Issue 41 Gender & Identity

IDENTITY

WELCOME

Welcome to Issue 41 of the Manchester Historian!

The theme of this issue is gender and identity. Such factors allow us to consider and analyse history with under-represented voices in mind. Since the social turn of the 1960s, many historians have begun to take a ‘history from below’ approach by focusing on minority perspectives rather than on histories of governments, political and military leaders, and monarchs. Unsurprisingly, many histories written before the social (and later cultural) turn centred on the stories of wealthy or powerful white men, and so, by reconsidering history from the perspective of other genders and identity groups, we are able to understand, critique and celebrate the stories and experiences of those who have been previously overlooked or written out of the history books.

In Britain, the Women’s Liberation Movement brought women’s history from the margins into the mainstream of historical thinking, seeking to trace both inequality and oppression through the past and to rediscover female experiences left out by conventional historiography. As the field developed, a gendered approach to history has provided a new lens through which to analyse a wide range of topics from sexuality, race, citizenship, and nationhood, to power and the construction of sexual difference. In this issue we are spotlighting gender and also hope to bring in questions of identity: in what ways is identity constructed and expressed, either by individuals or collective communities?

This issue brings together a collection of articles that carefully consider our chosen theme in a number of geographical contexts, covering topics such as the gay rights movement in Britain, gender and religion in Soviet Central Asia, colonial rule and queer identity in South Asia, and the Aba women’s rebellion in Nigeria. These pieces both amplify the stories of those left out of mainstream historical narratives and exemplify the significance of categories such as gender and identity as analytical tools for historians today.

We must thank Dr Kerry Pimblott, the University of Manchester History Department, the University of Manchester Graphics Support Workshop and our current Manchester Historian team for helping us envision and create the magazine’s latest issue. Additionally, we would like to thank all the writers who contributed to Issue 41. We were thrilled to receive so much interest in this issue, and we hope that the following articles reflect the enthusiasm UoM students continue to show for the Manchester Historian Happy reading!

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CONTENTS...

Prehistory and Ancient History

4 Gender in Euripides’ Baccahe, by Alexander Wilderspin Early Modern and Medieval History

5 6 6

The Wild and Queer Old West: Race, Gender and Identity in the American West, by Jason Lee

The Ottomans: A Measured Tolerance, by Sammy Riaz

Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: A Female Crime?, by Lauren Gibbon

The Matchgirls Strike, by Chloe Gordon

European & Modern Western History

19

The Harlem Renaissance - A Radical Expression of Racial Identity, by Ava Goldson

‘Cries for Blood’: How Menstruation Affected the Gendered Identity of the Female Body During the Holocaust, by Emma Breslin

Revolutionary Fashion; Creating the image of the future in early 1920s Russia, by Isaac Sinclair

7 8 9 10

Simon Tesko Nkoli Biography, by Erin Kilker

The Aba Women’s Rebellion, by Molly Davies

Was the war of independence a liberating experience for Algerian women?, by Sara Hamdani

Hujum: The Implications of Soviet Gender Policy in Central Asia, by Bella Brown

When Bernadette Devlin Fought For Her Soul: The Life Of An Irish Revolutionary, by Aisha Munir

Valerie Solanas: A Socialist Utopia Through Radical Feminism, by Hannah McCormick-Hill

Special Features

24 25

A Note On Trying To Define ‘Gay Identity’ in late 2022, by George Campbell

The effect of gendering nations as female in literature, and what that means for the next generation of female writers, by Charlie Clark

11 12

Morality, Prostitution, and Colonial Control of Indian Women, by Hannah Chaaban

From Kama Sutra to now_ How has colonial rule impact south Asian queer identity and literature, by Ocean Dattani

Non-Western American History

26

Recovering Indigenous Viewpoints: to what extent can we recover indigenous reactions to European colonisation in Brazil?, by Alvaro Novais Freire

13

A brief discussion of the Queue in Imperial China, by Katie Page British History

14

Antisemitism and masculinity in Victorian Literature, by Madeline Deane

Frida Kahlo: Creating a Vision of People with Disabilities, by Debra Schaefer

Defying a Dictator: The Mirabal Sisters, by Poppy Merrifield

15

Edward Carpenter: the Granddaddy of the Gay Rights Movement, Tim Jahnke

Interview with Sheila Rowbotham, by Sarah Cundy

‘The Year of the Beaver’ (1985) - A Review, by Lily Kitchen

16

Who was Charles Wotten? Remembering the victims of the 1919 race riots, by Sasha Braham

‘The Image of Man’ Review, by Theo Abbott

17

How Two Female Writers Permanently Altered the Collective Consciousness, by Charlotte Frith

Lifeblood: Afrofuturist Visions of the Queer Vampire in Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, by Persephone Dodd

Examining gender as presented in Euripides’ Baccahe

by Alexander Wilderspin

Euripides’ Bacchae is an ancient Greek tragedy written in 405 BC. The main conflict in Bacchae is between Dionysus and his cousin Pentheus. They act as each other’s foils throughout, with Pentheus standing for man’s rational side, and Dionysus standing for the hedonistic and irrational side. The play is centralised around both Dionysus’ assertion of his position as a God, and his strive to receive rightful worship. To reach his desired status, he drives all of the women out of Thebes to Mount Cithaeron and forces them into a state of madness. In the absence of the women, the city of Thebes falls into disarray.

Proceeding this, Dionysus is recognised as a God by some parties, yet not by his cousin Pentheus. Through earthquakes and illusions, Dionysus places Pentheus in a trance-like state and dresses him as a woman to take him up to Mount Cithaeron. Dionysus turns the bacchants at Mount Cithaeron against Pentheus and they tear him apart limb by limb.

Despite being written almost seven thousand years ago, Euripides’ writing style is modern in its presentation of women as an integral part of society. Yet, in spite of this modernity regarding gender, the women in Bacchae are still constrained to their ‘traditional’ roles as child bearers. Therefore, Euripides’ presentation of women as vital has patriarchal undertones, as they are presented as necessary to fulfil the duties men cannot fulfil alone.

The relationship between man and woman is a central theme of this play, and the concept that the city cannot survive without women is interesting. The city may be formally run by men, yet is carried by women. Euripides does have a neutral approach to gender discourse, as he does not praise men or belittle women on gender grounds.

It goes without saying that gender stereotypes are still present in the play, as the female bacchants are portrayed as hysteric, thus aligning to traditional misogynistic ideas re-

garding female behaviour. However, an alternative reading of this play could reveal Euripides’ portrayal of women as a criticism of masculinity. To elaborate, Euripides could have portrayed women as frantic to emphasise the extent to which males of authority - such as Pentheus - lack emotion and base their personalities around social expectations.

Pentheus’ hamartia is his hubris in denying Dionysus’ position as a god, yet his hubris is a manifestation of his desire to stick to the masculine status quo, as it is his desire to be logical and tactical which prevents him from acknowledging his cousin’s new status. Pentheus confines himself to the stereotypical masculine role, rather than entertaining the possibility of Dionysus’ newfound status. As Dionysus dressed Pentheus as a woman to punish and humiliate him, this illustrates the low social status of women, therefore highlighting the extent to which traditional gender stereotypes are present in this play.

It is also important to note that perhaps Pentheus’ punishment is a microcosm of the masculine fear of engaging in the feminine. As a transgender person myself, it is difficult to read this as a denunciation of crossing gender boundaries. Perhaps this form of punishment is a method deployed by Euripides to condemn the stringent gender boundaries upheld not only by Pentheus but by Greek society as a whole.

One could even say that throughout Bacchae, Euripides addresses gender curiously. In some instances, he portrays gender traditionally by enforcing archaic boundaries, yet in other instances, he views gender through an incredibly modern and progressive lens. Bacchae appears to criticise stark gender boundaries, whilst also emphasising the importance of women due to a woman’s role in the traditional gender boundary. Thus, Bacchae is definitely a play worth reading, as the gender issues addressed throughout this play are relevant in modern-day society.

The Wild and Queer Old West: Race, Gender and Identity in the American West

Trigger warning: Suicide and bigotry.

by Jason Lee

Whenever anyone imagines the “Wild West” certain images are always conjured up. A heroic gun-toting cowboy (probably John Wayne), a grand stallion, free in the desert plains, delivering justice, saving the girl. These Hollywood visions are increasingly resisted. Historians of the American West are recovering the stories of marginalised groups and individuals, helping us understand the way of life and identity of the “real Wild West”.

There are many explanations as to why Americans began to migrate west. There were the political motivations of America’s “Manifest Destiny” to colonise westward and ‘civilise’ the Indigenous population. Another motivation was economics, declining opportunities of the Eastern Seaboard and economic recessions drew migration west with the promise of opportunity, particularly in the 1848 gold rushes and with the rise of ranching.

Black and queer Americans also headed west but for many additional reasons. For African Americans, the west presented an opportunity for freedom. Many initially headed west as fugitives escaping southern plantations and later as ‘Exodusters’ in the 1870s fleeing Jim Crow. Queer people, as well as women, also headed west due to the horrors at home; some fled sexual or domestic abuse, and others fled the growing rigidity of concepts of gender and sex uality. These groups were sold the prom ise of freedom in the west’s colonisation.

These freedoms manifested in the growing agency in the West. Far from visions of white heroic masculinity, the west was filled with examples of representation. African Americans came to dominate the cowboy profession, with around 25% of cowboys being black in this period. This, plus the number of Latino and Indigenous cowboys, demonstrates the west’s diversity. This led some contemporaries to believe in a black “spiritual” affinity with the job. Some even became performers headlining shows and rodeos. Additionally, the west’s lack of central authority was utilised by many to escape increasingly gendered codes of life. Ambitious women demonstrated this, free from conceptions of domesticity, exploited opportunities for businesses, like Mary Elitch Long who ran the first woman-owned zoo. Others used the opportunity to create communities free from contemporary heterosexual and gendered expectations, with male miners in Camp Angel in Southern California holding dances dressed as women, wearing patches on their pants to signify their feminine role.

Freedom in the West began to be limited as authority was established, and many African Americans were significantly disappointed in their “Promised Land”. In the west, migration was often met with racism - early settler communities were facing a downturn in economic services, which were further stretched by this migration of African Americans who were increasingly blamed for their problems. Additionally, in starting with little capital of

their own, African Americans found themselves working poor quality land on homesteads or for former plantation owners.

For queer people, freedom from expectations did not necessarily mean acceptance. For most men in the west, work meant being in homosocial spaces for long periods where platonic and sexual acts often blurred. The common perception was that engagement in homosexual relationships was “acceptable” if these men eventually married women. Thus, gay men could enjoy some freedoms until they reached the age at which it was expected they were to marry. However, migratory life allowed individuals to move to another settlement when accusations of homosexuality arose. Similar to their male counterparts, sapphic (female) relationships were often understood as “romantic friendships”. Whilst widely accepted, they were not seen as ‘valid’. Those seeking to continue relationships with women faced societal difficulties and were typically branded as sexually predatory, man-hating and seeking to imitate men.

Recovering queer history is often difficult. Much of the sources we do have detail tragedy, such as in newspaper columns or in criminal records. Experiences of marginalised people are also lost because of the family burning of diaries and erasure by historians, deliberate or otherwise. However, notable individual examples do exist. First, there is the relationship between Jessie Elizabeth Wrigley and Portia Doyle. Jessie talked of how she felt like a “stranger” due to her sexuality; she went west with Portia who escaped from her husband, and they pursued a sapphic relationship. The nature of their relationship was only publically known due to media reporting on their double suicide - they had shot each other through the heart. Next, was ‘Old Nash’ the laundress of the famous army officer, General Custer. Her work as a midwife led her to be well respected, but at her death she was found to be trans, leading to ridicule from her fellow soldiers. However, there were people who supported ‘Old Nash’, with the wife of the General, Elizabeth Custer, expressing her sadness, saying, “Poor old thing, I hope she is comfy at last.” Finally, Alan Hart provides a happier story, Alan was the first documented transgender male to transition in the United States, and has felt “happier since”. Alan married, was a successful author, and made a revolutionary contribution to the screening of TB, saving thousands of lives.

In the Old West, to live freely was to live free from the ear of society and its judgement. This is seen in the use of coded language by gay men; terms such as ‘confirmed bachelors’ or ‘fans of poet Walt Whitman’, helped to keep their sexuality more private. Recovering these codes and engaging with marginalised experiences contributes to a better understanding of the American West, one filled with diversity, agency and resistance against violent racism and patriarchy.

The Ottomans: A Measured Tolerance

by Sammy Riaz

During the later years of the empire, the Ottomans were overtly portrayed by Europeans as callous and tyrannical autocrats who subjugated Christians in the Balkans. Such narratives portrayed the Ottomans as a brutish Islamic empire, whose only ambition was to persecute its Christian minority. Such a notion is not entirely accurate, as it fails to depict the actual relationship the empire had with its minorities.

During the empire’s rise, on the outskirts of the Byzantine border, the burgeoning principality started to see military successes against the deteriorating Byzantine empire. As this Muslim principality began to seize more Byzantine territory, it attracted Byzantine nobles to migrate to this rising state and utilised their ability to administrate and govern, building the bureaucratic institutions that would contribute to the Ottoman Empire’s longevity. Thus, we can observe the Ottomans adopted a pragmatic approach when it came to the construction of their empire, drawing upon the talents of their minority population.

Dhimmis - those who practised Christianity and Judaism, Christians and Jews, were allowed to practise their religion, administer their schools, and had judicial authority over their adherents in exchange for jizya, a tax which facilitated the acceptance of Ottoman rule by these minority groups. This concept is best exemplified by the Jewish Ladino community who

were expelled during the Spanish Inquisition, yet found refuge in the Ottoman Empire. Due to their religion, the Ladino established thriving communities, and their cultural practices blossomed and became rather widespread as a consequence.

However, it goes without saying that the tolerance given to its minorities was limited, with such limits illustrated during the unravelling of the Ottoman Empire. During the 19th Century, when notions of nationalism, citizenship, and statehood began to emerge, the Ottomans faced rebellions from minorities who were influenced by Ottoman ideals, pursuing autonomy for themselves. The Greek War of Independence was the beginning of a long line of successive nationalist revolts that weakened the Ottoman Empire. The once multi-ethnic and multi-religious polity desperately attempted to reclaim its authority over its dwindling minority population by enacting radical reforms.

