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This paper focuses on interracial Filipino-American couples attempting to migrate between the United States and the Philippines using the Repatriation Act of 1935 and the War Brides Act of 1945. The prospect of the migrating interracial couple posed new questions for US immigration bureaucracy, prompting reconsideration of policies regarding marriage, family, dependence and citizenship. Viewing the United States and the Philippines in one frame of analysis, with these two Acts as bookends, this paper considers migration a process driven by the desires and needs of couples, mediated by regimes of US border control and empire. Gendered and radicalised notions of protection influenced the implementation of these Acts, with longer term consequences for race, gender and family-based immigration policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines changes in male missionary marriage trends in the late nineteenth century. By examining the number of bachelor missionaries in two Irish Protestant missionary organisations, this paper argues that there was an increased acceptance of unmarried male missionaries in the mission workforce, a change that is reflected in other contemporary mission societies. Using case studies of three Irish Protestant missionary bachelors, this paper shows how bachelorhood influenced men’s missionary experiences in their social relationships, daily life and living arrangements. While accepting missionary bachelors, mission societies continued to emphasise the importance of Christian marriage as the ideal state of masculinity and femininity. Therefore, missionary bachelorhood was constructed as a temporary period of noble sacrifice during which men devoted themselves to mission work, while remaining expectant of marriage in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a close reading of autobiographical writing by a group of black Howard University students in the 1930s, this article examines narratives of sexual pleasure and trauma in young people’s lives. The students’ professor, Hylan G. Lewis, set ‘Life History’ assignments designed to reveal his students’ class status and moral beliefs. The article argues that the language of the Chicago School of Sociology – a methodological and epistemological approach to studying individual psyches and social structures – provided a ‘compulsion to confess’, thus allowing the students to push past a culture of dissemblance and reveal their inner worlds and sexual desires. The students’ papers challenge historical interpretations of respectability among the black elite and aspiring class. The article assesses the changing sexual culture of an inter-war college generation influenced by New Negro and Modern Girl culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the intersection of Spiritual Motherhood, early childhood education and child welfare in early twentieth-century Edinburgh. Its focus is St Saviour's Child Garden (SSCG), which opened in the Canongate, in November 1906, part of the Free Kindergarten movement that emerged in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century. The paper focuses on the SSCG's founder Lileen Hardy, in order to trace the development of this new approach to child welfare and women's work in Britain. It discusses her training at the Sesame House for Home-Life Training in London, her move to Edinburgh, and the network of predominantly women reformers, whose interests ranged from urban reform to medical welfare, she found there. It shows how this network facilitated the founding of the SSCG and discusses the form it took and Hardy's implementation of a modified form of Froebelian praxis. In so doing its concern is to show how Free Kindergarten forms part of a wider history of social welfare and urban reform as well as to the history of early childhood education, and to move attention away from the men usually associated with innovations in Scottish social reform like Patrick Geddes, and onto a group of women who created a women and child-centred proto-Welfare State in pre-First World War Edinburgh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informed by the multidisciplinary scholarship on emotions and the emotional labour performed by human services workers, this paper examines how institutions involved in the integration of migrants intervened in their subjects’ intimate lives. The focus is on the affective dimension of social welfare encounters that occurred in multicultural contexts shaped by renewed migration and a consolidated welfare state. Drawing on 100 confidential cases of marital conflict produced by the counsellors and caseworkers of a major post-1945 social welfare agency in heavily immigrant Toronto, Canada, the paper examines the frontline activities of liberal pluralist social workers, mainly women, but also men, who were themselves newcomers managing their own emotions, and their clients. It draws on relevant feminist scholarship in order to assess the many similarities and key differences in the range of narratives and scenarios contained in the files. However, the main contribution involves scrutinising the ‘emotional’ quality of caseworker–client encounters involving domestic disputes that did not appear to involve male physical violence, thereby highlighting the bonds of trust that sometimes developed between immigrant female counsellors and immigrant wife-assault victims. The paper also considers the emotional costs incurred by immigrant female social-work practitioners handling weighty and emotionally demanding caseloads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has observed a high degree of variety in the use of social networks by female migrants in the nineteenth century, but has failed to explain what factors produced that variety. This paper proposes a comparison between three groups of foreign female servants who moved within different migration circuits to Antwerp in 1860 or 1880. The Antwerp foreigners’ files and population registers provide an opportunity to analyse differences in the use of both vertical ties with employers and horizontal ones with colleagues and relatives. The results allow us to identify changes over time and a correlation between the types of networks used by servants and the migration circuit to which they belonged. As such, this study fits into current debates on the importance of information circulation and gender in relation to migration decisions and for labour intermediation in both the historical and social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical reappraisal of an interpretation about men and domesticity which has been current in nineteenth-century British historiography since the 1990s. Domesticity was the Victorian shorthand for how the ties of gender and generation should be ordered in family life. The ‘flight from domesticity’ – especially the growing trend of postponing marriage – signalled men’s growing impatience with these ties in the late nineteenth century. Recent scholarship has questioned both the validity of ‘flight’ and the equation of domesticity with familial relations. These debates are here reviewed, focusing in turn on the emotional economy of the bourgeois family, the homosocial conditioning of boarding education, the changing representation of women in public and the occupational choices of middle-class men. The paper concludes that ‘flight’ only fully works in relation to a restricted segment of the upper middle class, but the social and cultural prominence of that segment endowed its ambivalence about domesticity with a disproportionate significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores same-sex love and religion in