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Women's History Review

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Book reviews
a

Kirsteen Macpherson Bardell , Pat Starkey , Fiona Reid , Ruth Watts , Liz Dimock ,
f

Cornelie Usborne , Louise Ryan , Henrice Altink , Barbara Haber & Louise A. Jackson
a

University of Wolverhampton , United Kingdom

University of Liverpool , United Kingdom

University of Glamorgan , Pontypridd, United Kingdom

University of Birmingham , United Kingdom

La Trobe University , Australia

Roehampton, University of Surrey , United Kingdom

University College London , United Kingdom

University of Glamorgan , Pontypridd, United Kingdom

Harvard University , Pontypridd, USA

Leeds Metropolitan University , United Kingdom

Published 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
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Womens History Review, Volume 12, Number 3, 2003

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

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Women in Scotland c. 1100c. 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
ODowds 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 womens 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 womens 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 womens 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 Walkers 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 Suggets 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 womens
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 Manns research on women
in the book trade and John Finlays work on women as agents in early sixteenthcentury 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
womens historians face, of trying to find sources that inform us of womens 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
Thomass chapter on women in James V of Scotlands royal court and Ruth Geuters
work on womens 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 Grants research on Jacobean womens political activities in Scotland and
Nia Powells discussion of Welsh womens 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
womens 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 womens 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 Nashs contention that rethinking traditional narratives
through womens history involves a challenge to false universalities. Challenge is
also offered to traditional periodisation, reinforcing Judith Bennetts contention,
familiar to most students of womens 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 mens 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 ODowd, 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 headon 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 Sundays 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.
Dont be deceived by a title which suggests that this is a volume primarily for
historians of Scotland and dont 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
womens 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
womens 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 womens personal narratives to construct a different interpretation of the
way in which British people experienced the War.
One of Goodmans 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 womens work was vital for the war effort, it was
curtailed if it caused too much inconvenience for the husband. Widespread popular
belief in womens new responsibilities did not obscure the fact that a womans
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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Book Reviews
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
womens wartime experiences.
FIONA REID
University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, United Kingdom

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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 vicars 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
fathers large estate. After her fathers 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 womens 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 Gattys writing science for
children through Norths more active scientific role, albeit just within the confines
of respectable womanhood, to Ormerods 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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Book Reviews
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 womens 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

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We Women Worked So Hard: gender, urbanization and

social reproduction in colonial Harare, Zimbabwe, 193056
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 womens 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 books 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 womens resistance to colonial government and to local African men given
positions of authority under indirect rule and was, furthermore, an outburst of
womens dissatisfaction leading to the Womens War in 1929. The colonial
authorities, unprepared for and unable to interpret the meanings of Nwaobiala,
described it as Dancing Womens Movement, Womens Purity Campaign, Market
Riots, with little understanding of the symbolic significance of Nwaobiala as a
subversive anti-colonial activity. Bastians 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 womens 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. Allmans chapter in
Hodgson & McCurdys 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 womens 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 Barness 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 womans 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 womens 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 RTZOU PETERSEN, 2001
Oxford: Berghahn Books.
xvi + 184 pp., ISBN 1 57181 154 0, hardback, 20.00;
1 57181 789 1, paperback, 13.95
Womens 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 womens lives and
gendered attitudes. The 1920s, of course, are especially worthy of cultural research.
After all, German womens 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
womens and illustrated magazines which serialised novels for the female market
was itself an expression of the changes that had taken place in womens 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 Baums
stud.chem. Helene Willfuehr. It was serialised in 1928 in Ullsteins Berliner
Illustrirte and boosted this papers sale figures by no less than 200,000. A
subsequent book publication then reached over 100,000 in just four years. Baums
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 Europes 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 womens
identity: how much did fiction reflect and how much did it influence or reinforce
attitudes to women and womens 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 womens 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.
Petersens 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 Petersens 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
Buerin 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: Christs
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 Buerin 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 vlkisch 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 Herzogs
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. Baums 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 Keuns 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.
Womens 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 Kracauers 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 Keuns Das kunstseidene
Mdchen 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 Krperkultur and sex
reform were at their height. Krperkultur was not only the topic in such
nationalistic literature as Hans Surens Der Mensch und die Sonne (61st edition,
1925) and Herzogs Die Buben mentioned earlier. Gilgi, Keuns 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. Flmmchen, the
stenographer in Baums 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 Weimars
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
womens 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 Womens 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 womens history. Because publishers tend to view Irish womens 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 womens history
reader. Those who work in the field of Irish womens 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
womens history readers on particular topics, such as, for example, an Irish womens
suffrage history reader.
The book includes well-known and pioneering historians such as Cullen, Cullen
Owens, Daly, Luddy, MacCurtain, ODowd 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 womens history.
In a collection of thirty-one articles it is difficult to give an overall flavour of the
books 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 McClaughlins 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 Governments 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 Joness article, originally published in 1992, examines Marie Stopess first
clinic in Ireland. Opened in Belfast in 1936, the clinic catered largely for the local,
working-class, Protestant community. However, Joness 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 womens 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, 17891920
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 womens history that
examine the changes and continuities in the lives of various groups of American
women, such as S.J. Kleinbergs 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 Dreisers 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 womens
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 womens history and several studies that examine the
lives of particular groups of American women. Lecturers in American womens
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-byyear 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 womens 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
womens 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 womens 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 womens 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
womens public and private lives, including health, crime and sex.

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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 womens history, the 1893 Worlds 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 worlds fair did not include exhibits featuring the
accomplishments of women, an omission rectified by a group of activists who
created the Womans Building, one of the expositions most impressive
achievements. The promoters of the Womens 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 womens 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 Chicagos
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 Addamss Hull House, the Womens 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 Worlds 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 Womans Christian Temperance

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Union, disarmingly confesses that she didnt 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

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Feminist Freikorps: the British voluntary women police, 191440

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 Londons 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 Womens 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. Douglass 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 womens
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 Allens life, including her involvement with the Womens 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
Douglass 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 Allens 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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