The Tanzimat reforms largely failed to quell the growing tide of nationalism that both consumed the empire and pushed radical nationalist groups, such as the Committee of Union and Progress, to seize control in 1913. This was the final ‘nail in the coffin’ as minorities who persisted in the empire fell into the hands of the administration. The creation of a one-party state signified the tragic end of the once tolerant Ottoman Empire which transformed from a place of refuge into one of peril.

Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: A Female Crime?

by Lauren Gibbon

It is no coincidence that Shakespeare dramatised accusations of witchcraft upon his sixteenth-century stage when dealing with politically powerful women, like Joan of Arc, who threatened the early modern patriarchal social order. By the early sixteenth-century, sixty-thousand Europeans were executed for witchcraft, four-fifths of whom were female. Biological sex did not offer exclusive protection against accusations of witchcraft, but let us discuss the sex-related reasons that compelled an overwhelmingly female majority of witchcraft accusations in early modern Europe.

Misogynistic mentalities pervaded early modern Europe. In an attempt to justify why he believed women were fifty times more likely to succumb to demonic temptations, French demonologist, Jean Bodin (1530-1596) insisted ‘Satan addressed himself first and foremost to the woman’. In 1486, Heinrich Kramer issued Malleus Maleficarum that severely condemned female intellect, morality, and sexuality. Kramer extended his criticisms of the female sex to originate from Eve (‘the first woman’), therefore biologically blaming female immorality on evil witchcraft’s existence.

out their seed’. As a result, male anxieties concerning sex, contributed to sex-related witchcraft prosecutions.

Elderly widowed women were especially vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft as they had lost their husband’s socio-economic status. Widowed women endured poverty and weakened mobility, and they relied upon their communities for material assistance, which increased social tensions. Historians have argued that older women’s displays of hostility during social conflicts, prompting witchcraft accusations, were unconscious acts of aggression triggered by female menopause (although more research is needed to prove this).

‘See how the ugly witch doth bend her brows, As if, with Circe, she would change my shape’ (Shakespeare, King Henry VI Part I).

Witchcraft accusations often involved deep antagonisms between women, particularly accusations from new mothers against women who occupied maternal roles (i.e., midwives). Early modern Europe’s high infant mortality rate inevitably increased public suspicion of midwives. Witchcraft accusers may well have been suffering from extreme post-natal depression and subsequently projected their guilt, seeking revenge against their lying-inmaids, who also happened to be old and post-menopausal.

Early modern ecclesiastical suppression of female sexuality increased women’s vulnerability to witchcraft accusations. Descriptions of witchcraft had become threatening expressions of unconscious sexual desires. Early modern sexual beliefs validated witchcraft as a female crime. Elderly widows were believed to have increased sex drive, and thus were understood to use witchcraft to ruin young men’s fertility by ‘suck[ing]

Women were most vulnerable to witchcraft accusations during the early modern period. The patriarchy subscribed subordinate roles to women, which limited their mobility and socioeconomic autonomy. As mothers, midwives and widows, early modern European women were significantly at risk of prosecution for the crime of witchcraft due to Europe’s tolerance of female suppression, and prevailing patriarchal anxieties around women’s biological potential.

Simon Tseko Nkoli biography

by Erin Kilker

Simon Tseko Nkoli (1957 – 1998) was an anti-apartheid leader and gay rights campaigner in South Africa. He has a legacy of intersectional activism, winning victories against both racial and homophobic discrimination.

Nkoli first became politically active as a regional secretary in the anti-apartheid Congress of South African Students. As an ‘out’ gay man, Nkoli faced significant challenges operating within the organisation, with other members casting votes on whether he should continue to be allowed to serve. He faced repercussions based on the openness of his sexuality. He was also an active member of the mainly-white organisation Gay Association of South Africa (GASA). Nkoli was hugely frustrated by the failure of GASA to advocate for all LGBT South Africans. In maintaining an ‘apolitical stance’ on race issues, GASA repeatedly failed to stand against the racial oppression experienced by so many of its LGBT members and supporters, implicitly taking the side of white oppressors. In response to these failures, Nikoli left GASA to found the Saturday Group, the first black gay organisation in Africa. In 1984, Nkoli was arrested for his anti-apartheid campaigning and was one of twenty-two political leaders to be charged with treason and face the death penalty in the Delmas Treason Trial. By publicly coming out whilst in prison, Nkoli was instrumental in changing attitudes to gay rights within the anti-apartheid movement.

After being acquitted and released four years later, Nkoli founded the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand (GLOW) alongside Beverley Palesa Ditsie and Linda Ngcobo. As a community organisation and politically active group, GLOW was enormously successful. Aligning themselves with the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC), GLOW campaigned on the basis that ‘gay rights are human rights’, positively impacting social attitudes across South Africa. Simon Nkoli represented many ‘firsts’. He was the first gay activist to meet with the new South African president, Nelson Mandela. The Saturday Group was the first organisation to specifically represent LGBT Black Africans. In addition, Nkoli was amongst the first gay men in the public eye to share that he was HIV positive. With Beverley Palesa Ditsie, Nkoli organised South Africa’s first-ever pride parade in Johannesburg in 1990. This march was also the first ever on the African continent and it continues annually today. Nkoli’s trailblazing approach to activism has achieved enormous social change.

Nkoli worked tirelessly to enshrine protection from homophobic discrimination against LGBT South Africans in legislation and was thus instrumental in the inclusion of this clause in South Africa’s 1994 constitution. The repealing of its sodomy law followed, with an equal age of consent set. Terror Lekota, imprisoned with Nkoli for several years and later chair of the ANC, asked when it came to conceiving the new constitution, “How could we say that men and women like Simon, who had put their shoulders to the wheel to end apartheid, how could we say that they should now be discriminated against?”. This epitomises the impact of Simon’s relentless campaigning and sacrifice.

Simon Nkoli embodied the idea of ‘the personal is political’. At huge risk to his own safety in a nation hostile to both Black and homosexual men, Nkoli continued to campaign to improve the lives of countless South Africans.

The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, to explore how social identities and related systems of discrimination and oppression overlap. Although Nkoli’s activism began decades earlier, this is a term which epitomises his efforts. Mark Gevisser credits Nkoli with approaching anti-apartheid and anti-homophobia activism extremely creatively. He made the connections between his oppression as a Black South African and a gay man, and later as a person infected with HIV. GLOW became a powerful force for intersectional campaigning after organisations like GASA repeatedly failed to provide truly inclusive spaces.

His activism continued even after being diagnosed with HIV. Nkoli founded the peer support group ‘Positive African Men’ and continued to campaign for social change in attitudes towards HIV/AIDS. He would die aged 41, on the eve of World AIDS Day 1998, from AIDS. The South African government and society’s inadequate response to the exponential growth of the disease meant Nkoli fell victim to the virus he had spent years fighting. At his funeral, the pride flag was draped over Nkoli’s coffin, a symbol of his struggle and resilience in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Simon Nkoli left behind a powerful legacy. He affected enormous change in too-short a life, and as a human rights campaigner, he has been memorialised in films, plays, and exhibitions and received a Stonewall Award. South Africans who have the right to freedom from discrimination on the basis of race and sexual orientation owe their constitutional protections at large, to Nkoli. His work also continues to live on in modern activism. Nkoli was a key inspiration for the Treatment Action Campaign that made antiretroviral drugs available to South Africans living with HIV. His proud and enduring campaigning has obvious continued relevance in the work for destigmatising HIV/AIDS globally. Today, the fear and ignorance that Nkoli fought against are yet to be fully eliminated.

‘I am black and I am gay. I cannot separate the two into secondary or primary struggles.’

The Aba Women’s Rebellion

by Molly Davies

The Aba Women’s Rebellion in 1929, also known as the Women’s War, marked a significant development in anti-colonial resistance achieved by women in Nigeria. Following a period of restriction upon women’s participation in the political sphere, as well as newly imposed taxes, this nonviolent protest was the first major organisation of peasant women in West Africa and it is seen largely as a prelude to the later nationalist movements in Africa.

The Rebellion saw women in 1910s Agbaja avoid their homes in a month-long protest after suspicions that pregnant women were being murdered by local men, and in 1924 women organised in Calabar to oppose the imposition of a market toll. However, the Aba Women’s Rebellion marked a historically significant point in relations between British colonial proponents and Nigerian communities as the protests resulted in administrative change.

Colonial rule severely changed the position of women in Nigerian societies. Whilst women had previously been involved in local governance and market trad ing, this was radically reduced under Brit ish rule. Colonial authorities instituted a system of indirect rule in the early twentieth century through Warrant Chiefs, introduced by Frederick Lugard as the first colonial governor. Warrant Chiefs were Igbo men appointed by British governors who managed in accordance with the colonial administration, replacing the system of elected Igbo chiefs. Rapidly escalating into an oppressive, corrupt, draco nian rule: any public critics of their directives were imprisoned and insti tutions involving women were side-lined, thus imposing an entirely patriarchal order.

In tandem with these issues were concerns over taxation. Many women in Nigeria were involved with market trade, supplying food to an exponentially growing urban population, and were targeted under a new special tax. Furthermore, tax ordinances from previous years had excluded women, until this was recognised as inadequate for taxing a household and another burden for market women was created. Combined with financial crises after the economic crash, resentment at chiefs and the colonial administration swelled into a challenge against British authority.

The catalyst for the Women’s War was the figurehead Nwanyeruwa, a woman in Oloko, when the new census for taxation was taken. Women had been exempt from these taxes in previous ordinances, but when the appraisal of her house was ordered it became clear this was changing. Nwanyeruwa reported this to women in her community and news spread, resulting in thousands of women across the Bende District travelling to Oloko. In December of 1929, 10,000 women gathered outside the Warrant Chief’s office and demanded his resignation, sparking protests across the region. Nwanyeruwa is distinguished in the history of women’s militancy in Nigeria and the resulting emergence of anti-colonial nationalism. Her approach assisted in inspiring subsequent successful nonviolent protests, though some women

were involved in the destruction of the Warrant Chief’s homes. Protests then broke out across the Owerri and Calabar provinces, and included women from Igbo, Ibibio, Andoni, Ogoni, Efil and Ijaw ethnic groups; the vast network between market-women proved crucial for the communication and coordination of women in the protests. Led by the Oloko Trio (Ikkonia, Nwannedia and Nwugo), these protests primarily took the form of ‘sitting on a man’. This was a traditional female Igbo method of publicly shaming men. Designed to inconvenience and draw attention to men committing injustices, women would follow them while singing, dancing or even hitting their walls with pestles. Utilising this traditional practice, women across an area spanning six-thousand square miles transformed it into a powerful tool, challenging British colonial administration and their representatives. The Oloko Trio were known for their ability to de-escalate situations that were becoming riotous, though this did not always succeed; for example, around 55 women were killed by colonial troops in the suppression of the protests by January 1930. On one occasion, two women were shot when the army was brought in after protesters had formed a roadblock and police could not pacify the situation. Over the course of these protests, European factories were looted, prisons attacked, and 10 native courts destroyed.

By January 10th 1930, the protests had been suppressed by colonial troops and collective punishment inquiries were performed. Whilst the first inquiry commission in January was haphazard, the ‘Aba Commission’ in March saw 485 witnesses interviewed over a period of 38 days. Only around 100 of these witnesses were women, the rest were constituted of local Nigerian men and officials in the British colonial administration. Aimed at investigating the causes of the women’s rebellion, the commission recommended punishments for the key players while simultaneously suggesting reforms to the system. This challenge to colonial rule had never been witnessed before in Africa and the resulting changes reflected this. The system of Warrant Chiefs was abolished in 1930, and replaced with court tribunals which incorporated local forms of government and allowed women in the court systems.

The Aba Women’s Rebellion has a long-lasting legacy. Successive women’s movements in Ngwaland in the following decades such as the 1938 Tax Protests and the Oil Mill Protests of the 1940s were inspired and enabled by the 1929 rebellion. Its mobilisation of peasant women in a challenge to colonial authorities was on an unprecedented scale in Africa. It has been remarked that the transformation of a traditional practice for Nigerian women of ‘sitting on men’ into a formidable protest method is particularly significant. It was an important disruption to patriarchal British administration, led by women and using an inherently feminine protest method, which is thus highly symbolic.

Was the war of independence a liberating experience for Algerian women?

Trigger warning: sexual assault.

By Sarah Hamdani

From Hussein Dey’s surrender on the 5th of July 1830 until its independence in 1962, Algeria belonged to the French Empire. Though the main recognised constituents of its war of independence were indeed men, to gloss over the efforts of women during this fight would be to ignore the torture they had endured to see their country free once again. However, to focus on the women and their experiences of liberation is to witness once again that, for millennia, women have been viewed as the unequivocal spoils of war – ready to satiate perverted sexual desires. One is left wondering how far this war of independence can be said to have liberated Algerian women if it simultaneously oppressed them too.

Before discussing whether this war was indeed a liberating experience, it would perhaps be useful to clearly define what it means ‘to liberate’. The Oxford English Dictionary sets out three main definitions, which all seem to agree on the idea that ‘to liberate’ is synonymous with ‘to free from an obstacle’. The first definition means ‘to set free (someone or something confined or in servitude)’, i.e., to liberate someone from prison; the second means ‘to free (esp. women) from restrictive or discriminatory social conventions and attitudes’; the third definition, which applies to Algeria as a whole, defines the word as meaning ‘to free (a region or its people) from an oppressor or occupying force.’

During French colonial rule, women were subjected to many restrictions and suffered many oppressive moments. In keeping with their values of secularism, France banned the wearing of the hijab and any displays of religion, which arguably may have led in turn to the over-sexualisation of Algerian women. Taking inspiration from Delacroix’s ‘Women of Algiers’ (1833) which depicts essentially shirtless women, Picasso’s ‘Les Femmes d’Alger’ (1954) epitomises this depiction of Algerian women as sexualised ‘exotic’ creatures who serve to satisfy the West’s libidinal fantasies. However, after gaining independence, the second meaning of ‘to liberate’ comes into play, as women were free from secularism and sexualisation.

Nevertheless, this sexualisation, coupled with the restriction of religion and the lack of education, arguably encouraged women to fight for independence with the FLN (National Liberation Front) in 1954. Using female resistance fighters was not a novel idea, with the French themselves using women like Cécile Rol-Tanguy to aid in the WWII resistance efforts against German occupation by hiding weapons in their children’s prams. In this sense, the war of independence was indeed a freeing experience as it allowed women to take something which had previously been used to suppress them (their gender) and use it to their advantage to bring the French to their knees, thus once again demonstrating the second definition of ‘to liberate’.

