The Christianizing the Home Movement

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-242
Author(s):  
Amy O’Keefe
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Women ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Female Empowerment ◽  
World War ◽  
Culturally Informed ◽  
Christian Family ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second World ◽  
Family Centered

Abstract The ecumenical National Christian Council of China (ncc) was the institutional home to an important religious and social campaign: the Christianizing the Home Movement. This article traces the development of this movement from the ncc’s founding in 1922 until the Second World War disrupted its activity. This home- and family-centered movement was a site of female empowerment, and the expansive topics it addressed show women’s desires to serve and lead in a broad set of arenas. This article shows how the Chinese women who led the Christianizing the Home Movement built and shaped a movement and describes the nationwide network of leaders that carried it out, promoting an ideal of Christian family that was culturally informed and progressive.

scholarly journals Vera Lynn on Screen: Popular Music and the ‘People's War’

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATE GUTHRIE
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second World

AbstractBy the outbreak of the Second World War in Britain, critics had spent several decades negotiating the supposed distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, as recent scholarship has shown. What has received comparatively little attention is how the demands of wartime living changed the stakes of the debate. This article addresses this lacuna, exploring how war invited a reassessment of the relative merits of art and popular music. Perhaps the most iconic British singer of the period, Vera Lynn provides a case study. Focusing on her first film vehicle,We'll Meet Again(1942), I explore how Lynn's character mediated the highbrow/lowbrow conflict – for example, by presenting popular music as a site of community, while disparaging art music for its minority appeal. In so doing, I argue, the film not only promoted Lynn's star persona, but also intervened in a broader debate about the value of entertainment for a nation at war.

scholarly journals The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-161
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
The Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Narrow Road ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second World

This paper engages Cathy Caruth’s thinking about trauma, Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, and Giorgio Agamben’s theorising of bearing witness to examine the affective performance of remembering in Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Reading the narrative as a postmemorial account of Japan’s internment of Australian POWs in Burma during the Second World War, I focus on the body as a site of both wounding and witnessing to show how the affective relays between pleasure and pain reanimate the epistemological drama of lived experience and highlight the ambivalence of passion as a trope for both suffering and love. Framed by its intertextual homage to Matsuo Bashō’s poetic masterpiece of the same name, the Australian narrative of survival is shown to emerge from the collapse of the referential certainties underlying the binaries of victim/ victimiser, witness/perpetrator, human/inhuman, and remembering/forgetting. In Flanagan’s ethical imagination, bearing witness calls for a visceral rethinking of historical subjectivity that binds the world to consciousness as a source of both brutality and beauty.

scholarly journals Fashion and the femmes tondues: Lee Miller, Vogue and representing Liberation France

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 330-344
Author(s):  
Claire Gorrara
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
War Photography ◽  
Feminine Beauty ◽  
Multiple Messages ◽  
War Experience ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second World

This article will examine representations of the Liberation of France in the war reports of Lee Miller, an accredited photographer and correspondent for American and British Vogue during the Second World War. Miller’s frontline reports framed Liberation France in idealised images of feminine beauty and elegance, making use of fashion as a primary conduit for understanding the war and occupation for readers on the home front. As this article will argue, examining Miller’s choices and perspective as a female photographer sheds new light on the intersection of fashion, war photography and the female body. In Miller’s work, fashion becomes a site for imagining liberation in ways that foreground the gendering of war experience and the legacies of conflict for women. By charting Miller’s representations of French women at the Liberation, and above all the chastised figure of the femme tondue, this article will analyse how French women function as carriers of multiple messages about war, liberation and reconstruction in Miller’s work. Unlike the sensationalist images of the femmes tondues published in the British picture press and newspapers in the summer of 1944, Miller’s war reports in Vogue construct an empathic relationship with such underprivileged female subjects. Miller’s work opens a space, therefore, for speculation on the role of fashion in shaping how the Second World War was understood by a first generation of female memory producers and consumers.

scholarly journals ‘To Be a Woman’: Female Labour and Memory in Documentary Film Production, 1929–50

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 584-602 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Fox
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Film Production ◽  
World War ◽  
Female Labour ◽  
Professional Recognition ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second World

