Sally A. Alexander

Desert Island Texts

The following contributions came in response to a request, sent to a number of key figures in feminism today, to write on a text that had been formative for their thinking as feminists. The chosen ...

Generational memory and 20th-century lives

Ideas about memory as the source of human subjectivity developed throughout European liberal democracies in the first half of the 20th century, stimulated by war trauma and universal suffrage. Two archives of memory – psychoanalytic case histories and oral history – reveal the workings of generational memory in the formation of welfare states and social democracy. Generation is understood as people born into similar social environments, coming under similar influences at a particular historical time.

History's Value?

This issue of HWJ carries two features which spring directly or indirectly from the work of two founding editors, Tim Mason and Gareth Stedman Jones. Together these show how the study of British and European history has changed in the past forty or so years. On German and Italian fascism and modern British history respectively, they remind us of the value of historical thinking as a means to comprehend political and cultural change. The questions they raise about historical method and approach have a particular salience given the threat to the humanities in British Universities of the Conservative Coalition Government’s cuts to research and teaching. In a third feature in this issue, contributors respond directly to the cuts and their potential impact, addressing the general health of archives, and of medieval history; the Oxford University campaign against the cuts; and history teaching in schools. Further discussion of these and other themes will be found on the website of the Raphael Samuel Centre (www.raphael-samuel.org.uk) which is organizing a conference in 2012 on ‘History, the Nation and Schools’, as well as at historyworkshoponline.org, of which more below.

Eleanor Marx’s Political Legacy—self sacrifice or self‐realisation?

Eleanor Marx’s life invites thought about the politics of Victorian feminism, what endures in the minds of later generations and what is forgotten. Eleanor moves in and out of the feminist pantheon—prophet of Marxism, Ibsenite new woman, trade union organiser—her elusiveness repeating her own self‐doubt and ambivalence towards feminism. This article sketches the sequence of identifications in Eleanor’s political subjectivity and some tensions between them. Virginia Woolf’s appeal to ‘find the law’ (like Antigone) encompasses Eleanor’s ambivalence, identifying it both as a perpetual theme of twentieth‐century feminist thought and of human subjectivity itself.

The Witch and the Child: Women's Historical Writing and the Unconscious

EMINISM and Freud both shaped the individual human subject of the twentieth century liberal imagination, sexually differentiating it and giving it division and depth. If feminist militancy*‘votes for women’* forced nation states to the brink of universal suffrage, then psychoanalysis’ inner world of unconscious fantasy gave to every human being a significant personal history: no-one could escape their past. Both movements emerged from enlightenment ideals of equality, liberty and knowledge; the individual voice in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1770, published in 1781), or Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which anticipated the contours of unconscious feeling and the radical demands of the women’s movement. A hundred years after Wollstonecraft, psychoanalysts, like the nineteenth-century F