Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester University Press, 2013)

I have fallen sadly behind in writing up my reading of recent months, but hope to repair this omission. Starting at perhaps the wrong end, i.e. the most recent book bearing on my general research interests read.

Lucy Bland's long-awaited follow-up to her classic and pioneering Banishing the Beast, Modern Women on Trial, does not disappoint. While some of the material may be familiar from the various articles and chapters she has previously published, this is not just one of those volumes which appear to consist of lightly-edited articles put together within one cover, and with the gentle reader apparently expected to draw out the connections between them. It is  a very good thing to have Bland's insights altogether in one volume and not to have to chase up  the original articles, but this book is a good deal more value-added than that. Modern Women on Trial effectively links the matter in the separate chapters together throughout, not just in a brief covering introduction or conclusion, by emphasising the common themes and threads that join these scandals and causes celebres of the period 1918-1924.

It is a very good read: I was reading it in the interstices and the aftermath of a fairly intense conference but still found it compellingly engaging.

The various cases dealt with are the Maud Allan 'Cult of the Clitoris' libel suit against the sleazoid journalist Pemberton Billing; the flurry of concern, focusing around the drug-related, or allegedly drug-related, deaths of two young women, the actress Billie Carleton and the dancer Freda Kempton, over 'white women' associating with 'Chinamen' as well as narcotic use by women; the well known trial of Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters for the murder of her husband; the shooting of her Egyptian husband by Madame Fahmy; and the extraordinary convolutions of the Russell divorce case. Several of these have been the subject of rather sensationalist popular accounts, but Bland provides a deeper analysis of the responses to these cases across a range of voices, and the resonances with wider social concerns of the time, in particular the changing roles of women, the allure and the threat of modern life, and the continuing impact of  the Great War upon British masculinity.

Catching up on journal literature and chapters X

Actually a book, but only the first section seemed particularly relevant to my purposes: Mary Wilson Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: women. sexualities and religion in the Victorian Market (2003): useful stuff on 'family bibles' - unlike the Family Shakespeare of Bowdler note, the Bible couldn't very well be Bowdlerised, but family versions with the dodgy stuff in Very Small Print &/or marked as 'Not for Family Reading' were a widespread phenomenon. Also causes one to consider the role of the Bible as under-examined source of sexual knowledge.

Pat Thane, 'Family Life and "Normality" in Postwar British Culture', in Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (eds), Life after Death: approaches to a cultural and social history of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (2003). This was a really excellent piece on the distinctiveness of the postwar era and deconstructing the popular vision of the 50s in Britain as some lost era of 'normality'.

Alysa Levene, 'Family breakdown and the ‘Welfare Child’ in 19th and 20th century Britain' History of the Family 11 (2006) 67–79 - possibly a bit peripheral for my purposes, but some possible points to consider about the boundaries of 'the family' and issues around the 'contaminated/ing' child.

Gail Savage, ' They Would if They Could: Class, Gender, and Popular Representation of English Divorce Litigation, 1858-1908', Journal of Family History, 2011 36: 173. Yet another addition to Savage's string of important articles and chapters on divorce and marital law. A very illuminating analysis of who was actually accessing the Divorce Court, the role of class (a far greater percentage of the poor than one might think), the importance of an income to women who wanted divorces (i.e. upper class women with settled incomes, and actresses were in a much better position to bring the action), the distorting effect of what got reported in the press (upper class vice and bohemian decadence), etc,

Andrew Davies, 'Youth, violence, and courtship in late-Victorian Birmingham: The case of James Harper and Emily Pimm', History of the Family 11 (2006) 107–120, The 'othering' of sexual violence and domestic abuse by representing these as typical of the lower classes, plus assumptions that the women in question didn't mind it or even accepted it, even though Pimm had been making strenuous efforts to protect herself from Harper and his assumption that their relationship was not over.

Lucy Bland, 'White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War' Gender & History, Vol 17, issue 1, 2005, 29-61. Extremely valuable piece on the various allotropes of racist fears in the interwar period, from the immediately postwar race riots in port towns to the Eugenics Society-sponsored research on mixed-race children.

Julia Ann Laite (2008): The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene: abolitionism and prostitution law in Britain (1915–1959), Women's History Review, 17:2, 207-223. It's more than time that someone paid attention to the work of the AMSH into the C20th, and Laite does this extremely well.