the early eighteenth-century army, drawing on the autobiographical writings of two common soldiers. My main source is the story of early Methodist preacher Sampson Staniforth, who served as a common soldier in the 1740s. I discuss the British army’s attitude to same-sex love, the various contemporary meanings of Staniforth’s phrase ‘the unpardonable sin’, the impact of Methodism on his life, Methodist attitudes to sodomy and how Methodist historians treated Staniforth’s story. Very little work has been done on gender and religion in the early eighteenth-century army and the paper largely relies on a single ambiguous primary source so I offer questions for further research rather than conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Augustine’s plea to ‘give me chastity and continence, but not yet’ has resonated with modern readers and writers on the Middle Ages as the ‘natural’ reaction of men to the demands of Christianity for the restriction or even avoidance of sexual activity. By contrast, the appeal of virginity or vowed chastity for medieval women has been the subject of considerable historical interest. Combined with the prevalent assumptions about masculinity which developed in the late twentieth century, until recently it was difficult even to see that there was an issue to be addressed. The high medieval period recognised the appeal of the monastic life for the elderly knight but saw this as evidence of the growth of lay piety, rather than as a gender issue, and its disappearance in the thirteenth century as a product of the sacerdotalisation of monasticism. This paper argues by contrast that chastity had a continuing appeal to laymen, and that some, mainly older, men continued to desire an alternative to marriage. The paper explores evidence for how it was achieved and locates it in the context of both gendered assumptions about sexuality by historians and the wider understanding of celibacy in the high and later Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional studies of elites, both sociological and historical, have focused on male elite schooling to the exclusion or elision of female elite schooling. This leaves us with subtly different literatures on female and male lines of both contemporary elites and their forebears, and this represents a challenge for those working on elite education. Judith Okely noted back in 1978 that even if the education of boys and girls can be separate and asymmetrical, they are nevertheless ‘ideologically interdependent’. Likewise, Claire Maxwell and Peter Agglestone advocate the study of reproduction and privilege in contemporary British elite education for girls within a holistic framework that seeks to understand the complex relations between each student’s home, social milieu and school. Taking the idea of ideological interdependence as a starting point, this paper seeks to explore the history of nineteenth-century Catholic female education in Ireland, drawing on feminist critiques of power theory, to move beyond current narrowly defined debates on the utility and purpose of elite female education. An exclusive focus on the disempowering effects of official curricula obscures other socialising aspects of the schooling experience, especially those that enabled or empowered. This article takes the concept of cosmopolitanism as a way of understanding the benefits accompanying an education at a Catholic convent boarding school in Ireland. The graduates of these schools could lay claim to an associational culture maintained in adulthood through intermarriage, alumna clubs and charitable associations. The evidence of cosmopolitanism, real or imagined, within conventual schools manifested itself in curricular choices, public exhibitions and the cultivation of refined dress, accent and manners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the place of men in the home in post-war England, examining men and women’s subjective accounts of men’s role as husbands and fathers. The analysis is based on oral history testimonies with men and women about their perspectives on the role of men from the viewpoint of sons and daughters, wives and mothers, and from men themselves. As such, the paper adds a new dimension to gender histories of this period, by closely examining men and women’s perspectives on the same issue, and interrogating how this influenced family life. Focusing on three themes – family planning and conception; pregnancy and childbirth; and infant care – this article argues that the changes both men and women pointed to around fatherhood (such as being present at childbirth and more involved in infant care) must be set within deep gendered continuities. The sense of change was often greater than the actual change in men’s behaviours, and whilst the roles of mother and father were evolving, a strong distinction between these remained. Men highlighted the expertise and ultimate authority of women in family matters, whilst women continued to articulate men’s roles within family life as secondary to their own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western society appears inordinately keen on outdated and stereotypical tropes of Islamic architecture, talking of a 'hidden world' of Islam in which women are seen and not heard as they live their lives incarcerated in the harem. This trope of Western Orientalism has become entrenched in our culture through travel accounts, the writings of historical voyeurs such as Sir Richard Burton and the romantic/erotic imagery of nineteenth-century Orientalist painters. This paper aims to dispel many of the preconceptions that are held regarding the Iranian harem and the role of women in Safavid society by addressing the status of elite Iranian women, but also placing them in the wider context and considering the evidence for lower-class women who could simply not afford to live a cloistered life. There is also the case of non-Muslim women whose religions forbade polygamy and who were therefore immediately placed outside the harem and, although Safavid Iran included significant numbers of Zoroastrians and Jews as well a handful of Hindus, this paper will concentrate on one particular religious minority; the Caucasian Christians who were such an integral part of Abbas' great project that they were awarded a particular status in the city of Isfahan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians in the 1970s and 1980s explored the ways in which Victorian science characterised and caricatured the female intellect. As a core element of debates on the extension of the franchise, and on women in higher education, the scientific literature on the mental differences between men and women has been thoroughly explored. A key part of this literature dealt with the relative weights of male and female brains, and the assertions of evolutionists and anatomists that fundamental physiological differences explained any observable differences in psychology by natural law. The paper revisits this material with a new set of questions. To what extent did scientific discourse not only subordinate women, but also serve to reinforce a social hierarchy of men? How was manliness, as a natural mental quality, defined, and who did it exclude? Exploring the ways in which scientific literature mirrored discourses of racial, political and citizenship exclusions, substantial revisions to the existing historiography are suggested. The paper concludes by proposing a turn towards the image of the 'animal' as a fundamental category of analysis in Victorian thought, upon which constructions of gender, race and social hierarchy were constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces a series of articles on gender and history.

