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This obituary recalls the life of the feminist activist and academic Jalna Hanmer (1931–2023) who campaigned to end male violence against women and to improve the attitude of the police when dealing with domestic abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is the first step in the process of writing Filipino elite women into the history of public health by focusing on those who were not health practitioners (not doctors, nurses or midwives), but who were heavily involved in the campaign against infant mortality in the American colonial period. It argues that Filipino elite women fulfilled the extremely important role of administrators of organizations that addressed infant care and maternal and child health, in the distribution of milk and the dissemination of information about maternal and children's health. Using hitherto unused sources from the archives of La Protección de la Infancia, the periodicals of the National Federation of Women's Clubs, and colonial records, this study reveals how the public health movement in the Philippines was gendered, and analyzes the contributions made by Filipino elite women that have to date not yet been acknowledged in the scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early March 1939 the Nazi women's leader (Reichsfrauenfühererin) Gertrud Scholtz-Klink made a little-known visit to London at the invitation of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty and the Anglo-German Fellowship. Taking place against the background of intense efforts to maintain peace, and growing expectations of war, the visit prompted a variety of responses from British women activists. Through analysing these responses, as well as examining why this visit has been overlooked in historical writing, this article sheds new light both on women’s particular contribution to appeasement and on the gendering and feminising of internationalist activism in the aftermath of the First World War more generally. The German intentions behind accepting the invitation, the protests by a small number of London-based anti-fascist women and the reason why even some pro-appeasement women like Nancy Astor refused to meet Scholtz-Klink, are also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) was a major force in promoting anti-colonialism after 1945. The article traces how and why the WIDF came to support anti-colonialism from the mid-1940s to 1965. Part of the answer lies in the cosmopolitan vision and background of the membership of the WIDF that included increasing participation from nationalist and communist women from Asia and Africa. By sharing their views on colonial oppression the WIDF as a whole came to recognise the links between colonial oppression and women's oppression. Focusing on Vietnam and Algeria, this article analyses the strategies the WIDF used in its anti-colonial activism. One strategy was to document the effects of colonialism on the women of Asia and Africa and to publicise their experiences of ongoing colonial wars. A second WIDF strategy was to provide a platform for women from colonised countries to promote anti-colonialism through its congresses and appeals and by lobbying the United Nations (UN), especially in relation to the violation of UN conventions and principles. The article presents a new history of transnational anti-colonial activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As previously demonstrated by scholars, the social justice feminism movement in the United States accomplished its two central goals by the time of that nation's official involvement in World War II. This article examines the subsequent development of former social justice feminists' search for political activism after World War II through the activities of one of the social movement's later, significant leaders, Gladys Avery Tillett, particularly in her participation in the controversial and bitter campaign of North Carolina United States Senator Frank Porter Graham to retain his seat in the 1950 Democratic party primary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of how to be a heterosexual feminist has long vexed women's liberationists. This article is interested in how a set of British activist women in the 1970s dealt with the challenges of heterosexual love. The article's source for this is the Sisterhood and After archive, the relatively untouched tranche of interviews with leading activists in the women's liberation movement (WLM), compiled between 2010 and 2013 and held at the British Library. Through these intimate and often enigmatic sources, the author sets out to explore the space between the theory of loving men and its practice among a handful of women liberationists. In doing so the author emphasises the importance of a supra-political space, the private, in the composition of these narratives. In addition, the socialist complexion to the British women’s movement is considered in the context of the wider political moment of the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contains a cross-cultural comparison of constructions of politically militant women, beginning with Charlotte Corday of the French Revolution, continuing with Louise Michel of the 1871 Paris Commune, and concluding with Emmeline Pankhurst and the British suffragettes. The study reveals that as Michel's opponents attempted to ridicule and discredit her, they resurrected representations of Corday, modifying and aging them to fit her. The suffragettes' opponents similarly resurrected representations of Michel to ridicule them, but not as successfully. In response, Pankhurst's and the suffragettes' self-representations skillfully countered the anti-suffragists' dated and inaccurate representations of militant women as unhappy and unattractive spinsters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article briefly surveys the life and work of Barbara Wootton, who made an outstanding contribution to the social sciences and to public life, and to the connection between the two, between the 1920s and 1980s, but is too little remembered now. She campaigned for the parliamentary vote for women, for equality in public life when women had the vote, for equal pay, abortion, abolition of capital punishment, homosexual law reform, reform of the criminal justice system to encourage rehabilitation in place of punishment, for social equality more broadly and for policy changes to be underpinned by sound research. She deserves to be remembered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the rise of communal religious activities among British women of various Protestant denominations as well as a broader definition of the spiritual for many people. Communal religious service structures created a space in which young, mostly middle-class women could acquire both a degree of autonomy and a sense of effecting change in a wider sphere than would typically be open to them and, just as importantly, allowed them to meet and develop ties with others beyond their immediate family circles. This article looks at how two young