Laura Schwartz

The Bible and the Cause: Freethinking Feminists vs Christianity, England, 1870–1900

This article examines Victorian debates on scriptural interpretation and womens rights, when feminists and anti-feminists, Christians and secularists battled over whether the Bible assigned women a subordinate sphere. It argues that scriptural debates were of central importance to the nineteenth-century ‘woman question’, while womens rights provided the discursive terrain upon which Christians and secularists competed for power and legitimacy. The article focuses on the contributions made by women activists in the secularist or freethought movement. These ‘freethinking feminists’ have been largely ignored in the historiography, though they formed a longstanding and active current within the Victorian womens movement. They were often marginalised, however, because of their violently anti-Christian views and their insistence that the Bible needed to be rejected in full for women to acquire freedom and equality. They argued not only with conservative Christians but with other activists in the womens movement who sought to demonstrate that womens rights could be reconciled with scriptural teachings. Highlighting this alternative tradition reveals the ‘religious roots’ of Victorian feminism to have been diverse and highly contested, and expands our understanding of the multiple processes by which modern definitions of ‘secularism’ came into being.

Feminist thinking on education in Victorian England

This article examines some of the conversations that took place between women’s rights advocates on the subject of female education. The relationship between Victorian feminism and educational reform was a complex one, and historians have long argued over whether campaigns for women’s schools and colleges can be termed ‘feminist’. This article maintains, however, that it is possible to identify a current of feminist analyses, ideas and debates which formed an important part of the broader movement for women’s education. ‘Theory’ in this context was driven less by individual thinkers than by networks in dialogue with each other, responding to a clear practical agenda. Clusters of educational reformers were distinguished by their varying religious outlooks, attitudes to sexual difference, the kind of education they advocated, and their relationship to the wider movement for women’s emancipation. This article focuses primarily on higher education, and particularly on the Oxbridge women’s colleges, as arenas in which some of these themes and disagreements were most prominently and clearly articulated.

Freethought, Free Love and Feminism: secularist debates on marriage and sexual morality, England c. 1850–1885

This article examines the previously unexplored current of Freethinking feminism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Active in the women’s movement of this period, Freethinking feminists were nonetheless viewed as a liability—an attitude that contributed to their exclusion from much of the subsequent historiography. Such marginalisation was due not only to their vocal opposition to all forms of religion, but also their openness to discussing new ways of organising heterosexual relationships. This article focuses on Freethinking feminist critiques of marriage and support for free unions. It demonstrates that these issues continued to be debated in the Secularist movement at a time when many other radical organisations—including much of the women’s movement—kept silent on such topics. In this way, Freethinking feminists kept alive the more radical and libertarian critiques of traditional sexual morality developed by Owenite feminists in the 1830s and 40s. The author argues that the ideology of Freethought propelled its adherents to readdress questions of sex within a new ‘Secularist’ ethical framework. Fierce debate ensued, yet commitment to freedom of discussion ensured that ‘unrespectable’, libertarian voices were never entirely silenced. Freethinking feminism might, then, be viewed as the ‘missing link’ between early nineteenth‐century feminist visions of greater sexual freedom and the more radical discussions of sexuality and free love that began to emerge at the fin de siècle.

A Job Like Any Other? Feminist Responses and Challenges to Domestic Worker Organizing in Edwardian Britain

This article focuses on the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland (est. 1909–1910), a small, grassroots union organized by young female domestic servants in the years leading up to the First World War. This union emerged against a backdrop of labor unrest as well as an increasingly militant womens movement. The article looks at how the Domestic Workers’ Union drew inspiration from the latter but also encountered hostility from some feminists unhappy with the idea of their own servants becoming organized. I argue that the uneven and ambivalent response of the womens movement toward the question of domestic worker organizing is significant not simply as an expression of the social divisions that undoubtedly characterized this movement, but also as reflecting a wider debate within early twentieth-century British feminism over what constituted useful and valuable work for women. Attitudes toward domestic worker organizing were therefore predicated upon feminists’ interrogation of the very nature of domestic labor. Was it inherently inferior to masculine and/or professional forms of work? Was it intrinsically different from factory work, or could it be reorganized and rationalized to fit within the industrial paradigm? Under what conditions should domestic labor be performed, and, perhaps most importantly, who should do it?