The article focuses on the most prominent Indian nationalist family, the Nehrus, tracing their life in early twentieth-century Allahabad. It uncovers the first steps undertaken by the women of the family for the cause of their sex in the 1910s, and asks questions about the removal of such early feminist engagement from the works of history, autobiographies and archives documenting the Nehru saga, in which women’s independent agency has generally been neglected. The article traces such ‘selective memory’ back to the gendered notions governing private and domestic life at the Nehrus’, questioning ideas of modernity usually associated with this household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the controversy that arose when a monumental bronze nude statue of Achilles was unveiled at Hyde Park Corner (London) in 1822 as a monument to the Duke of Wellington and his army. The neoclassical statue (made by Richard Westmacott) perfectly embodied the 'modern male stereotype'. According to historian George Mosse, this masculine image was a powerful and stable symbol of nineteenth- and twentieth-century bourgeois societies. Intended by the commanders and artist as just such a symbol, the statue in practice was unable to express these high ideals. Ever since its unveiling, the statue has elicited laughter and ridicule. The uneasiness created by male public nudity is an aspect that Mosse missed in his history of masculine imaginary, in which he focused on certain moments of 'spectacular' masculinity in modern Western history. Ultimately, the failure of Westmacott's Achilles can best be understood from the well-known feminist framework on the gendered 'economy of the gaze', a framework that is all too often absent in the historiography on masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medieval fatherhood, like masculinity, was built upon intersecting identities. The present paper aims to identify those identities, to analyse the way in which they were constructed and to examine the linkages between fatherhood and masculinity in the context of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Montpellier, a great city in Mediterranean Languedoc. Fatherhood is a dynamic research field in medieval studies that is now enriched by the gender studies’ conceptual frame. Becoming and being a father had many social and cultural implications in late-medieval societies that correlated to gendered constructs. Of this complex subject, our inquiry in the Montpellier archives can offer only a fragmentary view. The article focuses on three fields of history connected to the study of medieval fathers: legal history, the history of the emotions and economic history, and illustrates how those fields can benefit from a more gendered perspective, helping us to enrich our understanding of medieval fatherhood and its relationship with masculine identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To see how contemporaries understood the body’s place in differences between men’s and women’s homicidal violence, this paper disaggregates the data from a sizeable sample of English homicide records produced between c.1500–1680 to see who men and women were accused of killing, and how, and places that information within the context of early modern medical and legal works. Women killed far fewer people than did men, which accords with studies of homicide in other times and places; but if we include in our counts (as contemporaries would have done) both infanticide and killings by means of witchcraft, we see that women were disproportionately represented amongst those deemed to have committed murder rather than the less serious crime of manslaughter. Early modern responses to homicide, and thus the long-lived laws that grew from them and the bodies of evidence upon which we rely, had embedded within them humoural understandings of male and female difference that were premised on variations in vital heat. More so than their ‘hot-blooded’ counterparts, women were associated with cold-blooded killings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the philosophy and work of one of the most significant Victorian male feminist secularists, Benjamin Elmy. Best known historiographically for his marriage to suffragist Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, he was among the first to theorise (for British readers) the precise nature of the French term feminism. Elmy’s significance has been marginalised by contested debates surrounding the use of his nom-de-plume, Ellis Ethelmer – a dispute this paper seeks to put to rest. Using a biographical methodology, key themes explored include the establishment of Elmy as a secularist-feminist author and the challenges to his reputation – in contemporary and modern sources – resulting from colleagues’ perceptions of him as a liability to the women’s cause. The author extends (by considering Elmy’s ‘revolutionary’ feminist texts of the 1890s) recent research highlighting how secularists engaged with, and undercut, theories of eugenics to create a ‘counter-paradigm’ whereby human degeneracy was attributed to traditional, religious marriage. Elmy’s writing is explored in the context of the organisation that encouraged its publication, the Women’s Emancipation Union (1891–99), highlighting that by linking the concepts of eugenics with those of social class, Elmy was not merely desiring health and pro-natalism amongst the intelligentsia, but among all, regardless of economic circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American women scientists of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were largely sequestered into the backwaters of professional science. In responding to this challenge, some women scientists affiliated with museums proved especially adept at synthesising women’s traditional responsibilities as moral reformers with a ‘masculine’ scientific knowledge that allowed them to discourse with professionals and those with political power. By cultivating lay and amateur interest in science – and in the biological and environmental sciences in particular – the museum women facilitated a transfer of knowledge and information throughout the public sphere. Club activities in particular provided museum-affiliated women such as botanist Alice Eastwood, bryologist Elizabeth Knight Britton, agrostologist Agnes Chase, anthropologist Alice Fletcher, horticulturist Kate Sessions and ichthyologist Rosa Smith Eigenmann with an opportunity to act as both environmental scientists and women. Thus the ‘museum synthesis’, a convergence of cultural expectation and scientific practice, offered a solution to women scientists who for various reasons were not accepted as full-fledged members of their institutions or disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how women used their social networks within the ancient Greek urban environment in two spheres: first with regard to their civic engagement, and second with regard to their social relationships. By examining the types of social networks in which women were involved, how they were used and their impact on social relations, it argues that historians should broaden their conception of women's contribution to the Greek civic environment. Such an approach shows how women negotiated social and economic status within the polis community, how they used their social capital as a resource for social and civic engagement and sheds light on their personal relationships. These relationships