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Book reviewsKirsteen Macpherson Bardell a , Pat Starkey b , Fiona Reid c , Ruth Watts d , Liz Dimock e ,Cornelie Usborne f , Louise Ryan g , Henrice Altink h , Barbara Haber i & Louise A. Jackson ja University of Wolverhampton , United Kingdomb University of Liverpool , United Kingdomc University of Glamorgan , Pontypridd, United Kingdomd University of Birmingham , United Kingdome La Trobe University , Australiaf Roehampton, University of Surrey , United Kingdomg University College London , United Kingdomh University of Glamorgan , Pontypridd, United Kingdomi Harvard University , Pontypridd, USAj Leeds Metropolitan University , United KingdomPublished online: 16 Feb 2011.

To cite this article: Kirsteen Macpherson Bardell , Pat Starkey , Fiona Reid , Ruth Watts , Liz Dimock , Cornelie Usborne ,Louise Ryan , Henrice Altink , Barbara Haber & Louise A. Jackson (2003) Book reviews, Women's History Review, 12:3, 499-520

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612020100200362

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Women’s History Review, Volume 12, Number 3, 2003

499

Book Reviews

Women and Gender in Early Modern Wales MICHAEL ROBERTS & SIMONE CLARKE (Eds), 2000 Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 320 pp., ISBN 0 7083 1550 X, paperback, £14.99; 0 7083 1580 1, hardback, £35.00

Women in Scotland c. 1100–c. 1750 ELIZABETH EWEN & MAUREEN M. MEIKLE (Eds), 1999 East Linton: Tuckwell Press. 282 pp., ISBN 0 86232 046 2, £14.99

Over the past twenty years, a large number of works have been produced on early modern English women, both general surveys and monographs on specific features of their lives. Thus, we have now reached a position where we know a great deal about how they lived. However, information on their Celtic sisters has been conspicuously lacking, aside from the publication of Margaret MacCurtain & Mary O’Dowd’s collection of essays on early modern Irish women ten years ago (which the book on Scottish women was directly inspired by). So it was with great pleasure that I was asked to review these books on the experience of women in late medieval and early modern Welsh and Scottish society. These two works seek to explore various features of women’s lives up to the mid- to late eighteenth century, and these are set against the context of great political, religious, social and economic change in the two countries.

Women and Gender in Early Modern Wales aims to provide an accessible introduction to the study of gender history in Wales. Although the book does focus predominantly on women’s lives, it does so within the context of a gendered social order, and it includes a chapter focusing specifically on changing perceptions of masculinity in Wales. Overall, ten contributions are presented, focusing on subjects including crime, religion, work and education. The chapters also highlight the range of sources which can be used to elicit information about women’s lives, from court records to poetry, needlework and diaries. Importantly, women are presented as agents and not merely victims in a patriarchal culture; a feature which is surprisingly, and convincingly, argued in Garthine Walker’s work on female abduction. Throughout the work the tensions evident after the Acts of Union with England (1536-43) are apparent, in a time traditionally seen as a period of Anglicisation of culture and language. This mixture of cultural continuity and change is demonstrated in a fascinating way in Richard Sugget’s discussion of changing perceptions of witchcraft in Wales.

Women in Scotland c. 1100-c. 1750 includes twenty contributions, divided into six sections which can be loosely defined as focusing on religion, literature, politics,

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economy, law and the family. The inclusion of more numerous chapters which are shorter in length means that the work gives a more encompassing view of women’s lives that is, perhaps, more accessible to the new or younger scholar than the work on Wales, although the same depth of analysis is not possible. A wide range of sources is utilised, including legal records, letters, poems, archaeology, oral tradition and folklore. Again, it is demonstrated that, despite the misogynistic image of early modern culture which we receive from sources such as Protestant theology or poetry (discussed in the work of David Mullan and Evelyn Newlyn), women could and did lead active lives, and were more influential in politics, the economy and law than was traditionally thought (for instance, in Alistair Mann’s research on women in the book trade and John Finlay’s work on women as agents in early sixteenth-century law courts). Contrasting cultures and languages are themes in this work, as well as in Welsh history. The differing experiences of Highland and Lowland women is demonstrated with two fascinating chapters on Gaelic speaking women; however, as the editors note, this is another area which needs much more research.

These are both important works, which form a welcome and necessary contribution to our knowledge of women in the British Isles. Both make a conscious effort to explore the variety of female experience in this period, whether single or married, wealthy or poor. Tellingly, both works allude to the problems, which all women’s historians face, of trying to find sources that inform us of women’s own opinions and feelings. Often, it is a question of reading between the lines in evidence predominantly produced by men and the frustration with the lack of evidence produced by women in this period is evident; for instance, in Andrea Thomas’s chapter on women in James V of Scotland’s royal court and Ruth Geuter’s work on women’s needlework in early modern Wales. In other cases, the evidence is there but has traditionally been ignored by male historians and archivists, as shown by Ruth Grant’s research on Jacobean women’s political activities in Scotland and Nia Powell’s discussion of Welsh women’s poetry before 1800. Thus, it is especially interesting when we do find sources produced by women themselves, revealing how they felt about their lives, as in the eighteenth-century diary of Elizabeth Baker of Merioneth, Wales, discussed by Simone Clarke, and the fascinating songs of early modern Gaelic women in Scotland highlighted in the work of Anne Frater.

It is to be hoped that these works will encourage the growth in research being carried out into women and gender in Wales and Scotland. Both books highlight avenues for future research, as well as including addresses for online bibliographies to aid new and existing researchers. The book on Welsh women and gender also includes a very helpful section on sources and further reading. This should enable comparative work to be carried out with English and European material, and also help the moves towards a fully gendered history. Furthermore, this could also enable us to think in terms of a British history, one which celebrates diversity as well as similarity.

KIRSTEEN MACPHERSON BARDELL University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

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Gendering Scottish History: an international approach TERRY BROTHERSTONE, DEBORAH SIMONTON & OONAGH WALSH (Eds), 1999 Glasgow: Cruithne Press. xxi + 280 pp., ISBN 1 873448 18 X, hardback, £20.00; 1 873448 16 3, paperback, £10.95 This volume consists of selected papers from the fifth Mackie Conference, held at the University of Aberdeen in 1996. At first glance, its title is misleading, and may have misled some of the contributors. Although the editors point out in their Introduction that the aim of the conference was to examine feminist and international perspectives on Scottish history – taking into account gender relations and social change not just in Scotland but also in Europe and North America – the rationale does not quite convince. Neither has it prevented some contributors, writing about other geographical areas, from straining to nod in the direction of Scottish history – if only to point out the lacunae to be found there in comparison with their own special field of research. But that is a fairly minor irritant, and should not detract from the profit and pleasure to be gained from a wide-ranging collection of essays, which adopt a consciously feminist approach to writing about women’s past. It is, as Terry Brotherstone points out in the concluding chapter, a volume about women, but also one about approaches to the writing of history and about internationalism.

