The British Women's Institute is more often associated with jam and Jerusalem than radical activity, but in this book Maggie Andrews explores the WI's relationship with feminism from the formation of the organisation in 1915 up to the eve of British feminism's renaissance in the late 1960s.The book aims to challenge, not only common sense perceptions about the Women's Institute but also those about feminism, interrogating preoccupations with domestic spaces and skills. This makes it is valuable reading for those interested in both historical and contemporary feminism, as well as, more broadly, the history of the twentieth century. Attention is given to the female cultural space and the value system provided by the WI, and the campaigns that articulated the needs of rural women and attempted to meet them.In this 100 th anniversary year of the founding of the WI, this celebrated text is re-published in a new and completely revised edition. Maggie Andrews's new afterword considers the resurgence of interest in the WI amongst young women in the twenty-first century, and the relationship between this and the contemporary cultural enthusiasm for the domestic. There is also a new chapter on the formation of the WI in the First World War and substantial additions to existing chapters, including discussions of the WI involvement with radio in the inter-war years, and with evacuation in the Second World War. MaggieAndrews is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Worcester; her research and publications have explored the inter-relationship of domesticity and femininity and most recently the Home Front in the First and Second Word Wars in Britain. BIC codes: JFFK, HBTB, 3JJ, 3JM, JFSJ1
Using the recent popularity of the Rystone Women's Institute millennium calendar as a starting point and drawing upon a range of popular texts, this article argues that where once the middle-aged, middle-class domestic woman was seen as the negation of sexuality and 'others' were defined by their embodiment of sexuality, in the last 25 years, informed by second-wave feminism, discourses of female sexuality have shifted and been wrenched; divisions whose boundaries have become more fluid. Downloaded fromThe assertion of middle-aged women's sexuality was however tempered by the slightly sepia tint to the photographs and careful positioning, which meant that there was nothing more 'shocking' in view than the occasional nipple. The domestic setting and the charitable aim of the calendar, raising money for the Leukaemia Research Fund in memory of John Baker, the husband of one of the models, meant that it did not challenge too many discourses of traditional femininities at once (see for example Devault, 1991). Significantly, the mise-en-scene of the photographs, the decoration of the domestic sets in which they were photographed, which included an Aga and a fruit press for example, ensured that the women were clearly signified as middle class.The fascination with, and thus the popularity of this WI calendar, lay in representing the WI, seen often -though incorrectly (see Andrews, 1997) -as quintessentially English, domestic-focused, middle aged and middle class -all twin sets and pearls -as sexual and sensual. In so doing the calendar toyed with three identity formations -related to age, class and domestic orientation -that have tended in the past to be perceived as sexless. Ussher suggests that images of women are associated with sexuality either in terms of 'embodiment' or 'negation' (1997: 3). Arguably the notion of middle-aged woman as sexless is a 20th century one; the origins of domestic, middle-class womanhood as a negation of sexuality can be traced to constructions of class in the emerging bourgeois culture (as opposed to a working-class or aristocratic culture) in the first half of the 19th century. Davidoff and Hall have documented (1987) the pivotal role that middle-class women played within bourgeois culture, which was encapsulated in a discourse of femininity, focused upon the domestic, family and marriage. Concerns about inheritance and property meant that the domesticity of the middle-class 'ideal woman' left little space for her sexuality, despite being predicated upon her role as 'wife' and mother. Discourses of class, age, and domesticity, are somewhat fluid, contested and relational; the private domestic world relied upon a perception of a public world, where, in the 19th century, sexuality was seen as the prerogative of 'others'. As Skeggs points out 'White middle-class women were able to locate themselves within a pure and proper femininity, precisely because Black and White working-class women were defined and desig-
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