not only enhanced women's well-being and allowed them to determine their own roles in community life, but also formed the basis of their engagement with the polis. Considering the social networks to which women belonged, and the differing types of social capital embedded in them, further enables an examination of female friendship. Recognising the contribution of women to the polis community is necessary in order to understand the wider social and civic relationships within the ancient city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early medieval Winchester, three monastic communities were enclosed together in the south-eastern corner of the town. By the later Anglo-Saxon period, Old Minster was a monastic cathedral and New Minster and Nunnaminster were monastic communities for men and women respectively. This paper addresses ways in which the three foundations collaborated and co-ordinated with each other and with the city. While gender segregated these communities, both liturgy and the urban context integrated them, as can be seen from the books used and produced by religious men and women in this city in later Anglo-Saxon England. The importance of prayer to the inhabitants of the city and the wider locale can be seen in the documents that request liturgical services - most often prayers and masses - in return for grants of land and other gifts. Ecclesiastical and lay individuals alike allied themselves to these religious houses, seeking commemoration and often also burial in their cemeteries and hoping to benefit spiritually from their prayers. The ways in which gender affected the religious experiences of Winchester's citizens and their consecrated brothers and sisters are complex, but they are also important in understanding how the saints and their servants on earth related to God, to each other and to the surrounding urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joan Kelly's path-breaking article, ‘Did Women have a Renaissance?’, first published in 1977, led historians of women in many fields to question the applicability of chronological categories derived from male experience. Thirty years later, the questioning continues, augmented by doubts about whether all systems of periodisation over-simplify the diversity of gender. This paper examines what might be lost if feminist historians, in their sensitivity to difference, refuse to apply structures of periodisation. It looks at challenges to both ‘Renaissance’ and ‘early modern’ as conceptual categories and suggests ways in which gender is and must remain central to understandings of these eras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper begins with a critique of the ‘imperialism-nationalism’ paradigm and its concomitant privileging of the period 1885–1947, which has dominated the writing of modern Indian history. It is argued here that the fixation with the ‘birth-of-the-nation’ theme has led to the neglect of women's agency; that it has resulted in many inconsistencies, dilemmas and unresolved issues regarding a range of topics within Indian gender-relations; and that this periodisation inhibits the reclamation of terms such as ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’. The second half of the essay proposes that women's agency can be recovered via a new chronology and a new template for understanding agency within which scholars will be enabled to retrieve the conscious voices of Indian women and record change in gender relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution engages with the transnational connections established by second-wave feminists in socialist Yugoslavia. The essay focuses on the writings of Zagreb-based anthropologist Lydia Sklevicky (1952–1990) and Belgrade-based sociologist Žarana Papić (1949–2002), two founders of women’s studies in the region, who were also among the organisers of the first international women’s studies seminar, held in Portorož in 1976 and of the first international second-wave feminist conference, held in Belgrade in 1978. Through the analysis of linguistic and political practices of translations that occurred between the late 1970s and early 1980s, I demonstrate that feminists in Zagreb and Belgrade took an active part in transnational feminist dialogues taking place at the time across Europe and beyond. Texts by feminist authors from the United States, the UK, Italy and France were often translated into Serbo-Croatian, and practices of translation became an integral part of pioneering feminist interventions, contributing to redefinitions of local debates and to the unravelling of patriarchal practices in a socialist society that had allegedly solved its ‘woman question’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French historian Michel Rey explored patterns and changes in the sodomitical subculture of eighteenth century Paris in a series of articles published in the 1980s and 1990s and based largely on one series of police records from the period 1715–50. Other sources, some known and others unknown to Rey, have been analysed or located since the 1990s, so it is time to review and revise his conclusions. These sources require us to revisit his questions about demographics and mentalities, identity and community, surveillance and repression, and consider other questions about same-sex relations in the context of the Ancien Régime. This article outlines an agenda for the next round of research in the Archives of the Bastille in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal and several series of police and ministry records in the Archives Nationales, which will take more than a few years to complete. It discusses the variety of documents to be digested, presents some sample sources and early findings, and suggests avenues for further inquiry, with the objective of pursuing, expanding and refining the work of the pioneering historian of this subject and connecting the history of same-sex relations with other issues (hierarchy, migration, friendship, popular attitudes, categories of difference and more) in French history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the three articles in this Forum explains how they bring to a wide audience a central problem in the historiography of nineteenth-century Mexico: the relationship between gender and the construction of citizenship, its varieties and mechanics. Each also deals with the use of gender as a power-loaded category to build the image, voice and symbolic meaning of women in relation to key institutions such as the state, the family and social imagery. This article uses gender as an analytical category in order to explore how ways of thinking about sexual differences influenced the construction of the political community and the public sphere in Mexico, in the wake of the revolutionary War of Independence. Relevant legislation, petitions, judicial records and especially pamphlet literature are used to illustrate the ways in which ‘the symbolic constructions’ rooted in prototypical images of men and women constituted an essential element in the construction of a new political community, and of new ways of talking about and acting upon ‘the public’. Laws that made a married woman's citizenship dependent on that of her husband characterised Mexican law, and that of most other nations as well, from the nineteenth into the early-twentieth century. Using an 1881 Supreme Court decision that upheld the expatriation of two Mexican sisters who married