The book is divided into three parts. Part One is broadly historiographical. Chapters by Sian Reynolds, Elizabeth Ewan, Jane McDermid, Grethe Jacobsen, Deborah Simonton, Ida Blom, Margery Palmer McCulloch and Mary Nash consider aspects of women’s history. They cover a wide variety of topics – from work to marriage and maternalism; from the contribution of individual women like Ishbel Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, and her fight to secure women equal status with men in the creation of the League of Nations, to the complexities of gendered developments in the emergence of the Norwegian welfare state. The varied geographical contexts powerfully illustrate Mary Nash’s contention that rethinking traditional narratives through women’s history involves a challenge to false universalities. Challenge is also offered to traditional periodisation, reinforcing Judith Bennett’s contention, familiar to most students of women’s history, that the caesurae between segments of past time as defined by historians should not be thought relevant to the history of women – if, indeed, they are necessarily significant to the study of men’s lives.

The complex and multitextured nature of feminist history is a theme which also runs through Part Two, which comprises chapters by Fiona Downie, Nicholas Mayhew, Mary O’Dowd, Lesley Diack, Lynn Abrams, Oonagh Walsh, Elizabeth J. Clapp and Linda Mahood. They are mainly empirical studies from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, based on research into German women in the nineteenth century, Ireland in the sixteenth and the nineteenth, Scotland in the late Middle Ages, and both Scotland and the USA in the nineteenth century. Themes identified

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in Part One re-emerge – for example, power and influence, work and religion. The studies also highlight new ones, such as delinquency, campaigns for social welfare, mental health and citizenship.

Part Three consists of just one chapter by Terry Brotherstone, who tackles head-on the complaint from historians of Scottish women that in the recent urge to rewrite the national history as part of the celebratory activity surrounding devolution, women are still being left out. Drawing attention to a six-part series in Scotland on Sunday’s celebration of Scottish history in which references to women were few and far between, Brotherstone argues that this marginalises serious research in order to perpetuate the story of the white Scottish male – a function not just of intellectual taste but of theory and politics.

Don’t be deceived by a title which suggests that this is a volume primarily for historians of Scotland and don’t try too hard to identify the connecting threads. Perhaps the weakness of this volume is that some of its contributors have attempted to weave them. Although its lament that Scottish history, and particularly Scottish women’s history, tends to be marginalised recurs throughout the volume, it also contains riches and approaches to the histories of many nations that will stimulate and suggest tools for a wider study of gender and its ability to enable us to understand the past.

PAT STARKEY University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

Women, Sexuality and War PHILOMENA GOODMAN New York: Palgrave. xii + 164 pp., ISBN 0 333 76086 7, £42.50 Philomena Goodman has produced a sociological as well as a historical survey of women’s lives in Britain during the Second World War. Her method demonstrates a firm commitment to gender theory and to the retrieval of female voices, and her aim is to use women’s personal narratives to construct a different interpretation of the way in which British people experienced the War.

One of Goodman’s main arguments is that the stability of gender relations was crucial to the minimising of social discord during the War, and that this stability was maintained despite the fact that women were actively encouraged to adopt new roles. That conventional gender relations were largely retained in this situation was due to the construction of ‘patriotic femininity’, a concept designed to uphold morale and avoid the undermining of masculine prestige. The idea that gender roles were essentially fixed was also sustained by the notion of ‘the duration’, which made it clear that any changes in social relations were of a temporary nature and due only to the extraordinary circumstances.

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The main research for this work was based on personal, open-ended interviews and on data sources found in the Mass-Observation Archive. This is a remarkable and fascinating source, created because the founders of the project wanted to know how ‘ordinary’ people coped with the social reality of the War. That the project was, at one point, commissioned by the Ministry of Information only indicates the extent to which the wartime government believed that it contained invaluable information about the impact of war on society at large.

The book begins by looking at ‘Place, Space and Gender’, fundamental concepts given the way in which women visibly occupied spaces which had previously been uniquely male. Goodman argues, however, that occupational segregation was largely maintained and that conventional concepts of femininity and masculinity were preserved by a heightened heterosexuality in which women became particularly responsible for male morale.

A substantial section of this book is devoted to women in industrial employment, and it explores the contradictory way in which women continued to be regarded as sex symbols whilst taking part in arduous, dirty, physical work. Interestingly, Goodman notes that although women’s work was vital for the war effort, it was curtailed if it caused too much inconvenience for the husband. Widespread popular belief in women’s new responsibilities did not obscure the fact that a woman’s primary duty was to maintain the integrity of the family home because, ‘As a general rule the presence of a woman is essential to the household’. However, Goodman also includes the lighter notes produced by her interviewees. Many women found considerable pleasure in their work and their financial freedom, many were able to break the petty rules which regulated their lives, and, despite the hardships and grief, many actively enjoyed their wartime experiences.

Women played an equally important role in the armed services as on the factory floor. Women in uniform raised serious moral problems because the military is the ultimate and most fundamental male sphere. As a result, women were presented as auxiliary, and their efforts, although essential to the War, were culturally marginalised. Goodman aptly summarises the military dilemma at this point: women were needed in the services but their presence was a potential distraction for the troops. On the other hand, men had sexual needs that had to be met given that the authorities were determined to promote heterosexual male behaviour. These conflicts between women in uniform, morality and femininity remained unresolved throughout the War.

Personal morality was a key issue for women who remained at home too. The period was accompanied by an atmosphere of greater sexual licence because the uncertainties of wartime were not conducive to long-term, far-distance commitments. Women may also have experienced a new level of personal freedom because their fathers or husbands were away on service. On an even more threatening level, they may well have had new, non-familial men in their lives if American GIs arrived in their area, or if members of the armed forces were billeted on them. Paradoxically, although many women did experience greater sexual freedom during the War, the

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sexual double standard remained. The responsibility for unwanted pregnancy, venereal disease and marital infidelity remained firmly located with the woman the entire time.

The work ends with no firm conclusion but with two contradictory quotations from women. It is a fitting ending in that the participants have the final say; also in that the two conflicting paragraphs highlight the contradictions and ambiguities of women’s wartime experiences.

