculinity (although most consider it as part of their broader argument), the continuing vibrancy and wider significance of gender history is well represented here in this generally stimulating, if highly diverse, collection.