women, Mary Neal and Emmeline Pethick, used one such organisation, the West London Mission, as a springboard for wider activism: Emmeline Pethick, as Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, came to prominence as one of the leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union, and Mary Neal's work on recovering the disappearing morris dance for the benefit of working-class girls brought her national recognition. Both women benefited from friendship networks which allowed them to draw other women into their work and both faced opposition from male-dominated power structures, but the spiritual element with which they imbued their activism remained integral to their projects and to their lives. Ultimately, though, the evolution of their spiritual beliefs brought them to assess their life achievements in very different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While elite women's imperialist activism in early-twentieth-century Britain is now well recognised, little attention has been paid to how this female imperialism was integrated into broader right-wing politics. The adherence of many right-wing women to a conventionally ‘masculine’ model of empire is also under-researched. This article explores the connections between imperial and wider right-wing politics, the new forms of Conservative activism for women they generated, and the ‘masculinist’ gender model of this imperial Conservatism, through an investigation of the political life of Violet Milner (1872–1958). It emphasises the impact of the South African war in forming imperial ideologies which influenced attitudes to ‘domestic’ as well as imperial politics; highlights the degree to which elite women participated in the campaigns of the Edwardian radical right over tariff reform, national service and Ulster, and in the interwar ‘diehard’ campaigns over India; and traces the enduring influence of turn-of-the-century imperial attitudes into the post-war era as demonstrated by her revival of the ‘Milner religion’ and her editorship of theNational Review. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This editorial reflects on the life of Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913), a suffragette in Edwardian Britain, who died on 8 June 1913 after running on to the race course at the Derby, four days earlier, and trying to grab the reins of the King's horse, Anmer. Rather than seeing her as a suicidal fanatic, it is suggested that she was a sensible, level-headed, religious woman, a risk-taker who probably did not intend to die. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adopts a biographical approach to examine the politicization of a woman activist, Gertrude Tuckwell (1861–1951), in the British labour movement at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the influence of Tuckwell's radical background and argues that her loyalty and sense of duty towards her family shaped and directed the nature of her social and political work. With emphasis on the years between 1891, when she began to work for the Women's Trade Union League, and 1921, when this organization was transferred to the General Council of the Trades Union Congress, it is argued that these characteristics have contributed to her neglect within British labour history, which has tended to foreground those women whose leadership roles have been easier to define. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do boundaries of nation, language, memory, and time operate as researchers write the lost history of women? Why and how are subjects chosen, and how do subjects choose writers? What sorts of privilege does the English language give to native speakers on the global stage? Why have I chosen two subjects who spoke Finnish and Hungarian, two of the least known and difficult to learn languages for speakers of English? While trying to answer these questions, I will intersperse a ‘shadow narrative’ of my own borderland crossings into the narrative of one of ‘my’ international border-crossers in the interwar period, Rosika Schwimmer (1877–1948) of Hungary and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article outlines the contribution of suffrage shops to the campaign of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU); it charts the emergence of stores nationwide, and provides for the first time a full list of WSPU shops. Amidst the WSPU's various campaign activities, branch shops established new spaces for, and new dynamics in, the votes for women movement from 1909. Recognising these shops' roles as new, semi-public campaign spaces, the connections between the image and functions of these new campaign spaces are explored, with the retail image of WSPU shops argued to be central to their role of engaging and attracting the consumer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with six Swedish suffragists who belonged to an informal network in the Swedish Suffrage Organization and who corresponded over the twenty years that the struggle for the vote took, from 1902 to 1921. The analysis takes place on two levels; on the one hand, it deals with the women's description of their emotional experience, and on the other, with how these feelings were constructed and used in political propaganda as a kind of 'capital'—in demonstrations, public meetings or festive occasions. The suffragists on the barricades lived at a time of much drama and many tensions and the period generated powerful feelings that could be utilized in the campaign for the vote. The theoretical framework is Randall Collins's model of 'interaction rituals' where he argues that feelings are of great importance for social movements in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For professional British women in the early twentieth century, support for the suffrage campaign was often problematic, and risked provoking charges of lack of decorum. While women teachers, being numerous, were able to campaign actively, the contribution of the doctors was limited, because their numbers were small. They subscribed to suffrage societies and participated in the great processions, but tended to avoid other public demonstrations; tax resistance was their main form of protest. Very few were prepared to risk their reputations by engaging in more militant activities, and it was not until 1914 that they were finally able to make a significant contribution to the suffrage movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese suffragists in the early 1910s attempted to inject gender into early Republican politics. They employed a new rhetoric of citizens' civil rights and new institutional practices to do so. Suffragists acquired power and authority in the public sphere, questioned the authority of the National Assembly and Legislature, and interfered with the merger of the Nationalist party. They defined the nature of the Republic and defended women's place in it by challenging the political dominance of men. The suffrage movement shaped the modern politics of nation building, democracy and subjectivity in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]