With an estimated 11,000 women fighting in the war, it is no surprise that some women made a name for themselves as resistance fighters, with the likes of Zohra Drif being considered to this day as a hero of the war. Drif’s most famous exploit is perhaps the Milk Bar Café bombing in 1956. Responsible for the death of three women and the injuries of multiple adults and c

hildren, Drif’s actions are classed as one of the main events of the war of independence. Though Drif was imprisoned in 1957 and liberated in the first definition of the word by Charles de Gaulle in 1962 after Algerian independence, her time in prison could be classed as freeing in that she went on to become a member of the Algerian Council of the Nation. Here she fought for an amicable relationship between France and Algeria, claiming that the war of independence was not against the French public, but rather against colonial rule.

However, as inspiring as Drif’s story is, it is only one experience amongst those of other female resistance fighters who were not as fortunate as Drif in coming out of the war relatively unscathed. Louisette Ighilahriz, much like Drif, joined the FLN and smuggled weapons throughout Algiers. Captured in September 1957, Ighilariz was kept completely naked for the entirety of her prison sentence, facing sexual violation and torture in the most egregious manner by French commandants in a bid to make her reveal vital information about the FLN. Upon her release, Ighilariz was convinced by her family to withhold her story of the violation that she had endured, for fear she would bring the family into disrepute. She initially acquiesced, though in 2001 she released her memoir ‘Algérienne’ which detailed her experiences during prison, including rape and torture. Consequently, though she was liberated in the first meaning of the word, Ighilariz was in fact further oppressed after the war of independence.

Ultimately, the answer to the question at hand is far more ambivalent than one would wish. Though all citizens were liberated in the third sense of the word (being freed from an oppressor), some, like Ighilariz, had experienced moments which oppressed them further, and so they were not fully ‘liberated’ in the second meaning of the word (being freed from social constraints). As a whole, it ostensibly seems as though the war of independence was perhaps a liberating experience for women like Drif, although when one focuses on individual testimonies, it becomes evident how much of Algeria’s post-colonial foundations are built on the traumatic and oppressive experiences of women.

Hujum: The Implications of Soviet Gender Policy in Central Asia

By Bella Brown

Trigger warning: sexual assault and violence.

At the dawn of Stalin’s rule, the Soviet state envisaged a n ew, unwaveringly socialist Central Asia. The Uzbekistan Communist Party declared a hujum (assault) in Central Asia that attacked Muslim women’s practice of veiling their faces in late 1926. The party alleged this proposal was launched to free women and create a more equal society when in reality, it was part of the Soviet Union’s ideology of scientific atheism, an anti-religious policy. Other attempts which stripped Uzbeks of their culture were ongoing - such as the closing of Mosques - and part of a wider goal to create a homogenous and loyal socialist state. In the instance of hujum, women were to remove their chachvons and paranjis (face and body veils) in demonstration of their newfound liberation. The veil was seen as symbolic of women’s seclusion from society and therefore the unveiling illustrated that communism had ‘freed’ them. Whether this policy liberated women, as it supposedly sought to, will be deliberated.

To persuade women to unveil, public demonstrations of unveiling and mass meetings were held. In these large gatherings of Muslim women, party members made rousing speeches encouraging women to unveil and liberate themselves. Veils were torn off by women and burnt in bonfires, inciting intrigue, and encouraging even more unveiling. In some instances, women were inspired to march through the streets singing revolutionary songs. Initially, the campaign had some success: the party reported that 100,000 women were unveiled in the months following the 8th March 1927, when the hujum was formally announced. This does not resemble the reality - it is likely an overestimation - and many women quickly re-veiled.

Shortly after launching this campaign, there was a violent backlash from Uzbek men. The opinion of the mahalla (an all-Muslim Uzbek neighbourhood) critically influenced the backlash, as they argued the campaign negatively shaped the perception of unveiled women. Unveiled women frequently faced murder and rape because unveiling was associated with prostitution and sexual misconduct, yet there are no reliable accounts of the murders which occurred during this time from the OGPU (the Soviet secret police). Reports suggest that murders were mostly by the victim’s husband or their husband’s families, illustrating that these actions were primarily amongst the Uzbek communities and had little to do with the state. In Mahram, party members raped an unveiled woman, leading to 100 out of 170 women putting their paranjis back on in fear. Here, the mahalla was key to lessening the spread of unveiling.

The reasons for the violence following the imposition of the hujum is debated. Douglas Northrop argues the veil represented a conflict between the socialist project and Uzbek identity, claiming this tension was rooted in colonialism. Marianne Kamp proposes that it was instead based on a conflict of identity and modernity, as the Uzbeks rarely enacted violence towards Russians. An important consideration is the common misconception that Eurocentric ideas of gender equality are universal, which Kamp implies. Some Uzbeks may have preferred their way of life to this

forced liberation from outside their culture. The brutality that occurred can be seen as a combination of both Northrop and Kamp’s explanations, as the Uzbeks attempted to reclaim their identity, which they felt was being lost due to the imposition of hujum.

Mumina-khanun Khakimova, a member of the Komsomol, recounts feeling a “great faith in the new life” during the hujum period. Women were able to unleash their own personal power and rebel against the patriarchal system that upheld society. So, despite these problems, women’s agency in the public domain increased from unveiling. A woman’s choice to unveil was public and a direct reflection of their husband’s views, so by unveiling they demonstrated themselves, or their husband, as loyal members of a communist society. Hence, women became ‘loyal’ Soviet citizens because they were offered a newfound sense of liberation, not because they necessarily truly believed in the premise of Soviet communism. However, this switch was no easy feat. The choice to unveil was a battle for Uzbek women, between the mullah which dictated that they remained veiled, and the state which opposed this. Women were hence placed in a unique position in which they could exercise their own power, by choosing to resist either authority. Their clothing was a symbol of change and provided empowerment. Much like the foot-binding campaigns occurring in China, whilst these were cultural impositions, they also gave women an opportunity in an otherwise restrictive society.

Did the hujum have any long-lasting impacts? It’s debatable. The consistency of pushing for the unveiling was scattered throughout the 1930s but veiling nonetheless decreased throughout this period. The prevalence of the paranji gradually withdrew; by the 1950s it had largely been phased out. The greater consequences of the hujum were extreme violence and increased tension as opposed to causing masses of women to unveil. Despite these violent consequences, the announcement of the hujum and the complex reaction amongst Muslim women had the effect of allowing women to exert agency and authority over their own bodies and dress.

Morality, Prostitution, and Colonial Control of Indian Women

By Hannah Chaaban

Hierarchies of morality were used by the British to justify colonial intervention across India. By depicting Indians as ‘immoral’, the state further entrenched binaries between the colonised and the coloniser. Such entrenchment paved the way for Western thought to be dominated by the perception of empire as a civilising mission. Prostitution enabled imperialists to portray empire as a mission of civilisation. The colonial administration projected sexual deviance onto virtually all Indian women, regardless of their caste, class, and self-identification. This had huge implications for British rule, as the mission to control Indian women spread into a mission to control Indian society.

This logic is exemplified by both the emphasis the regime placed on venereal disease, and the passing of the 1868 Contagious Diseases Act. Labelled as prostitutes, Indian women were blamed for the spread of venereal disease. The creation of moral panic over phenomena enabled Britain to expand its control through legislation. The Contagious Diseases Act, despite being framed as a moral policy aiming to protect public health, subjected women to strict and invasive policies. It authorised arrests of women suspected of prostitution, requiring them to undergo genital exams. It confined diseased women in hospitals where they were forced to stay to ‘recover’. Sentences could initially be up to three months, yet this quickly increased to one year. This act also enabled the surveillance of women in bazaars, which were regarded as areas of prostitution. Such surveillance demonstrates how the state used narratives surrounding prostitution and morality to repress and survey Indian women. Ultimately, the sexual health discourse was an imperial method of strengthening control.

Partha Chatterjee - a prominent political scientist - proposed a theoretical framework which conceptualised colonial and post-colonial histories. This framework helps one understand how moral hierarchies were used to further British control in India. He clarified that upper-caste Hindu males divided society into outer and inner domains, those in the latter were subject to colonial intervention. Within this framework, Chatterjee argued women belonged to the inner sphere, and if such women stayed out of British control,

India was never have truly colonised. His framework politicised the female Indian body, therefore, highlighting how the body was a topic of debate between the British and Indian patriarchs. This reinforces the idea that British colonisers used narratives of morality and prostitution as forms of control.

Morality and prostitution were central narratives of both colonial intervention and the control of Indian women. By projecting immorality and prostitution onto women, Britain could not only portray imperialism as a ‘moralising mission’, but further its control over women. As demonstrated by Chatterjee, this narrative impacted governance in India by revealing how the regulation of female bodies played a central role in the empire.

From Kama Sutra to now: How Colonial Rule impacted South Asian Queer Identity and Literature

By Ocean Dattani

Great strides have been made towards stronger representations of queerness both in law and in the media, yet further work is needed to achieve a more intersectional approach. While shows like Heartstopper are fantastic and should be celebrated for their ability to show queer joy, it points to a trend of representing dominant white narratives of queerness. Queer culture has a rich and varied history outside of the western sphere that deserves to be celebrated. It is equally important to acknowledge the ways in which western hegemony and the colonial empire’s understanding of morality imposed upon non-western countries lead to the erasure of queer identity from such cultures. This is shown in the British colonial penal code Section 337, a clear example of the removal of queer identity explicitly linked to racism and colonisation, which had a huge effect on cultural attitudes.

It is crucial to examine the pre-colonial histories that are usually left out of discussions around queerness. Pre-colonisation, the mix of different states and regions all had very different views of queer identity relating to their own unique culture and heritage. Texts such as the Kama Sutra and the Vana Pavra, alongside other texts, have a fluid perspective on gender and sexuality. Famously, Hinduism recognises a third gender, and there are also instances of women and men in same-sex relationships depicted in temples. This is a culture and society that casually accepted queer people in South Asia. The Hijra, the aforementioned third gender, were viewed as a revered part of most sects of Hinduism, who celebrated their connection to both the masculine and the feminine. Many deities and gods were genderless or gender fluid, and many of them had relationships outside of strict heterosexual definitions. Similarly, Sikhism does not have a clear stance on homosexuality or any other queer identities, but notably, it does not mention heterosexuality either. This, paired with Sikh teachings to not hate and to accept anyone, can make it a queer-friendly and accepting faith. This deserves to be acknowledged and recognised in contrast to Christian doctrine which can often be read as homophobic and exclusionary.

Within politics, the most well-known anti-queer legislation is Section 337, a law that was used by the British to condemn queerness in South Asia. This was part of a larger movement in which South Asia was held to Christian morality, ideals and standards. Like many policies, this was used as a tool to justify the British invasion and exploitation of South Asia. They felt that their invasion was legitimate as a ‘civilizing mission’, when in reality, colonial

subjects were often dehumanized. The aim of the British was to increase their global power and economic growth through the plundering of resources. The belief in ‘bringing western standards’ simultaneously dehumanized and delegitimized the cultures, peoples and traditions of the country that they were plundering. This had long-lasting political ramifications, the effects of which are still seen today in Asia; each country has a different level of legality afforded towards queer people. In Bangladesh homosexuality is still criminalised but large parts of the rest of South Asia are making grounds to try and decriminalise homosexuality. Although in most cases queer people in this region are not afforded the same respect as their heterosexual counterparts.

What’s notable about this history is the way in which queer persecution and othering are linked to colonialism. It is impossible to remove one from the other, and it’s crucial to acknowledge that they are inexplicably linked. In South Asia, the existence of queer people and their tolerance within wider society was utilised as a weapon by the British. They controlled the narrative around what was moral and immoral through religious absolutes and utilized this, not only to justify invasion but also the continuing oppressive British regime. This rewriting of history has the tendency to focus on the supposed ‘good things’ the empire did, which ignores the deep scars left on the previously-colonised countries after they gain independence. Attitudes imported by the British and Portuguese remained, and history, religion, and society as a whole became dictated by the colonial past which approached queerness and sexuality from a narrow-minded, white, colonized perspective. This turned Katha, the Hindu religious storytelling in which a priest would tell stories as a religious act, into written stories that were only framed from the perspective of the people with an agenda of invasion.

It is crucial to reframe and understand how history, queer identity and discourse have been shaped by the white dominant narratives created in order to exploit South Asia. The rich history of queer identity in South Asia needs to be realised. Queer liberation, freedom and identity were restricted by colonialism through the use of bigotry against queer people as a tool of colonial conquest. As such it is crucial to re-examine the ways in which colonialism has shaped history, and the enduring narratives of queer identities in South Asia, alongside reclaiming the narratives that have been erased. It is also critical to keep intersectionality at the forefront of queer discussions and activism, to ensure that the intersections between race and queer identity are recognised.

A Brief Discussion of the Queue in Imperial China: The subjugation of the Han Chinese People Through Laws on Hairstyle and its implications on Chinese cultural identity

By Katie Page

The Qing Dynasty

The Qing Dynasty existed from 1636 until 1912 and experienced prosperous beginnings. The dynasty oversaw the cultivation of the arts, as well as economic developments and stability, which in turn facilitated the expansion of foreign trade. Yet despite this, the Qing dynasty is also widely documented for its crises and eventual downfall. From 1796, with the death of Emperor Gaozong of Qing, the dynasty began to face several challenges such as western imperialism, corruption, and extreme population growth (to name but a few). The final century of the Qing Dynasty experienced multiple revolts, rebellions and excessive treaties enforced by the United Kingdom as a result of defeat in the opium wars, plus the defeat of the first Sino-Japanese war.

