ABSTRACT This article aims to reinsert British women and their perspectives into our understanding of anticolonial resistance in Palestine. Historiography on the Arab Revolt (1936–39) has previously been built from colonial state archives that disproportionally speak with a male voice and, as such, rely on certain gendered assumptions to describe the historical participants and events of the period. This article focuses on the records of three British women who worked as teachers during the mandate period, examining how they experienced and understood the anticolonial resistance and violence that occurred around them. It contextualises them within the wider British archive of the Revolt and draws on other experiences across the British Empire to seek to unravel how gender, race and violence intersected in their perception of the events around them.
This article examines the cultural and intellectual history of the Chinese "slave girl" in Progressive Era California. Joining a rich literature on how the movement of women across Europe and the Americas stoked cultural anxieties around sex work, gender norms, and "trafficking," this article uses missionary documents and newspaper accounts to explore how slavery discourse collapsed variations in Chinese women and girls' experiences of freedom and unfreedom in America. I show how, in contrast to her non-Chinese counterparts, the Chinese "slave girl" was positioned as a racialized object of rescue within the borders of the American nation-state, where missionaries could wield violent state power in the name of religious and reformist zeal. This article concludes by re-reading and deconstructing "rescue" narratives through a reparative lens.
This article examines the published writings of Lorna Gulston (c. 1932-2023), a hitherto unknown Northern Irish civil servant who wrote many articles for the earliest British lesbian magazines such as Arena Three, Sappho and Sequel. In doing so, the article asks: How did Gulston find her way onto the pages of these pioneering magazines? Did Gulston's contribution, obscure though it is in the memory of the movement today, matter in the overall arc of lesbian visibility and activism in twentieth-century Ireland, north and south? Using the remarkably large volume of writing that Gulston published, chiefly in the years preceding the establishment of gay and lesbian activist organisations on the island of Ireland, the article suggests that Gulston was a rare example of an Irish activist who belonged to a 'homophile' generation of activists. In doing so, this article provides the first study of a woman based on the island of Ireland who considered herself part of the bridging generation between the early Sapphic currents of the early twentieth century and the post-1968 liberation era. Ultimately, the article argues that Gulston's life and writings trouble the standard arc of Irish activist history.
ABSTRACT While gender relations around 1900 were generally marked by sharp dichotomies grounded in nature and the body, the case of naturism appears paradoxical. An influential movement in Germany, it promoted a reform of the body according to natural principles. While sharing conventional ideas about gender roles, naturist practices—vegetarianism, naturopathy, and nudism—largely refrained from sexing the body. Although scholarship has noted this phenomenon, it has not provided a systematic explanation. This article argues that the absence of sex differentiation in naturist practices can be explained through a praxeological analysis of competing body concepts. It shows that naturists operated with two bodies: an anatomical and a hygienic one. While anatomy justified gender dichotomy, hygiene privileged a non‐sexed model. The article explains the emergence of feminist activism within the naturist movement and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of gender and body history around 1900.
ABSTRACT In this article, we ‘think with care’ about gender in Scotland in the early twentieth century, undertaking an ethnographic approach to the archive of OneKind, formerly the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Vivisection (SSPV), which has only recently been catalogued. In exploring the development of the SSPV from its beginnings in 1911 to 1930, we draw on Joan Tronto's definition of care and Puig de la Bellacasa's three dimensions of care: labour/work, affect/affections and ethics/politics. We argue that the SSPV, founded and largely run by women, employed gendered discourse rooted in a distinctive gendered politics of care embedded in Scottish evangelical Christian socialism; this gendered politics has not been the focus of previous historical research. This context of Christian socialism in Scotland created a milieu in which the women of the SSPV, positioned by their gender as natural bearers of compassion, led campaigns. They articulated a duty of gendered care towards animals and expanded a conception of brotherhood (fraternity) that demanded social change. By focusing on specific relationalities and explanations surrounding meanings of care in Scotland, we deepen our awareness of where we are today and how we got here. Understanding the gendered history of care between humans and other animals is essential to finding effective ways to move forward in caring about and for the nonhuman.
