Fashioning Sapphism

Fashioning Sapphism

Author: Laura Doan

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2001-03-08

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0231110073

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An in-depth study of early 20th century social conditions and cultural trends in Britain that constructed the popular image of the "modern lesbian"


Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture

Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture

Author: Cathy McGlynn

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-11-23

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 331963609X

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This timely collection engages with representations of women and ageing in literature and visual culture. Acknowledging that cultural conceptions of ageing are constructed and challenged across a variety of media and genres, the editors bring together experts in literature and visual culture to foster a dialogue across disciplines. Exploring the process of ageing in its cultural reflections, refractions and reimaginings, the contributors to Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture analyse how artists, writers, directors and performers challenge, and in some cases reaffirm, cultural constructions of ageing women, as well as give voice to ageing women’s subjectivities. The book concludes with an afterword by Germaine Greer which suggests possible avenues for future research.


Bringing Up War-Babies

Bringing Up War-Babies

Author: Amanda Jones

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 1351387057

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The figure of the wartime child in the mid-twentieth century unsettles and disturbs. This book employs a range of material – biographical, literary and historical – to chart some of the surprising and unanticipated crossovers between women’s writing and early psychoanalysis in the years of the Second World War and the decades before and after. This volume includes examples of children’s adventure fiction, as well as works written for adult audiences and important and previously unrecognized similarities are noted. The war was a disruptive influence in the lives of all who lived through it. Although active self-censorship is observed in the behaviour and attitudes of adults at this time, this book demonstrates how fictional children are able to articulate feelings such as anxiety and fear that adults were under pressure to conceal or to repress and at times, the figure of the wartime child becomes a surrogate for the writer herself or her suppressed fears and anxiety. When peace returned, this study finds women writers quick to identify and communicate a discomfiting new ambivalence between parents and children.


Odd women?

Odd women?

Author: Emma Liggins

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2016-05-16

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1526111640

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This genealogy of the 'odd woman' compares representations of spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women’s fiction and auto/biography from the 1850s to the 1930s. Women outside heterosexual marriage in this period were seen as abnormal, superfluous, incomplete and threatening, yet were also hailed as ‘women of the future’. Before 1850 odd women were marginalised, minor characters in British women’s fiction, yet by the 1930s spinsters, lesbians and widows had become heroines. This book examines how women writers, including Charlotte Brontë, Elisabeth Gaskell, Ella Hepworth Dixon, May Sinclair, E. H. Young, Radclyffe Hall, Winifred Holtby and Virginia Woolf, challenged dominant perceptions of singleness and lesbianism in their novels, stories and autobiographies. Drawing on advice literature, medical texts and feminist polemic, it demonstrates how these narratives responded to contemporary political controversies around the vote, women’s work, sexual inversion and birth control, as well as examining the impact of the First World War.


Dressing for Austerity

Dressing for Austerity

Author: Geraldine Biddle-Perry

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-04-30

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1786731975

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A new look for Austerity...The coldest winter on record, rationing, successive economic crises, bombed out towns and cities; with some justification 'Austerity Britain' in the late 1940s is coloured in the popular imagination in tones of drab. Dressing for Austerity shines a light on alternative visions of post-war optimism and aspiration. It traces how, set against the Labour government's philosophy of 'Austerity by design' in a climate of post-war idealism, the desire for affordable fashionable clothing, access to leisure, and the health, time and money to enjoy them became totemic symbols of post-war ambition that impelled new strategies of state control and consumer agency. The book examines the immediate post-war period - its politics, its fashions and its people - in new ways and on its own terms as a critical tipping point in the making of modern Britain.


Mrs Humphry Ward and Greenian Philosophy

Mrs Humphry Ward and Greenian Philosophy

Author: Helen Loader

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-03-26

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 3030141098

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This book examines Mary Ward’s distinctive insight into late-Victorian and Edwardian society as a famous writer and reformer, who was inspired by the philosopher and British idealist, Thomas Hill Green. As a talented woman who had studied among Oxford University intellectuals in the 1870s, and the granddaughter of Dr Arnold of Rugby, Mrs Humphry Ward (as she was best known) was in a unique position to participate in the debates, issues and events that shaped her generation; religious doubt and Christianity, educational reforms, socialism, women’s suffrage and the First World War. Helen Loader examines a range of biographical sources, alongside Mary Ward’s writings and social reform activities, to demonstrate how she expressed and engaged with Greenian idealism, both in theory and practice, and made a significant contribution to British Society.


D. H. Lawrence and Feminism

D. H. Lawrence and Feminism

Author: Hilary Simpson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-01

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1040017789

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First published in 1982, D. H. Lawrence and Feminism discusses Lawrence’s work by examining it in relation to aspects of women’s history and the development of feminism. Two different modes of pre-war feminism which provide important themes in Lawrence’s early writings are examined in the opening chapters. The central chapters deal with the war, both as a catalyst for major changes in the position of women and as a point of no return in the development of Lawrence’s work. A final chapter looks at the way in which Lawrence used women as collaborator, and their writing as source material. This book will be of interest to students of literature, women’s studies and history.


Behind enemy lines

Behind enemy lines

Author: Juliette Pattinson

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2021-07-08

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1526162237

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Behind enemy lines is an examination of gender relations in wartime using the Special Operations Executive as a case study. Drawing on personal testimonies, in particular oral history and autobiography, as well as official records and film, it explores the extraordinary experiences of male and female agents who were recruited and trained by a British organisation and infiltrated into Nazi-Occupied France to encourage sabotage and subversion during the Second World War. With its original interpretation of a wealth of primary sources, it examines how these ordinary, law-abiding civilians were transformed into para-military secret agents, equipped with silent killing techniques and trained in unarmed combat. This fascinating, timely and engaging book is concerned with the ways in which the SOE veterans reconstruct their wartime experiences of recruitment, training, clandestine work and for some, their captivity, focusing specifically upon the significance of gender and their attempts to pass as French civilians. This examination of the agents of an officially-sponsored insurgent organisation makes a major contribution to British socio-cultural history, war studies and gender studies and will appeal to both the general reader, as well as to those in the academic community.


Cohabitation and Non-Marital Births in England and Wales, 1600-2012

Cohabitation and Non-Marital Births in England and Wales, 1600-2012

Author: R. Probert

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-06-23

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 113739627X

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Today, cohabiting relationships account for most births outside marriage. But what was the situation in earlier centuries? Bringing together leading historians, demographers and lawyers, this interdisciplinary collection draws on a wide range of sources to examine the changing context of non-marital child-bearing in England and Wales since 1600.