Spanish citizens, this article posits that dependent citizenship rules in Mexico affected women with financial resources more directly than they affected less privileged women. At the same time, class and status mitigated the potentially negative effects of dependent citizenship. Exploring women's dependent citizenship in Mexico in the late-nineteenth century reveals that both nationality and law were fluid concepts. With respect to nationality and the legal disabilities imposed on foreigners, law only unevenly penetrated elite levels of Mexican society. Law and jurisprudence articulated a particular vision of the Mexican nation that was not always realised. This essay examines the Ramírez family saga as an allegory for national suffering and sacrifice during the French Intervention (1862–67). According to myth and memory, the matriarch of this poverty-stricken indigenous family, Agustina Ramírez, lost her husband and twelve sons in battles against foreign invaders. Only one son survived. Nineteenth-century policy makers celebrated Agustina Ramírez as a heroic model of republican motherhood and awarded her a lifetime pension. Unfortunately, they were unable to locate her and she was supposedly buried in a pauper's grave in Mazatlán. This paper deals simultaneously with the gender and ethnic implications of Agustina Ramírez's story in the nineteenth century and the historian's search for documents to substantiate this myth-history. The story of Agustina Ramírez was first told, embellished and then retold primarily by men, but aimed strategically at Mexican women. Thus this essay argues that the patriarchal voice speaking for Agustina Ramírez actually contributed to the failure of republican motherhood in Mexico. As a rare, surviving, sixteenth-century female voice, accessible through her published Examinations, the Henrician martyr Anne Askew is a popular subject of modern study. Many modern scholars tend to treat her primarily as a woman expressing a specifically female faith and subjectivity. But both in describing the unsuccessful struggle for survival of their author, and in assuring their readers of her faith and constancy, the Examinations portray Askew adopting strategies under persecution known to have been used by her male friends and allies within the London evangelical and reformist community. Considered in their context – Henrician evangelicalism and its persecution – the Examinations, as an artefact of persecution and its negotiation, have a great deal to tell us about what Askew was doing when she wrote them, quite apart from their value as a record of sixteenth-century ‘female’ spirituality. This article considers the extent to which depictions of the seraglio/ serail in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Embassy Letters and Charles, Baron de Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes contain discourses of female emancipation or positive views of women in Middle Eastern societies. Situating these texts within the genealogies of ‘orientalism’, it teases out the intersecting agendas and multiple meanings to which the seraglio trope contributes. It compares the ‘modern’ intellectual concerns of the two authors, their use of existing images and ideas of the ‘orient’, and of fantasy, reportage and ‘philosophy’ in the making of their texts. Arguing that both texts present themselves primarily as contributions to the new field of social comparison and intellectual or ‘witty’ analysis, it suggests that Montagu's need to engage with the contested role of ‘woman writer and thinker’ and her greater reliance on reportage introduced a specific gendered discourse on seraglios which modifies the controlling and Eurocentric character of her text. The man accused or convicted of sodomy and other homosexual offences in nineteenth-century England was a doubly marginalised figure. English law prevented him from giving evidence at his trial, and he was scorned by homophile writers and sexologists as a situational ‘pervert’. However, the voice of the accused sodomite could be heard in four separate genres. First, the exculpatory text, written by or for the accused, presented his unmediated voice. Second, radical pamphlets presented the facts for an informed public. Third, the newspaper report recounted what appeared to be verbatim conversation of sodomites. And, fourth, the criminal petition enabled centre and locality, government and people, to debate the case and become involved in questions of guilt and innocence. The sodomite was far from silent. Indeed, he was compelled to speak. This article examines the impact of gender, race and colonial myth on the French takeover of Tahiti in the 1840s. It centres on representations of the young queen, Pomare IV, who resisted increased French influence in her kingdom by clinging to Britain, whose interest in her kingdom was declining. French aggressions, directed at the young, obstinate queen, were combated by English representations of Pomare as a vulnerable Polynesian version of Victoria. This paper interrogates the drama of the French takeover, how representations of Pomare functioned within the fracas that was known as the ‘Tahiti Affair’ and how subsequent historical representations of her have neglected to filter competing depictions of Pomare generated in this hotly contested episode of Anglo-French imperial competition. A distinguishing feature of the 1913 Gandhian satyagraha (passive resistance), in South Africa was the ‘marriage question’. The matter became a central issue for resistance with the March 1913 decision by Justice Malcolm Searle of the Supreme Court of the Cape Province, which declared all Hindu and Muslim marriages polygamous, rendering them legally invalid in South Africa. Within the existing historiography, Indian demands for redress are understood as incorporating into the 1913 satyagraha a self-evident grievance. Rather than assuming that the marriage question simply presented itself as a self-evident cause for protest, this essay traces the discursive reinscriptions that attended its inclusion into the satyagraha campaign. It argues that the Searle judgement is less important with regard to the formulation and implications of the verdict itself, and more important in terms of how it lent itself to a discursive formation whose impassioned gendered contours could mobilise elite support for a failing satyagraha campaign. French women supported their demands for citizenship in 1848 by looking to history, but were faced with historical writing which overlooked them. Subsequently, they themselves experienced this process as their actions were ignored or distorted. One activist, Jenny P. d'Héricourt (1809–1875), was the first to tackle women's historiographical exclusion. From 1855 onwards, her publications highlighted a history specific to women, denouncing the betrayal of revolutionary principles by so-called republicans and democrats. In pursuit of universal suffrage, her analysis of the past underlined the impossibility of human progress while historical progress was differentiated by sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents abstracts of articles on gender and history. 'Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption,' by Laura Briggs; 'Female Icons, Feminist Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric and Women's Agency in the 1950s China,' by Tina Mai Chen; 'Sadists and Sissies: Anti-pornography Campaigns in Cold War America,' by Andrea Friedman.

