Divided sisterhood? Nationalist feminism and feminist militancy in England and Ireland

The generally accepted story is that British militant suffragists performed an unexpected and abrupt move away from the feminist movement and towards a fiercely jingoistic nationalist campaign once the war began in 1914. Yet, given the nature of exchanges between Irish and British militant feminists, Irish feminists should not have been surprised by this turn from gender solidarity to English nationalism. In this article, I argue that Irish-British militant feminist entanglements worked to expose the powerful role that English nationalism played in suffrage politics at a time when nearly all the focus was on the disruptive influence of Irish nationalism

Book review: Millicent Garrett Fawcett: selected writings edited by Melissa Terras and Elizabeth Crawford

In Millicent Garrett Fawcett – available open access from UCL Press – Melissa Terras and Elizabeth Crawford offer a new collection of writings by the seasoned organiser, lobbyist and public speaker who campaigned for women’s suffrage. Contemporary feminists will take inspiration from the book’s evidence of the formidable fortitude, optimism, determination and generous spirit of activists like Fawcett, writes Sharon Crozier-De Rosa. Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Selected Writings. Melissa Terras and Elizabeth Crawford (eds). UCL Press. 2022

Book review | Markievicz: prison letters and rebel writings

In Markievicz: Prison Letters and Rebel Writings, Lindie Naughton offers a new edition of the collection of letters written by Constance Markievicz, who was a political activist, an Irish revolutionary and the first woman MP. Originally published in the 1930s as The Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz, this new edition presents the letters as they were as well as previously unpublished letters, mostly written to friends and family, including her sister, Eva Gore-Booth, during and in between periods of imprisonment. Alongside offering Markievicz’s perspective on early-twentieth-century Irish politics, the collection provides sometimes surprising insight into the interior life of a figure often overshadowed by her controversial reputation, writes Sharon Crozier-De Rosa

Book review: Markievicz: prison letters and rebel writings edited by Lindie Naughton

In Markievicz: Prison Letters and Rebel Writings, Lindie Naughton offers a new edition of the collection of letters written by Constance Markievicz, who was a political activist, an Irish revolutionary and the first woman MP. Originally published in the 1930s as The Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz, this new edition presents the letters as they were as well as previously unpublished letters, mostly written to friends and family, including her sister, Eva Gore-Booth, during and in between periods of imprisonment. Alongside offering Markievicz’s perspective on early-twentieth-century Irish politics, the collection provides sometimes surprising insight into the interior life of a figure often overshadowed by her controversial reputation, writes Sharon Crozier-De Rosa. Markievicz: Prison Letters and Rebel Writings. Lindie Naughton (ed.). Merrion Press. 2018

Shame, Marie Corelli, and the New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle Britain fin-de-siecle Britain

Phenomenally popular fin-de-siecle celebrity Marie Carelli, in her fictional and nonfictional writing, repeatedly affirmed that the era\u27s iconic New Woman represented not the promise but the threat of modernity. Modernity, as represented by the New Woman, did not extend the civilizing process. Rather, it jeopardized it. By challenging rules of behavior that were integral to the civilized state, the New Woman threatened a return to a previous state of barbarianism. Indeed, by refusing to allow a proper feeling of womanly shame to regulate her thoughts and actions, this icon of modernity seemed to counter Norbert Elias\u27s understanding of the symbiotic relationship between advancing frontiers of shame and the progression of civilization. Given that this New Woman\u27s improper behavior threatened to destabilize English society and interrupt British imperialism-Britain\u27s international role of bringing civilisation to others-as self-appointed guardian of the public conscience, Carelli took it upon herself to attempt to shame her. More accurately, she took it upon herself to elicit proper feelings of guilt and shame from her readers, particularly her female readers, whose sympathies dared to stray too closely toward the damaging feminist aspirations of the unseemly and unwomanly New Woman, and the decivilizing process she apparently championed. Carelli unambiguously opposed what she saw as the transgressive New Woman\u27s decivilizing drive; nevertheless her writing demonstrates her era\u27s accommodation of a complex attitude toward the notion of human progress and its inevitability or otherwise. By the early decades of the twentieth century, Britain had reached what Carelli termed a state of over-ripe civilisation. So, while this celebrity writer railed against the New Woman\u27s threatened instigation of a decivilizing process, she simultaneously, and somewhat paradoxically, promoted a limited reversal of civilization. Importantly, she only advocated a partial, controlled rolling back of progress to a time when human relations were not threatened by an attempted obliteration of sexual difference. In the endeavor to restore civilization to a state of balance-to reverse cultural change-Corelli worked to reinstate the frontier of shame: specifically, womanly shame. Given her rule as queen of the bestsellers for almost three decades-given that her writing was such an integral and ongoing part of the era\u27s public debate-her large body of work casts light on just how accepted her literary technique of using emotions to attempt to effect wider cultural change was at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century

Marie Corelli\u27s British new woman: A threat to empire?

