Save the Womanhood!

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Women Philanthropists ◽  
Local Law Enforcement ◽  
Women Police ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War

Save the Womanhood examines twentieth-century anxieties about promiscuity and prostitution, and the efforts of social purists to ‘save’ working-class women from themselves. Offering an historical analysis of concerns about women’s interactions with urban space beyond London, the book notes that the pioneering work of women philanthropists and women police patrollers in Liverpool often ran counter to the ambitions and liberties of other women who travelled through the city in search of work and adventure. National debates about the efficacy of solicitation laws, fears about ‘white slavery’ and concerns about changing sexual practices and new consumer cultures gave women street patrollers in Liverpool greater opportunity to justify their own forms of ‘respectable’ public womanhood. For much of the twentieth century, these women patrollers networked with other agencies to enact a powerful form of moral surveillance on the streets. Yet the book also notes that the post-war decline of social purity organizations did not mean that their ideas about the need to monitor female morality went away. The book argues that when female-run, local organizations concerned about immorality went into decline in the post-war years, it was because official institutions and local law enforcement had increasingly taken up their cause. As such, this is a history that also speaks to contemporary debates about the criminalization of sex workers by showing how laws against solicitation have been historically intertwined with moral judgement of women’s sexual practices.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 210-216
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
The Law ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War ◽  
Moral Weakness ◽  
Safe Working

While historians have examined how prostitution and promiscuity were frequently conflated by social purists and philanthropists in the late Victorian period and early twentieth century, this book examines the persistence of these ideas well into the latter half of the twentieth century. The notion that the respectable, young, working-class woman could be distinguished from the supposedly disreputable and corrupting prostitute produced a highly gendered understanding of urban space. Working-class women, and especially immigrant working-class women, were monitored for signs of apparent moral weakness. Moreover, even as social purity organisations went into decline in the post-war years, their ideas persisted in legislative efforts to control prostitution. Women who worked as prostitutes were increasingly regulated and pushed out of sight into less safe working spaces. As such, it is argued here that the law increasingly mirrored the sort of social purity thinking which considered prostitution to be a form of moral contagion which needed to be eradicated.

Experts in Womanhood

2018 ◽  
pp. 14-40
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
World War ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Gender Ideals ◽  
Women Police ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The City ◽  
First World

This chapter examines the development of some of Liverpool’s most significant moral welfare organisations between the late-Victorian period and the end of the First World War. It unpacks the early historical trajectories of the House of Help, the Liverpool Vigilance Association, the Liverpool Catholic Women’s League and the Liverpool Women Police Patrols, and it argues that these organisations continued to view women’s relationship to the city through the lens of Victorian gender ideals. Moreover, the chapter examines how the pioneering and well-intended efforts of these organisations to craft a ‘respectable’ form of public womanhood during the first two decades of the twentieth century were still steeped in presumptions about the immorality of the working class, and working-class women in particular.

At the Crossroads of Empire and Nation-State: Partition, gold smuggling, and port cities in the western Indian Ocean

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 898-929
Author(s):  
NISHA MATHEW
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Persian Gulf

AbstractThis article investigates gold smuggling in the twentieth-century western Indian Ocean. It illustrates how gold, condemned as a ‘barbarous relic’ by international monetary economists and central banks in the immediate post-war period, created an economy in the intermediate zone between a retreating empire and emerging nation-states in India and the Persian Gulf. Bombay and Dubai—connected by mercantile networks, trading dhows, migrants, and ‘smugglers’—were the principal constituencies and key drivers of this trans-regional economy. Partition and the concomitant flight of Indian mercantile capital into Dubai becomes the key to unlocking the many dimensions of smuggling, including its social organization and ethnic constitution. Looked at in such terms, gold smuggling reveals a transnational side to both partition and the post-colonial history of Bombay which has drawn little critical attention from historians. Consequently, it expands the analytic space necessary to explain how Dubai was able to capitalize on the arbitrage possibilities offered by import regulations in India, tap into the global networks of trade and finance, and chart its own course of development as a modern urban space throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Tafuri on Hous-‘ing’: Housing History as City-making Praxis

2017 ◽  
pp. 36-51
Author(s):  
Irina Davidovici
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
European Cities ◽  
History Of

Manfredo Tafuri’s assessment of modernist housing projects as “islands of realised utopia” summarises dilemmas still faced in the production of European cities today. In his writings, Tafuri has consistently shown that housing is not only about industrial production but, fundamentally, social reproduction. Understood as a discursive practice, the history of housing as a history of ideas reveals fundamental mechanisms in the production of urban space. The historian’s perspective necessarily engages with cycles of cultural production and economic enterprise, intertwined in endless discourse.  On this basis, this article reviews the research methodologies distilled from Tafuri’s housing case studies in Berlin and Frankfurt, Vienna and Rome, in order to, firstly, re-evaluate the critical instruments of the housing historian, and secondly, trace their transformation as theoretical discourses into practices of city-making. Taking into account Tafuri’s notion of historical analysis as a contradictory, complex and constantly renewable operation, the paper proposes a revised understanding of twentieth-century housing history as a history of productive urban practices.