Was gender as a discursive formation of power exclusively shaped by secular forces unleashed in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries? Answering ‘no’ to this question, my paper seeks to show how gender and religion were mediated by contests over sovereignty, at a conceptual and political level. I examine a colonial context, the British takeover of Malabar in southern India, wherein the new claimants to rule challenged in new ways the power of a saintly Arab Muslim family representing in itself a transoceanic expansion. Through a case of conversion trouble, I demonstrate the appearance of gender in a relationship to religion that was at once historically specific and theoretically general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the rape of a twelve-year-old girl by three American marines in Okinawa in 1995, a trope of masculinised domination and feminised subjugation has shaped many feminist discussions of US-Okinawa relations. However, post-war US domination in Okinawa has entailed far more complex dynamics involving gender and nation. This article examines domestic reformism that flourished in US-occupied Okinawa where a group of home economists and home demonstration agents dispatched from Michigan State University (MSU) played an instrumental role in disseminating 'scientific domesticity'. Following the land-grant philosophy of educational outreach and self-help, MSU home economists engaged in a series of domestic reform activities where they attempted to transplant notions and practices of 'scientific domesticity' and modernise and empower local women. Taking place amidst the intense militarisation of Okinawa under American rule, domestic reformism generated much excitement and enthusiasm among local women. By analysing how domesticity and militarism became intertwined in post-war Okinawa, the article explores the complex links between domesticity, international educational aid, militarism and the cold war in the Asia-Pacific region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the sensational appeal of Katherine Davis's The End of the Road, leading to its unofficial designation in The Exhibitor's Herald as 'the most talked about Picture in America' in 1919, it is surprising the film has not received greater critical attention for its peculiarly feminist eugenic vision. Reading The End of the Road alongside other US government hygiene films and contemporaneous journal articles and medical texts, I reveal a different vision of Progressive Era eugenics than that found in the well‐known work of Shelley Stamp, Martin Pernick and Stacie Colwell. Drawing a distinction between what the progressives themselves termed 'positive' and 'negative' eugenics, I explore hygiene cinema's unexpected intersection with first‐wave feminism, progressive economics and welfare reform. In so doing, I reveal a window into a nearly‐forgotten feminist counter‐culture that briefly attained governmental support due to the overlap in membership between the American Social Hygiene Association and the US War Department. At the centre of this vision is The End of the Road's eugenic heroine, Mary, who is neither a wife nor a mother but a college‐educated working woman who promotes the 'development of oneself for the service of mankind'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to this special issue focused on the history of gender and reproduction.

Presents abstracts of articles related to history. "The Bombay Debt": Letter Writing, Domestic Economies and Family Conflict in Colonial India," by Erika Rappaport; "The Autocracy of Love and the Legitimacy of Empire: Intimacy, Power and Scandal in Nineteenth-Century Metlakahtlah," by Adele Perry; "Looking for Feminism," by Mahua Sarkar.