Despite extensive scholarship on British documentary in the period from 1929 to 1950, the role of female documentary film-makers has received relatively little attention, partly due to their fragmented and partial ‘archival trace’. Combining neglected materials in the BECTU oral history project, the personnel records of the GPO Film Unit, and the personal papers of leading female documentarists, this article challenges the standard narrative of wartime opportunity and postwar decline that tends to characterise the examination of women's employment more broadly in this period. It uses women's experience in documentary film production to offer a more complex explanation of the effect of war within a wider chronological framework and within the context of workflow, labour patterns, training and networks within the industry itself. It examines female documentarists’ own accounts, through oral histories, to suggest that such sources should be ‘read against the light’ to offer insights into the memory of the Second World War, contending that the place of gender in defining individual careers both during and after the conflict remains contested, a site of the continued struggle for professional recognition, achievement and identity.

scholarly journals Reimagining Asia: Indian and Australian women crossing borders

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (04) ◽  
pp. 1183-1221
Author(s):  
HEATHER GOODALL ◽  
DEVLEENA GHOSH
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Chinese Women ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Women's Movements ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
World War ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second World

AbstractThe decades from the 1940s to the 1960s were ones of increasing contacts between women of India and Australia. These were not built on a shared British colonial history, but on commitments to visions circulating globally of equality between races, sexes, and classes. Kapila Khandvala from Bombay and Lucy Woodcock from Sydney were two women who met during such campaigns. Interacting roughly on an equal footing, they were aware of each other's activism in the Second World War and the emerging Cold War. Khandvala and Woodcock both made major contributions to the women's movements of their countries, yet have been largely forgotten in recent histories, as have links between their countries. We analyse their interactions, views, and practices on issues to which they devoted their lives: women's rights, progressive education, and peace. Their beliefs and practices on each were shaped by their respective local contexts, although they shared ideologies that were circulating internationally. These kept them in contact over many years, during which Kapila built networks that brought Australians into the sphere of Indian women's awareness, while Lucy, in addition to her continuing contacts with Kapila, travelled to China and consolidated links between Australian and Chinese women in Sydney. Their activist world was centred not in Western Europe, but in a new Asia that linked Australia and India. Our comparative study of the work and interactions of these two activist women offers strategies for working on global histories, where collaborative research and analysis is conducted in both colonizing and colonized countries.

“A Tonic to the Nation”: The Festival of Britain, 1951

1995 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. M. Leventhal
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Open Letter ◽  
World War ◽  
Crystal Palace ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Festival Of Britain ◽  
The Government ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second World

No event of the post-Second World War decade in Britain is recalled as affectionately or enveloped in such an aura of nostalgia as the Festival of Britain, a five-month series of cultural events and exhibits, with its centerpiece at the South Bank in London. But the Festival dear to the recollections of those growing up during and after the war diverged sharply from the original conception of its progenitors.In 1943 the Royal Society of the Arts, partly responsible for the Great Exhibition of 1851, suggested to the government that an international exhibition along similar lines be staged in 1951 to commemorate the earlier event. To propose a celebratory occasion in 1943 was an act of faith that the war would not only end successfully, but that Britain would have recovered sufficiently by 1951 to warrant such a demonstration. In September 1945, with the war over and Labour in power, Gerald Barry, the editor of the News Chronicle, addressed an open letter to Stafford Cripps, then President of the Board of Trade, advocating a trade and cultural exhibition in London as a way of commemorating the centenary of the Crystal Palace. Such an exhibition would advertise British products and display British prowess in design and craftsmanship. He favored a site in the center of London, such as Hyde Park or Battersea, either of which would provide ample space for such an exhibition. What prompted these suggestions was the need to provide practical help to British commerce at a time when it was clearly under pressure shifting from wartime controls to peacetime competition.

scholarly journals The Devil Burns Gold There: The Heritage of Nazi Germany Crimes in Death Valley, Chojnice, Poland

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawid Kobiałka
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Death Valley ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
World War ◽  
A Site ◽  
Mass Killings ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Second World

AbstractThis paper is about Death Valley – a site of mass killings orchestrated by Nazi Germany that took place on the outskirts of Chojnice during the Second World War. I begin by referring to some examples of conflict archaeology that persuasively demonstrate how what has so far been the domain of history is transforming into archaeology. I then present historical information concerning Death Valley. Following this, the paper presents the results of archaeological investigations into material traces of mass killings in Death Valley. Finally, I present an ethnography of Death Valley, scrutinizing the contemporary role of the site among local communities.

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