Sonya O. Rose

Gender, Citizenship and Subjectivity: Some Historical and Theoretical Considerations

Because the French Revolution failed to produce a widely acceptable definition of citizenship, the limits of manhood suffrage in the early nineteenth century were uncertain. Social practices, in particular scientific activity, served as claims to the status of citizen. By engaging in scientific pastimes, bourgeois Frenchmen asserted that they possessed the rationality and autonomy that liberal theorists associated both with manliness and with civic capacity. However, bourgeois science was never a stable signifier of masculinity or of competence. As professional science emerged, the bourgeois amateur increasingly became the feminised object of satire rather than the sober andmeritorious citizen-scientist.

At Home with the Empire: Introduction: being at home with the Empire

What was the impact of the British Empire on the metropole between the late eighteenth century and the present? This is the question addressed in a variety of ways and across different timescales in this volume. Such a question has a history that perhaps needs remembering: for it is both a repetition and a reconfiguration of a long preoccupation with the interconnections between the metropolitan and the imperial. Was it possible to be ‘at home’ with an empire and with the effects of imperial power or was there something dangerous and damaging about such an entanglement? Did empires enrich but also corrupt? Were the expenses they brought worth the burdens and responsibilities? These questions were the subject of debate at least from the mid-eighteenth century and have been formulated and answered variously according both to the historical moment and the political predilections of those involved. The connections between British state formation and empire building stretch back a long way, certainly into the pre-modern period. It was the shift from an empire of commerce and the seas to an empire of conquest, however, that brought the political and economic effects of empire home in new ways. While the American War of Independence raised one set of issues about native sons making claims for autonomy, conquests in Asia raised others about the costs of territorial expansion, economic, political and moral.

Metropolitan desires and colonial connections: reflections on consumption and empire

There is now a body of writing and debate on the constitutive role of colonial and imperial elements in the material and cultural as well as political history of the United Kingdom, and on the interactions of material, political and cultural developments in that constitutive process. This work has been helped by the growth of studies by economic and social historians of consumption as a dynamic agent in processes of material change since the eighteenth century, rather than just an effect of changes in production or marketing. Interest in histories of consumption in relation to those changes has converged with interest in such histories as a feature of social and cultural change signalled in publications like the volume edited by Brewer and Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods , and those edited by Berg on luxury. Earlier studies of demand, retailing and spreading use or ownership of different products, tended to focus on providers (from large enterprises to corner shopkeepers) rather than customers. Now studies of income levels or standards of living are allied to analyses of the views, values and preferences which have influenced decisions to buy or use particular goods. This convergence is part of the opening up of the study of consumption across a much broader front. From considering it as a discrete area of practical human activity, historians, social scientists, and cultural theorists have enlarged the range of approaches used to understand it, shifting attention from acts of consumption to the persons (‘consumers’) undertaking them, and developing different insights and methods of enquiry.

Race, empire and British wartime national identity, 1939-45.

Britains self-portrait as a democratic and paternalistic imperial nation was persistently undermined by the contradictory repercussions of racial divisiveness. The consequences of racism in both the metropole and in the colonies threatened the metropole-colonial relations so fundamental to British imperial sensibilities. Thus, government officials were involved throughout the war in repairing Britains reputation with its imperial subjects. Using evidence from Colonial Office and Ministry of Information files, this article contributes to historical understanding of the empires place in British national identity in the World War II years. It suggests the extent to which racism at “home” and in the colonies destabilized British efforts to bolster imperial loyalties that would persist into the post-war future.

Proto-Industry, Women's Work and the Household Economy in the Transition to Industrial Capitalism:

Using samples of households from the 1851 and 1881 censuses of Arnold, Nottinghamshire, a proto-industrial village specializing in framework knitting, the research reported in this article examines the changes in the economic activities of household members as the domestic industry was being superseded by the factory system. The data show the continuing importance of the family economy to the economic viability of households and the increasing significance of the economic contribution of wives. These economic contributions were made possible by an increased demand for women to do homework as seamers of hosiery, which occurred as a consequence of changes in the methods of manufacturing knitted garments.