Lucy Bland, ‘The Trials and Tribulations of Edith Thompson: the Capital Crime of Sexual Incitement in 1920s England’ Journal of British Studies, 47, 2008, pp 624-648. This makes an interesting contrast to  Blands' study of the Mme Fahmy case. Thompson did not kill her husband, was shocked when Bywaters attacked him, but nonetheless got depicted as a dangerous siren and hanged.

Stephen Brooke - 'Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s' - Journal of Social History 34:4 2001, 773-795. Good on the issues around changing masculinity (though poss could do with more on male dandyism. Teds, etc?) , also the romanticisation of the old-style (imaginary?) working class 'mum' - denigration of 'modern girls' (but isn't this always the case - they are always being criticised for frivolity and pleasure-seeking and obsession with dress etc, and then they get married - it's a life-cycle thing)

Catching up on journal literature VI

Matt Houblrook, '"The Man with the Powder Puff'" in interwar London', The Historical Journal 50, 1(2007) pp.145–171: useful stuff on changes about perceptions of men seeking sex with other men, in the light of wider changes to do with the increasing acceptability and respectability of women using cosmetics, and the role of material objects in policing practices.

Claire Langhamer, 'Adultery in post-war England', History Workshop Journal,  62, Autumn 2006, pp. 86-115: excellent stuff about the changing significance of adultery as marriage-breaking in tandem with the new companionate vision of marriage - i.e. physical fidelity becomes more important when the emphasis is on the emotional relationship rather than issues of good provider/good housekeeper etc. Also the idea that the ideal couple did everything together and shouldn't have separate interests - this intersected for me with Alison Oram's paper on our Berks panel and the citing of wife's over-involvement with female friends in cases of marriage breakup.

Derek Thompson,‘Courtship and marriage in Preston between the wars’, Oral History,3 (1975) (hand't seen this before: much-cited in various other things I looked at). Points for noting Mention of men being furtive buying condoms or going to pharmacy that was not local for them; importance of class and religion in socialisation and courtship; the different grades of dance-hall and 'monkey rack'; huge scandal of shotgun marriage plus the horror at unwed mothers (shame on family) etc

 

Helena Michie, 'Victorian Honeymoons. Sexual Reorientations and the "Sights" of Europe', Victorian Studies 43 (2001), p. 229-253: the rupture/rite de passage that the honeymoon was for both partners (entry to full adult masculine status for the male) and also for women (whole new identity and renaming) - poss leaning a bit hard on literary honeymoons (which she suggests may give a darker picture than the real thing!)

Charles Barker, 'Erotic Martyrdom. Kingsley's Sexuality Beyond Sex' Victorian Studies 44 (2002), p. 465-488 Wellcome non-electronic before 2006 :  interesting but question arises of how typical were Kingsley and Fanny exchanging their heated courtship letters (author makes nice analogy with phone sex)  
 
Christopher Matthews, 'Love at First Sight. The Velocity of Victorian Heterosexuality' Victorian Studies 46 (2004), p. 425-455: evicence from paintings and literary texts mostly, men as falling in love at first sight and that this is problematic (deceptive women).

Angela Cassidy, 'The (Sexual) Politics of Evolution. Popular Controversy in the Late 20th-Century United Kingdom' History of Psychology 10 (2007), p. 199-226 Interesting about the popular media interest in the revival of evolutionary psychology from 1990s, but it was also being reworked away from the standard conservative gender dynamics by feminists (to some extent - the pop narrative seems to me to be pretty much wedded to the conservative primeval savanna vision?)  


Martin J. Wiener 'The Sad Story of George Hall. Adultery, Murder and the Politics of Mercy in Mid-Victorian England', Social History 24 (1999),  p. 174-196: case which illuminated shifts c. 1860s in the acceptability of wife murder on provocation - in the Hall case large amounts of public sympathy (his wife had been carrying on with a lover with whom she had had a premarital relationship) vs increasing judicial desire not to let this kind of thing go - he was reprieved as often happened when case could be made for wife's provocation and husbandly innocence (e.g he was not abusive) but the law was tightening up around this time: in this case public pressure was heavily involved in grant of reprieve. Changing paradigms of manliness to a more caring one (rather than ownership & power) / general anti-violence tendencyat ht the period.