This article considers discussions of sexual difference in a range of popular prescriptive texts published between 1920 and 1940 in order to explore the relationship between science and American marital advice literature. It demonstrates the particular role science played in shaping, legitimising and enforcing changing discussions about what 'good sex' should look like in contemporary advice - supporting a hierarchy of sexual activities and desires that privileged a particular version of marital heterosexual expression. Through this, it also interrogates the 'popular' version of sexual science being consumed by the American public at this time. In addition to adding new perspectives to our understanding of contemporary advice and its relationship with science and medicine, it will also act as a provocation for further research into the ways the public engaged with sexual science in early twentieth-century America.

The effects of COVID-19 have been profoundly felt across higher education as across broader society. In particular, the pandemic has revealed that many of our most stubbornly entrenched inequalities do not simply follow gendered fault lines, but rather care fault lines. In this article, we adopt a maternal epistemology and collaborative witnessing to outline the disruption that academic mothers have experienced during the pandemic. However, we argue that this disruption is not simply obstructive to academic mothers and other caregivers. Rather, COVID-19 has provided a potentially transformative moment for the visibility and normalisation of care in the academy. It has forced the complex negotiation of paid work and care work that academic mothers must constantly manage into the spotlight. The pandemic has provoked an opportunity for a different performance of mothering in the academy; one that does not require us to invisibilise our care to be valued. This (re)performance and revaluation has the potential to reform the cultural landscapes of the academy, towards spaces in which care is reimagined as not simply an encumberment but also an enrichment.

This article analyses the contestation over female citizenship in Spain's transition to democracy in the mid 1970s. It posits that the transition opened up a discursive space for the construction of a new concept of female citizenship, which was filled with competing images of female citizens, from the Francoist housewife to the consumer activist to the feminist. Through a close reading of the democratic press, the article explores the contradictions and tensions involved in imagining a new female citizen for a democratic Spain. With a focus on the representation of feminist citizenship, the article argues that the central tension surrounding female citizenship was the contradiction between new modes of female participation, new sets of rights and a framework of meaning which could not make sense of these changes. As a result, there was no comfortable place for the female citizen in the emerging master narrative of the transition.

Drum magazine was first published in March 1951. Like other magazines, it both reflected and shaped the society from which its audience emerged. During 1951, its audience, mainly urban black readers, was able to push the publication away from its original rural focus towards an urban emphasis. Town living, however, meant different things to different people. Thus, while readers were successful in shifting the focus of the magazine, they were less successful in influencing the way the publication presented urban life. This paper explores the struggle between readers, journalists and editors over the Miss Africa beauty contest announced at the beginning of 1952. Although the magazine reluctantly admitted men to the contest, it discriminated against male entrants in a variety of ways over the course of the year, and subsequent competitions barred male contestants entirely. Despite opposition from male readers who wished to be considered beautiful, the men of Drum were largely successful in asserting their own deeply gendered cultural vision of urban life.

Jesuit-run Marian Congregations proliferated in 1930s Spain. Drawing on literature produced for their members, this article demonstrates how gendered understandings were fundamental to the congregations' symbolic delineation of an uncontaminated Catholic space. Visions of an incorrupt male elite abound, reinforcing the Jesuits' educational mission among future leaders and opinion-formers. In contrast, the purity of women and children was seen as a sign of society's moral health. Modesty was the quintessential female virtue. Yet, the cult of the Virgin Mary suggested that the virginal female body was both tool and symbol in the struggle against a fallen world. Girls were, therefore, charged with the task of moral guardianship. Such campaigns were emblematic of Spanish Catholicism's tendency to proffer religious solutions to social problems.

This essay examines how, in the context of depopulation and mass immigration, members of the French pronatalist movement advanced a policy favouring immigrants from Italy, Spain, and Poland. Because the 'demographic crisis' created a shortage of citizens as well as workers, pronatalists held that foreign workers must also be assimilable, and able to produce French offspring. While the racial difference of colonial subjects was deemed immutable, pronatalists called for the immigration of white foreigners whose less 'modern' condition promoted fecundity, traditionalism, and gender dimorphism. Evidence is drawn from demographic studies, the press of France's largest pronatalist movement, and a pronatalist advisory committee created by the Ministry of Health in 1920.

The intertwining histories of Chinese dress and politics are registered by the way successive leaders and their spouses chose to present themselves. This essay examines the sartorial practices of three specific marriage partnerships to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the counterbalance of female and male roles played out in the public gaze through the great turns of twentieth-century Chinese history. While the protagonists themselves had little to say publicly about their appearance, there are compelling visual images, as well as telling contemporary comments, which are interrogated for their representation of a revolutionary Chinese modernity.

This article explores gender and power relations in a South African criminal society through an examination of the legend surrounding a prominent leader. Tseule Tsilo achieved a degree of notoriety in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. Tsilo's legend lives on in the lore of the Marashea, the criminal organisation to which he belonged. However, rather than being embraced by the entire Marashea, Tsilo is a hero only to men. The legend was created, and is sustained, by men and for men, a discursive development that mirrors the gendered nature of power within the Marashea.