FIONA REID University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, United Kingdom

Revealing New Worlds: three Victorian women naturalists SUZANNE LE-MAY SHEFFIELD, 2001 London: Routledge. ISBN 0 415 2706 9, hardback, £65.00 Despite the expansion of the scientific world of the nineteenth century, the professionalisation of science reaffirmed traditional gendered and class characteristics. This well-researched and structured book seeks to demonstrate how three Victorian women naturalists attempted, with some success, to overcome the barriers of gender and find a respectable niche in the scientific world whereby they could have their scientific endeavours acknowledged and, at the same time, retain their reputation as ladies. Margaret Gatty discovered a passion for algology at the age of thirty-nine, and thereafter balanced bringing up ten children and the busy life of a vicar’s wife with her absorption in marine biology, including writing very popular and profitable books for scientific beginners and children. Marianne North was able in her late thirties, after the death of her beloved father, to turn to painting from nature and travelled the five major continents to search for specimens and paint them in their natural habitat. She went beyond the flower painting which, having become feminised, was seen as low art and hardly a science, to create a unique genre of botanical art with her unusual oil paintings of contextualised plants. Eleanor Ormerod learnt to study insects quietly and unobtrusively on her father’s large estate. After her father’s death when she was forty-five, she used her wealth and ever growing expertise on ‘injurious insects’ to publish annual Reports from 1877 to 1901. Using the voices of men and women engaged in both agriculture and entomology, she encouraged and used the observations of others, creating a ‘community of entomological knowledge amongst real people’. She carved a wholly new niche as an economic or agricultural entomologist and was for ten years the Honorary Consulting Entomologist to the Royal Agricultural Society and for five the Agricultural Adviser to the Board of Agriculture.

None of the three had had a formal scientific education, although in the fluid world of nineteenth-century science, that was not necessarily an overwhelming

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drawback. Each worked in sciences or ways that were on the margins of what was then mainstream science and so were more easily acceptable for a woman. All three, as Sheffield emphasises throughout, took great care to establish their femininity, their subordinate place as women naturalists, their deference to ‘professional’ and, therefore, male scientists. At the same time, their mental and, indeed, physical, liberation through science shines through: each experiencing complete joy in their work and reluctant ever to stop. Sheffield equally, therefore, drawing on their autobiographical material, demonstrates the subtle ways in which each woman affirmed her growing confidence in her own ideas, discoveries and scientific being.

The contradictions between the women’s acceptance of a subordinate role, yet inner conviction of their knowledge and status, is carefully teased out. Sheffield shows that although all three women based their scientific work on acceptable ways of women working, there was some progression from Gatty’s writing science for children through North’s more active scientific role, albeit just within the confines of respectable womanhood, to Ormerod’s regular publications in scientific journals and scientific standing, including being co-examiner in Agricultural Entomology for three years at the University of Edinburgh. Even so, despite Ormerod wanting to be seen as part of the scientific community and stressing the need for applied science, she simultaneously asserted that gap between amateur, practical science and ‘male’, professional academic science which most historians of science have accepted until recently.

It is in showing how these three women bridged that gap, although to some extent frustrated by the very limitations on their scientific status which they themselves apparently accepted, that this book is most successful. The essence of the book is distilled in the last chapter where Sheffield deconstructs contradictory photographic and other images of the women. These women are shown to have pushed at, but never completely overstepped, the gendered boundaries of behaviour and knowledge in which they were reared.

There are some overstated arguments but this is a book worth perusing, not least for the endnotes, which explore many of the current debates which underpin the text. It is a great pity that the cost of the hardback version is prohibitive even to many libraries in these cheese-paring days.

RUTH WATTS

University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

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‘Wicked’ Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa Dorothy L. Hodgson & Sheryl A. McCurdy, 2001 Oxford: James Currey. xiii + 325 pp., ISBN 0 85255 695 0, hardback, £40.00; 0 85255 654 4, paperback, £16.95

‘I Will Not Eat Stone’: a women’s history of colonial Asante Jean Allman & Victoria Tashjian, 2000 Oxford: James Currey. xlvi + 255 pp., ISBN 0 85255 691 8, hardback, £40.00; 0 85255 641 1, paperback, £15.95

‘We Women Worked So Hard’: gender, urbanization and social reproduction in colonial Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930–56 TERESA A. BARNES, 1999 Oxford: James Currey. xlv + 204 pp., ISBN 0 85255 686 1, hardback, £40.00; 0 85255 636 5, paperback, £16.95

These three volumes add to the rapidly burgeoning genre of African women’s and gender studies, in this instance part of a Social History of Africa series edited by Jean Allman & Allen Isaacman and published concurrently in Britain, the USA (Heinemann) and South Africa (David Philip). The volume on Zimbabwe is also published in Harare (Baobas Academic). This process of publication is invaluable in giving access to readers in three continents. One hopes that there will also be provision for distribution in the rest of black Africa, which has provided the subjects for most of the first two volumes and which continues to furnish rich source material for historical research. It is well known, however, that devalued currencies, low incomes and minimal budgets for library acquisitions indicate that access will be much more limited in those areas.

‘Wicked’ Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa came to fruition in the minds of Hodgson & McCurdy after the American African Studies Association meeting in 1993 at which they were struck by the innovative work being presented on gender in Africa. Further panels were arranged for the following ASA meeting, which sparked lively debate and led to a special issue of the Canadian Journal of African Studies that published six papers. The interest was such that further publication was envisaged, resulting in the present volume. Fourteen papers cover historical and contemporary issues in Lesotho, Tanzania, Zambia, Uganda, the Gambia, Nigeria, Ghana and Niger. ‘Contesting’, ‘confronting’, ‘making/taking space’, ‘negotiating’ are key concepts in this book. The authors focus on these processes, by which African women come to terms with the patriarchies of traditional, colonial and post-colonial political and social structures.

Hodgson & McCurdy open space for negotiating the meaning of ‘wickedness’: as, for example, a mainly masculine discourse defining actions that lie outside a constructed normative mode that aims to control or oppress women; or, as an

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assertion of female agency challenging cultural constraints on women and evoking labels of ‘wickedness’. The authors propose that reading chapters against one another will lead to an understanding of the multiple meanings of ‘wickedness’. What is clear is that the ‘wicked’ women of the book’s title are not a specific reference to African women prostitutes, who are but a small part of the totality of the researchers’ subjects.

