‘The Willing Captive of Home?’: The English Catholic Women's League, 1906–1920

1991 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula M. Kane
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Short List ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Henry Cardinal Manning wrote in 1863 that he wanted English Catholics to be “downright, masculine, and decided Catholics—more Roman than Rome, and more ultramontane than the Pope himself.” Given this uncompromising call for militant, masculine Roman Catholicism in Protestant Victorian England, frequently cited by scholars, it may seem surprising that a laywomen's movement would have emerged in Great Britain. In 1906, however, a national Catholic Women's League (CWL), linked closely to Rome, to the English clergy, and to lay social action, emerged in step with the aggressive Catholicism outlined by Manning 40 years earlier. The Catholic Women's League was led by a coterie of noblewomen, middle-class professionals, and clergy, many of them former Anglicans. The founder, Margaret Fletcher (1862–1943), and the league's foremost members were converts; the spiritual advisor, Rev. Bernard Vaughan, was the son of a convert. A short list of the clergy affiliated with the CWL reveals an impressive Who's Who in the Catholic hierarchy and in social work in the early twentieth century: Francis Cardinal Bourne (Archbishop of Westminster from 1903 to 1935), Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (a convert and well-known author), and influential Jesuits Bernard Vaughan, Charles Plater, Cyril Martindale, Joseph Keating, Leo O'Hea and Joseph Rickaby. The CWL was born from a joining of convert zeal and episcopal-clerical support to a tradition of lay initiative among English Catholics.

Flower Empowerment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Stalker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Japanese Women ◽  
Educational Reforms ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Job Opportunities ◽  
Paid Labor ◽  
Upper Middle Class

Ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging, was first systematized in the fifteenth century, when it was limited to elite male practitioners. It was first widely practiced by women in the early twentieth century, but did not reach mass popularity until the 1950s and 1960s, with an estimated ten million students, over 99 percent of whom were female. While it was still considered by many to be a domestic skill for upper-middle-class housewives, it increasingly offered employment for postwar Japanese women as teachers and even as headmasters (iemoto) of their own schools, allowing women to engage in paid labor without violating traditional gender norms. This chapter traces the trajectory of job opportunities for women in ikebana, examining how educational reforms in the Meiji and postwar periods provided chances to study and obtain teaching licenses in ikebana and how the three largest schools—Ikenobo, Ohara, and Sogetsu—increasingly professionalized their corps of teachers.

Not a Fanatic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Self Control ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

One of the more difficult aspects of middle-class respectability has been getting it right when it comes to displays of emotion—too little and a person seems stoical, indifferent, cold; too much and a person is likely to be accused of wearing their feelings on their sleeve, incapable of self-control, being dangerous, overzealous, a fanatic. Religion is a particularly interesting context in which to consider the display of emotion. This chapter examines how accusations of zealotry populated nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of American religion. Zealotry was a contested idea that religious leaders, public officials, scholars, and the popular press discussed repeatedly. It was good, many commentators argued, for Americans to be zealous. But it was not good to be labeled a zealot. Zealots were led too much by their emotions. They were easily confused, frequently irrational, and sometimes dangerous.

The First Blows to European Domination

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Tolan ◽  
Gilles Veinstein ◽  
Henry Laurens
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Major Power ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
Initial Wave ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Alignments ◽  
Political Alignment

This chapter chronicles the initial wave of revolutionary fervor in the Muslim world. It first looks at Persia, the first revolutionary Muslim tendencies arose. Moreover, in the early twentieth century, European political alignments changed, with tragic consequences for the Muslim world under European domination, despite theoretical independence. The new European political alignment, founded on a de facto alliance between France, Great Britain, and Russia, came about directly at the expense of the Muslim world in Morocco, Egypt, and Persia. By contrast, imperial Germany, which felt threatened by a supposed desire to encircle it, more than ever looked like the major power protecting Islam.

Wonder House

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Onion
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Education ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Museum

The Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the first children’s museum in the country, aimed its offerings at middle-class children who they saw as independent strivers. In discussing the types of science education available at their museum, the educators who ran the Brooklyn Children’s Museum showed how science education for boys in the early twentieth century was pitched at a higher level than the equivalent offerings for girls.

scholarly journals Nonconformity and socialism: the case of J. G. Greenhough, 1880–1914

2019 ◽  
Vol 92 (258) ◽  
pp. 771-789 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liam Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Alternative Interpretation ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Self Interest

Abstract This article examines the life, thought and activism of the prominent Baptist minister John Gershom Greenhough. Existing scholarly and popular narratives generally focus on the key role played by Nonconformity in nurturing the labour movement in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Using Greenhough as a case study this article posits an alternative interpretation of this relationship, contending that the individualistic religious culture of Nonconformity was often deeply hostile to socialism. This hostility motivated Greenhough, and others like him, to abandon their historical allegiance to the Liberal party in the early twentieth century in favour of the Conservatives. More broadly, this article investigates the process of political and ideological conversion and challenges dominant historical readings that characterize anti-socialism as being synonymous with middle-class economic self-interest.

‘What is a Beautiful Body?’

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 192-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murat C. Yıldız
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Young Men ◽  
The Self ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Sports Clubs ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article examines the emergence and spread of the ‘sportsman’ genre of Ottoman photography in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Istanbul. The ‘sportsman photograph’ depicted young men posing shirtless or wearing tight-fitting athletic attire, flexing their muscles and exhibiting their bodies. These images were embedded in a wider set of athletic and leisure activities and constituted novel social and photographic practices. By tracing the deployment of ‘sportsman’ photographs in sports clubs and the press, I argue that they cemented homosocial bonds, normalized and popularized new notions of masculinity, confessionalized the male body and reconfigured the ways in which Ottoman Muslims, Christians and Jews performed and conveyed their commitment to middle-class notions of masculinity and the self.

The Lost Link: Social Work in Early Twentieth‐Century Alcohol Policy

2004 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 652-674 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel E. Roiblatt ◽  
Maria C. Dinis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Alcohol Policy ◽  
Early Twentieth Century
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