Sharon Crozier-De Rosa

Marie Corelli's British new woman: A threat to empire?

At the height of the British Empire, England was in the midst of major social, economic and moral upheaval. The roles and status of middle-class women were particularly affected by many of these changes. In turn, as the gap between idealism and ‘reality’ grew, the validity or usefulness of Victorian notions or ideals of womanhood increasingly came under attack. Arising from this commotion was the figure of the late Victorian and Edwardian ‘New Woman.’ Her appearance provoked further confusion and ambiguity about gender that had repercussions for empire. This paper addresses the way in which the role of English women in sustaining the British Empire intensified the social pressures on them in the metropole. It examines the threat to nation and empire represented by the New Woman by looking at how she was presented to the rapidly growing general reading public at the end of the nineteenth- and beginning of the twentieth century. This is achieved by looking at the bestselling novels of Marie Corelli, a phenomenally popular turn-of-the-century author. Corellis novels repeatedly affirm that the New Woman represented the threat of ‘modernity,’ that she was a danger to ‘civilisation’ and therefore to British imperialism.

Introduction: Nationalism and transnationalism in Australian historical writing

One of the strongest trends in Australian historical writing over the last two decades has been a drive to emphasise the nation’s connectedness with the rest of the world. Across a range of historical genres and topics, we have seen a new enthusiasm to explore entanglements between Australian history and that of other places and peoples. The history of travel has been an important contributor to this line of inquiry, but it is at the more intellectual, imaginative and emotional levels that the greatest gains are sometimes claimed for the study of what has become known as ‘transnationalism’. This trend to emphasise international networks in history has been drawn on by historians in the essays that follow. It reflects and contributes to an international flourishing of histories emphasising mobility in the context of empires and globalisation. But where does this leave the idea of ‘the nation’ as a factor in thinking through post-white settlement Australian history? And are some of the claims made for the explanatory impact of transnationalism exaggerated? In a recent article on the ‘transgressive transnationalism’ of Griffith Taylor, Carolyn Strange nodded to the ‘path-breaking’ recent works of Australian historians who have led a ‘transnational turn’, but her conclusion was partly corrective: ‘whether or not transnational thinking was transgressive, strategic or otherwise in the past, and whether or not our historical subjects were progressive or regressive are questions for contextual analysis, in which the nation will continue to matter’. In March 2012 a number of historians gathered at a workshop in the Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Deakin University, to discuss the standing of nationalism and transnationalism in Australian historical writing. All of them had been involved in the production of transnational history in various ways and they took the opportunity to both reflect again on their own work and to critically examine current debates. This collection has been developed from papers presented at that workshop. The five articles here are deliberately short and, hopefully, punchy. Rather than offering a detailed survey of this large field, they seek to stimulate debate and to suggest future intellectual directions.

Divided sisterhood? Nationalist feminism and feminist militancy in England and Ireland

The generally accepted story is that British militant suffragists performed an unexpected and abrupt move away from the feminist movement and towards a fiercely jingoistic nationalist campaign once...ABSTRACT The generally accepted story is that British militant suffragists performed an unexpected and abrupt move away from the feminist movement and towards a fiercely jingoistic nationalist campaign once the war began in 1914. Yet, given the nature of exchanges between Irish and British militant feminists, Irish feminists should not have been surprised by this turn from gender solidarity to English nationalism. In this article, I argue that Irish-British militant feminist entanglements worked to expose the powerful role that English nationalism played in suffrage politics at a time when nearly all the focus was on the disruptive influence of Irish nationalism.

The national and the transnational in British anti-suffragists’ views of Australian women voters

The issue of woman suffrage, and the unevenness of its development worldwide, provoked much heated discussion in the early twentieth century. In Britain women were campaigning — often violently — for the vote, while in the Antipodes women already had at least the national vote. This paper looks at national and transnational aspects of this debate as it was played out in the pages of the British Anti-Suffrage Review. It looks at how conservatives in the British metropole were compelled to articulate, even reformulate, their sense of national and imperial identity in light of the existence of the Australian woman voter. It also uses a written exchange between travelling Australian suffragist, Vida Goldstein, and her British male correspondent to demonstrate how Australian feminists — despite taking advantage of the opportunities offered to them through imperial networks — did not necessarily feel compelled to articulate their sense of identity or belonging in imperial terms. On the contrary, Goldstein insisted on a national identity based on values at odds with those of her imperial counterparts; values drawn from a non-British, wider ‘new’ world. This article has been peer-reviewed.