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Whiteness, as a lived experience, is both gendered and racialised. This book seeks to understand the overlapping imbrication of whiteness in shaping the diverse material realities of women of European origin. The analysis pertains to the English-speaking slave-based societies of the Caribbean island of Barbados, and North Carolina in the American South. The book represents a comparative analysis of the complex interweaving of race, gender, social class and sexuality in defining the contours of white women's lives during the era of slavery. Despite their gendered subordination, their social location within the dominant white group afforded all white women a range of privileges, shaping these women's social identities and material realities. Conscious of the imperative to secure the racial loyalty of poor whites in order to assure its own security in the event of black uprisings, elite society attempted to harness the physical resources of the poor whites. The alienation of married women from property rights was rooted in and reinforced by the prevailing ideology of female economic dependence on men. White Barbadian women's proprietary rights as slave-owners were upheld in the law courts, even the poorest slaveholding white women could take recourse to the law to protect their property. White women's access to property was determined primarily by their marital status. The book reveals the strategies deployed by elite and poor white women in these societies to resist their gendered subordination, challenge the constraints that restricted their lives to the private domestic sphere, secure independent livelihoods and create meaningful existences.
The interwar years were a challenge to the women’s movement, which was somewhat becalmed and lacking direction after the suffrage victories of 1918 and 1928. While legislation aimed at removing sex discrimination from the workplace was enacted after the First World War, other laws, attitudes and traditions pressurised women to return to traditional gender roles that some had escaped from during the war. Nevertheless, by the outbreak of the Second World War women from all walks of life and in most professions had made steady progress in their search for equality, and the position of women in 1939 was unrecognisable from that in 1919. This book aims to establish how certain women were able to break through the obstacles ranged against them and achieve personal, professional and political fulfilment, and in so doing it formulates a framework for participation for other subjugated and marginalised groups. Taking the structure of a group biography of thirteen understudied and very different women, and using previously unpublished archival material, the book uncovers, on a granular level, the dispositions, skills and personal relationships that these women were endowed with that helped them achieve participation in the public world of work and politics. Each chapter examines a different participation strategy, from direct action to the use of formal networks, which different women employed to gain access to a range of areas barred to them, from politics, to engineering, to mountaineering, to foreign correspondence and humanitarian activism.
domestic sphere and without ( figure 22 ). The film’s principal setting is the banlieue flat that constitutes Samia’s family home, which is immediately coded as ‘other’ to a majority audience. As Yacine says, ‘This isn’t America, it’s le bled ’, a reference to Algeria confirmed by the way Amel, one of Samia’s older sisters, quickly changes out of her mini-skirt before entering. Its ‘foreignness’ is emphasised by the visual presence of the large
general provide notable examples in many cities (Beckett and Herbert, 2009). Across these scales, the idea of governing can be linked to the management of a home: ‘Homeland Security is not only a matter of articulating the domestic sphere to a national and global crisis/threat but of developing and acting upon a set of technical strategies from the domestic sphere as a response to this broader crisis as a threat to a Homeland.’ (Hay, 2006: 352) The end result of these narratives is to increasingly mobilise social thinking around the idea that social welfare is a private
by their luxurious life, demanding that they consider whether it is ‘really such a misery to be left out of a pleasant party, to have a dinner spoiled, or a gown ill-made?’ (ii, 441). Yet, in uprooting women readers from the domestic sphere, West relocates them in the masculine realm of travel and adventure. She places them in close proximity to danger and to a disruptive sexuality, as they imaginatively ‘accompany a Byron around the barren shores of Terra del Fuego’ and ‘sail with an Inglefield in an open boat’. One of the reasons for recommending travel
range of strategies – many ingenious and courageous – that women employed to overcome the enormous social and political obstacles in their way, so that we can better understand how change and progress can be achieved. The women’s movement after the First World War The First World War had, in many countries, radically disrupted gender roles and enabled women to break out of the domestic sphere and assert their right to work in traditional masculine occupations, and generally to be more active, productive and visible. 10 After the war, various legislative and
implies, the move out of infancy corresponded with a greater male presence in their upbringing, as fathers (or surrogate fathers) took the primary role of educator and disciplinarian. For young girls, the mother and the domestic sphere continued to be major influences. Greater mobility and reasoning also brought the child into contact with a broader range of influences. Instruction and correction would
into a composite stereotype of the ideal woman who was modest, goodtempered and industrious in the domestic sphere and in appropriate public works. Her opposite was an equally unlikely character, the loose or lewd woman, the unruly, undisciplined woman, the immodest, voluble gossip and the woman who worked outside the home for wages. Visitors to Shetland from the Scottish mainland and overseas were surprised to see women active in the public sphere and found their assertive manner somewhat discomforting. They equated women’s substantial and visible presence in the
-material insecurities by contextualizing how, historically, a particular separation of the public and domestic spheres has been institutionalized and used in mechanisms of secondary exploitation (Dörre and Haubner 2018 ). Entanglements of market-work and care Precarization concerns distributive as well as productive work, paid and unpaid work: in other words, social realms of work and of care. As Nancy Fraser points out, those two realms are entangled and the ‘boundaries delimiting “economy” from “society”, “production
advertisers featuring the endorsement ‘as recommended in The Queen ’ in their beautifully illustrated display advertisements. 6 The Queen was an iconic British women’s magazine, the embodiment, as feminist critics see it, of the media industry’s age-old collusion in sequestering women and women’s interests into a separate domestic sphere. 7 Michelle Elizabeth Tusan picks out The Queen in her critique of the women’s domestic press, which she describes as an ‘important counterpoint to the women’s political press … Periodicals that focused on issues relating directly to