How Muscular was Victorian Christianity? Thomas Hughes and the Cult of Christian Manliness Reconsidered

1998 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 421-430
Author(s):  
Sean Gill
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Adult Male ◽  
General Reaction ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Muscular Christianity ◽  
Traditional Image ◽  
The Way ◽  
Christian Beliefs

Despite the enduring popularity of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which has never been out of print since its publication in 1857, the reputation of its author, Thomas Hughes, has suffered from the general reaction against Victorian values which characterized the first part of the twentieth century. Even as late as 1965, out of sympathy both with Hughes’s Christian beliefs and with his moral didacticism, Kenneth Allsop could dismiss him as a writer ‘fluctuating between a facetious smugness and a creepy piety’. However, in recent years scholars such as George Worth and Norman Vance have provided us with a more sensitive and nuanced picture of his thought, and one which severely qualifies the traditional image of Hughes as an exponent of a muscular Christianity which exalted an anti-intellectual credo of schoolboy athleticism and adult male toughness perfectly attuned to the ethos of high Victorian imperialism. This paper examines some of the ambiguities which are to be found in Hughes’s attempts to encapsulate and transcend the ideals of appropriate masculine and feminine behaviour within the specifically Christian context from which they arose, and in so doing cast some light on the way in which Victorian Christianity both contributed to, and was influenced by, the construction and maintenance of gender roles for both men and women.

A “Burlesque Queen in Bobby Socks”: Domesticity, Criminality, and Suspense in Charles Williams’s Noir Fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maysaa Husam Jaber
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Gender Schema ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
Noir Fiction ◽  
The Way

This article proposes that Charles Williams’s mid-twentieth-century noir fiction reshapes post-war representations of gender roles and paves the way for various renditions and developments of noir. Williams’s works are narratives of transgression meeting domesticity, crime meeting docility, and cunning meeting conformity; they portray a deadly recipe that comprises different, even conflicting ingredients of a fusion between domesticity, crime, and suspense. By examining the recurring figure of the criminal housewife in his work, especially Hell Hath No Fury (1953), this article argues that Williams brings forth a complex and subversive gender schema to trouble both the creed of domesticity popular in the 1950s and the stereotyping of the lethal seductress prevalent in noir fiction. By so doing, Williams’s noir not only brings the transgression of women to the fore but also displays a compelling picture of post-war gender roles in the US under McCarthyism.

Dark Rooms and Developing Fluid

2020 ◽  
pp. 86-122
Author(s):  
Erika Hanna
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historic Sites ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Chapter 3 explores the practices of photography clubs. Throughout Ireland, during the twentieth century, men and women spent their evenings in the dark rooms of photography clubs, and their weekends on days out to historic sites and beauty spots organized by these groups. As such, these organizations played an important role in mediating ideas of photographic value, technical perfection, and the picturesque. This chapter explores their history, and uses the way photography was taught to explore the relationship between photographic aesthetics and how society and people were envisioned through landscape. Until the late 1960s, the photographic conventions propounded by organizations such as the Photographic Society of Ireland and the Belfast Central Camera Club tended towards conservatism in both content and style. Amateur enthusiasts in general adhered to the pictorial tradition of studied set pieces—of sweeping hills or the curve of a beach offset by a white cottage—cropped and adapted to reach a standard of technical formalism and perfection in line with conventions derived from painting. Moreover, discussions of the respective merits of documentary and pictorial styles for depicting landscape within the amateur photographic press, although framed as aesthetic arguments, encompassed bigger issues. Correspondents debated their ability to respond to the upheavals of European modernity and their responsibility to depict uncomfortable themes through photography. As such, concerns about style became broader arguments regarding Ireland’s position within Europe, the boundaries of society, and the nature of the visible within Irish life.

Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (eds.) Women in the Holocaust

2002 ◽  
pp. 506-508
Author(s):  
Sabine von Mering
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Personal Narrative ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Face ◽  
Historical Detail ◽  
The Way

This chapter discusses Women in the Holocaust. This book shows how men and women experienced the Holocaust differently owing to culturally defined gender roles, gender-related expectations, and differences in the way the Nazis treated them. The twenty-one original articles in this book present a wide spectrum of historical detail, personal narrative, short fiction, description of experiences, statistical evidence, and theoretical conclusions. They highlight women’s suffering and ingenuity, their mistakes, and their unfailing resilience in nurturing relationships, supporting others, and sacrificing everything for their children. They also tell the story of women’s professional versatility, courage, and even creativity in the face of a monstrous machinery of death.

scholarly journals Understanding the Dynamics of Conflict: Insights from the Case of Algeria

1970 ◽  
pp. 46-51
Author(s):  
Cathie Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Crisis Of Masculinity ◽  
The Way