Enchanted Modernity, Anglicanism and the Occult in Early Twentieth-Century Oxford: Annie Moberly, Eleanor Jourdain and their ‘Adventure’

Abstract In August 1901, two respectable, unmarried Edwardian ladies travelled backwards in time. On a sightseeing trip to the Court of Versailles, Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain were transported back to 1792 where they encountered the soon-to-be-executed Queen Marie Antoinette. In 1911 they recounted their experiences in An Adventure, a book that was widely reviewed and ran to many editions. Throughout these episodes and their telling Moberly and Jourdain held the positions of Principal and Vice Principal of St Hugh’s Hall, one of Oxford’s newly established colleges for women. Later historians and members of St Hugh’s tended to dismiss them as ‘potty’ or attempted to protect their reputations as pioneers of women’s education from (what was subsequently perceived to be) the embarrassment of An Adventure. This article revisits Moberly and Jourdain’s “Adventure”, historicising rather than pathologising or seeking to explain it away. Alongside the sceptical responses, there were many who believed Moberly and Jourdain, and the two women did not lose social or professional standing as a result of telling their story. In trying to understand why this should have been the case, the article draws upon two bodies of recent scholarship. Firstly, it examines An Adventure in light of work that has rejected older formulations of modernity as necessarily ‘disenchanted’, and instead argues for the blurring of boundaries between occult and scientific discourses. In many ways, the case of An Adventure exemplifies and furthers this thesis, showing how it was possible for two educated, professional, “modern” women to believe they had entered into “an act of memory” by Marie Antoinette that transported them backwards in time. Yet, while most scholarship interested in the relationship between modernity and enchantment focuses on the relationship between science and heterodox/occult religions, An Adventure brings another element to the discussion: orthodox Christianity, and the Anglican Church in particular. Moberly and Jourdain came from clerical families and were devout adherents of the Church of England. Their “Adventure” also, therefore, speaks to recent histories of Christianity in modern Britain, which have argued against an overly polarised and oppositional understanding of the relationship between Christianity and the occult, or Christianity and secular science, pointing to the churches’ capacity for adaptation and incorporation. The article traces the reception of An Adventure as a way to explore further the basis upon which such claims could be both made and judged as credible in a rapidly modernising early twentieth-century Oxford. While highlighting the interconnections between the occult, Anglicanism and secular/scientific scholarship, the article argues that people at the time nevertheless carefully policed the boundaries of “legitimate” and “illegitimate” belief systems, a process informed by both gender and class.

Book review symposium: Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

The author would like to give thanks to Dr Gregory Schwartz at the University of Bath for the guidance, motivation and assistance he offered in the writing of this review, and Jennifer Tomlinson for her helpful comments on an earlier draft. Also due a mention are the presenters and participants at ‘A Conversation on The Problem with Work’, hosted at the University of Warwick in November 2012, for the light they helped shed upon the implications of Weeks’s important book.

Book review symposium

Amid the devastation wrought over the past five years by the current global capitalist crisis, debates accompanying harsh austerity policies have tended to enact few variations of one basic script: ‘jobs’ are the salvation from collapse, corporate ‘job creators’ its avengers. Unprecedented pain is thus being visited, in the name of job creation, upon those that, over the past four neoliberal decades, have already suffered the injuries of economic liberalization. Politicians from the right and the left alike have consistently used the imperative of creating jobs to legitimize deepening inequalities, the constant erosion of labour and environmental standards, corporate tax cuts, the dismantling of public services and redistributive policies, the deepening insecurity of lives forced to depend on labour markets that offer little of the rewards and dignity they promise. Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work is thus uniquely timely for those who want to confront the narrowing of options and the stifling of imagination currently underway in mainstream discussions on how jobs shape a precarious world. The book’s main strength is its critical appraisal of employment not merely as an object of sociological analysis and therapeutics. The crisis of work is not here primarily about employees’ security, motivation and satisfaction, or the challenge of rebalancing the requirements of jobs, families and social provisions. It cannot be fixed by social engineering and productionrelated policy interventions. It rather speaks to the collapse of norms – evoking citizenship, freedom, empowerment and socialization – that have made work a master signifier of social existence in an age in which, as Weeks argues following André Gorz, actual jobs have ceased to underwrite any of those values. It is thus time, Weeks continues, to replace sociology with political theory as the key to unlock the implications of work with power relations, imaginative projects, social processes that produce governable subjects but also liberate subversive desires of liberation from, as much as of, labour. If the problem, then, is life’s subordination to work, it comprehensively affects the stable and precariously employed as well as the unemployed while fusing realms conventionally separated as ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’. Rather than the 526346WES0010.1177/0950017014526346Work, employment and societyBook review symposium research-article2014

Women, Religion and Agency in Modern British History

Dr Laura Schwartz is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick. She is the author of Infidel Feminism: secularism, religion and women’s emancipation, England 1830–1914 (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2012) and A Serious Endeavour: gender, education and community at St Hugh’s College, 1886–2011 (Profile Books, 2011). She has also published previously in Women: A Cultural Review, the Oxford Review of Education, and in Women’s History Review. Correspondence to: Laura Schwartz: l.schwartz@warwick.ac.uk Women’s History Review Vol. 21, No. 2, April 2012, pp. 317–323