The Queue

It’s important that we first understand what the ‘Queue’ was and the context behind it. Hair was hugely significant within China. The Han Chinese people heavily embraced Confucianism and its notion of ‘filial piety’ (in simple terms: to be respectful to one’s parents). Thus, the cutting of hair was thought to be damaging to the body (which was gifted by the parents), causing disrespect to them if carried out. Han Chinese culture was oriented around this belief and so, Han Chinese people would not cut their hair, instead wearing more beautiful, intricate hairstyles. However, with the establishment of the Qing Dynasty, the Queue order was implemented, decreeing that all Han Chinese men (with the exceptions of monks) were to adopt the Manchu hairstyle of the ‘Queue‘ (a hairstyle categorised by shaving the front of the head and plaiting the remaining hair at the back of the head). This resulted in substantial resistance from Han Chinese people as it was believed that this was entirely against their philosophical and cultural practices. Determined to enforce this hairstyle and to evidence Han Chinese submission to Qing rule and the Manchu people, Han Chinese men were given an ultimatum; adopt the hairstyle or face execution

Upon the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, Han Chinese men were reported cutting off their braids to signify defiance against Qing rule and liberation from the Queue order, choosing to adopt shorter hairstyles instead. Since then, shorter hair has been the predominant style of men in China. This change in belief highlights the change in cultural values as a result of life under Manchu oppression. It should also be noted, however, that with the globalisation of China around this time period, Chinese people were also influenced in their abandonment of the Queue by a rise in anti-Chinese sentiment (otherwise known as Sinophobia). The Queue acted as a ‘signifier’ of an individual’s Chinese ethnicity, as well as being very significant in the conception of negative stereotypes. These stereotypes are still prevalent today, and were especially prominent within the 20th century, with numerous films, television shows, books and video games portraying stereotypical Chinese characters as having this hairstyle, among other negatively stereotyped characteristics.

Gender and the Queue

Alternatively, no laws were created pertaining to the hairstyles of Han Chinese women during this time period. Whilst there existed a hairstyle for women in Manchu culture called the Liangbatou (pronounced Lee-ang-ba-toe), it wasn’t enforced on Han Chinese women as the Queue had been on Han Chinese men. One theory for this is that laws on women’s hair weren’t necessary to substantiate the Qing dynasty’s ascension to power on account of women’s pre-existing lower standings within society. The main measures of achievement for women within the Qing dynasty were determined by one’s ability to provide male heirs and then practise abstinence upon their husband’s death in order to honour them (with this even being heavily rewarded). Yet, despite this, there is little evidence discussing why exactly the Queue was imposed on Han Chinese men but not the Liangbatou on Han Chinese women. Of course, the reasoning for this decision is purely speculative and this is just one of many possible explanations for this decision.

Finally, it should be noted that further reading into the laws of the Qing dynasty would expose the true extent of the attempts to erase the Han Chinese cultural identity. Whilst this article provides a simple, brief overview of the forced adoption of the Queue, this was but one of the forms of oppression experienced at the hands of the Qing dynasty, with there being considerably more complexities and laws than can be written about.

Anti-Semitism and Masculinity in Victorian Literature

By Madeline Deane

Trigger warning: sexual assault.

When we think of xenophobia, often we are susceptible to oversimplifying it, without considering the intersectionality of gender and race. Historically, antisemitism has largely existed within a repressive hetero-normative framework of gender identity and sexuality. Considering Antisemitism in Victorian England then, it’s important to take on a gendered perspective, looking at the relationship between Judeophobia and conceived ‘masculinity’.

The Victorian period saw the success of the novel, a form of story-telling which was new and revolutionary in the literary landscape. Novels were a way in which writers could speak to the sympathies of the public, underpinning their narratives with politics and ethics.

Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist was wildly suc cessful; a serialized story, published be tween 1837 and 1839. The novel’s villain is “Fagin”, an old Jewish man who is described as nightmarishly evil and deformed and is often referred to as the devil. The novel has been widely criticised for its outright antisemitism but is still considered to be one of Dickens’ greatest novels.

George Du Maurier’s Trilby was the number one best-selling novel of 1894, said to be one of the most popular novels of the whole Victorian period. Serialized, and further adapted into a successful play, it was a huge hit. Now, Trilby is more or less forgotten about and unread. The narrative follows “Trilby”, a half-Irish girl, and “Svengali”, a Jewish hypnotist, who puts the young girl under his spell. Du Maurier went as far as to include an artistic depiction of Svengali in the novel, in which he appears with the body of a spider and the face of a man. The illustration is titled ‘An Incubus’ - a demon, who in mythology, often attempts to sleep with women.

We may consider the villains of both of these texts then, as imaginations of monstrous ‘hyper-masculinity’, characters who wield immense power and use it for evil. Whether it be managing and exploiting a criminal gang of orphans, or manipulating a young girl under hypnosis (some critics interpreting this as a potential rape), the two characters intimately link the Western antisemitic Jewish caricature with the ‘hyper-masculine’ embodiment of evil. Despite this pattern, presenting a Jewish man as hper-masculine is not the only stereotype in Judeophobia. Historically, antisemitic depictions of Jews have markedly differed. The Jew has been characterised as hyper-masculine, effeminate, queer, the devil, and at times, a saint.

These seemingly binary oppositions converge and complicate the ways in which we theorize antisemitism. As a form of xenophobia which has had a deeply entrenched foothold in history, antisemitism in Victorian literature reflects an amalgamation of stereo-

types which relate to ‘masculinity’ as a developing construct. The preceding Enlightenment period saw the theorizing of the ‘correct’ body as the Aryan male, embedding the standard for race, gender, and sexual behaviour. And the Victorian period was increasingly interested in how people may be categorised as ‘other’. It’s no surprise then that xenophobia often existed at an intersection with what we would now consider ‘queerphobia’. Jewish men were denigrated for their ‘unmanliness’, but also for being devilishly hyper-masculine. This paradox reflects a certain historical self-referentiality of antisemitism. As pointed out by Matthew Biberman, a published scholar in the field of literary antisemitism, early modern texts presented the Jewish man as ultra-masculine and villainous, and in turn, the Christian as “feminine” in his care and virtue. Throughout history, however, Christian men have attempted to realign themselves with a certain image of ‘masculinity’, and so depictions of Jewish men have mocked their ‘effeminacy’. It’s apparent then, that throughout different periods in history, there is a back and forth of antisemitic belief to reiterate ‘otherness’, which fluctuates with gender stereotypes.

In Oliver Twist’s “Fagin” and Trilby’s “Svengali”, we see Jewish characters who are presented as overtly “masculine” in their apt manipulation and power over others. They are reflective of the perceived loss of white Anglican supremacy during the Victorian period; the ‘manipulation’ carried out by individuals of other religions and races into previously white and Christian roles.

The 19th century saw an improvement in the conditions of the Jewish population in England. Many Jewish migrants had settled in London, and Judaism became the second biggest faith after Christianity. The British state was becoming more secular, and religion was an increasingly private practice. Significantly, ‘The Universities Tests Act’ of 1871 meant that non-Christians could teach at and attend university. This is just one of the shifts in Victorian society which meant that social, political and economic status was becoming less and less exclusive to white Anglicans.

The idea of white male supremacy started to be called into question, through the increasingly allowed upward mobility of minorities. Victorian literature was a way of asserting white masculinity in the form of somewhat unchallenged literary “tradition”, which was not always seen as racially problematic. Whether or not these authors were antisemitic in their personal lives, in any case, is an unproductive way of viewing their writings. Fundamentally, these antisemitic novels should not be referred to as a product of their time, they are intentionally hateful even by their own standards.

Edward Carpenter: the Granddaddy of the Gay Rights Movement

By Tim Jahnke

Edward Carpenter was born in 1844 in Brighton to a middle-class naval family. He grew up with nine siblings. All of his brothers pursued careers in the armed forces, while he decided to go to university. He was admitted to Cambridge University in 1864. In 1867 Carpenter was offered a clerical fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He accepted and was ordained into holy orders.

After reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass he first became interested in socialism. In 1873 he resigned from his position at Cambridge and set out for the north of England to work on the University Extension Movement. However, this did not fulfil his desire to improve the lives of the working classes. In 1883 Carpenter received a considerable inheritance and moved into a house in Millthorpe, outside Sheffield, where he lived according to his ideals of a simpler, communal life. In Millthorpe he made sandals and wrote poetry and on politics. In the same year, he published Towards Democracy, one of his most widely known works.

Throughout his life, Carpenter came to support many causes such as gay rights, feminism, vegetarianism, the movement for clean air, and opposing vivisection. He did not follow a political party as his beliefs were more closely tied to anarchism than to the Labour Party’s doctrines. He spread his political beliefs through personal connections and his poetry, rather than through a political career or major literary works.

In 1890 Carpenter travelled to British Ceylon and India, where he discovered Hindu teachings. These travels are documented in his book From Adam to Elephanta. He intertwined his socialist message with that of eastern religions and formed a political teaching titled “mystic socialism”. Many of his political views seem to echo current left-wing agendas, such as a right to clean air and against eating or testing on animals. Those views were extremely forward-thinking in Victorian times and are somewhat reflective of today’s climate activism. Although Carpenter was aware of his homosexuality, he was unable to openly express it until later in life, due to the stern Victorian morality and its illegality. Only at Millthorpe was he finally able to express his sexuality freely. He established many long-lasting friendships with other men, which seem to have had romantic undertones. He also sometimes travelled to Paris to visit male prostitutes.

In 1891 Carpenter met George Merrill with whom he would build a 40-year-long relationship. Merrill was a member of the working class and was legally registered as Carpenter’s servant, though they lived out their relationship openly. This was almost unheard of in the 1890s, as they were both men and of different classes. Especially in its early stages, their relationship caused much criticism, particularly following the 1895 trial

and conviction of Oscar Wilde. Despite this, they lived a relatively undisturbed rural life, and Millthorpe became a place of refuge and pilgrimage for admirers of Carpenter. Merrill was also the person that inspired E.M. Forster to write Maurice, which in turn is speculated to have inspired D.H. Lawrence to write the heterosexual romance Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

John Addington Symonds, who was the first person to privately publish trailblazing books on homosexuality, died in 1893, and Carpenter may have seen it as his duty to follow in Symonds footsteps. Thus, he privately published his pamphlet Homogenic Love, but it was unfortunately overshadowed by the Wilde trial and was therefore excluded from his collection of writing, Love’s Coming-of-Age. However, in 1908 Carpenter published a collection of essays titled The Intermediate Sex. This was the first work that was generally available, portraying homosexuality in a positive light. It was seen as the crucial text in support of homosexuality, published 60 years before the start of the modern gay rights movement. In 1911 he published Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk, which outlined the important and exclusive spiritual role that homosexual and transgender people play in many non-European and non-Western cultures. Surprisingly, his books avoided prosecution, though they were investigated by the police.

Carpenter became a hero to the early generation of Labour politicians, as his later writing focused on pacifism, socialism, and unionism. During the Labour government of 1924, Carpenter received a greeting for his 80th Birthday signed by every member of the cabinet.

In 1922 Carpenter and Merrill left Millthorpe for reasons that are still unclear. They lived out their days in Guildford, Surrey, where Merrill died in 1928. In 1929 Carpenter himself died and they were buried next to each other in Guildford.

After Carpenter’s death, during the great depression of the 1930s, his brand of socialism became widely unpopular. In The Road to Wigan Pier George Orwell writes about “fruit drinking, nudist, sandal wearer[s] and sex maniac[s]” in the Labour Party, clearly referencing Carpenter’s style of living.

It was only in the 1960s and 70s during the feminist and gay liberation movement that Carpenter’s teachings became relevant again. Fiona MacCarthy called him the “gay godfather of the British left”, and his influence on the gay liberation movement has been profound, though not very well recognised. Sheila Rowbotham’s 2008 biography Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love has again renewed interest in him, poignantly stating that Carpenter is doomed to be continuously rediscovered.

Who was Charles Wotten? Remembering the Victims of the 1919 Race Riots.

By Sasha Braham

Trigger Warning: Racial Violence.

The 1919 Race Riots, and its greatest tragedy, the ‘lynching’ of 24-year-old Charles Wotten, are some of the most violent periods of racial upheaval in 20th-century Britain. However, despite the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the increased importance being placed on Black History Month, the history of British race riots and its victims are not taught or publicised enough. While people are often familiar with Civil Rights campaigns and racial violence in America, the violence against people of colour in Britain and the racist legacy of the British Empire are somewhat forgotten. I hope to share a small aspect of the truly shocking history of race relations within the UK and its lasting impact on British society today.

On the 5th of June 1919, Charles Wotten was stoned to death on the Queen’s Dock in Liverpool. Not much is known about Wotten other than that he was a 24-year-old ship’s fireman from Bermuda. After serving in World War I, he was discharged from the Royal Navy and remained in Liverpool in a boarding house on Upper Pitt Street.

A day before Wotten’s murder, a group of Scandinavians brutally stabbed a West Indian man, John Johnson, near Upper Pitt Street. In retal iation, the following day, friends of John son confronted the Scandinavians, and a fight broke out. This sparked a wave of racial vi olence targeted at Black, Chinese, Ukrainian, Russian and South Asian individuals. Large white mobs filled the streets, and the police began to raid everywhere that was Black-owned or known to house Black workers, including boarding houses.

As Wotten escaped from police searching his boarding house, he was chased by an angry white mob of 300 to the Queen’s Dock, and while the police stood and watched, Wotten was chased into the river and pelted with stones and bricks until he died. The actions of this mob can be seen to have echoed the Ku Klux Klan’s lynchings of African American men.

Following Wotten’s death, racial violence engulfed Liverpool, known for its Black population, and a white mob of 10,000 pursued any black person they could find. Black workers were fired by their employers and Arab and Chinese homes and businesses were attacked and set ablaze.

At the inquest into Wotten’s death, the coroner decreed that the cause of Wotten’s death was drowning but stated that there was no evidence as to how he got into the water. Despite several police officers being present, no arrests were made for the murder of Wotten. This was a cover-up that Liverpool’s Black community did not forget.

Charles Wotten’s death is a story of great injustice and pain for his ancestors. Remembering Wotten and other victims of the race riots is helped by The Great War to Race Riots archive, which contains the personal testimonies of Black servicemen and workers stranded in Liverpool, facing the plights of racism and unemployment. The research of this project was invaluable to the book, Great War to Race Riots, which crucially offers a voice to Black servicemen that have been previously forgotten. The 1919 Race Riots were a consequence of mounting racial tensions in seaports across the UK. Following WWI, the economic downturn brought social, economic, and political anxieties for union-backed white workers and demobilised white servicemen. This economic tension grew into resentment against Black and minority communities and businesses, which white groups saw as foreign competitors for jobs and the attention of white women, and therefore a threat to Britain’s post-war national identity. Black workers were violently targeted, and many were left destitute after cities introduced ‘colour bars’ in many industries and white workers refused to work with Black workers.

