Sisters and Sisterhood

Author(s):  
Lyndsey Jenkins

This is a book about the possibilities for, and experiences of, working-class women in the militant suffrage movement. It uses the Kenney family as a case study through which to understand who these women were, what they wanted, and what the vote meant to them. It identifies why they became politically active, their experiences as activists, and the benefits they gained from their political work. It stresses the need to see working-class women as significant actors and autonomous agents in the suffrage campaign. It shows why and how some women became politicized, why they prioritized the vote above all else, and how this campaign came to dominate their lives. It also places the suffrage campaign within the broader trajectory of their lives in order to stress how far the personal and political were intertwined for these women. It addresses questions of class and gender, politics and activism, and agency and identity in the early twentieth century, engaging with recent historiographical research around politicization, networks, and transnationalism. It is a history of education, faith, and social mobility as well of suffrage, and of teachers, theosophists, political activists, social reforms, friends and sisters, as well as suffragettes.

Modern Italy ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maud Anne Bracke

The article analyses cross-class encounters within 1970s feminist campaigning from the perspective of the history of emotions. It is based on a case study of a feminist women's sexual health clinic (consultorio autogestito) in a working-class district near Turin, the Falchera, in the mid-1970s. The article investigates the role played by emotions in the creation of a sense of community among women from different socio-economic and educational backgrounds. The encounters between feminist activists from Turin and working-class women living at the Falchera are understood as framed by these emotional exchanges, which led the women involved to question in new ways their own life-stories, aspirations and understanding of libertà. It is argued that these exchanges led to a reshaping of feminist politics at the grass-roots, specifically in the articulation of strongly situated notions of liberation. The analysis is based on original interviews and interviews published at the time.


2021 ◽  
pp. 019251212110400
Author(s):  
Rainbow Murray

Why is politics dominated by wealthy men, and how do gendered and class barriers to running for office intersect? This article addresses these questions using the UK as a case study. Drawing on interview data, I highlight the formal and informal institutions that shape the class and glass ceilings in electoral politics. I identify how the high personal costs of running for office, especially in relation to candidates’ time, present a barrier to those without significant financial resources. These costs are gendered, as women typically have less time and money than men. These resource barriers are compounded by additional gendered obstacles including discrimination, abuse and gendered family roles. I find that the intersection of the class and glass ceilings creates cumulative barriers that are particularly prohibitive for working-class women. The findings extend our understanding of class and gender gaps within politics and, crucially, the intersection between them.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 94
Author(s):  
Renata Garcia Campos Duarte

Este artigo tem como objetivo discutir a importância da utilização de impressos operários enquanto fonte para as pesquisas em história da educação, analisando alguns debates e ideias educacionais presentes em dois jornais operários de origem associativa: O Labor, da Confederação Auxiliadora dos Operários, e O Confederal, do Centro Confederativo dos Operários. As associações responsáveis pelos periódicos foram constituídas nos primeiros anos de existência de Belo Horizonte, cidade construída para sediar a nova capital do Estado de Minas Gerais. Os impressos operários, por sua vez, são entendidos em suas particularidades tendo-se em vista as suas características, os quais divulgavam algumas ideias e debates, como os referentes ao campo educacional. A partir da análise dos jornais foi apurada a existência de demandas e propostas por educação para todas as classes sociais, visto que o ensino em Belo Horizonte não era ofertado a todos, ou se era oferecido, não alcançava as classes sociais menos favorecidas.The working class press and the History of Education: an analysis of the contributions of the newspapers The Labor and The Confederal to the History of Education in the initial years of Belo Horizonte. This article aims to discuss the importance of the use of working class press as a source for research in the history of education, analyzing some debates and educational ideas present in two workers' newspapers of associative origin: The Labor, of the Auxiliary Confederation of Workers, and The Confederal, of the Confederative Center for Workers. The associations responsible for the periodicals were constituted in the first years of existence of Belo Horizonte, city built to host the new capital of the State of Minas Gerais. The working class periodicals, in turn, are understood in their particularities in view of their characteristics, which disseminated some ideas and debates, such as those concerning the educational field. From the analysis of the newspapers, the existence of demands and proposals for education for all social classes was verified, whereas the education in Belo Horizonte was not offered to all, or if it was offered, it did not reach the less favored social classes. Keywords: Workers associations; Belo Horizonte; Education; History of education; Working class press.


Author(s):  
Stephanie Vander Wel

Chapter 6 traces the musical and lyrical developments of honky-tonk in the late 1930s and 1940s with Al Dexter, Ernest Tubb, and Hank Williams and remained a predominant mode of country music after World War II, right when Kitty Wells, Goldie Hill, and Jean Shepard contributed to the musical discourse. These female artists, taking over male-defined and often parodic representations of women, developed narratives that articulated class-specific voices couched in the metaphors of sexual and material desire, heartache, and loss juxtaposed with 1950s ideals of domesticity. Examining the particulars of musical style and vocal expression, this chapter argues that female artists in their various enactments of the honky-tonk angel, the angry, jilted housewife, the single mother, and the forsaken lover disclosed the paradoxes of class and gender and helped to lift the cloak of invisibility shrouding working-class women.


1980 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 653
Author(s):  
Alice Kessler-Harris ◽  
Susan Estabrook Kennedy

1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (43) ◽  
pp. 225-229
Author(s):  
Dagmar Kift

The history of the music hall has for the most part been written as the history of the London halls. In Dagmar Kift's book, The Victorian Music Hall and Working-Class Culture (the German edition of which was reviewed in NTQ 35, and which is due to appear in English from Cambridge University Press), she attempts to redress the balance by setting music-hall history within a national perspective. Arguing that between the 1840s and the 1890s the halls catered to a predominantly working-class and lower middle-class audience of both sexes and all ages, she views them as instrumental in giving these classes a strong and self-confident identity. The sustaining by the halls of such a distinct class-awareness was one of their greatest strengths – but was also at the root of many of the controversies which surrounded them. The music-hall image of the working class – with its sexual and alcohol-oriented hedonism, its ridicule of marriage, and its acceptance of women and young people as partners in work as in leisure – was in marked contrast to most so-called Victorian values. The following case study from Glasgow documents the shift of music-hall opposition in the 1870s away from teetotallers of all classes attacking alcohol consumption towards middle-class social reformers objecting to the entertainment itself. Dagmar Kift, who earlier published an essay on the composition of music-hall audiences in Music Hall: the Business of Pleasure (Open University Press), is curator of the Westphalian Industrial Museum in Dortmund.


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