Leroi-Gourhan and the Field of Ethnology

Paragraph ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-44
Author(s):  
Christopher Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Arctic Circle ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Language Technology ◽  
Formative Experience ◽  
Post War

The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.

Towards the Final Legitimation of the Party

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Sole Source ◽  
The Political ◽  
Party Formation ◽  
Post War ◽  
Dominant Influence

Chapter 3 investigates the process of party formation in France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy, and demonstrates the important role of cultural and societal premises for the development of political parties in the nineteenth century. Particular attention is paid in this context to the conditions in which the two mass parties, socialists and Christian democrats, were established. A larger set of Western European countries included in this analysis is thoroughly scrutinized. Despite discontent among traditional liberal-conservative elites, full endorsement of the political party was achieved at the beginning of the twentieth century. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of the interwar totalitarian party, especially under the guise of Italian and German fascism, when ‘the party’ attained its most dominant influence as the sole source and locus of power. The chapter concludes by suggesting hidden and unaccounted heritages of that experience in post-war politics.

scholarly journals Solidarity of the shaken: from the experience (Erlebnis) to history

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Belejkaničová
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin ◽  
Ex Nihilo ◽  
Post War ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Usual Pattern

AbstractIn his Heretical Essays, Jan Patočka introduces the concept of the solidarity of the shaken. He argues that it emerges in the conditions of political violence—the frontline experience (Fronterlebnis). Moreover, Patočka brings into discussion the puzzling concepts of day, night, metanoia and sacrifice, which only further problematise the idea. Researching how other thinkers have examined the phenomenon of the frontline experience, it becomes obvious that Patočka did not invent the obscure vocabulary ex nihilo. Concepts such as frontline experience, sacrifice and the metaphors of the day and night were commonly used by thinkers in the inter-war and post-war eras in their examination of community (Gemeinschaft). This study aims to reconstruct the idea of the solidarity of the shaken as contextualized within a broader scholarly debate on the concept of community (Gemeinschaft). Through the critical dialogue between Patočka’s works and the works of Ernst Jünger and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, this study will portray how Patočka, in his discourse on the frontline experience, follows the usual pattern of overcoming one’s individuality, transcending and opening up to the constitution of solidarity. This paper will argue that Patočka defined the solidarity of the shaken in an attempt to revive the positive aspects of a community and break with the regressive (if not sinister) uses to which it was put in the twentieth century.

The Revival of Quantification: Reflections on Old New Histories

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Steven Ruggles
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second Wave

AbstractQuantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the “New History” that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history.

Producing space, the confrontation between abstract space and everyday life: ‘I wunder if heaven got a ghetto”

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tonia Carless
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Abstract Space ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Urban Restructuring ◽  
The Social ◽  
Macro Scale ◽  
Local Space ◽  
Cardiff Bay

This paper is intended as a contribution to current debates about the changing conditions of urban space and uneven development. It will analyse the functions of the architectural professions in this process and how their productions prefigure the social and economic arrangement of space. It will examine these notions through analysis of Cardiff Bay and will analyse the changes occurring under late capitalism in the shift to Post-Fordist modes of accumulation. While the paper will examine the local space of Cardiff Bay, the analytical ground will be extended to the ongoing restructuring of space under the new global economies at a macro scale.Urban restructuring is most evident in the decentred metropolis of the post-modern city, the new cities for consumption. The growth or collapse of multinational capital needs to be seen as framing the occupation of space, its investment and disinvestment, and as an ongoing process, part of a systematic reprogramming of space that can and should be examined at every stage of its operations.Relocating the economic, political and social into considerations of space means that the paper will also incorporate historical analysis of modes of production and social formations. To consider space as ideological means that transfigured space must also be considered. The paper will therefore raise ideas that are directed towards the transformation of social and political space, and will examine that which identifies Lefebvre's distinction between appropriated and dominated space.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document