Bringing the Empire home: women activists in imperial Britain, 1790s–1930s

This chapter focuses on womens metropolitan-based activism on imperial issues in the period between the 1790s and the outbreak of the Second World War. The women concerned are mainly British-born, white and middle or upper class as it was from this sector of the population that the leadership for most empire-focused campaigns came. However, there is also some consideration of white working-class womens relationship to these campaigns, and of both white colonial women and black and Asian women who were active within or without these movements, and often challenged hegemonic discourses. Discussion concentrates on womens activism within organisations with a specifically imperial focus, rather than imperial activism within the organised feminist movement or the relationship between feminism and imperialism, aspects of which are covered in chapters by Jane Rendall and Keith McClelland and Sonya Rose. The chapter covers a long time-span, which saw major developments both in the politics of empire and in womens relationship to public life and politics. It explores the interconnecting dynamics of these two arenas of change through discussing womens involvement in movements aiming to reform the Empire and the colonised, in organisations promoting support for imperialism, and in anti-imperial and anti-racist activism. Chronologically, these campaigns overlapped with each other, but they peaked in succeeding periods: the nineteenth century, the Edwardian period and the interwar period respectively.

Men of war: masculinity and the First World War in Britain

and defeat at war’s end. Another topic explores post-war reconciliation through contemporary assumptions of American exceptionalism, a viewpoint brought over to Europe by ordinary soldiers convinced of the righteousness of their mission and reinforced in newspapers and broadsheets. Eerily similar to some of today’s discussions around the war-on-terror, one component even justified the war and post-war occupation as a way to transform German ‘Kultur’, which was said to abuse women. Turning to transnational activism, Kuhlman follows the work of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and its U.S. and German branches. From its archives and publications, she juxtaposes the members’ first-hand knowledge of wartime conditions with official diplomats’ isolation as they negotiated treaty articles in Paris. She also details these women’s expansive gender and pacifist visions as an alternative blueprint which, as she explains, was thwarted partly by contradictions in their own rhetoric. The final theme innovatively compares women’s labour force participation in the Great War in Germany and America, including the expectations and realities these women faced during the transition to a peacetime economy. This section also looks at the welfare and social services available to those who had fought during the war and the commemorative practices honouring wartime sacrifices. Although, the cumulative data presented (including a useful map and deftly analysed cartoon illustrations) confirm the triumph of patriarchy, a number of analytical shortcomings mar the arguments. For instance, Kuhlman employs ‘modernity’ (a twentieth-century enlightened, egalitarian defence of rights) as a metric against which to assess historical patterns, but its use seems simplistic, teleological, and defied by the complexity of historical change (pp. 5, 8, 40). Too often, she relies on rhetorical paradoxes as causal explanations for feminist shortcomings – as if a better logic could have assured a more favourable outcome in the challenge to gender–power relations. Thus, while the book makes a persuasive case for the return to patriarchy after the war, it neither adequately confronts alternative evidence nor assesses what the granting of female suffrage meant for women’s own life experiences and consciousness. In spite of this, however, Kuhlman successfully sustains the transnational analysis throughout the study. The book is appropriate for upper level undergraduate thematic courses in war and peace and methodological courses exploring international and transnational themes. In addition, as the centenary anniversary of the Great War approaches, its rich empirical evidence, unusual focus on unofficial peacemaking and attention to women’s place in national reconciliation could broaden its appeal to the general interested reader.

Book Review: Maternal Instincts: Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875-1925

women alone handling the birthing process, that women’s modesty not be compromised by male doctors. Her niece spoke her mind; Madame du Coudray was always the politician. Beyond the story of this woman’s life, the historian will find this book invaluable to fill in the details of a revolution in midwifery, moving from the birthing descriptions in Gélis’s History of Childbirth, where babies were butchered in breech births, to the careful instruction of fresh young women to go back to their villages and try to practice the new techniques. The transition was not without conflict. In an amazing segment, Gelbart translates the protest of an experi enced midwife to the young trainee trying to take over into a breathtaking account of traditional birthing techniques and culture. Gelbart illustrates the dynamics of resistance and change. Madame du Coudray was convinced that clean linens were important; her niece promoted the use of gloves, warned about the danger of puerperal fever, illustrated the use of forceps, the cae sarean operation, vaccination for smallpox, and other medical advances. Madame du Coudray published her book, and the response of physicians was to publish their own. She built a model; they adapted models found in Paris. She developed a second model with clear and red liquids to demonstrate loss of blood and waters, primarily for the surgeons, who were called in when the pregnancy was going to end in the death of either the mother or the baby. She promoted breastfeeding and set up guidelines for selecting a wet nurse if breast-feeding wasn’t possible. Gelbart makes a good case for crediting du Coudray with the survival of many infants and mothers in the eighteenth century and of midwifery itself in nineteenth-century France. This is social history at its best, bringing together the personal and political struggles of an eighteenth-century entrepreneur in the realm of women’s health and infant survival. While caught up in the richness of the tale and the intricacies of the historian’s craft, the reader cannot help but recognize the intersection of gender and power. And so, Nina Gelbart brings to life an amazing woman who maneuvered her way through the labyrinth of royal bureaucracy and made an impact on innumerable women and families in France.