The essay identifies previously unnoticed signposts charting the construction of women in nineteenth-century Bengal as autonomous, self-possessed persons, with entitlements to an intellectual life and immunities against physical and sexual death. Out of these claims, the notion of the female citizen would emerge as a coherent and convincing possibility in the next century. This essay focuses on three pieces of colonial legislation, on specific court cases and social reform movements, and finally, on women's self-narrativisation against these developments. Laws resonant in the emergent public sphere weakened the absolute authority of norms, while the multivocal public sphere interrogated the jurisdiction of colonial laws. Thus, neither norms nor laws could claim the hegemony that earlier religious prescriptions had possessed because of the symbiosis between legality and morality. This breakdown of the hegemony of religious precepts and laws thus created a space for women's self-creation as autonomous subjects.

This article explores the pioneering efforts of two Australian historians, Margaret Kiddle and Kathleen Fitzpatrick, to place issues of women and gender centrally in a narrative of Australia's past. While they were not the first women to enter the history profession in Australia, both women made a significant mark on the Australian history profession in the years after World War II. Furthermore, their first books represent the earliest scholarly Australian works in which women appeared as central figures. Their achievement was initially overlooked by feminists of the 1970s, but in retrospect can be viewed as a first step in subverting the dominant masculinity of Australian national identity.

The relationship between marriage and citizenship was implicit in the practices of most democratic states during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The policy of depriving women who married foreigners of their citizenship was legally codified only with the process of 'nationalisation'. In the particular case of Switzerland, the practice was not codified until 1941, at the height of the movement of peoples unleashed by the Second World War, and it was only fully dismantled in the 1990s. This article analyses the discursive webs linking gender construction, nation state and legal system during the controversies surrounding the marriage rule in Switzerland between 1917 and 1952. It explores the formative role of gender in the process of delineating the practices of inclusion and exclusion and in shaping the internal boundaries within the nation between foreigners and those who belonged: citizens.

Because the French Revolution failed to produce a widely acceptable definition of citizenship, the limits of manhood suffrage in the early nineteenth century were uncertain. Social practices, in particular scientific activity, served as claims to the status of citizen. By engaging in scientific pastimes, bourgeois Frenchmen asserted that they possessed the rationality and autonomy that liberal theorists associated both with manliness and with civic capacity. However, bourgeois science was never a stable signifier of masculinity or of competence. As professional science emerged, the bourgeois amateur increasingly became the feminised object of satire rather than the sober and meritorious citizen-scientist.

Historical analysis of the topic of women and smoking has concentrated on the early part of the twentieth century and on the challenge which smoking by 'new women' or 'flappers' offered to dominant notions of womanly behaviour. This paper considers, rather, the dominant constructions of women and smoking in the UK offered through the prism of changing versions of public health in the last fifty years. The construction of women and smoking, it is argued, has been emblematic of those policy agendas within public health and has borne a reciprocal relationship to them. The traditional view of women as mothers has been renegotiated and redefined through the new scientific alliances of late twentieth-century public health. These constructions have helped to set the parameters of discussion within which policy has been made.

Recent historical studies have reconsidered the plight of white women accused of infanticide in Australia, casting new light especially on the motives of single women and mothers of large families. Still unredeemed and largely unanalysed, however, is the baby-farmer. This article explores stereotypes of this bête noire of the nineteenth-century city, addressing concurrent medicalisation of the maternal body, child-birth, infant feeding and foster care. In so doing it also analyses representations of the midwife and the wet-nurse, along with their essentialised opposite, the good mother, who abided by the newly defined "rights of the child".

This article uses the perspective of cultural anthropology to consider the construction of an early modern perception of time and its relation to the dress and personal consumption of a male subject. It focuses on a costume book from the Renaissance compiled by Matthäus Schwarz, a member of the bourgeoisie, who lived in Augsburg from 1496 to 1574. The book contains a collection of 137 drawings, portraying Schwarz's personal choice of dress. It is also an account of Schwarz's life, beginning with his parents, then covering his life-stages from birth to old age. The relationships between body and dress and between the male subject and the world run as a major thread through the book. This article shows how closely connected Schwarz's body is with the life of commodities (dress) and consumption. The life-story of this Renaissance man is expressed in terms of changing fashions, which act as his subjective measure of time.

This essay examines the texts of Soviet plays from the 1920s known as agitation trials that deal with issues of women's emancipation and participation in the public sphere. It argues that, far from showing women to be men's equals (the ostensible purpose of the plays), the trials give a shocking portrayal of their heroines' faults, from passivity and meddling to gossip and lack of discipline. Given these weaknesses, the women delegates are supposed to recognise their need for tutelage from the new authorities. Their citizenship is thus held, at best, on contingent approval from those authorities.