Two examples are given here to illustrate the scope of this imaginatively edited volume. The first is a chapter on Nigeria in the colonial period by Misty Bastian in which the Nwaobiala of 1925 is analysed: Bastian argues that the Nwaobiala was a form of women’s resistance to colonial government and to local African men given positions of authority under indirect rule and was, furthermore, an outburst of women’s dissatisfaction leading to the Women’s War in 1929. The colonial authorities, unprepared for and unable to interpret the meanings of Nwaobiala, described it as ‘Dancing Women’s Movement’, ‘Women’s Purity Campaign’, ‘Market Riots’, with little understanding of the symbolic significance of Nwaobiala as a subversive anti-colonial activity. Bastian’s analysis, against a background of purificatory duties of Igbo women, the veneration of women for the deities of the land and long-established practices of song/dance performances, egwu, is a colourful interpretation of ‘wicked’ women as a solid anti-colonial movement.

The second example is from Tanzania in the period after independence, when, as Hodgson explains, layers of patriarchal structures were superimposed on the process of controlling of women, from pre-colonial Maasai tradition, through the native courts that originated in the colonial period, to post-colonial discourses of the independent state. In this highly instructive chapter Hodgson analyses the conflicting influences at play in a court case of 1992, in which a young Maasai woman (a ‘wicked’ woman?) took her father to court rather than marry according to his will. The facts of the case are complex, reflecting the shifting social environment in the late decades of the twentieth century. The schooling of the girl was such that she could communicate in court in Swahili, the lingua franca and language of litigation, whereas the father could only communicate through a translator. The customs and beliefs of the Maasai were, and are, in conflict with the marriage laws of the Tanzanian state that do not allow for coercion or force; the native courts of the colonial period attempted, not wholly successfully, to maintain traditional process in family law, and were a model for the establishment of post-colonial courts. In this fluid legal environment, a case such as this allowed scope for women to test the interstices in this amalgam of tradition and modernity, and through their own subjectivity.

A further array of specific incidents, cases and movements is attended to in the remaining chapters in this collection, all very worthy of readers’ attention. One is left with the idea that ‘wickedness’ is a concept that covers any category of behaviour or activity that is resistant to a perceived norm, be it a masculine discernment or that of political or cultural forms.

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All of these volumes demonstrate the cultural diversity of Africa along with the varying impacts of British colonial authority in different regions and on distinct societies. Colonial Zimbabwe was strikingly different from colonial Asante, not least because it was a white settler society founded on the dubious political and military accomplishments of Cecil Rhodes and his men, the takeover of extensive tracts of land for commercial white farming and mining and, by the 1930s, permanent restriction of the African population in ‘dustbowl rural reserves or slums on the outskirts of towns … only to be allowed out to do manual labour in white households and for farmers, mine owners and urban business men’ (Barnes, p. xvi).

Barnes offers a rich analysis of Zimbabwean historiography, demonstrating how valuable the research of the last two decades has been in promoting new views of African women’s history, and setting her own ideas in line with, and sometimes opposition to, earlier work. She focuses unashamedly on Harare, the name given to the African townships that lay outside the colonial capital, Salisbury (and now the name for the capital city), and points to other townships around Bulawayo, the second city of the colony, and other towns, as having different histories, albeit with some similarities. There is engagement with the categorisation of class and an interesting breakdown of the different groups of women who inhabited Harare, those who struggled to survive and those who became respected, influential and sometimes even relatively prosperous, as, for example, the doily-crocheting women (Barnes, pp. 31-32).

In colonial Asante, while Western economies drove the commodities boom of the early twentieth century, the Asante people were drawn into a monetising economy in which the competing interests of men and women were played out and gender relations adjusted to changing external circumstances. This was especially true of cocoa production. While much research has already been done on marriage and economic processes, Allman & Tashjian provide an innovative approach by focusing on the first generation of Asante women born in the colonial period, following their lives from childhood to old age. This is achieved with a fine sense of immediacy through interview material from the women themselves and a narrative that focuses on fluid change in marriage relations, childbearing and rearing, and inheritance resulting from external economic factors and the blending of new British administrative and legal processes. The authors have also attained an understanding of the historicity of social relations through the length of the twentieth century, supported by analysis of relevant historiographic material. As with other research in the closing decades of the century, the authors expressed a ‘certain urgency’ to collect the ‘reminiscences’, ‘stories’, ‘recollections’, ‘memories’ of a group of octagenarians and nonagenarians; there is no doubt that this material, backed up by thorough archival research, gives new understandings of the early colonial period.

Important theoretical questions are addressed: the ‘continuities’ and/or ‘discontinuities’ between the pre-colonial and colonial period, the matter of British exclusion of women office-holders of pre-colonial Asante and more general marginalisation of women politically and legally under colonial administration, and,

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most significantly, women taking the opportunities offered by colonial legal process to overthrow or subvert customary process to their own advantage. Compared with some parts of Africa, mission influence on marriage was surprisingly late in Asante. The combined mission and colonial Education department activities of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to draw a halt to what were perceived by those authorities, along with male Asante leaders, as ‘uncontrollable’ women. Allman’s chapter in Hodgson & McCurdy’s volume about this same group of women demonstrates how ‘uncontrollable’ and ‘wicked’ merge as categories.

The authors trace the changing solutions to ayerefa, ‘roughly translated as adultery’ (Allman & Tienjian, p. 171), examining instances from pre-colonial times to the 1930s and demonstrating a continuing demand by women to negotiate fruitful outcomes for themselves against a hardening of chiefly power enhanced by British indirect rule in the native courts, the codification of customary legal process and the combined moral force of mission and Education department activities. Herein, the authors note a paradox in their findings, namely, that this first generation of colonial Asante women struggled in positive and assertive ways to find economic and social equity within a framework of administrative and legal structures that was increasingly disadvantageous to women.

These three volumes reflect the exciting developments of historical research in general, and African women’s and gender history in particular, in the closing years of the twentieth century. Postmodern influences have opened up new emphasis on a decentred understanding of history and led to the exploration of the subjectivity of all people. This is demonstrated in these tomes, each with a focus on oral history but all of them engaging head-on with the difficulties that oral history entails and the tensions therein with the archival record and the ‘official’ sources. There is abundant discussion of these issues.

To close, I draw attention to the front cover photograph of Barnes’s volume on Zimbabwe. Albeit of the colonial period, this photograph has multiple meanings for African womanhood in the present, displaying that blend of tradition and modernity that is and will be a signifier for the future. The composition shows a woman with four children, one hidden from view on the woman’s back and cloth-fastened in traditional manner, two dressed formally in classic Western-style suits, and the woman, also in a suit, leading the children by the hand and carrying, as women do across the continent of Africa, a heavy bundle on her head. Barnes comments on this ‘one-woman public transport system’ and notes that despite her encumbrances, she ‘is graceful, in control, moving forward’. There have been enormous changes in the understandings of women’s roles in Africa in Western epistemology even over a short period in the closing years of the twentieth century. Much current scholarship takes heed of how African women see themselves and understand their own histories. These realisations have assisted in ‘moving forward’ this whole field of study.