Competing interpretations of gender roles have played a central role in the recent conflict in Algeria. It is impossible to understand this without exploring the desperate circumstances of many men in Algeria, and throwing new light on the debate on the ‘crisis of masculinity’. Nearly all the accounts I have read by women of their experience of the conflict highlight the issue of gender separation and difficult, painful relations between men and women, which leaves both parties in distress. This article is an attempt to explore the way in which masculinity is constructed and represented in Algeria, and to look at the r

scholarly journals THE SUBJECTIVE DIMENSION OF NAZISM

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 1107-1132 ◽  
Author(s):  
MORITZ FÖLLMER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
German Society ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Violent Acts ◽  
Film Stars ◽  
The Way

ABSTRACTThe present historiographical review discusses the subjective dimension of Nazism, an ideology and regime that needed translation into self-definitions, gender roles, and bodily practices to implant itself in German society and mobilize it for racial war. These studies include biographies of some of the Third Reich's most important protagonists, which have important things to say about their self-understandings in conjunction with the circumstances they encountered and subsequently shaped; cultural histories of important twentieth-century figures such as film stars, housewives, or consumers, which add new insights to the ongoing debate about the Third Reich's modernity; studies that address participation in the Nazi Empire and the Holocaust through discourses and practices of comradeship, work in extermination camps, and female ‘help’ within the Wehrmacht. In discussing these monographs, along the way incorporating further books and articles, the piece attempts to draw connections between specific topics and think about new possibilities for synthesis in an overcompartmentalized field. It aims less to define a ‘Nazi subject’ than to bring us closer to understanding how Hitler's movement and regime connected different, shifting subject positions through both cohesion and competition, creating a dynamic that kept producing new exclusions and violent acts.

Sex Differences in Cardiovascular Reactivity

2009 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Whited ◽  
Kevin T. Larkin
Keyword(s):  
Blood Pressure ◽  
Heart Rate ◽  
Sex Differences ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Cardiovascular Reactivity ◽  
Task Type ◽  
Conflict Task ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Conflicting Evidence ◽  
Blood Pressure Responses

Sex differences in cardiovascular reactivity to stress are well documented, with some studies showing women having greater heart rate responses than men, and men having greater blood pressure responses than women, while other studies show conflicting evidence. Few studies have attended to the gender relevance of tasks employed in these studies. This study investigated cardiovascular reactivity to two interpersonal stressors consistent with different gender roles to determine whether response differences exist between men and women. A total of 26 men and 31 women were assigned to either a traditional male-oriented task that involved interpersonal conflict (Conflict Task) or a traditional female-oriented task that involved comforting another person (Comfort Task). Results demonstrated that women exhibited greater heart rate reactions than men independent of the task type, and that men did not display a higher reactivity than women on any measure. These findings indicate that sex of participant was more important than gender relevance of the task in eliciting sex differences in cardiovascular responding.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

Heritage

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Omar Shaikh ◽  
Stefano Bonino
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Online Video ◽  
The South ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Public ◽  
Video Footage ◽  
Community Heritage ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
The Way

The Colourful Heritage Project (CHP) is the first community heritage focused charitable initiative in Scotland aiming to preserve and to celebrate the contributions of early South Asian and Muslim migrants to Scotland. It has successfully collated a considerable number of oral stories to create an online video archive, providing first-hand accounts of the personal journeys and emotions of the arrival of the earliest generation of these migrants in Scotland and highlighting the inspiring lessons that can be learnt from them. The CHP’s aims are first to capture these stories, second to celebrate the community’s achievements, and third to inspire present and future South Asian, Muslim and Scottish generations. It is a community-led charitable project that has been actively documenting a collection of inspirational stories and personal accounts, uniquely told by the protagonists themselves, describing at first hand their stories and adventures. These range all the way from the time of partition itself to resettling in Pakistan, and then to their final accounts of arriving in Scotland. The video footage enables the public to see their facial expressions, feel their emotions and hear their voices, creating poignant memories of these great men and women, and helping to gain a better understanding of the South Asian and Muslim community’s earliest days in Scotland.

Breeding Better Babies in the Eugenic Garden City: ‘Municipal Darwinism’ and the (Anti)Cosmopolitan Utopia in the early Twentieth Century

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Currell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Core Beliefs ◽  
Garden City ◽  
New Town ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Body ◽  
Practical Level ◽  
The Way

Showing how ‘modernist cosmopolitanism’ coexisted with an anti-cosmopolitan municipal control this essay looks at the way utopian ideals about breeding better humans entered into new town and city planning in the early twentieth century. An experiment in eugenic garden city planning which took place in Strasbourg, France, in the 1920s provided a model for modern planning that was keenly observed by the international eugenics movement as well as city planners. The comparative approach taken in this essay shows that while core beliefs about degeneration and the importance of eugenics to improve the national ‘body’ were often transnational and cosmopolitan, attempts to implement eugenic beliefs on a practical level were shaped by national and regional circumstances that were on many levels anti-cosmopolitan. As a way of assuaging the tensions between the local and the global, as well as the traditional with the modern, this unique and now forgotten experiment in eugenic city planning aimed to show that both preservation and progress could succeed at the same time.

Poetic Trespass

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lital Levy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Old World ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Emile Habiby ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, “Homelandic,” is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a “language plague” that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. This book brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, the book presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, the book traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, the book finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their “other,” as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, the book introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, the book will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

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