scholarly journals Restoring the 'Mam': Archives, Access And Research Into Women’s Pasts In Wales

2011 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
Mandi O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Public Funding ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Local History ◽  
Community Groups ◽  
General Lack ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Women’S History

In this article I look at issues around access to material for researching the pasts of women in Wales and two archives in Wales are discussed: The Butetown History and Arts Centre (BHAC) which has recorded oral interviews with women from the community of Butetown (‘Tiger Bay’) in Cardiff, as well as collecting other material about the community, and Archif Menywod Cymru/Women’s Archive of Wales (WAW), which is working to ‘rescue’ sources of women’s history across Wales. Access to all archives is vital as there is a general lack of material about women’s pasts in Wales which can be used to challenge stereotyped representations of Welsh women, particularly of working-class women. Both BHAC and WAW have relied on public funding to differing degrees and this has been an increasingly important element in helping a large number of groups and organisations in Wales in the areas of community and local history to carry out their own research. However, public funding often comes with obligations regarding access to material which might not tie in with the aims and ethos of some more specialist archives. The changing nature of county record offices/archives is also important as they continue to become much more involved in collaborative projects with community groups and other organisations.

A Source Analysis in German Women's History: Factory Inspectors' Reports and the Shaping of Working-Class Lives, 1878–1914

1983 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean H. Quataert
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Source Analysis ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Wage Earning ◽  
Women’S History

Sources are the building blocks of the historical narrative. The search for source materials and their critical cross-examination are integral parts of the historian's task. Yet these efforts usually are hidden from view: historians favor presenting the completed narrative rather than discussing the important steps in research. In some fields of history, the question of appropriate sources is exceedingly critical. Women's history is one such field, quite simply because the secondary literature has tended to neglect women's lives and the more common primary archival sources similarly are mute. Societal prejudices that kept women out of our documented history also have limited their appearance in the original sources. For example, Saxon officials in the textile villages of the Oberlausitz drew up detailed lists of wage-earning weavers around the mid-nineteenth century. These lists are remarkable for the absence of women, who were very active in home weaving, due to an administrative decision to limit the survey to those with the franchise.1 In the history of lower-class women are found the same complications that social historians experience in tracking the lives of people who left sketchy and incomplete records. And much of the published material that exists on working-class women challenges the historian for its class as well as gender and ideological biases.

scholarly journals Marxian Approaches and Women's History in Early Post-war Japan

2004 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 55-81
Author(s):  
Curtis Anderson Gayle
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Writing Groups ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The Core ◽  
Post War ◽  
Women’S History

During the early post-war period Marxian approaches to history in Japan sought to enfranchise women so that they might begin writing their own histories and become participants within the drive toward revolution. History writing was conceived as an existential activity and cultural practice that could help women and the working class become agents of socio-political change. A number of women's history-writing groups found such approaches useful and adapted some of the core methods about history writing originally developed in Marxian approaches between 1945 and 1955. By grounding their approaches to history in terms of 'local' and 'regional' spaces, however, these women's history writing groups would also differentiate their socio-political objectives from those espoused by Marxists concerned with 'national subjectivity' (minzoku jikaku). Instead, through emphasizing the role of inter-class and even inter-gender cooperation within specific representations of the 'local' and 'regional' these groups hoped that such approaches could become models for other women's history-writing groups. This paper will argue that Marxian approaches were both a source of inspiration and difference for such women's history-writing groups in Tokyo, Nagoya and Ehime.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Donna T. Haverty-Stacke
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Radical History ◽  
Feminist Movements ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Women’S History

The introduction provides an overview of the study, situates its place within the relevant historiography of biography, working-class and radical history, women’s history, and the history of religion, and articulates its main contributions to these fields. It explains how Carlson’s life illuminates the workings of class identity within the context of various influences over the course of a lifespan, contributes to recent historical scholarship exploring the importance of faith in workers’ lives and politics, and uncovers both the possibilities and limitations for working-class and revolutionary Marxist women in the period between the first- and second-wave feminist movements. It also lays out how the main themes will be covered in the chapters that follow.

scholarly journals Presidential Address: National Unity and the Politics of Political History

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail Cuthbert Brandt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Political History ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Ethnic History ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
Women’S History

Abstract The latest lengthy round of constitutional discussions has once again highlighted Canadians' desire and need to know their history. But which history? In the opinion of some historians, Canadianists have done a disservice to their compatriots by forsaking national political history in favour of increasingly specialized research into areas such as women's history, regional history, working class history and ethnic history. This call for a renewed emphasis on national political history raises the central issue of how to produce a history that accurately represents the experience of the diverse elements which constitute the Canadian community. An examination of some selected themes from women's history suggests that a reconceptualization of political history and its relationship to social history would result in a more integrated and meaningful approach to our collective past.

Separate Tribes? Working-Class and Women's History

1991 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Oestreicher ◽  
Lisa M. Fine ◽  
Phyllis Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Women’S History

History's Noncrisis

1994 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 86-88
Author(s):  
Louise A. Tilly
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Present Situation ◽  
American Historical Association ◽  
Political Theorist ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
Epistemological Debate ◽  
Women’S History

Ira Katznelson's evocative and stimulating essay is an effort to chart how we got from there to here and to point to new directions in which labor history might fruitfully move. By some irony of coincidence (or, more likely, by a logic that easily could be traced) I was at all the events he mentions (except the recent “ambitious talk by a political theorist”—I was out of town that day), even the founding meeting of the European Labor and Working-Class History group and newsletter convened by Robert Wheeler at the American Historical Association 1971 Annual Meeting.I also read most of the key articles and books he cites at about the same time he did. My reading of this history and the present situation of labor history differs from his not because I disagree with the facts about labor history, but because I disagree with the scope of the epistemological debate behind its “loss of elan, directionality, and intellectual purpose.” Thus the fact that labor history is not in crisis, as he insists, must be extended to history in general, with the caveat that an epistemological debate is going on not just in labor history, but throughout the discipline of history, including women's history.

The Sexual Crisis and Popular Religion in London, 1770–1820

1988 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 56-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Clark
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Crucial Issue ◽  
Religious Symbolism ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Patriarchal Power ◽  
Women’S History

Religion is becoming a crucial issue in women's history. Tired of portraying women as misguided victims, historians have begun to show how women have used religion, especially radical religion, to gain added status or at least impart meaning to their lives.l But in this new portrayal we must be careful to untangle the threads of female religious symbolism from the realities of women's lives, to examine the contrast between the opportunities for women in radical religion and the restrictions placed upon them by established churches and chapels. Furthermore, we must consider that religion is vital to the construction of masculinity in strengthening patriarchal power but also in revealing the needs of men, especially plebeian and working-class men, to cope with their lack of power.

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