LIZ DIMOCK La Trobe University, Australia

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Women and Modernity in Weimar Germany: reality and representation in popular fiction VIBEKE RÜTZOU PETERSEN, 2001 Oxford: Berghahn Books. xvi + 184 pp., ISBN 1 57181 154 0, hardback, £20.00; 1 57181 789 1, paperback, £13.95 Women’s magazines and popular fiction in Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s have recently received increased attention within German studies; not surprisingly, given her phenomenal success, scholars have focused particularly on Vicki Baum and her serialised novels (e.g. Lynda King, Hartmut Vollmer). Historians, however, have been more reluctant to take this topic seriously despite pioneering studies by, inter alia, Patrice Petro and Elizabeth Harvey. This is surprising since this is a rich field for any investigation into women’s lives and gendered attitudes. The 1920s, of course, are especially worthy of cultural research. After all, German women’s role had undergone a radical transformation, occasioned firstly by industrialisation and modernisation but secondly by the double impact of a lost war and the revolutions of 1918-19. Rapid social changes at a time of extreme economic volatility made older conventions increasingly problematic and led to the construction of new forms of female self-definitions. The appearance of a wealth of women’s and illustrated magazines which serialised novels for the female market was itself an expression of the changes that had taken place in women’s education, political suffrage and their increased economic visibility. The skilful exploitation of topics which were close to the heart of female readers and a cool style which suited the current taste for New Objectivity produced such best selling novels as Baum’s stud.chem. Helene Willfuehr. It was serialised in 1928 in Ullstein’s Berliner Illustrirte and boosted this paper’s sale figures by no less than 200,000. A subsequent book publication then reached over 100,000 in just four years. Baum’s next published novel, Menschen im Hotel (1929), did even better, no doubt because of its success on stage and on screen as a Hollywood movie. The exploitation of the new market of women readers was an important factor in the growth of a mass reading public and the development of industrialised publishing houses such as Ullstein, Mosse and Scherl, who were among Europe’s market leaders. The phenomenal sales of a Baum novel and the increasing role of commercialism in the literary world were all the more important since the printed word had to compete increasingly with other forms of mass entertainment, such as films, sports, dance halls, radio and records.

It is the special value of this stimulating study that it attempts to analyse the complex interrelationship between popular culture, social change and women’s identity: how much did fiction reflect and how much did it influence or reinforce attitudes to women and women’s own image of themselves? To this end Petersen scrutinises novels written not just by women but also by male authors and she has chosen a wide spectrum of texts in which women figure both in modern and

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traditional role models. Peterson has sensibly structured her book according to the various arenas of women’s activities: personal life (family and reproduction), public life (work and leisure), intimate life (sexuality) and, finally, in possibly a less cohesive chapter, life at the margins (deviant sexuality, racism and anti-Semitism). The discussion takes due note of class, gender and urban/rural differences and it is illuminated by theoretical insights and references to the debates among the Weimar Left about the influence of mass culture, e.g. by Brecht, Benjamin and Kracauer. As one writer, Otto Biha, put it, ‘the ideology produced on the intellectual assembly line by the Scherls and Ullsteins of the world is the most dangerous poison gas on the culture front’. The legislative attempts in the Reichstag to protect young people from ‘filth and trash’ bear witness to the gloomy reception of this aspect of modernity, which was interestingly shared by the entire political spectrum. Sadly, this important campaign is hardly mentioned here. Leftish, liberal and conservative middle-class circles agreed that low-brow literature was a problem but they were divided about a solution: either they hoped that the working-class public would ‘read themselves up’ to better works or they despaired at the amount of trivia on the market. In an attempt to improve the reading matter of the proletarian public, communist writers founded the federation of the proletarian-revolutionary writers in 1927 and wrote literature from below for the series of Rote-eine-Mark Romane affordable for everyone. But they soon learned that they could not really compete with commercial publishers.

Petersen’s study succeeds in revising some entrenched ideas about the New Woman. It makes a spirited case against the suggestion by other literary historians that the female characters in Weimar middle-brow literature fail to represent emancipation. Instead, Petersen teases out subtle indicators of significant liberation. It is to Petersen’s credit that she does not confine herself to ‘Berlin’ or urban culture only. In many ways, her examples of fiction about rural life are especially interesting since discussions of modernity in the 1920s usually focus on cities, and Weimar politics, too, neglected the issue of the countryside. Novels like Madam Bäuerin by Lena Christ (1920) suggest that the independent and self-confident New Woman, as well as a belief in modernity, also existed outside city life: Christ’s heroine was in fact raised in a town but moved to the countryside where she – presumably like other young urban women could also have done – finds personal happiness and takes part in productive life on a farm. Madam Bäuerin espouses progressive ideas and a new lifestyle and is critical of traditional values and customs. When it celebrates the notion of ‘homeland’, it does so as a sense of belonging out of choice, a far cry from more völkisch nationalist ideas pervading much of Heimat literature.

Petersen contrasts such liberal and feminist aspects with the typically conservative portrayal of country life featured in such novels as Rudolf Herzog’s Die Buben der Frau Opterberg, also published in 1920. Herzog paints a picture of a rural society which presupposes a strong bond with the native soil and strict gender division. Here the relationship between the sexes is shown to be seriously disturbed.

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The heroine is forced to take on the role of the traditional male character in a rural novel because her husband is a failure. Her ‘strong-as-an-oak’ character is contrasted with a weak and alcoholic father who succumbed to the psychological havoc caused by the lost war since he lacked a true patriotic spirit. In fact, this reversal of traditional gender suggests degeneracy and national ruin and implicitly blames the left for this and its introduction of democracy and republicanism.

Best selling fiction seems to have reached a mass audience by carefully tapping into areas of particular concern for young women. Baum’s stud.chem. Helene Willfuehr, for example, describes the tribulations of a young women scientist attempting to combine career and (illegitimate) motherhood. It also portrays the dilemma of pre-marital sex and the vicissitudes of fertility control in the form of abortion. Moreover, the heroine, Helene, has managed to enter the exclusive sphere of academia, working as a chemist on an exciting breakthrough in the fashionable area of rejuvenation therapy. Similarly, Irmgard Keun’s first book, Gilgi, eine von uns (1931), celebrates the girl power of her protagonist, who succeeds in overcoming social prejudice and personal setbacks (Gilgi is also a single mother) and eventually achieves personal self-fulfilment. Of course, modern advertising methods contributed to the high profile of such novels and their authors, who were paraded as the very symbols of the New Woman whose professional success and lifestyle appeared desirable to their women readers. Baum, for example, was carefully portrayed not just as a popular novelist but also as a happy wife and mother of two, who also had time to pursue sport and frequented the same gymnastic studio as Marlene Dietrich.