The standpoint of the British government after these riots is a truly shocking revelation concerning the extent of institutionalised racism within the UK. Following the riots, the British government labelled Black workers as the ‘problem’, rather than the white rioters, and intensified its repatriation scheme, offering to remove colonial citizens from Britain out of fear of a ‘black backlash.’ Between 1919 and 1921, an estimated 3,000 Black and Arab seamen were removed from Britain under the repatriation scheme.

The British government’s decision to treat immigrants in this ‘draconian’ way sustained racism, reclassifying Black people, Asians, and Arabs as ‘aliens.’ Even a century on, the British government maintains such an attitude to immigrants, evidenced by the 2018 Windrush Scandal which highlighted that hundreds of Commonwealth citizens were wrongly detained, deported and denied legal rights. While the government has apologised publicly for these ‘mistakes’ these schemes were intentional and present the lasting influence of institutional racism impacting society.

The identity of Wotten and the victims of the 1919 riots should not be forgotten; the violence they faced highlights the importance of the British Empire’s legacy of discrimination and prejudice. The poor response of the British government and the rioter’s mentality to attack immigrants that ‘stole their jobs’ is pertinent to modern-day societal issues such as Brexit, which witnessed an upsurge in reports of racist abuse and serves as a scary reminder of how far we as a society must progress in order to stop alienating minorities.

How Two Female Writers Permanently Altered the Collective Consciousness

By Charlotte Frith

It is not often an author has the capacity to create a shift in cultural conscience. This ability is reserved for the most creative and talented minds: writers that can not only entertain, but revolutionise, galvanise, and place a spark of being into society’s mindset. Having said this, writing craft alone will not suffice, the conditions must be prime and the masses in a place to welcome the change that may arrive. The political unrest, industrial intensification, and extreme classism during the nineteenth century provided creatives with the opportunity to influence and disrupt. One change that ensued was that Britain would soon (somewhat) acknowledge women as professional authors. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Elizabeth Gaskell were amongst those who awkwardly fumbled their names into the zeitgeist via anonymity and pen names, yet eventually their books, Frankenstein, and Mary Barton respectively, each offered society a revolutionary new perspective.

Eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley’s inspiration for writing Frankenstein is its own marvellous tale as documented by herself in an early edition of the book. Whilst holidaying in Switzerland, celebrity poet Lord Byron challenged Mary, her husband, and their friend to each write a ghost story. Her intention was to write a story ‘which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror – one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beating of their heart’. After learning of Erasmus Darwin’s experiments involving galvanism and stitching together corpses, absorbing the Gothic nights on Lake Geneva, and reading ghost stories on an evening, eventually, Frankenstein’s monster visited her in a horrific nightmare. Shelley knew then how her story would transpire. She did not realise that this novel was the first of its kind as a horror story that held its roots in science - she had just invented science fiction.

Critics were perplexed after reading this new genre. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published an article in 1818, the same year of the novel, which attempted to categorise Frankenstein as romantic fiction and then as a political satire and found it to be ‘the first general division of works of fiction, into such as bound the events they narrate by the actual laws of nature’. It also claimed that its ‘logical precision’ set it apart from other novels. However, this did not mean that people were prepared for the notion that science could possess the ability to create life; a predominantly Christian readership initially rejected the novel. Also published in 1818, The Quarterly Review claimed, ‘the dreams of insanity [...], and the author, notwithstanding the rationality of his preface, often leaves us in doubt whether he is not as mad as his hero’. The critic’s main issue was the book’s lack of moral substance, finding that ‘it fatigues the feelings without interesting the understanding; it gratuitous-

ly harasses the heart’. These contemporary reviews demonstrate a baffled, offended, and fascinated reaction to this story.

Although writing with different motives, Elizabeth Gaskell also defied established cultural norms by engendering a new view of northern-working class life. After working as a philanthropist in Manchester, Elizabeth gained an intimate insight into the struggles faced by the factory workers and their families. She consequently felt compelled to write her first novel Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848). This novel traces the lives of multiple working-class families, each violently suffering from the consequences of an extremely classist nineteenth century, but finding solace and comfort in collective unity. In a Manchester that renowned philosopher Fredrich Engels deemed ‘hell on upon earth’, the characters in Mary Barton possess a tenacity for altruism and equality.

Gaskell exposed the domestic issues faced by industrialisation in northwest cities and attempted to trigger empathy and understanding amongst the middle classes who seemingly viewed the lower classes with contempt. She documented families who were willing to sell heirlooms and give the last of their food to ensure the survival of strangers with humility and grace. Gaskell also shines a light on the unrelenting efforts of the Chartist movement through the character John Barton who conceives:

‘The rich know nothing of the trials of the poor; I say, if they don’t know, they ought to know. We’re their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds’.

Like Shelley, Gaskell was risking agitating her middle-class readership as she presented factory owners as avaricious and misanthropic. A review by The Manchester Guardian, published in 1849 claims ‘The only fault of the book is that the authoress has sinned gravely against the truth, in matters of fact either above her comprehension, or beyond her sphere of knowledge’ suggesting that ‘it appears very strange that no notice whatever is taken of what has been done by the masters for improving the condition of the workmen’.

These authors disrupted traditional firmly held attitudes to create a shift in the collective consciousness: the impact of which we are undoubtedly still feeling today. Their writing skills and creativity were powerful enough to defy the society they were in dispute with, and although both were published anonymously and were initially assumed to be men, their craft was still persuasive enough to prevail once their gender was revealed. These women not only created something unique but were imperative in establishing females as disruptive writers.

Women-led Strikes: The Matchgirls’ Strike

By Chloe Gordon

It’s 6:30 am, and you’ve just arrived at the Bryant & May match factory in the East End of London for a long fourteen-hour shift of dangerous, monotonous work, ending the day with measly wages of just 1 shilling and 9 pence per 100 boxes of matches you wrap. Not only this but ridiculous fines could be imposed on you, such as 6 pence for dropping a tray of matches or 5 pence for being late. You could even be fined for having dirty feet, which was quite possible considering many workers were too poor to afford shoes. With only two scheduled breaks, and fines for going to the toilet outside of these times, you would end the day exhausted and downtrodden. Horrifically, it gets worse… Bryant & May used white phosphorus in their matches despite it being known to cause ‘phossy jaw’ which, initially starting as a toothache, was fatal in 20% of cases. Appallingly, workers who complained of a toothache were told to immediately have their teeth removed, or faced being fired. This was the sad reality for the 1,400 women and girls who went on strike in July 1888 in a bid to improve their conditions and pay.

The Matchgirls strike was sparked by Annie Besant’s expose ‘White Slavery in London’, published in The Link on 23rd June 1888. Besant was a campaigner for women’s welfare, revealing the terrible working conditions and low wages faced by the women and girls who worked at the factory. In response to Besant’s article, Bryant & May tried to get their workers to sign a paper confirming that she was not telling the truth, but the women and girls understandably refused. The unfair treatment, and refusal to acknowledge it from their bosses, along with the dismissal of one of the workers, led to a full-blown strike in July 1888. Management quickly reinstated the sacked employee but other concessions, particularly regarding wages and fines, were demanded by the striking women. By the 6th of July, the whole factory had stopped working and the women-led strike was in full swing. Although initially ambivalent towards the strikes, as they put women out of work with no means of support, Besant quickly joined the strikers and the London Trades Council became involved. A lot of publicity emerged around this mass movement of women and girls and Bryant, a leading Liberal, became nervous about the exposure. Bryant & May eventually conceded to the strikers and it was

stated that the fines and deductions for the costs of materials should be abolished. Meals were also to be eaten in a separate room where food could not be contaminated with white phosphorus. Once this was agreed upon, the strike was ended. Although a success in regard to unfair pay, the strike did not stop Bryant & May from using white phosphorus in their matches, despite their knowledge that red phosphorus was far less dangerous. Potentially as a direct consequence of the strike, the Salvation Army opened its own match factory in the Bow district in 1891 which used red, rather than white, phosphorus. Despite its closure in 1901, the factory influenced Bryant & May who announced that they would no longer use white phosphorus in their matches. Later, in 1908, the House of Commons passed an Act officially prohibiting the use of white phosphorus in matches, a long-term effect of the strike.

The strike has been memorialised in popular culture and has been commemorated in recent years. English Heritage announced that a blue plaque, at the site of the former Bryant & May factory in Bow, London would be erected to commemorate the strike, and this was unveiled on 5th July 2022. The film Enola Holmes 2 was recently released on Netflix, containing a fictionalised account of the origins of the strike. The strike may have happened over a century ago, but it is clearly still remembered and influential. The successful collective action of the female workers is an inspiring story; they paved the way for better conditions and pay in match-making factories. The efforts of these women stand particularly relevant in today’s society, in relation to the current public sector strikes in universities and hospitals, indicating a continued effort for workers to strive for better treatment and conditions, as predicted by the Matchgirls.

The Harlem Renaissance – A radical expression of racial identity.

By Ava Goldson

In an English Literature Modernism module somewhere inside a Science Faculty building on Oxford Road in 2022, we are being asked to consider how much the Harlem Renaissance was a modernist movement. My lecturer notes that the likes of T.S Eliot, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield were exiles from their home countries. By choice, they left their birthplaces. Their writing grapples with questions of rejecting and embracing identity. It is non-traditional and novel work.

At the same time, in the early 20th century, a neighbourhood in New York City bubbles with an influx of new residents. First slowly, with some families moving into the area in the early 1900s, and then quickly - ‘by 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the south had moved north’. This neighbourhood reached its boiling point, the Harlem Renaissance. Most were exiles from their hometowns, but this eruption brought home an African Amer ican cultural capital. Whilst modernist in nature with its questions of identi ty, the art is preoccupied with Black identity in America, yet another departure from mainstream and traditional writings of the time. It was a movement of its own that dealt with a different set of identity issues. Houston A. Baker, writer of ‘Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance’ said, “It seems to me that Africans and Afro-Americans […] have lit tle in common with Joycean and Eliotic Projects.” Literature from this movement is doing some similar things to the writing from the modern ist movement but to label these writers as modernists doesn’t seem to be so cut and dry.

One such figure of this movement is Gwendolyn Bennett, a lesser-known figure but one of the earliest participants. She mentored young writers who grew to be significant figures of the movement such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Born in 1902 in Giddings, Texas, her parents divorced just after a move to Washington D.C. where her father kidnapped her at age seven. They moved around for her whole childhood. As well as this and despite this, she excelled at school throughout her life.

A scholar and an apparent personality (a ‘favorite at literary salons and parties’), she ended up taking classes at Columbia University. She was the first Black graduate at the Pratt Institute and was hired by Howard University to teach fine arts. During this time, she began to publish poetry, first in Crisis (1923) and in Opportunity, two of many ‘little magazines’ featuring work from writers in the Harlem Renaissance. These magazines were a true artistic revival in that the work was novel, experimental and critical. Most importantly, for a revival of a suppressed voice in literature, it regularly featured little-known artists. Bennett’s work seems to be an exploration of feminine Blackness, at once a reclamation of the quality of darkness and a rejection of the external gaze; the gaze which pins one down to definitions. It is a little like the modernist quest to escape

external definition which risks an identity crisis: Eliot’s Prufrock pictures the abstract ‘eyes’ of the external gaze which leave him “sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,”. Mourning a lack of ability to self-define, Prufrock is fearful and passive. But where Eliot mourns, Bennett rejoices:

‘Night wears a garment

All velvet soft, all violet blue…

And over her face she draws a veil

As shimmering fine as floating dew…

And here and there

In the black of her hair

The subtle hands of Night

Move slowly with their gem-starred light.’ (Street Lamps in Early Spring published in Opportunity, May 1926)

Here and in other poems by Bennett, darkness is her own. ‘Night’ is a woman who evades the external gaze using softness and beauty. Hidden by the veil, she is a person self-defined by some worldly power that feels starry and wondrous. The veil itself, the thing that obscures her, is a textured part of her being that subtly reveals and obscures her hair; her ability to evade a judgmental gaze is within her control. What lies beneath the veil is equally as powerful, Maureen Honey describes this kind of work and Bennett herself as ‘self-assured, she parades through the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance with regal grace.’ Her preoccupation with the nighttime, stemming from her earliest work, Nocturne, ‘This cool night is strange/ Among midsummer days’ unveils Bennett’s grapple with identity to be one that strives to embrace and reclaim Black feminine identity away from the White World and the White literary world. Maybe it is in this reclamation of personal, racial identity where some Harlem Renaissance writers differ from the modernists…

Gwendolyn Bennett won a scholarship to study in Paris aged 23, where she moved and became an exile for a while in Europe. On her return she co-edited Fire!! Magazine and became assistant editor at Opportunity. Her father was then killed in a subway accident, and she was made to resign from her position at Howard University when she became engaged to a medical student within the university. In the mid-1930s, he died, and Bennett returned to Harlem. But it was too late, the arrival of the Great Depression and the FBI’s investigation into communist affiliations of Black writers stopped her from publishing for the rest of her life.

Unjustly, Bennett never got to have a full literary career. Her poems that depicted personal and literary power as a young Black woman in the 1920s are her legacy.

‘Cries for Blood’: How Menstruation Affected the Gendered Identity of the Female Body During the Holocaust

By Emma Breslin

placed immense pressure on the female victim of the Holocaust. The mass extermination carried out in the concentration camps can be partly understood through the lens of the violation of the female body and the annihilation of pre-existent gender identities. In a similar manner, women had their dignity exposed in concentration camps. Many oral testimonies demonstrate how women felt ashamed about bleeding in public. The absence of female sanitary facilities infringed upon the privacy indebted to these women. Trude Levi, a Jewish woman from Hungary, remarked ‘we had no water to wash ourselves, we had no underwear. We could go nowhere. Everything was sticking to us, and for me, that was perhaps the most dehumanising thing of everything.’

Trigger Warning: Gender Identity

The effect of menstruation on females in concentration camps has often been omitted from popular research. Until recently, the history of the body has been somewhat omitted from historiography regarding the Holocaust, yet menstruation must be recognised as a feature which defined the female experiences of the Holocaust. Menstruation became a symbol of the horrific atrocities and struggles imposed upon the female body. This article will therefore explore whether menstruation in concentration camps was a gender identity crisis, or whether it facilitated female solidarity within the camps. From the moment they entered concentration camps, female individuals were subjected to both severe regulation and systemic violence. The foundations of female identity were attacked, and a socially compromised space was created. On arrival to camps, women had to abandon their appearance-related rituals. Women also lost weight due to malnourishment, and particularly relevant to this gender discourse is the loss of weight many women experienced from ‘feminine’ regions such as their breasts and hips. Such aesthetic changes fed into a crisis of gender identity, and Erna Rubinstein, a Jewish woman from Poland who was incarcerated in Auschwitz, wrote in her memoir, ‘what is a woman without her glory on her head, without hair? A woman who doesn’t menstruate?’.

