This account examines some of the areas of women's political activity in Britain from the Glorious Revolution to the election of the first female Prime Minister in 1979. It shows how women had worked in a variety of arenas and organizations before the suffrage campaign and explores the directions their political activity took afterwards.
This book examines the political lives and contributions of Margaret Bondfield, Ellen Wilkinson, Barbara Castle, Judith Hart and Shirley Williams, the only five women to achieve Cabinet rank in a Labour Government from the party’s creation until Blair became Prime Minister. Paula Bartley brings together newly discovered archival material and published work to provide a survey of these women, all of whom managed to make a mark out of all proportion to their numbers. Charting their ideas, characters, and formative influences, Bartley provides an account of their rise to power, analysing their contribution to policy making, and assessing their significance and reputation. She shows that these women were not a homogeneous group, but came from diverse family backgrounds, entered politics in their own discrete way, and rose to power at different times. Some were more successful than others, but despite their diversity these women shared one thing in common: they all functioned in a male world.
This book serves as an introduction to the extraordinary diversity of women’s activism. Paula Bartley's original research is supported by a range of writing to provide a powerful impression of the actions taken by groups of women from across the social and political spectrum, making the book invaluable to both students and interested readers. These women set out to make a difference to their locality, their country and sometimes the world. The story of women’s activism embodies stimulating accounts of progress and reversals, of commitment and uncertainty, of competing rights and challenging wrongs. The story of women’s activism is not tidy or well-ordered. It is messy and unorthodox. And full of surprises.
In the first half of the twentieth century, many writers and artists turnedto the art and received example of the Elizabethans as a means ofarticulating an emphatic (and anti-Victorian) modernity. By the middleof that century, this cultural neo-Elizabethanism had become absorbedwithin a broader mainstream discourse of national identity, heritage andcultural performance. Taking strength from the Coronation of a new, youngQueen named Elizabeth, the New Elizabethanism of the 1950s heralded anation that would now see its 'modern', televised monarch preside over animminently glorious and artistic age.This book provides the first in-depth investigation of New Elizabethanismand its legacy. With contributions from leading cultural practitioners andscholars, its essays explore New Elizabethanism as variously manifestin ballet and opera, the Coronation broadcast and festivities, nationalhistoriography and myth, the idea of the 'Young Elizabethan', celebrations ofair travel and new technologies, and the New Shakespeareanism of theatreand television. As these essays expose, New Elizabethanism was muchmore than a brief moment of optimistic hyperbole. Indeed, from moderndrama and film to the reinternment of Richard III, from the London Olympicsto the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, it continues to pervade contemporaryartistic expression, politics, and key moments of national pageantry.
Most modern democracies punish hate speech. Less freedom for some, they claim, guarantees greater freedom for others. Heinze rejects that approach, arguing that democracies have better ways of combatting violence and discrimination against vulnerable groups without having to censor speakers. Critiquing dominant free speech theories, Heinze explains that free expression must be safeguarded not just as an individual right, but as an essential attribute of democratic citizenship. The book challenges contemporary state regulation of public discourse by promoting a stronger theory of what democracy is and what it demands. Examining US, European, and international approaches, Heinze offers a new vision of free speech within Western democracies.
Silvia Evangelisti presents the story of the women who have lived in religious communities, from the dawn of the modern age onwards - their ideals and achievements, frustrations and failures, and their attempts to reach out to the society aroundthem.