Women’s leisure activities feature large in many of these novels, as they did in Weimar cultural life, a direct consequence of the shorter working day and the relative high wages. Petersen challenges Kracauer’s critique of much leisure activity, especially travel and dance, as an ersatz experience, a poor substitute and a ‘distortion of real life’. She points out that ‘spatial indulgence’ for its own sake may well have been precisely what many women sought. As Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen shows, many young women, particularly if their work was repetitive, desired to fill their leisure time with glamorous activities: ‘I want to be glamorous, at the top. With a white automobile and a bath smelling of perfume, everything, just like Paris’. But, says Petersen, we should not underestimate the excitement felt by many women of being able to move freely out of familiar spaces into new areas, not just unknown geographical spaces but also to unexplored zones of the body as the ‘unexplored locus of power’. This was, after all, the time when Körperkultur and sex reform were at their height. Körperkultur was not only the topic in such nationalistic literature as Hans Suren’s Der Mensch und die Sonne (61st edition, 1925) and Herzog’s Die Buben mentioned earlier. Gilgi, Keun’s New Woman heroine, exercises before work every morning punctually at half past seven by an open window: ‘forwards bends, up and down; the fingertips touch the floor, the knees are straight. That is the form. Up – down, up down’. Flämmchen, the stenographer in Baum’s Menschen im Hotel, liberates the bookkeeper, Kringlein,

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from a parochial and narrow-minded existence when she shows him how to dance. Of course, sport and body were highly gendered; young men typically were obsessed with boxing and cycling and young women with dance, but boundaries could also be blurred between the sexes: Vicki Baum herself practised boxing and her novels are full of references to boxing as a sexy sport and one which transcended class boundaries in that it was an intrinsically ‘proletarian’ activity which had become fashionable amongst the middle classes and particularly the left.

On a more critical note, while there is much of interest here for students of literature, popular culture and Weimar history, this historian would have wished for a little more care in contextualising the novels. Alas, statistics are quoted rather haphazardly; for example, the number of female students is strangely only quoted for Imperial Germany (p. 18), statistics of illegitimacy and of marriage are equally incomplete and taken from a study of the Third Reich – when of course there is plenty more relevant literature available. There are other inaccuracies and omissions; for example, the discussion of fertility control is misleading; the task of marriage counselling centres was to preach the gospel of eugenics but, what is strangely not mentioned but much more relevant, there were plenty of sex and birth control clinics which distributed contraceptives at low cost or even free of charge. The laws governing abortion and contraception are misrepresented and the campaign to reform them really deserves proper mention. It was one of Weimar’s most passionate campaigns fought inside and outside parliament, which attracted mass support from ordinary people as well as the left. Furthermore, there is too little analysis of the reception of these novels to allow us to make reasonable inferences about the way they may have influenced gendered perceptions of women’s role at this crucial time of German history. Nevertheless, this is a very welcome addition to the cultural history of the Weimar Republic.

CORNELIE USBORNE

Roehampton, University of Surrey, United Kingdom

The Irish Women’s History Reader ALAN HAYES & DIANE URQUHART (Eds), 2001 London: Routledge. xi + 242 pp., ISBN 0 415 19914 X The aim of this reader is to explore the lives of ordinary Irish women since 1800. It is divided into six sections covering historiography, politics, health and sexuality, religion, emigration and employment. This collection brings together an impressive range of previously published articles and book chapters. As Hayes & Urquhart point out in their introduction, most of these pieces have been published in obscure journals or in books with small print runs and are now difficult to obtain. The idea of such a collection is therefore to be welcomed and will undoubtedly prove

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valuable to teachers and students. The lists of further reading which precede each section are helpful and will be of use to those who wish to do more detailed research.

In general, one of the potential problems with such a collection of previously published material is the selection process; who is to be included and who is to be excluded. There is the danger that such a collection may be viewed as the canon of Irish women’s history. Because publishers tend to view Irish women’s history as a small market, they may be reluctant to publish another such reader and, therefore, it is likely that this collection may come to be seen as ‘the’ Irish women’s history reader. Those who work in the field of Irish women’s history could probably cite several articles that could have been included in this collection. However, the fact that there were so many authors to choose from is a testament to the growing strength of the discipline. We can only hope that in the future we will see Irish women’s history readers on particular topics, such as, for example, an Irish women’s suffrage history reader.

The book includes well-known and pioneering historians such as Cullen, Cullen Owens, Daly, Luddy, MacCurtain, O’Dowd and Ward. But the editors are to be congratulated for including a number of recent works by lesser known researchers. This adds to the diversity of the collection. It is also interesting that the editors have included male as well as female historians. The editors have done a good job of including work on the north as well as the south of Ireland. It is noteworthy that these two regions have not been split off into separate sections of the book; instead, articles on the north and the south sit alongside each other within sections on religion, politics and health.

It is commendable that the editors have included the work of researchers based outside of Ireland. It is important that the work going on outside of Ireland is not merely pigeonholed in terms of histories of the Irish diaspora. There is now a growing number of historians based at British universities, for example, who are researching a diverse range of topics relating to Irish women’s history.

In a collection of thirty-one articles it is difficult to give an overall flavour of the book’s content and it is impossible to discuss all the contributions. I will, however, mention two articles which, in my opinion, represent the best qualities of the collection. Trevor McClaughlin’s article, ‘Barefoot and Pregnant? Irish Famine Orphans in Australia’, originally published in 1991, analyses the experiences of young famine orphans, over four thousand of whom were selected from Irish workhouses by British officials for assisted passage to Australia between 1848 and 1850. This was not only a way of dealing with impoverished orphans in Ireland but was also part of the British Government’s attempts to infuse more ‘white blood’ to the colonies. However, the young Irish women were greeted with hostility in Australia and condemned as dirty, ignorant and useless. In addition, they were exposed to great dangers on the long sea journey and McClaughlin unearths particular cases of cruelty and sexual violence. This article pursues an

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underresearched aspect of Irish emigration and a little-known consequence of the great famine of the 1840s.