This crisis in the gendered identity of the female body was further exacerbated by the mass occurrence of amenorrhoea, more commonly known as the loss of menstruation. In her research surrounding menstruation, Anna Hájková draws on the connection between shock, starvation, and the loss of one’s period. Such experiences of amenorrhoea caused fertility-related anxieties to spread around concentration camps, and many women in the camps began to worry about their futures as mothers. Lilian Kremer argued the fear of infertility resulted in camp-induced amenorrhoea becoming a ‘dual psychological assault on female identity.’

Amenorrhea was commonplace in Nazi concentration camps. Kleinplatz and Weindling interviewed 93 female Holocaust survivors, reporting that 24.4% of their pregnancies ended in miscarriages and 6.6% of their children were stillborn. These statistics reveal the difficulties and complications that female camp survivors suffered. The social expectation for women to bear children

Women expressed the common opinion that menstruating without access to adequate supplies made them feel ‘subhuman,’ and part of the ‘lowest level of humanity.’ Not only did the Holocaust attack the foundations of womanhood, but it also eradicated the female body of basic human dignity. However, this discourse can also be examined from an alternative perspective. Despite the degradation of the female body in concentration camps, some female survivors suggest their experiences of menstruation facilitated female solidarity within the camps. Many orphaned female survivors would approach older women for help with menstruation issues, meaning older women took on maternal roles within the camp. Although amenorrhoea can be considered a threat to gender identity, it can also be deemed an in-camp source of the reconstruction of maternal dynamics.

To summarise, menstruation, or the lack thereof among the female population, was a symbol of the neglect of the female body within concentration camps. There were no considerations of privacy or the provision of adequate supplies in the camps. Such affairs resulted in the collapse of femininity with women feeling further degraded in an already degrading environment. However, it is also interesting to consider that, for some, menstruation was a medium through which female power, solidarity, and resilience were reconstructed.

Revolutionary Fashion; Creating the image of the future in early 1920s Russia

by Isaac Sinclair

The early years of the USSR were exciting and turbulent. Rapid industrialisation, education, and the rise of gender equality led to a feeling of great hope for the country’s future. Whilst women who lived in rural areas continued to wear traditional hand-sewn Russian dress, women living in urban areas of Russia began to style themselves based on the western ‘New Woman’ who was independent, childless, smoked, and drank alcohol.

To build on the notion of women leaving their heritage behind, many Muslim women abandoned the hijab and joined Komsomol, the Young Communist League. Female Komsomol members were known as Komsomlkas, and they fashioned an androgynous look by adopting shorter hairstyles, leather jackets, and men’s tunics and belts. The Komsomol look was far from ‘feminine’ and caused a stir; in fact, the Komsomol look was even immortalised in calendars and propaganda posters. Although the Komsomol trend had phased out by the mid1920s, it made a reappearance during the second world war as many young women purchased military uniforms.

Such fashion, in combination with the active role of Soviet women in the second world war, caused western citizens to view the Soviet woman as masculine. Despite Stalin’s

efforts to return to gender traditionalism, western views of the masculine Soviet woman were reinforced by the shapeless unisex work uniforms present in 1950s Russia.

Yet the Komsomolka look was not the most radical. Following Marxist beliefs that fashion was fickle and unnecessary, the Proletkult - a group of young revolutionaries - proposed the prozodezhda. The prozodezhda was the failed Soviet rival of the flapper dress, and it was created with the aim of freeing women from ‘fashion slavery’. With striking triangles and geometric patterns, the prozodezhda was a practical dress essential for the new Soviet worker.

As indicated by the above comment, the bold look was not a hit, as female workers preferred to fashion more traditional floral garments. Failing to gain mass popularity, the prozodezhda was expensive to produce, thus becoming inaccessible.

This revolutionary development soon came to an end and the Proletkult group ceased to exist past the 1920s. Under Stalin fashion was no longer perceived as bourgeois, and fashion houses were created to rival the west.

When Bernadette Devlin Fought For Her Soul: The Life Of An Irish Revolutionary

Aisha Munir

It grew to several hundred strong but was met with strong opposition, with Unionists throwing stones and glass bottles. When this happened in Derry, Devlin stood up and declared the city ‘the capital of injustice.’ After the march, she finally declared herself a socialist. Her outspokenness during the marches and protests led her to become a well-known figure and in April 1969, she was voted in as the Member of Parliament for Mid-Ulster at the age of 21, the youngest MP ever elected until 2015.

Referring to both working-class Catholics and Protestants, she took aim at the so-called democracy in the Tory government and the Unionists, declaring in her maiden speech: “There is no place for us in the society of landlords because we are the ‘havenots’ and they are the ‘haves’... we were beaten into the Catholic area because it was in the interests of the Unionist Party to establish that we were nothing more than a Catholic uprising.”

Bernadette Devlin wrote this as part of the foreword for her autobiography, published when she was just 21 in 1969. The ‘movement’ she refers to is the civil rights movement she was part of in the North of Ireland in the 60s and 70s. Devlin was born in 1947 to a working-class Catholic family in Cookstown, Tyrone. Tyrone was a predominantly Catholic county, but Cookstown was mixed. She described the tension between Republicans, who believe in a united Ireland, and Unionists, who support British involvement to create a ‘unified’ state.

Growing up, she got her “political feelings” from her father and a “martyr complex” from her Christian mother, and in answer to how she became a socialist, life made her one. She did not name herself a socialist until later in life. At Queen’s university, searching for an ideology to help her codify the environment she was raised in, she was disappointed to find many of the student political parties were involved in high-brow intellectual discussion, irrelevant to society as she knew it.

For her, the history of religious conflict had now shifted into something more political. Yes, those who owned the houses in places like Derry were Protestant, but politics meant they got more votes due to their position as landlords. Even the so-called Protestant state touted by the Unionist Party was reserved only for the Protestant rich. The people, instead of being united against their awful conditions, were divided over religious issues.

Her demands became simply “jobs and houses for everyone.” Devlin rejected the binaries imposed on Ireland - Catholic/Protestant or republican/unionist - instead of analysing it from a socialist perspective. Devlin understood where previous Irish socialists had gone wrong and she was not prepared to make the same mistakes. She ended up creating her own student group. The story goes that John. D. Murphy took the group’s poster to print and, realising they had no name, styled them “People’s Democracy”. On New Year’s Day 1969, PD began a four-day civil rights march - the “Long March of January” - from Belfast to Derry, inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s “March on Selma”.

Her speech was praised as courageous, outstanding, and fiery. Though overall, she found Westminster to be a sham, with people who didn’t care to change what they knew was happening: “[There are] no politics outside the Chamber. [Tory and Labour members] both go to the same club and the same parties with the same friends.”

The Battle of the Bogside, 12-14th August 1969, showed the world the violence the Catholic community were facing. A photo captured of Devlin shows her masked, standing next to Paddy Coyle, the 13-yearold who was the subject of the famous “Petrol Bomber” mural.

August 22 1969 saw her begin her tour of America. The Black Power movement had already influenced the civil rights movement in Ireland. Devlin criticised Irish-Americans who opposed the struggle for African-American rights in the U.S. but supported the fight for civil rights in Ireland.

She returned to Ireland disillusioned by Irish-America but her relationship with the Black Panther Party remained strong. The key to New York City, which she’d been gifted, was, on her behalf, presented to the Black Panthers. In 1971, she would visit Angela Davis in prison who would, in turn, support Devlin’s daughter in the 90’s.

Devlin was also present during Bloody Sunday, where thirteen people were killed. She narrated hearing the first shot fired from her left side – the place where, later, the Saville inquiry stated the British paratroopers were stood – and described the traumatic aftermath.

As she was still an MP, she was rushed to Parliament as an emergency debate was called. Ordinarily, the MP who has an immediate interest in the matter should be the first to speak. But she was repeatedly denied her ‘right’ to speak and when the Home Secretary – who she dubs “The Liar” - claimed the paratroopers fired in self-defence, she crossed the room and slapped him.

Today, Devlin works with the organisation she helped found: STEP, a community development scheme in Tyrone. She has survived being shot 14 times in assassination attempts and continues to seek justice and work towards her goals.

“In this movement which is still struggling to free our people from the bonds of economic slavery, I am only one amongst hundreds of my generation. We were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it.”

Valerie Solanas: A Socialist Utopia Through Radical Feminism

Hannah McCormick-Hill

Trigger warning: domestic abuse, misandry.

On the 3rd of June 1968, Valerie Solanas entered the Decker Building in New York City and fired a single bullet through the body of the famed artist, Andy Warhol. When questioned by journalists as to why she committed such an act, her response was ‘Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am’. The manifesto mentioned by Solanas was SCUM, a self-published manifesto which would, in recent years, become something of a cult classic among contemporary feminists. SCUM, which was once thought to have stood for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’ was a radical feminist manifesto which called for the worldwide overthrow of male-dominated systems. Solanas’ manifesto is wildly provocative in nature and advocates for the violent eradication of the male species through societal anarchy.

At times Solanas’ manifesto can seem humorous or satirical in tone, through statements like ‘To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo’. However, the overall goal of her manifesto is one that is not so facetious, her goal is to make our society a fully automated one, a society where the ‘money system’ has been abolished and the government has been overthrown. In order to achieve this, Solanas argues that men must be eradicated. A good chunk of Solanas’ manifesto is dedicated to the critique of men, devaluing them in comparison to women, hence misandry is central to its premise. In this way, SCUM is often read as a mere hate campaign against men, a manifesto of little value containing the ramblings of a crazed man-hating woman. For example, some statements are extreme in nature, such as, ‘the male is, by his very nature, a leech, an emotional parasite and, therefore, not ethically entitled to live’. However, Solanas elaborates further on her political motivations throughout the manifesto. The purpose of SCUM is to motivate women to withdraw from the labour force, and to paralyse the world’s economy. She urges women to ‘stop buying’ and instead loot and disrupt the systems in place. Solanas saw SCUM as a motivational text for female rebellion, not only inciting women to rebel against the patriarchal forces dominating our society, but to rebel against the capitalistic structures, we exist within. Although Solanas’ writing is shrouded in problematic content, the underlining goals of her feminist manifesto were ones of a socialist origin. If we are to return to Solanas’ statement, ‘Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am’ it is fair to assume then that Solanas was not only a radical feminist but a radical socialist too.

However, it is important to peer further into who Valerie Solanas was, aside from her revolutionary thinking, to understand where her political standpoint may have originated from. In 1951, at the age of fifteen, Solanas left home due to abuse at the hands of her father and grandfather. Despite her vulnerable state, Solanas managed to put herself through school and studied at the University of Maryland. In order to achieve financial independence Solanas resorted to begging and prostitution to support herself in adulthood. Eventually, she would land herself in the heart of New York City, soaking up its culture while writing plays and political pieces, such as the SCUM manifesto. A significant play which Solanas would write in 1965, provocatively named Up Your Ass, was a play in which a man-hating prostitute and a beggar would kill men. It was this play that would eventually lead to her association with Warhol and her eventual attack. Although it may be easy to look at the events throughout Solanas’ life and jot her political standpoint down to her abuse or negative interactions with men, perhaps it is instead more useful to look at the political context of her writing.

Solanas was a woman who was often homeless and worked as a sex worker. These are two positions within a western capitalist society which are both neglected and targeted by its economic and political systems, especially in the 1960s. Thus, Solanas was shaped into the revolutionist thinker she came to be through her experiences within these oppressive positions. Her position as a disadvantaged woman within a capitalist society undoubtedly influenced the anti-capitalist views she expressed in the SCUM manifesto. Not only this, but Solanas lived throughout the era of second-wave feminism and the feminist liberation movement; themes of which can largely be seen throughout the SCUM manifesto. A major element of the women’s liberation movement was provoking the public, in order to make society aware of issues that women faced. It is then possible to understand the provocative nature of SCUM as a deliberate action to draw attention to the revolutionary ideas Solanas was campaigning for. However, Solanas’ later attack on Warhol suggests her provocation in SCUM was not solely an empty threat. Though SCUM was produced at the beginning of second-wave feminism, the socialist feminist influences of this second-wave can be seen within Solanas’ writing.

Whilst Valerie Solanas is most often remembered for her shooting of one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, her revolutionary thinking is still profoundly important to this day. SCUM and its renewed popularity in the 21st century is a prime example of how socialism and feminism have historically been theoretically intertwined and continue to be as such, to this day.

A Note on Trying to Define ‘Gay Identity’ in Late 2022

by George Campbell

In 2022, people who identify with the label ‘gay’ do so in a world that is perhaps more confused than it has ever been about what it wants to do with ‘gay’ people. In the UK, homosexuality was partially decriminalised in 1967, and more than two decades ago the age of consent for same-sex partners was brought down from 21 to 16 (equal to that of straight couples). It wasn’t until 2014 that same-sex marriages were allowed to take place in Britain. But, more recently, the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill was passed in Florida, preventing classroom discussion of gender identity and sexuality in public schools, and the latest bill to be drafted by Republican lawmakers would see a similar legislature implemented at a federal level.

Why then, at this critical juncture, is the question of gay identity so important? In one of the foundational texts on queer theory (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity), Judith Butler gives us as nuanced an answer as we are likely to find. The book begins by arguing for the importance of creating a clearly defined category called ‘woman’. Without this central category of organisation, Butler claims feminism struggles to make much progress in fields such as representation and emancipation. That is to say: how can a feminist campaign for women decide whether women are adequately represented in politics or media, without first deciding which people are women and which people are not? As this last question makes clear and, as Butler goes on to argue, the creation of a category is necessarily exclusionary. Furthermore, if you exclude people who should have been included, you end up fighting for the rights of only the most privileged members of a group.

Women of colour had to wait 50 years longer than their white counterparts to gain the right to vote in America. This was a direct result of the decision of the white, middle-class suffragette movement to exclude non-white Americans from their category of ‘woman’. Even today, in the UK, we see an example of exclusionary categorisation by the LGB Alliance; a hate group that seeks, among other things, to exclude identity from and allegiance with trans people. As a result, before we begin to define terms like gay, woman, or black, we must first acknowledge that what we are doing is vital for meaningful political action but also dangerous for those we might overlook.