This article provides the first analysis of constructions of female criminality in sexological photographyin Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany by comparing Erich Wulffen's Der Sexualverbrecher (1910, The sex offender) and Das Weib als Sexualverbrecherin (1923, Woman as sex offender). It explores the new potential that photographic images in the Wilhelmine era had for illustrating notions of gendered criminality, portraying women mainly as victims and only in a handful of cases as exceptional criminals. In the Weimar Republic an entirely new type of criminal emerged – that of the ‘female sex offender’. Photographs in this period served both as evidence and as a warning to professional readerships about the violent threat these women posed to the fabric of German society. This article explores the intellectual context for this shift, and thereby speculates on how the photographs in question could be reinterpreted as contributions to a history of female violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patriarchy has been variously criticised as a rigid hermeneutic category since the mid-1980s. The postmodern turn has contested master narratives; recent feminist historiography has highlighted the multiplicity of female experience; and masculinity studies have called into question the dichotomy of male dominance/ female subordination by illustrating difference and hierarchy between men. This essay discusses some of these issues for the early modern period by bringing into focus two major historiographical trends that have shaped recent scholarship on gender: female agency and masculinity. Examining research on early modern Italy comparatively with historiographical traditions that have shaped British and American scholarship and drawing on recent scholarship and the author’s own research, the essay argues that patriarchy can be a useful category of analysis in current historiography if informed by updated theoretical and methodological insights into gender, such as the exploration of masculinity or more sophisticated conceptualisations of agency. Problematising and complicating early modern patriarchy involves the understanding of the meaningful process through which gender interacted socially and symbolically with other forms of power and difference in private and public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that in order to develop an understanding of patriarchy as a dynamic historical force, we need to think about it as a social formation which, like capitalism, both shapes and is shaped by other aspects of society. Patriarchy embodies numerous contradictions. Those contradictions provide space for female agency, as well as possibilities of change. The ability of patriarchy to change and adapt, by moving through various contradictions, helps us understand the process by which patriarchal equilibrium is maintained. The contradictions are illustrated by an examination of the ways men and women failed at patriarchy in early modern England: as unruly wives and cuckolded husbands. Both men and women consistently fail in the performance of patriarchy, but these particular anxieties shed light on the specific ways patriarchy was connected to other social and political concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores gendered discussions of indecent exposure cases (tried under the Vagrancy Act) of men revealing their ‘private parts’ in public in London before the fin-de-siècle. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, I argue that the growth of modern, urban anonymity was tied to the emergence of gendered and sexual codes of conduct regulating masculinity in various city spaces. Though this period saw the growth of policed society, Londoners were still negotiating acceptable male behaviour. The article also shows how the very definition of ‘public space’ was not, in fact, clear to city dwellers, as there was a fundamental confusion surrounding the Victorian notion of what might be deemed ‘public’. Furthermore, the article explores the understudied role of the press in discussion of gender and sexuality prior to the rise of the fin-de-siècle ‘New Journalism’ and its much-discussed sex scandals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illustrates the collaborative work of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and the Trusteeship Council to define the role of women and gender in the transitional moment from colonialism to self-rule in Africa (1948–65). In this historical context, women became a contentious symbol of national unity, as both anti-colonial activists and UN delegates saw them as the ‘guardians of tradition’. Within this framework, the female body became the locus of contested politics involving myriad historical actors from local rulers to religious NGOs. I argue that UN actors claimed to advance women’s rights, while simultaneously undermining them through an approach that went from outrage to acceptance. UN representatives were not always in agreement; they assumed different positions regarding the practice of polygamy and female circumcision. This article draws on original UN sources and contributes to ongoing debates within histories of gender, colonialism and diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationships, both real and imagined, that developed between German prisoners of war and women on the British home front during the First World War. Through an analysis of press coverage and archival materials, it adds a new dimension to the history of women’s wartime experiences. Contact with German prisoners challenged the authorities’ capacity to both control and protect British women on the home front. News of women’s interest in German prisoners jeopardised the morale of British soldiers and the idealised image of British women as potential wives and mothers while threatening the balance between the battle and home fronts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marriage was at the heart of the administration of colonial subjects in Natal, a British colony which would become part of the Union of South Africa in 1910. In contrast to colonial spaces in which authorities attempted to bring English-style ‘civility’ to native practices of marriage, the codification of Native customary marriage in Natal sought the preservation of ‘non-Christian’ forms of cultural practice as firstly an explicit denial of liberal reform in the mid-nineteenth century, and then from the middle of the twentieth century, as a demonstration of the commitment of a segregationist state to the supposed cultural and ethnic integrity of ‘non-white’ inhabitants of apartheid South Africa. This article attends to gender in order to deconstruct and demystify the making of the colonial common law. The marriage practices of European settler citizens that were being incorporated into the common law challenged the very idea of Christian propriety that was the rationalisation for excluding the marriage practices of native subjects. The lines of difference between ‘civilised’ and ‘Christian’ common law and ‘barbaric’ and unassimilable Native law were in fact created out of common and simultaneous assertions of domestic patriarchy, something that has been made invisible by the understanding of the colonial state and the civil codes through which it governed as being without a cultural specificity of their own. Between [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 1950, a custody battle between a Malay-Muslim woman and a Dutch-Catholic family over thirteen-year-old Nadra/‘Bertha’ Maria Hertogh seized public attention. The dispute escalated into a colonial ‘scandal’ when news emerged of Maria’s discreet ‘Muslim child marriage’ to a twenty-two-year-old Malay schoolmaster while the custody matter was pending in Singapore. As events unfolded, public opinion grew increasingly critical of local marriage practices, child-care and imperial authority. These developments led members of Singapore’s Legislative Council to propose an