Greta Jones’s article, originally published in 1992, examines Marie Stopes’s first clinic in Ireland. Opened in Belfast in 1936, the clinic catered largely for the local, working-class, Protestant community. However, Jones’s analysis of the historical records reveals the complexities around class, religion and the uneasy relationship between the northern parliament in Stormont and Westminster. Some women from southern Ireland, where contraceptives were banned, wrote to and visited the clinic in Belfast. This not only reveals the difficulty of policing the border between north and south but also the ways in which some Irish women sought to circumvent the constraints of church and state.

The articles within this collection are accessible to the general reader as well as those with a particular interest in Irish history. This book should achieve good sales and a wide readership and will, I hope, be the first of many such readers rather than remaining ‘the’ reader on Irish women’s history.

LOUISE RYAN University College London, United Kingdom

The Routledge Historical Atlas of Women in America SANDRA OPDYCKE, 2000 New York: Routledge. 144 pp., ISBN 0 415 92138 4, £10.99 What American Women Did, 1789–1920 LINDA MILES COPPENS, 2001 Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. ix + 259 pp., ISBN 0 7864 0899 5, £36.60 The Routledge Historical Atlas of Women in America provides an excellent supplement to recently published textbooks on American women’s history that examine the changes and continuities in the lives of various groups of American women, such as S.J. Kleinberg’s Women in the United States, 1830-1945 (1999). It contains more than one hundred maps, tables, charts and photographs that highlight the contributions that American women of different races and classes have made to America from the early 1600s till the late 1990s. The book, however, is more than a record of achievements of American women; it also maps their domestic and private lives. It is divided into five parts covering distinct periods in American history. Each part is preceded by a short and clearly written introduction that describes the economic, social, political and cultural context and indicates the extent to which it affected the four roles of American women: homemaker, volunteer, worker and citizen. The introduction is followed by chapters dealing with particular groups of women or subperiods. A key feature of each part is a case study of an

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individual woman. Opdycke has not only chosen prominent figures (the abolitionist Angelina Grimke, and Eleanor Roosevelt), but also less well-known women (the eighteenth-century midwife, Martha Ballard, and the African-American community activist, Georganna Deas), and even fictive women (Theodore Dreiser’s protagonist, ‘Sister Carrie’). She has illuminated the lives of these women by providing maps of where they lived and worked, photographs, and quotations from their speeches or written works.

To make American women more visible in the private sphere, Opdycke has not only included maps of the USA and individual states that give key facts of women’s lives, such as their participation in the labour force and voting patterns, but also maps of particular neighbourhoods and plans of houses and other buildings that played a major role in the lives of many generations of American women. The maps and plans are in colour and their legends are easy to read. The tables, charts and the historical statistics provided in the appendix are very student-friendly. Students will also appreciate the suggestions for further reading, which contain the most recent overviews of American women’s history and several studies that examine the lives of particular groups of American women. Lecturers in American women’s history will find this atlas an indispensable teaching tool. I have used the maps, tables and charts in my lectures to illustrate the similarities and differences between American women in the past, and in my seminars as a means to teach students historical skills, such as carrying out basic statistical analyses.

It is not only the price but also the content and layout that makes What American Women did, 1789-1920 a less attractive book for students. It is a year-by-year description of the achievements by American women, from the founding of the republic in 1789 to the winning of the vote in 1920. Each year is divided into seven areas: work, education, arts, law and politics, religion, reform organisations and domesticity. Each area addresses a particular woman. Some of the women mentioned are well known, while others have thus far been less celebrated in America, such as the Mississippi-born slave, Bridget Mason, who worked as a midwife after she obtained her freedom in 1856. The entries are based on a wide range of published primary sources as well as biographical works and journal articles. An appendix provides tables that describe the female population according to race and ethnicity and give essential information about women’s reproductive and productive lives. Students will consult this book primarily for its tables and extensive bibliography. The book also offers little for lecturers. Some of the entries and their accompanying photographs can be used in lectures to illustrate American women’s lives. The index is constructed in such a way that it is relatively easy to find a number of women for a particular subject.

Like Opdycke, Coppens has aimed to represent women from a variety of backgrounds. She has succeeded rather well in this. The photographs that accompany the entries, for instance, range from Abigail Adams, the wife of the vice president, to Navajo women shearing sheep and Italian immigrant women buying bread. Coppens, however, has failed to live up to her second aim: to provide a

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‘broad picture of what these women did and thought’. American women in the nineteenth century were not only workers, members of reform organisations and active citizens, but also homemakers. The latter role is largely ignored in What American Women Did. Under the heading domesticity, Coppens examines attitudes about women’s roles but does not document how American women dealt with the responsibilities for house, husband and children. Another major flaw of the book is its method of referencing. Coppens has only provided notes for additional information about the women drawn from secondary sources. Hence, the reader does not know what sources she has used for each of the women entered.

What American Women Did examines some aspects of women’s lives that The Routledge Historical Atlas of Women in America largely ignores, such as religion and arts. The book will be appreciated by American scholars and students as it sets out how women have helped to shape the nation. Lecturers and students outside of the USA will find The Routledge Historical Atlas of Women in America a more useful companion. It covers a wider period and addresses far more aspects of women’s public and private lives, including health, crime and sex.

HENRICE ALTINK

University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, United Kingdom

Favorite Dishes: a Columbian autograph souvenir cookery book CARRIE V. SHUMAN (Ed.), 2001 (reprinted from an 1893 edition) Champaign: University of Illinois Press. lxiii + 210 pp., hardback, $29.95; paperback, $15.00 At the time of the American Civil War (1860-64), a new sort of cookery book was invented by Northern women seeking to raise funds to buy hospital supplies and food for the Union. Their book, A Poetical Cookbook, was a compilation of recipes provided by the group of women volunteers, who sold the book with great success to members of their community at a fund-raising fair. When the war was over, groups of women in both the north and south continued to compile and sell cookbooks to benefit wounded veterans and the widows and orphans of soldiers who had died in battle. In following years, the beneficiaries of funds raised by such books soon expanded to include local churches, schools, hospitals, and cultural institutions, and the many thousands still being produced in America constitute a category of cookery books we now call ‘charity’ or ‘community’ cookbooks.

Favorite Dishes, published originally in 1893 and now back in print, is an excellent example of the genre in that it commemorates a landmark event in American women’s history, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago. The Columbian Exposition celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the European discovery of the New World and was designed to illustrate the success

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and prominence of America through exhibits representing national achievement. As originally planned, this world’s fair did not include exhibits featuring the accomplishments of women, an omission rectified by a group of activists who created the Woman’s Building, one of the exposition’s most impressive achievements. The promoters of the Women’s Building had not only to raise funds but also to encourage other women from every state and from forty-seven nations to participate in creating exhibits illustrating women’s social and economic vitality. Much of the success of this huge project was the result of the commitment of Bertha Honore Palmer, a society woman married to Potter Palmer, one of Chicago’s most prominent financiers.

