Nostalgia, gender, and the countryside: placing the "land girl" in First World War Britain

In December 1917, an article in the Daily Chronicle, entitled ‘The New Land Lady’, stated that:

One of the good things which may issue from this war is a revival of the old English countryside.

The happy village may be born again.

If this reformation should come, it will be the work of the women.

The nostalgia evident in this call for women's wartime ‘return’ to the land to restore a lost, pastoral idyll during an event more usually associated with modernity raises several questions. What meanings can be attached to the ways in which women agricultural workers were seen as the key to a ‘rural revival’ and thus as crucial to a revitalized nation during the First World War? And what are we to make of the seemingly contradictory appeal to women radically to leave their presumably urban and suburban homes and conservatively to restore the countryside?

As Raymond Williams pointed out, this emblematic English countryside has always been placed in a more ideal past, and the desires to return to or to preserve the allegedly unchanging patterns of land and the lives attached to it are integral to the problem of modernization itself. More recently, Alun Howkins has argued that the ideology and ‘ideal’ of England and Englishness have remained essentially ‘rural,’ and that in 1914 this was the vision of Englishness that ‘went into battle'. However, one might certainly be forgiven for assuming that the creation of the Women's Land Army and the resulting appearance of urban women in trousers, breeches and puttees in villages throughout Britain would herald something more like a ‘transformation’ than a ‘revival’.

Letters from Mapoon: colonising Aboriginal gender

Much information on traditional indigenous society in Australian historiography and anthropology stems from the vast store of eyewitness accounts left by missionaries, settlers and government officials. How cautious does one need to be in using such material? After all that it reveals about the moral and legal universe of its writers, can it speak reliably about traditional society? This article traces the production of knowledge about indigenous gender relations at Cape York Peninsula through a lineage of sources from the 1890s to the 1990s and concludes that unless the assumptions embedded in the primary sources are clearly identified, the discourse on Aboriginal womanhood continues to be a colonising project.

Science, an ally of feminism? Isabelle Gatti de Gamond on women and science

Cet essai analyse la façon dont Isabelle Gatti de Gamond (1839-1905), l'une des principales féministes belges du XIXe siècle, définissait les rapports entre les femmes et la science.

Même si les revendications effectives de Gatti de Gamond étaient très radicales, son discours sur la femme partageait les motifs du discours générique qui était dominant dans la culture de la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle. Sa représentation des rapports entre les sexes supposait une différence fondamentale entre l'homme et la femme, une équivalence ou une « égalité dans la différence », plutôt qu'une égalité tout court.

Pendant la première partie de sa carrière, Gatti de Gamond resta proche d'une vision traditionnelle et assez abstraite de la différence sexuelle, une différence située surtout au niveau de la mission et de la destinée féminine et masculine, inscrite dans une différence, interprétée métaphysiquement, de "nature". Plus tard, la différence entre les sexes fut définie en fonction d'une distinction établie scientifiquement. Il s'agissait notamment d'une différence sexuelle enracinée biologiquement, mais légitimée et fortifiée par une division sociologique entre les sexes. Même son exaltation romantique de la femme trouvait place dans cette image scientiste, non seulement parce qu'elle partait des mêmes oppositions sexuées, mais aussi parce que l'œuvre sociologique dont Gatti de Gamond s'inspirait, possédait un fort potentiel nostalgique. Sa pensée sur la relation entre les femmes et la science partageait les mêmes prémisses. Elle se basait sur des frontières strictes entre les champs de connaissance et les approches cognitives masculines d'une part, féminines de l'autre, même si les femmes bénéficiaient de la possibilité de surpasser quelques-unes de ces frontières et d'exercer, intellectuellement ou moralement, une influence salutaire.

Bastardy and the great famine: Ireland, 1845-1850

‘A woman who has had an illegitimate child is looked on with contempt, and would not be associated with. But the young women have a great deal of discretion, and few of them go astray in that way.’

Parish of St. Mary's, Cork, 1835

While the claim may seem surprising, Irish society enjoys no mean place in the history of sexuality. Malthus may be said to have re-focused attention on the folly of giving free rein to the passion between the sexes, and some historians, as well as contemporary commentators, viewed the state of pre-Famine Ireland as a confirmation of the dangers of runaway population growth. Post-Famine Irish society, by contrast, gave the appearance of being fashioned according to the principles of Malthusian population policy: an older age at marriage for men and women, a rising incidence of permanent celibacy and a relative absence of ‘vice’. Indeed, long before the end of the Victorian era Irish people were renowned for their prudential approach to matters sexual. This extended to sex outside marriage. Irish illegitimacy rates were amongst the lowest in the Western world. Ideologues protested the virtue and purity of Irish women, and of the Irish race more generally.