The second thing we must have in mind when attempting to define gay identity is the history of homosexuality as a fairly recent subcategory of academia. To be clear, there have always been people who are attracted to those of the same gender

but ‘gayness’ as an identity in Britain is very much a product of the last two hundred years. As such, it was constructed by the minds which held power at the time; mostly straight, white and male minds. In his now infamous study Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948), biologist Alfred Kinsey brought into the ‘Western’ consciousness the ideas that would go on to shape conceptions of what it meant to be gay for the next seven decades. Today, the study can be understood as littered with errors (both with its sample selection and general academic ethics) but its influence is still stronger than any text from the first half of the 20th century simply because it was, for some time, the only study available which covered homosexuality in detail.

Kinsey interviewed only two African Americans as part of his research, which supposedly included more than 5,300 participants over a fifteen-year period. As a result, the common conception of gay identity is painfully white. The majority of his participants were also college students or academics and so tended to be middle and upper class. Perhaps most significantly, Kinsey did not release the follow-up study Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female until 1953 (five years later). It is unsurprising, then, that women are often an afterthought when it comes to building an understanding of homosexuality and lesbian identity. Homosexual acts between women were never made illegal in the UK, and whilst works like Kinsey’s influenced perceptions of same-sex desire, it is also important to recognise such work as a product of its time.

So, what is gay identity? How do we go about defining it without being exclusionary or divisive? Is it on Canal Street or on any street? Is it online? Is it defined by the discrimination it still faces or does it exist despite it? Is it religious or secular? Black or white? Cis or trans? The answer is perhaps none of these things or maybe all of them. I can tell you what it is for me, but it will not be the same thing for you.

If I were to leave you with only one note on defining gay identity at the end of 2022, it would be this:

“Remember that your history started before you were born. Forget what a lifetime of hate has taught you.”

The Effect of Gendering Nations as Female in Literature, and What That Means for the Next Generation of Female Writers

by Charlie Clark

To be a woman is not a place of neutrality. To be a woman in literature, to read of your body as a site of battles and uprisings, of famine and protest, destroys any sense of impartiality. There is a long-standing tradition of gendering the nation: the motherland, the mothership, the innate feminine sense of home. But what happens when this sense of gender becomes so deeply tied in with a sense of nation that the two have become almost inseparable?

As a woman, I can trace my body through nations since antiquity. It is inescapable in literature, particularly in poetry. We as women have always been there as a figurehead in the literary canon, voiceless figures speaking for a nation. Take the figure of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, for example: also known as ‘The Poor Old Woman’, she is a wandering figure without a home, who needs the help of young Irish men willing to fight and die for Ireland to rejuvenate herself and reverse her ageing to some degree. This figure became most prominent through Yeats’ treat ment of her in his play, ‘Cathleen Ni Houlihan’, using her as a representative of the Irish struggles under British coloni al rule, her body becoming a site of allegory and metaphor to put across the concept of nationhood. But of course, it is male writers who map this allegory onto us. Throughout history, this portrayal of nationhood as female was our only chance to be included and represented in the male-dominated literary canon, and so made little sense to alienate ourselves from one of the only acceptable feminine representations. But what does this mean now, when the amount of female writers is only expanding? This concept of woman-as-nation, I argue, does more harm than good in the creation of a sense of gendered national identity. As women, we have been placed into the role of representative without understanding the burden this creates. I feel no connection to England as a motherland, no solidarity between myself as a woman and England as a feminine creation, despite the constant connections made between the two in countless pieces of literature. It is hard to grapple with the concept of a nation which has been forced onto our gendered existence without conforming to the norm, using our bodies and identities as a transactional site in which to gain access into this elusive men’s world of metaphors and similes. To be a female writer, writing about national identity, your role is pre-defined. And to break into this world, this role will be thrust upon you without question, leaving you expected to attempt to evaluate and bring together two separate identities in one. The imposition of this national narrative onto the feminine, using and appropriating the site of the female body as a non-consensual figurehead for a nation, creates a sense of dissonance between the two identities and can often serve to further isolate female writers grappling with both concepts and their personhood as an intersection of the two. To try and enter this space in an attempt to redefine the sense of gender pre-established by someone outside of this identity is a challenge in itself. This imposition of metaphor, of woman-as-nation, has, instead of bringing the female identity closer to the poetic and literary canon, created a distance between the two, alienating women from the discourse sur-

rounding the concept of national identity and nationhood within their work due to the predefined position they have been given in terms of an expression of national identity. This can only serve to make women and female writers feel as if they have no place beyond the role of figureheads within the sphere of national literature, driving a wedge between the two identities as well as refusing to acknowledge the lived experiences of women within the nation in question. To become part of this tradition, to enrol yourself within this literary canon, you must re-negotiate the idea of woman-as-nation within a narrative that is overwhelmingly patriarchal. It is a necessary act of re-evaluation, taking the two singular concepts of ‘woman’ and ‘nation’ in conjunction with each other, and what it means to step away from bearing the burden of national identity. The concept of a nation exists as a gendered entity in ways that tend to disempower real women by silencing their actual voices and obscuring their experiences, objectifying women at the expense of their flesh-and-blood subjectivity and negating the importance of their knowledge and understanding of actual experiences, material lives and agency. It is vital that female writers, grappling with the concept of identity, interrogate the disjunctions produced by the nationalisation of the feminine and the feminisation of the national, both within themselves and within the society and literary subculture. Through revising, editing and reconfiguring nationalism rather than repudiating it, there is more opportunity to create space within such narratives for the historical and material experiences of women.

The historical gendering of nations as female within literature has served to create disharmony between the two identities of gender and nationality, with their intersection in modern women’s literature a cause for a re-evaluation of the way the two separate concepts interact. It has now fallen to the female writer to take on the burden of woman-as-nation and examine that to her national identity, reclaiming space within the literary canon and overcoming the divide that the imposition of this metaphor has caused.

Recovering Indigenous Viewpoints: to what extent can we recover indigenous reactions to European colonisation in Brazil?

by Alvaro Novais Freire

When Pêro Vaz de Caminha arrived in Brazil on the 22nd of April 1500 aboard Pedro Alvares Cabral’s voyage of ‘discovery’, he was awestruck. The letter he wrote to the Portuguese King Manuel I is in stark contrast to those written by other explorers of the period. Caminha admired the innocence of the natives who were unashamed of their nakedness. He does not portray the natives as barbaric but, rather, as noble savages. He calls them “handsome” and even says of one woman, “she was so well-shaped and so rounded, and her private parts so graceful that many women of our land… would feel embarrassed for not having theirs look like hers”.

Pêro Vaz de Caminha’s letter is celebrated in Brazil as the country’s birth certificate and yet, the text highlights a key challenge in the retelling of Brazil’s colonial history. There are a plethora of European accounts of this history, but the viewpoints of the natives, who lacked literacy, are difficult to recover. Many

of the European accounts dehumanised the natives, portraying them as noble savages, sensationalising the practice of cannibalism amongst them as Michel de Montaigne did in his essay “Of Cannibals” from 1580 and Hans Staden did in his account True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil from 1557. This is not to say these accounts are not valuable, they serve an important role in the retelling of the history of colonialism in Brazil, but they tell a one-sided history without indigenous voices balancing them out. The question of identity in Brazil is a complicated subject. Miscegenation of Brazil’s multiracial society means that Brazilians are mostly of mixed heritage. Miscegenation of the natives by the Europeans became commonplace soon after European ‘discovery’, assimilating many natives and acculturating them. The usage of the Nheengatu and Tupi Austral, indigenous languages that acted as lingua francas in Brazil for much of the colonial period, were widespread, and both languages were spoken by natives and Europeans alike. Nevertheless, the literature remained dominated by the Europeans who used the language as an additional means of deculturating the natives as many natives became monolinguistic, losing their native languages and part of their identity. However, contemporary indigenous retellings of Brazil’s colonial history aid in the recovery of indigenous viewpoints. Indigenous authors such as Kaka Werá Jecupé and Daniel Munduruku have written books attempting to reclaim their side of history and are contributing to the literary body of Brazil’s colonial past in an invaluable manner. However, recovering the native viewpoint of Brazil’s past remains difficult with the deculturation of the natives through miscegenation and language and the dominance of European perspectives in the colonial period.

Frida Kahlo: Creating a Vision of People with Disabilities

by Debra Schaefer

Frida Kahlo was a resilient lady. She had plans to become a doctor, a politician, and an artist, yet such plans were tarnished in 1925. Following being impaled by an iron handrail whilst riding on a bus, Kahlo became a patient. However, during her years of recovery, Kahlo created art which exhibited the perspectives of a woman with disabilities.

As a result of the bus collision, Frida sustained injuries to her pelvis, spine, collarbone, and legs. Particularly relevant to her gender identity was the puncturing of her abdomen and uterus. She was placed into a full-body cast and was prescribed rest. Her future seemed bleak, yet prior to her accident, her husband described her as having a ‘strange fire in her eyes’, and despite the many dark days she endured, her fire certainly kept burning.

Frida had to lie flat for a long period of time. She spent hours staring at the ceiling until her parents encouraged her to paint as they believed there was more to Frida than her injuries. Her mother attached a specially made easel to her bed and fastened a mirror atop its four posters, allowing Frida to view herself as a muse. Her paintings illustrate her experiences of this period, and particularly interesting is Without Hope (1945), in which Kahlo depicted herself under bed covers, buried by an easel. Her close friend and fellow activist, Andrés Henestrosa (19062008), explained that Frida ‘lived dying,’, and this mindset was evidenced by her art. A Few Small Nips (1935), Thinking About Death (1943), and The Broken Column (1944), all envisaged the damage her body could not overcome, confirming

Frida was a realist toward the difficulties of being both a woman and disabled. She did not portray herself as having conquered the impediments of her physical form. Instead, she presented herself as living and suffering not only amidst physical disabilities but also amidst her position as a Mexican woman.

In a letter to her husband, she saw herself as ‘a maimed woman,’. She saw herself as incomplete, yet her talent was never contained by the plaster corsets or prosthetic leg she wore until her death. Deeply entrenched by thoughts of her pain and limitations, she was still a revolutionary, a leader, and a catalyst. By her example, she created a vision of what being disabled could mean.

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (1907-1954).

Defying a dictator: The Mirabal Sisters

by Poppy Merrifield

Throughout history, women have often played a pivotal but underappreciated role in political resistance. Traditional gender norms of the mid-20th century placed women in less political roles; they were subservient housewives. In reality, many women have been crucial in the fight against totalitarian regimes, the Mirabals illustrating as such.

Rafael Trujillo created a regime of violence and terror, inhibiting civil liberties in the Dominican Republic and displaying a dangerous hatred for the Haitian people. He created a network of informers called caliés, employed by the ‘Servicio de Inteligencia Militar’ - a secret service. Every aspect of life was controlled; historian Nancy Robinson wrote that “every Dominican family had a victim of Trujillo in its closet”. Trujillo exhibited high levels of machismo, viewing women exclusively as objects for his enjoyment and pleasure. Women were to please and serve the dictator as he saw himself as inherently superior. Reportedly, families hid their daughters from ‘El Jefe’ as he was notorious for sexually harassing younger women. A defiant woman - a revolutionary - had no place in Trujillo’s Dominican Republic.

Yet, Las Mariposas (the Butterflies) were defiant women. The code name referred to three of the four Mirabal sisters: Patricia, Minerva and María Teresa. Their sister Dedé was supportive but largely politically uninvolved. The sisters came from a Catholic, middle-class family; they grew up on a farm in the town of Ojo de Agua, and all received a good education, which was unusual for women in this era. Patricia, the oldest, married at 17 and had three children. María Teresa, the youngest, studied at the University of Santo Domingo, married and had a daughter. Minerva is reported to have been the “true” revolutionary behind the ‘Catorce de Junio’ (Fourteenth of June) movement. She studied law at the University of Santa Domingo, married at 28 and had two children. They were well-educated, independent women, mothers, and wives. Their upbringing inherently subverted the traditional ‘ideal’ woman of the 20th-century Dominican Republic.

The sisters were crucial in resistance efforts. Patricia and her family reportedly made explosives together and their home was the place where the Fourteenth of June Movement was officially established on January 10th, 1960. The sisters hid weapons in their homes and gave food and shelter to those hiding from the government. They blatantly opposed Trujillo, hurting his machismo by not conforming to his regime. Minerva boldly rejected Trujillo’s advances by smacking the dictator in the face during an event - she and her family swiftly exited, further hurting his sense of masculinity. Trujillo became practically fixated on the Mirabals, primarily Minerva and even the smallest acts of defiance would be reported.

The Mirabals were instrumental in devising the plan to assassinate Trujillo at a cattle fair. But the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar imprisoned the Fourteenth of June supporters only a day before the plot was to be executed. Mass arrests and torture followed, and the Mirabals and their husbands were captured. Yet fearing an international backlash, Trujillo released female prisoners, as he believed that having women in prison made them seem a viable threat to his regime and therefore a threat to his masculinity. The sisters actively embarrassed the dictator by making frequent visits to their imprisoned husbands and speaking out against his authority, continuously bruising his ego. The Mirabals lack of conformity put their lives at risk and Minerva had to repeatedly dismiss her allies’ concerns for her safety.

On November 2nd, 1960, Trujillo publicly observed that he was now only facing two problems: the Catholic Church and the Mirabal Sisters. Trujillo moved Patricia’s and Minerva’s husbands to a prison complex in Puerto Plata, yet the sisters chose to move there to be closer to their husbands. On November 25th, 1960, Minerva, Patricia, María Teresa and their driver - Rufino de la Cruz- were overtaken on an empty stretch of road by Trujillo’s agents. They were dragged to a sugarcane field and violently murdered. In a feeble attempt to cover up the murder, the agents put their bodies back into the car and pushed it over a cliff. But before her death, Patricia managed to alert another driver to what was happening, and word quickly spread. Devastatingly, Patricia was only 36, Minerva was only 33, and María Teresa was only 25, adding further travesty to the injustice.

Historian Bernard Diederich wrote that the assassination of the sisters ‘had a greater effect on Dominicans than most of Trujillo’s other crimes’. These were women - daughters, wives, sisters, and mothers. Their brutal murder deeply affected the people of the Dominican Republic, especially the men. Women and children are socially seen as the most vulnerable members of society. In murdering the Mirabals, the people of the Dominican Republic felt they had failed these mothers and an even deeper hatred of Trujillo pervaded society. Six months after their deaths, seven men ambushed and shot the dictator.

