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This article analyses cross-dressed performances by women in films produced in the Russian Empire between 1910 and 1917. It examines around 25 films, both those that are extant and those considered lost, and identifies two major groups: cross-gender cast films and films featuring women characters who temporarily disguise their gender identity. In most of the films in the first group, women are cast in the roles of boys and young men, which links them directly to the theatrical travesty tradition. The article devotes special attention to Portret Doriana Greia / The Picture of Dorian Gray (Vsevolod Meyerhold, 1915, Russian Empire), in which the actress Varvara Ianova played the eponymous role. It also traces some of the public discussions on the topic of travesty in Imperial Russian theatrical circles, focusing on a 1905 brochure Pochemu ia igraiu rol’ Orleanskoi Devy / Why I Play the Part of the Maid of Orleans by Boris Glagolin, an innovative theatrical actor and director who indeed portrayed Joan of Arc on stage. Among the films that depicted cross-dressing as intrinsic to the plot, the article briefly reviews several comedies, as well as dramas in which cross-dressing was less widely represented and usually included as part of a heroic narrative. The film Nelli Raintseva (Evgenii Bauer, 1916, Russian Empire) represents a remarkable exception to this trend and is therefore analysed more closely.

This essay will re-evaluate several women writers of the 1910s as neo-Edwardian writers, by examining a range of fictional and autobiographical texts that are set in the recent past of the Edwardian period. It will focus in particular on three suffragette narratives that were published in the pre-World War One years - Constance Maud, No Surrender (1911), Gertrude Colmore, Suffragette Sally (1911) and Lady Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners: some personal experiences (1914) - that seek to represent, and evaluate, the movement's activities during the Edwardian decade and which have not yet been the subject of sustained critical comparison. By identifying some distinctive formal and thematic tropes in these texts, I aim to explore their continuing interest to different scholarly communities and to develop a fresh reading of these works' literary, and wider cultural and social, provenance as neo-Edwardian texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how working-class households tried to manage fluctuations in income and expenditures by a combination of saving and borrowing. The Swedish Cost of living survey from 1913–1914 focused on working-class and lower-income white-collar households in urban areas. It asked the participating households to keep track of weekly incomes, expenditures, and financial operations in accounting books, which were kept for an entire year. These books make it possible to trace fluctuations in income and expenditures on a weekly basis over an extended period of time, something few other sources allow. A sample of 30 households were chosen on the basis of expected irregular incomes. However, a subset of maintenance workers turned out to have regular incomes. Four households were chosen as cases for in-depth investigation and are presented as ideal types. The four types have been labelled cash accumulators, bank savers without net annual saving, small borrowers, and mixers of saving and borrowing. The cash accumulating households strove to save enough money to pay for their high rent. Bank savers used their savings account for precautionary and target savings reasons, resulting in no net annual increase in their savings. The small borrowers relied on small loans to make ends meet. Their expenditures varied with their income and they also had problems repaying their loans, since they had to take out new loans to pay for old ones. The mixers used both savings and loans, even though they could have financed their consumption through savings. They used loans to pay for consumer durables, primarily furniture. The households managed to smooth their consumption to varying degrees. Despite borrowing extensively, the expenditures among the small borrowers varied, even on food. Fluctuations in food expenditures, although uncorrelated to income, were also present among the cash accumulators as well as the mixers. Household practice was affected by dependency ratio and degree of income fluctuation. For example, the small borrowers had many children and an average income but with large fluctuations. The mixers had also large variations but no children, which allowed them to save more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay illustrates how Ben Hecht's short stories in The Little Review and the Chicago Daily News crucially expand the scope of burgeoning research into post-Wildean, American Decadence. These works (written between 1915 and 1921) have been over-shadowed by Hecht's later Hollywood career to the point where they have all-but eluded scholarly commentary. However, attention to these vignettes of sensual experience in downtown Chicago reveals that they develop Decadence in a unique direction, which fuses the backstreet Decadence of Arthur Machen and Arthur Symons with the pulp fiction published by Hecht's mentor, H. L. Mencken, in The Black Mask. The result, I argue, is that Hecht's short stories create a hard-boiled Decadence: a new form which uses Decadent language to explore the continuity of Decadent sensuality in the unlikely setting downtown Chicago, at the same time as it uses the emerging tropes of hard-boiled fiction to define the impediments to having a Decadent sensibility in such circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lambda Nordica is the property of Lambda Nordica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of the article is to apply gender perspective to a wide-ranging study of different actors' dealings during the Gävle City Council elections of 1910 and 1912 in order to analyse local political culture in the wake of the 1909 reforms to the Local Government Act. Taking as the starting-point the idea of political culture and the actions of various key figures at the time of the election, the focus is on the gendering of Swedish politics once women's suffrage had been introduced. The results are based on an intersectional analysis of the electorate's behaviour, using electoral rolls, population registers, and press reports. The study includes local women's organization's strategies to increase women's political participation, as well as the part played by the local branches of the political parties. Seen in the national context, Gävle was unusual - three women won seats on the City Council in 1910, in the run-up to which the local Society for Women's Suffrage had run a spirited campaign to ensure that the women candidates got to stand in safe seats. All the newspapers in 1910 carried exhortations to voters of both sex to exercise their votes, and several newspapers reported an enthusiastic election turn-out amongst women. Two years later the Society for Women's Suffrage had split, losing some of its influence in the process. Before the 1912 election, moreover, no women were selected to stand for a safe seats, and the newspapers' reporting of the election tended to render the female electorate invisible, which in itself gave a somewhat misleading picture of the situation, bearing in mind that in the event similar numbers of women would vote in this election as had done in the previous one. Otherwise, in terms of the actual turn-out, it is noticeable that the male and female electorate adhered to the same social pattern -- the rich, as always, voted in far greater numbers than those with few votes (municipal suffrage was income-based in such a way as an individual could have two or more votes in the same election). Yet there were also some noticeable differences between the sexes. The majority of the female electorate were unmarried women with few votes; a majority of the men who turned out to vote were married and well established. Since all the political parties without exception put up male candidates in the 1912 election, and chose to address their propaganda to a gender-neutral electorate, they tapped a fundamental characteristic of political culture that had deep historical roots. We would therefore argue that the actions of the local branch of the Society for Women's Suffrage prior to the 1910 election were crucial in establishing the fact of women as political citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]