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Abstract In England's developing elementary school system domestic subjects teachers had a singular position. Part of a wider domestic subjects movement intent on the professionalisation of traditional domestic skills as a means of raising women's social status, these women assiduously promoted the practical domestic work of cooking and cleaning as part of the school curriculum. The period 1870-1914 saw both the elementary class teacher and the domestic subjects teacher moving towards professional status, but from an examination of their background, their training and their working conditions it can be seen that the struggle for the promoters of domestic skills was unique. Paradoxically they reinforced home-centredness and individual private domestic work from a public position as educators that increasingly required collective, standardised action to promote the movement's aims.

ABSTRACTIn this reflective piece I consider the way women, and, to a lesser extent, men, are often defined by different societies according to their parental status. In doing so I touch on the meta...

In public archives there are a number of hand-embroidered cloths worked by suffragettes incarcerated in Holloway Prison between 1911 and 1912. Denied political status, some of the embroiderers used...

During the first third of the twentieth century, several women joined associations to promote legal reforms. Between 1917 and 1934, the Cuban Parliament passed laws regarding women’s legal status, therefore challenging the traditional relations between state, Church and family inherited from the colonial period. Although the Constitution of 1940 incorporated these measures, Cuban women barely took part in state institutions, but their increasing presence in public affairs marked a turning point in their social status. A few women were appointed as Cuban representatives to international organizations, and political parties set up female auxiliaries. Moreover, several women’s associations worked for peace, demanded improvements in the healthcare system, took action towards enhancing education in rural areas and pushed for effective reform of the Civic Code in order to provide equal rights for men and women. African-Cuban women’s participation in these organizations was limited due to discrimination and they in turn set up their own organizations. This research was financed by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, Spain [grant number FPU 12/06945] and also by the project‘El espacio antillano: génesis, circulación y redistribución de individuos, mercancías, ideas, saberes y modelos (siglos XVIII–XXI)’, National Project MINECO (Ministry of Economy, Spain) HAR2015-66152-R, headed by Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, Professor of Research at the Spanish National Research Council. Peer Reviewed

Agency, activism and organisation have been central and constant themes in women’s and gender history. They provide useful lenses through which to study women’s interaction with the social world. Both separately and in combination, they constitute a valuable analytical framework for the study of women’s lives, culture and experience in past societies by foregrounding and articulating historical challenges made to patriarchy, social structure and the status quo. Agency highlights the individual action/social structure explanatory dichotomy whilst activism and organisation help focus on the specific ways in which women have challenged, resisted, overthrown or gained entrance to social structures and institutions that had tended to ignore, exclude, disadvantage or penalise them.

Abstract 1928 marked the culmination of efforts directed towards women's enfranchisement. The struggle to obtain the vote for all women was a central focus of the first wave of British feminism. This article examines the way the achievement of the vote was constructed in the pages of Time & Tide, a weekly paper founded by feminists in 1920. The debate took place in the context of a shift in the construction of women's sexuality which intensified and made more complex the feelings about political equality of feminists and others writing for the paper. Feminists such as Margaret Rhondda, Winifred Holtby, Cicely Hamilton and Naomi Mitchison offered perspectives on gender equality and difference which were shaped by class and marital status. They came together, however, in their desire to maintain a vision of the independent woman.

This article considers rural women's place on the land in south-central New York during the first half of the twentieth century. Based on a community history and ethnographic study conducted during the 1980s, the article draws on women's oral narratives to explore the connections between women's sense of agency and their relationship to the land through descent and inheritance, marriage into a landowning family, founding a farm in partnership, and the experience of dispossession.

Frequently eighteenth-century service is described as a life-cycle stage used to build up the financial wherewithal to set up house. As such it was central to the way youth or girlhood was traversed, and studies of adolescent years rightly emphasise the importance of service. However, this narrative, while largely accurate, is also problematic. What happened when service did not end with marriage, or when a woman remained single well into adulthood? In practice, servants were found among both the married and single, and among the young and the old. Concentrating on the eighteenth century, and incorporating material from Nordic Europe, this article teases out some of the nuances in the context and experience of service that partially disrupt the established narrative.