The Mirabals’ legacies represent a dynamic shift in gender roles and a catalyst for growing female involvement in politics and political resistance. They have become feminist, revolutionary icons. Thirty-seven years later a crowd gathered at the Trujillo Obelisk. It had been painted over and dedicated to the monument to Las Mariposas. There is a deep adoration for these women felt across the Dominican Republic; they were more than just women who were murdered for rejecting ‘El Jefe’s’ advances, but political activists in their own right.

An interview with Sheila Rowbotham

by Sarah Cundy

Our co-editor Sarah spoke to historian and activist Sheila Rowbotham about the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) and the movement for women’s history.

SC: Recently, I came across your article, ‘women: the struggle for freedom’, from a 1969 edition of Black Dwarf, where you write that women’s issues were a ‘smouldering bewildered consciousness, with no shape - muttered dissatisfaction which suddenly shoots to the surface and explodes’. So, I’ve been wondering, why do you think that women’s issues exploded in the late sixties and early seventies?

SR: I don’t know! It’s interesting to try and work out why things happen at certain times and not others. Even when I was at school in the 1950s there were women who I had been friends with who were certainly thinking about and questioning their position as women and particularly the double standard of sexual morality- which was on the decline but still very lodged in people’s brains. The same too, when I went to university (I was seen as very odd for going on to university as there were still very few women who did, even from middle-class backgrounds), but it seemed totally a conversation between individual friends, and it wasn’t something that we thought could also be out in society.

SC: Do you think that the increase in women going to university had an influence on the beginnings of the Women’s’ Liberation Movement?

SR: That definitely played a role, but I think partly ideas spread so widely because of the newspapers’ caricatures of us [as university educated] and that had the opposite effect they intended because women got so fed up with the hostile way in which we were being depicted. But it was a wide coalition, trade union women related to women’s liberation as they saw it as a general defiance of the way that women were treated. Another element was the fact that so many women were going out to work whilst also being responsible for housework and childcare. There was a parallel campaign which emerged at a similar time for equal pay or, at least, the right to be graded the same way men were for comparable or the same work. At the Ford factory, there were large demonstrations of trade union women striking for equal pay and then ideas were also coming in from the Black Women’s movement in the USA which stressed centring yourself in relation to a group and we were more explicitly doing that than the older socialist tradition of trade union politics.

Thinking again about how or why things happen at certain times, you can find lots of ways to describe these big shifts, like, ‘there were more young women going into higher education’, or, ‘there were more jobs available to women’, or, ‘with welfare developments in capitalism women were tak-

ing on more social work and administrative roles’, you can have all these descriptions, but they don’t quite touch why it is that an individual suddenly sees themself in a different way.

SC: And how did history fit in? Particularly, I’m thinking of the first Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College in 1970, organised by the History Workshop which brought together women’s history and women’s issues.

SR: Yes, it’s interesting, I found recently that the term workshop was originally used by avant-garde artists who wanted to have a cooperative approach in the sort of mid-60s and somehow Raphael Samuel got hold of that idea when he started the history workshop meetings at Ruskin. I think that was because he wanted to bring everyone in on the same basis: the working-class students at Ruskin who came from their unions would give talks but also they would have Christopher Hill or E. P. Thompson to come and talk as well. The university students and people who came mixed with the trade union students. It was an idea of everybody having the right to their own access to history and I think that idea just became a sort of common sense. The history workshops attracted lots of younger people my age or younger including Sally Alexander who was a student at Ruskin and Anna Davin who played an important part in the history workshop and another student who sadly died called Arielle Aberson, who understood a lot about French historical approaches of which I only had a very hazy idea- although I had been taught by Richard Cobb who, with people like [Albert] Soboul, studied France with a ‘History from Below’ approach.

SC: Historiography of France had quite an influence then on you personally I recall- particularly the work of Edith Thomas?

SR: Yes, I had read a book she wrote on the Paris Commune and then I discovered that she’d also written about the women of the 1848 Revolution. When I was writing Women, Resistance and Revolution I realised that many of these women’s journals were in London. Many years later, I found out that this was because one of the women involved in the 1848 Revolution, Jeanne Deroin, had come to Britain and been in contact with the Socialist League, I think William Morris spoke at her funeral, it’s so interesting that those connections were there…

The full interview- including continued discussion of WLM in the 1970s and after the election of Thatcher, and Sheila’s thoughts on women’s history and the teaching of history- is available on our website. Sheila’s memoir of the 1970s, Daring to Hope is available in the Main Library.

The Year of the Beaver (1985) - A Review

by Lily Kitchen

“Labour isn’t working” read the Conservative Party slogan for the 1979 general election in which they were ultimately and predictably victorious. This sentiment also underpins The Year of the Beaver, though examined from a very different political perspective. The film documents the 2-year-long Grunwick Strike (neutered by the press as ‘The Grunwick Affair’) from the point of view of those directly involved, and from those supporting the strikers. Its scope is broad, narrating the failures of the Labour Party, the opportunism of the Thatcherites, and the complicity of trade unionists with the government and industry itself.

The documentary is an effective and well-researched oral history of the events, using contemporary news footage, interviews, and articles. As well as being an engaging piece of filmmaking, it fundamentally exists to make sense of the Thatcher era, which it was made in the midst of, but in hindsight helps us to understand the further 7 years of Tory rule after Thatcher’s resignation. This Conservative era reflected 18 years of emerging hyper-capitalism, of factory managers in cahoots with the subservient unions quelling strikes before they got too ‘disruptive’, and of “worker against worker, areas of the country pitted against each other”. Sound familiar?

The Grunwick strikers were seen by many (persuaded by The Sun, The Times, and the TV news) as people who sought “to

undermine the British industrial character” at a time of high unemployment and a spiral in the home market. This myth, still touted by the Conservative party and right-wing pundits today, is dispelled elegantly by the filmmakers through their inclusion of the words of many strikers. The majority of them were women from ethnic minorities making less than the national average, processing film at the Grunwick plant. An achingly portentous interview with a miner striking in solidarity states simply “it’s much more effective, stopping the coal.”

The strikers simply sought support and recognition from the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff. The strikers were all struck off from the employ of Grunwick’s while the workers who remained at the plant were given a 15% pay rise if they didn’t attempt to join the union. They experienced police violence and unlawful arrests and ultimately were abandoned by the union, the TUC and by the Labour government.

The Year of the Beaver, though intended to be a polemic on hyper-capitalism, anti-unionism, and the emergence of neo-liberalism in the mid-80s, also acts as a stunning insight into the contemporary Tory party. They too believe that Labour and socialism as a whole cannot and will not work. And like in 1979, far too many are willing to take them at their word.

Image of Man - A Review

by Theo Abbott

In reading George Mosse’s historical tracing of manliness, one gets the impression of an author who appears omniscient of masculinity’s insidiousness and is also personally encumbered by the subject matter at hand. Oppressed both by totalitarianism and, as a gay man, it is no wonder that he has a keen eye for the inner workings of stifling social structures, having been trapped within their labyrinthine chambers for large swathes of his life.

Much like Mosse’s itinerant existence, emigrating from Nazi Germany to Britain and then to the US, The Image of Man charts diverse historical territories, giving an expansive account of modern masculinity’s evolution from the French Revolution onwards. Nevertheless, Mosse intrepidly reverses his first-hand experience of fleeing fascism in this book by guiding us towards the climactic status of modern manliness; a mobilising force in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Before the climax, Mosse seamlessly escorts us through the annals of modern masculinity in all its disparate manifestations. The evolution begins at the transition from aristocratic to bourgeois society; dissecting the duel and its subsequent abolishment to show how literal mediaeval honour codes were both diluted and zealously reappropriated by the modern zeitgeist. Thanks to the fine balance between facts and theory, there’s nothing particularly taxing about The Image of Man. Nevertheless, Mosse rewards committed readers with little historical gems. Such as Karl Marx’s instigation of a student duel, an indispensable piece of information for seminars and house parties alike.

Mosse explores how the false equivalence between a masculine beauty ideal and moral righteousness came to be. This is followed by a fascinating exposition of the ‘countertype’ to this ideal, which emboldened the oppression of minorities that strayed from the hegemonic standard of being a white male. Burgeoning fin-de-siècle opinions precipitated huge societal shifts in this domain of ideas which Mosse juggles with poise in his succeeding chapter on decadence, masterfully conveying how sexual deviance and nascent scientific discoveries interacted with masculinity. Mosse then takes a detour into the socialist applications of manliness before boomeranging back to fascism, which is most striking in its co-opting of classical imagery in service of hate.

What is most commendable about this history is its steadfast alignment with its stated aim. Mosse prefaces the book with the claim that it is purely ‘concerned with the evolution of a stereotype’ and this principle is stuck to assiduously. Mosse resists narrativization to the point of explicitly noting that the history of this idea lacks ‘dramatic tension’. The Image of Man illuminates a thread of masculinity through modern history so vividly that one can chart when it is frayed and challenged by other social forces, when it is pulled taut and rope-like for the erection of fascist states, and when it is tortuous and tangled, asphyxiating a range of victims with its stifling demands.

Lifeblood: Afrofuturist Visions of the Queer Vampire in Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories

by Persephone Dodd

The vampire – traditionally figured as an elusive aristocrat defiling victims to satiate his bloodthirst – has permeated Gothic literature since the early nineteenth century. Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is considered the first to lesbianise the subgenre with his 1872 novella, Carmilla. Le Fanu’s narrative is wrought with Catholic fears of homosexual monstrosity and a colonial threat of displacement by the dark-featured stranger who has penetrated European high society. Turning attention to American literature, Maisha L. Wester has argued that Gothic tropes “all occur as parts of narratives of slavery, not as part of the supernatural”, which is where Jewelle Gomez begins her Afrofuturist epic, The Gilda Stories.

Situated in the 1980s and 90s paranormal fiction boom, The Gilda Stories imagines a diverse network of ethical vampires who transgress time and space to straddle immortal/mortal American life. The novel simultaneously engages with Black feminism, Queer theory, and Afrofuturism, establishing the nuanced identities of its Queer women of colour as principal rather than peripheral. A paradigm for comprehending and creating a world outside of Western-dictated notions of selfhood and progress, Afrofuturism is rooted in African diasporic identity’s intersection with techno culture and speculative fiction. As such, Gomez sets each chapter in a different state and key moment of Black American history, beginning with protagonist Gilda’s recent escape from slavery in 1850s Louisiana, and concluding in the futuristic 2050. As an American lesbian of African and Native Wampanoag and Ioway heritage, Gomez recognises the prejudices her characters face throughout the timeline, whilst exploring celebrations of Queer and diasporic communities’ creativity, friendship, sex, and love. The Gilda Stories divorce monstrosity from the Queer vampire of colour through Gomez’s concept of reciprocal vamping and the model of Queer motherhood.

The Gilda Stories’ vampires enter victims’ minds and exchange a cognitive gift – “energy, dreams, ideas” — in return for the rejuvenating blood they take. This reciprocity acts as a corrective to white heteropatriarchal exploitation of women of colour to preserve social dominance. Instead of choosing vengeance, Gomez’s vampires channel historical injustice to create a humane world, for, as one wise character muses, “it is through our connection with life, not death, that we live”. While the novel’s vampires are recast as selfless givers and creators, the (white, male) humans are conversely presented as parasites to Gilda’s community, threatening sexual violation, physical exploitation, and artistic appropriation. This dynamic is successful in overturning previous evocations of Queer Black women as leeches to society in Gothic literature, meanwhile illuminating dominant power structures’ greater inclination to ‘vamp’ than the vampires themselves. A characteristic of Afrofuturist literature, this socialist vamping creates equality between earthly beings that is unattainable via systems of white supremacy and Western capitalism. In Jerry Rafiki Jones’s words, Gomez shows “it is possible to satisfy one’s ‘hunger’ without being a monster, without producing terror, exploitation, or bodies in pain”. The symbiosis crafted between vampire and vamped in The Gilda Stories marks a mobilisation of Gothic’s fantastical elements to rewrite the past and imagine a better future for Queer and diasporic communities.

Gina Wisker’s claim that African-American Gothic “explores the duties of care that mothers and grandmothers have for the next generation, which needs to recuperate the past and revise the future” bears a striking resemblance to The Gilda Stories’ presentation of motherhood. Gilda’s birth mother was a Black slave who died of an illness caught from nursing her white owner family, epitomising the ‘vamping’ role whiteness has played throughout history. However, her enduring presence in Gilda’s memory demonstrates pride of lineage and foregrounds the tragic fracturing effect that bondage has imposed on Black identity. The other predominant maternal force is Gilda’s lesbian vampire co-parents: a white brothel owner called Gilda (from whom younger Gilda inherits her name) and Bird, a Lakota Native American who teaches Gilda history and languages over her time in Louisiana.

Described by Victoria Amadour as an “action of white reparation to black slaves”, Gomez conceptualises a maternal blood-sharing process between elder Gilda and younger Gilda to symbolise initiation into vampiric immortality. The process begins with elder Gilda drinking from younger Gilda’s neck and younger Gilda drinking blood from the elder’s breast, an image of Queered lactation. Creating a tenderness indicative of mother and baby postpartum, Gomez writes “Gilda kissed her on the forehead and the neck where the pain had been”, and describes how the younger “clung to Gilda, sinking deeper into a dream”. This ritual concurrently resists nineteenth-century anti-miscegenation laws and heteronormative phallocentrism by allowing the lesbian vampire to biologically ‘birth’ Gilda without male involvement and bypass the male-inflicted strain that pregnancy places on women’s bodies. Giving due attention to her Black identity while being immortally adopted by a white woman, Gomez uses aural imagery as a uniting force of past and present to join both maternal figures (natural and vampiric), by writing that Gilda “heard a soft humming that sounded like her mother” while drinking from elder Gilda’s breast. Maternity in The Gilda Stories conveys gynocentric racial harmony and defies the rigid bounds of heteronormativity to illuminate the virtues of the Queer family dynamic.

While monstrous presentations of Queer women of colour continue to pervade popular media, Gomez’s vampiric odyssey carves out a space to empower marginalised identities. Cheryl Dunye’s upcoming television adaptation of The Gilda Stories will provide a welcome opportunity to decentre Queer diasporic communities’ suffering on screen and utilise the Gothic aesthetic to instead explore their pride.

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