At the height of the British Empire, England was in the midst of major social, economic and moral upheaval. The roles and status of middle-class women were particularly affected by many of these changes. In turn, as the gap between idealism and ‘reality’ grew, the validity or usefulness of Victorian notions or ideals of womanhood increasingly came under attack. Arising from this commotion was the figure of the late Victorian and Edwardian ‘New Woman.’ Her appearance provoked further confusion and ambiguity about gender that had repercussions for empire. This paper addresses the way in which the role of English women in sustaining the British Empire intensified the social pressures on them in the metropole. It examines the threat to nation and empire represented by the New Woman by looking at how she was presented to the rapidly growing general reading public at the end of the nineteenth- and beginning of the twentieth century. This is achieved by looking at the bestselling novels of Marie Corelli, a phenomenally popular turn-of-the-century author. Corelli\u27s novels repeatedly affirm that the New Woman represented the threat of ‘modernity,’ that she was a danger to ‘civilisation’ and therefore to British imperialism. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Book extract: ‘Preserving their own memory: constitutional suffragism and the Fawcett Society’ from remembering women’s activism by Sharon Crozier De-Rosa and Vera Mackie

2018 marks the centenary of partial suffrage in Britain, when property-owning women over the age of 30 won the right to vote in parliamentary elections in the UK. To commemorate the historical link between LSE and the campaign for women’s suffrage, on 23 November 2018 the Towers at Clement’s Inn on LSE campus are being renamed Pankhurst House, Fawcett House and Pethick-Lawrence House after three important suffrage campaigners with specific connections to the School. To celebrate the occasion, this feature offers an edited extract from the new book Remembering Women’s Activism (Routledge 2018, pages 22-24), by Sharon Crozier De-Rosa and Vera Mackie, in which they discuss the memorialisation of the non-militant and militant branches of the British suffrage movement, the establishment of The Women’s Library and the physical spaces of LSE that link these histories

Evaluation of appendicitis risk prediction models in adults with suspected appendicitis

Background Appendicitis is the most common general surgical emergency worldwide, but its diagnosis remains challenging. The aim of this study was to determine whether existing risk prediction models can reliably identify patients presenting to hospital in the UK with acute right iliac fossa (RIF) pain who are at low risk of appendicitis. Methods A systematic search was completed to identify all existing appendicitis risk prediction models. Models were validated using UK data from an international prospective cohort study that captured consecutive patients aged 16–45 years presenting to hospital with acute RIF in March to June 2017. The main outcome was best achievable model specificity (proportion of patients who did not have appendicitis correctly classified as low risk) whilst maintaining a failure rate below 5 per cent (proportion of patients identified as low risk who actually had appendicitis). Results Some 5345 patients across 154 UK hospitals were identified, of which two‐thirds (3613 of 5345, 67·6 per cent) were women. Women were more than twice as likely to undergo surgery with removal of a histologically normal appendix (272 of 964, 28·2 per cent) than men (120 of 993, 12·1 per cent) (relative risk 2·33, 95 per cent c.i. 1·92 to 2·84; P < 0·001). Of 15 validated risk prediction models, the Adult Appendicitis Score performed best (cut‐off score 8 or less, specificity 63·1 per cent, failure rate 3·7 per cent). The Appendicitis Inflammatory Response Score performed best for men (cut‐off score 2 or less, specificity 24·7 per cent, failure rate 2·4 per cent). Conclusion Women in the UK had a disproportionate risk of admission without surgical intervention and had high rates of normal appendicectomy. Risk prediction models to support shared decision‐making by identifying adults in the UK at low risk of appendicitis were identified

The Shame of the Violent Woman

British and Irish suffragettes invited passionate opposition. British anti-suffragists were adamant that violence degraded womanhood. Physically, women were not suited to the exercise of physical force. Women’s bodies were built to facilitate the more nurturing and less destructive function of childbirth. Emotionally, they were not trained to engage in legitimate forms of violence as men were. Honour codes directed men’s use of violence. Men were directed to adhere to standards of courage, chivalry, and fairness when engaging in physical combat with each other. Women were not brought up to embody these virtues. Violent women were, therefore, aberrations. This chapter examines anti-feminist opposition to female acts of militancy on the grounds that women’s violence jeopardised the operation of codes of chivalry that were established to protect them—the weaker sex—from the violent actions of men—the stronger sex. The chapter also analyses patriotic Irish women’s rejection of the shame of the violent woman and their construction of a feminist and nationalist ethics of violence. Patriotic Irish women claimed that their militancy could help restore national honour by returning the ancient nation to its pre-colonised state—one in which male and female warriors co-existed

Forward! But not too fast!

In 1920 Arnold Bennett wrote Our Women, sub-titled Chapters on the Sex- Discord. The nine chapters on the \u27sex-discord\u27 surveyed various aspects of relations between the sexes in the immediate post-war years, drawing on contemporary understandings about the changing position of women as it did so. The general conclusion reached by Bennett was that many changes had occurred in the era following the close of the Victorian period that he viewed as fruitful and desirable. Not least of these was a breakdown of the old wasteful gender idealisation that characterised women as helpless and dependent and men as useful and active; an idealisation that had very real consequences for many in that it dictated the extent and nature of the opportunities that were available to men and women, particularly women. Post-war British society, then, benefited from more knowledgeable, more mobile, and less inhibited middle-class women; they benefited from the creation of the modern girl