Under her leadership, sufficient money was raised and complex plans laid out so that the work of women from all parts of the world could be displayed. Mrs Palmer had already made her mark as a knowledgeable art collector by introducing the French Impressionists to an American audience, but she was also a feminist reformer who supported Jane Addams’s Hull House, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the cause of higher education for women. Deploring militant marches and other radical tactics, Mrs Palmer preferred the milder strategy of displaying the achievements of women in an impressive building that was part of an event designed to capture the attention of the entire world.

The portrait of Mrs Potter Palmer that faces the title-page of Favorite Dishes reveals a delicately featured woman swathed in a five-strand pearl necklace with matching earrings. This cookery book, we are told, has ‘over three hundred autograph recipes, and twenty-three portraits contributed specially by the Board of Lady Managers of the World’s Columbian Exposition’. The Lady Managers were the women who had pulled off the monumental job of working on the building, and the purpose of the cookery book was to raise funds to enable women from all parts of the country to travel to Chicago to see the Fair. This touch of noblesse oblige appears again in the preface of the book where the compiler informs readers that the objective of the book was to offer experts in the art of cookery as ‘cheerful assistants of women who need the encouragement and blessings of their more fortunate sisters’.

As with many community cookery books, the recipes are as revealing of the background of the contributors as the cause that occasioned the food in Favorite Dishes, most of which reflect the Yankee backgrounds of the Lady Managers. Directions for such standard fare as steamed brown bread, Boston baked beans, corn bread and clam chowder set the tone of the book, although occasional recipes for other American regional specialties make guest appearances. Mexican enchiladas and the Creole jambalaya and rice pilaf from South Carolina are here, but no dishes that represent more recent immigrants – no macaroni or lasagne, for example, and certainly no gefilte fish.

Regrettably, too few of the contributors, many of whom were national figures, comment on their recipes, but those that do are interesting and revealing. Frances Willard, who for many years was the leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance

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Union, disarmingly confesses that she didn’t care much for cooking. Isabella Beecher Hooker, half-sister to Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe and a crusader for suffrage, offers a recipe for sponge cake, ending with what was probably her signature statement: ‘I am cordially yours for womankind, also for mankind’. To her and a long line of other feminists, the two groups were not the same. Taken as a whole, Favorite Dishes: a Columbian autograph souvenir cookery book is an exceptional example of a community cookery book that serves as a valuable document of social history. The cast of characters that produced it and the recipes they chose add another layer of meaning to a significant historic moment in the life of the USA.

BARBARA HABER Harvard University, USA

Feminist Freikorps: the British voluntary women police, 1914–40 R.M. DOUGLAS, 1999 Westport: Praeger. xiv + 171 pp., ISBN 0 275 96249 0, hardback, US$58/£48.95 In 1924 ‘Commandant’ Mary S. Allen spent six weeks touring the USA, where she was ‘welcomed as head of London’s women police’ by both the New York Police Department and the press, who assiduously followed her every move, photographing her as she postured in her uniform of trousers and gold-braided cap (p. 94). It was not until the day of her departure that her lack of official status and authority was exposed by the New York Times. Allen was, from 1920, the head of the Women Police Service or WPS (renamed the Women’s Auxiliary Service or WAS in 1921), an independent organisation which sought to train women police and to campaign for their appointment. The Home Office, the Metropolitan Police and many constabularies refused to recognise Mary Allen as anything other than a fraud and an impostor. The story of this American trip epitomises the dilemma of writing about Allen, which R.M. Douglas’s Feminist Freikorps never quite resolves. Mary Allen was clearly a self-publicist, possibly an egotist, and certainly possessed with an ability to be extremely economical with what others assumed was ‘truth’. What, then, is it possible to say about her and the WPS?

Douglas has chosen to study a fascinating organisation. Whilst women’s involvement in policing during the First World War has been examined by a number of scholars, there has been no in-depth study of the WPS or of its activities during the inter-war period. Founded in 1914 as the Women Police Volunteers by moral crusader Margaret Damer Dawson and suffragette Nina Boyle, the organisation soon split when it was used to enforce a curfew on women in Grantham under the Defence of the Realm Act. Restyled as the WPS in 1915 under Dawson, its members were also involved in the policing of female munitions workers. However, in 1919, when the Met came to appoint its first women police, Commissioner Sir Nevil

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Macready refused to recognise Dawson and Allen, turning instead to the women patrols that had been organised by the National Union of Women Workers.

Douglas acknowledges the difficulty of writing about the WPS/WAS when the majority of sources that are available were produced by Allen herself; his attempt is an extremely valiant one, but he never quite achieves what he sets out to do. Allen herself remains far too firmly situated at the centre of the picture. There is very little by way of encounter with rank and file members. In 1921 the WAS had 110 members employed in twenty-eight county and borough forces, and a further nineteen in the private sector (p. 81). Yet we hear very little of these other women, of their aims or motivations. Such an eccentric and forceful figure as Allen cannot be taken as ‘representative’ of any group. It seems somewhat misguided, therefore, to entitle the book Feminist Freikorps in order to reflect the links which Allen and a small number of her immediate coterie developed during the 1930s with the British Union of Fascists. Such an authorial position might have been more appropriate if the book was intended as a biography of Allen. However, while biographical detail about Allen is pushed to the fore, she suddenly disappears from view – and indeed the narrative regarding the WAS collapses – when she is politically discredited in 1939.

Without doubt Douglas must be congratulated for piecing together what he can of Allen’s life, including her involvement with the Women’s Social and Political Union. Scholars of suffrage, of fascism, and of policing will certainly find that this study contains a great deal of useful information. Yet there are aspects of Feminist Freikorps that are contentious. Some readers will disagree, for example, with Douglas’s use of the term ‘lesbian’ to describe those who were ‘involved in stable and exclusive domestic arrangements with other women, who mingled in recognised lesbian circles and whose relationships seem more likely than not to have included a sexual component’ (p. 37, n. 36). It is unclear how the third of these criteria has been assessed. The reasons for raising the issue of Allen’s sexuality are never clearly articulated, although there seems to be an oblique line that is woven through the narrative which implicitly links moral purity, lesbianism and the ultra-right as a political trajectory with a presumed internal logic. In short, this is a brave and absorbing study, but like Allen herself, it courts controversy.

LOUISE A. JACKSON

Leeds Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

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