Age of Marriage Bill, which stirred debates on the consequences of gender inequalities within marriages in Malaya. In December 1950, after a British judge invalidated the thirteen-year-old’s Muslim marriage and awarded her custody to her Dutch family, riots broke out in Singapore. Studies of the outbreak and aftermath of religious and ethnic violence have since eclipsed analyses of the public discussions engendered by the Bill. This article, however, refocuses attention upon these debates on gender and marital inequalities and examines them in parallel with the public reactions to Maria Hertogh’s case. It argues that these inter-communal debates in cosmopolitan colonial Singapore provided space for Malay’s diverse communities to work out the tensions they encountered at the age of political self-determination in Southeast Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the history of Radcliffe College’s Zoological Laboratory, a women’s-only laboratory associated with the all-male Harvard College that became a centre for training women in animal biology. Radcliffe’s laboratory developed in the late nineteenth century in the face of Harvard’s fierce resistance to coeducation and popular scientific ideas that questioned women’s biological fitness for scientific study. This article documents how extralaboratory factors – such as masculine cultures of sociability, informal mentorship relationships and gender segregation in everyday academic life – carried over into the construction of experimental biology as a discipline. I argue that understanding how gender functioned in Radcliffe’s laboratory requires examining adjacent spaces and institutions on and off campus where scientific identities were forged, including neighbourhood boardinghouses and coeducational scientific society meetings. During this period, debates about the right approach to studying the natural world turned on competing visions of manliness in the field or at the laboratory bench. The entrance of Radcliffe women into male-dominated laboratory spaces motivated the articulation of new forms of scientific masculinities associated with the experimental rigours and professional aims of the turn-of-the-century ‘new biology’. More broadly, I contend that notions of scientific masculinity and the concurrent development of fraternal laboratory cultures served to exclude women from full participation in the biological sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconstructs the circumstances of the little-known Edward S. W. De Cobain gross indecency scandal in the early 1890s. I examine its significance to Victorian notions of class, Anglo-Irish politics and gender performativity through an analysis of newspaper reporting, personal correspondence and court documents. Edward De Cobain, Member of Parliament for East Belfast, became the focus of attention after serious allegations of attempted buggery were launched against him. De Cobain absconded from Britain upon word of the charges, but he continued to maintain his innocence while abroad until his eventual incarceration in 1893. In this article I revisit this sexual scandal involving a parliamentarian and disadvantaged young men but I aim to focus our attention away from the trial and toward the period of intense scandal that preceded it. The protracted and contradictory nature of the scandal invited public moralists, lawyers and journalists to debate the appropriate response to accusations of this sort, whilst politicians struggled to leverage the scandal to their party’s advantage. Moreover, the scandal – like Dublin Castle and Cleveland Street before it – brought into question the moral integrity of Britain’s ‘public men’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life-worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life-trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of 'motion' that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al-Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the conventional interpretation of the transition from French to British rule in Quebec, which has emphasised the increasing marginalisation of women in the colonial economy. Using hitherto unexplored criminal and civil court records and newspaper advertisements, reveals that women and in particular married women, both French and English speaking, were active in all facets of business life. Given the importance of imported British luxury items in the colonial economy following the American Revolution, this article argues that women occupied a particularly dynamic segment of business life in Quebec, and were especially prominent in the critical textile and fashion trades. A major theme of this article is to show the significance of informal trade networks in expanding economic development in the late eighteenth century, where women were demonstrably key players. The presence of women in both formal and formal economies goes far to locating Quebec in a burgeoning Atlantic economy, and to explaining the nature of consumer society in this new British colony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deploys children's bodies as an analytical lens to examine the political significance of knowledge production and childhood in British colonial projects in late colonial India. Scholars have theorised the 'body as method' of history to argue that bodies are imbued with meanings, become stakes in power struggles and are sites of knowledge and power. I examine this theme by investigating a key locus of knowledge production for children - the colonial school and its curriculum, specifically physical education. To underline the multi-stranded processes and loci of colonial knowledge production, I examine nationalist pedagogies of two Bengali children's magazines ( Amaar Desh and Mouchak) as a form of informal schooling. I argue that the colonial state's engagement with physical education in schools stemmed from anxieties to both discipline native children's bodies, and to discourage students' 'seditious' political activism. Second, I demonstrate that for Bengali educated elites, children embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their projects of re-masculinising the youth. These nation-building projects placed a premium on masculinity, influenced boy cultures to imitate adult male cultures, and inscribed gender roles on the bodies of Bengali boys and girls. By doing so, these colonial encounters restructured and redefined childhood in crucial ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carters' Barracks and Point Puer were the first attempts at creating a prison institution specifically for the growing number of juvenile male transportees who were being sent to the Australian colonies. Beyond the structures and regulations of the institutions, this article seeks to examine the ways in which the boys' understanding of masculinities shaped their relationships with prison authorities and within the juvenile prison community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the recent wave of historical studies that have examined the immediate social transformations implied by slavery abolition on gender relations. It highlights slave women's attempts to alter their status and the personal agency they displayed in the immediate post-proclamation period in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). During this very early period (1874-1877) women were quite an active presence in the colonial court and the percentage of cases discussing the right of women to leave their husbands increased. Traditional and colonial powers soon reacted to this changing situation. There were two main constraints to women's emancipation. On one hand there was a general confusion on the legal status of wives within traditional family, and on the other, the logic of debt concealed within the repayment of dowries tried to force women back into bondage even when they succeeded in changing their status from slaves to free women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]