Americas and Oceania Collections blog

Exploring the Library’s collections from the Americas and Oceania

23 posts categorized "Women's histories"

26 September 2023

Verse and Reverse: Uncovering the work of the Toronto Women’s Press Club

Occasionally, you come across an item in the British Library that can open up a new pathway through our wider collection. One such item is Verse and Reverse, the title of two collections of poetry, printed in 1921 and 1922, written and published by the members of the Toronto Women’s Press Club.

In April 1921, the Toronto Women’s Press Club, a regional branch of the Canadian Women’s Press Club, held a poetry night. Members anonymously submitted poems, which they read aloud to each other. Pleased with the experiment, the membership decided to gather the poems together and publish a booklet, repeating the endeavour the following year. The British Library holds both collections, bound together, at shelfmark 1168.c.57.

Verse and Reverse
The cover of ‘Verse and Reverse’ (1168.c.57).

Since I first read about the Canadian Women’s Press Club, its members and history have intrigued me. Founded in 1904, the Club emerged out of the relationships forged when sixteen women working in the Canadian press achieved sponsorship to report on the World’s Fair in St. Louis, USA. It was during their ten-day railway journey they formed the idea of a professional network to support, promote and advocate for its members. With writers working in both French and English, it was the first nationally recognised club of its kind, founded long before women achieved suffrage in Canada.

At the start of the twentieth century, the nature of the literary marketplace for women drew almost all writers into the orbit of newspapers and periodicals. As such, the Canadian Women’s Press Club was a broad church. As one might expect, members included pioneering journalists, like founder Kit Coleman, the first Canadian woman accredited as a war correspondent, and suffragists Nellie McClung and Emily Murphy. Yet, novelist Lucy M. Montgomery, author of the bestselling Anne of Green Gables (1908), also served as a regional vice president of the club. Another active member was E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), the daughter of a Mohawk chief and English mother, who performed poems and stories about Indigenous experience. Historians have documented the compelling story of the club’s founding, most recently Linda Kay. Yet, there is much more to uncover about its regional branches and evolutions across the twentieth century. I was keen to see what the Toronto Branch’s Verse and Reverse might illuminate.

In the 1922 ‘Prefatory Note’ to Verse and Reverse, Isabel Eccleston MacKay observes there ‘are few things more delightful than to turn to the fresh-cut pages of a new miscellany’. I certainly agree. There are familiar figures among the contributors to Verse and Reverse, (Montgomery has poems in each booklet), but it is the less familiar names that intrigue. While the poetry collected is interesting, what I find exciting about something like Verse and Reverse is that it gathers the names of many forgotten writers working in Toronto in the 1920s together. This makes it a great starting point for further research, which the British Library’s wider collection is able to support.

Our Canadian holdings are remarkably rich. Much of this owes to the process of colonial copyright deposit to the British Museum Library. This undiscriminating process meant, for a time, the accrual of items published in Canada was not as subject to the ideologies of taste and the financial constraints that can shape acquisition. As such, I found it was easy to order up a sample of other titles from the lesser-known Verse and Reverse contributors. Gathering together works of ephemeral popularity, what starts to emerge is a snapshot of women’s cultural production at the start of the twentieth century in Toronto; not the luminaries preserved across time, but the disparate and largely forgotten output of everyday, professionally organised women who earnt their living through their pens.

Pictures of book covers. All are text except 'After the Honeymoon' which shows a well dressed man and woman flyiung above the earth in a hot air balloon.
The covers of books ‘Etiquette in Canada’ (YA.1987.b.1605), ‘A Canadian History for Boys and Girls’ (09555.aa.3), and ‘After the Honeymoon’ (08416.bb.82)

Although all their contributions to Verse and Reverse were poems, the Toronto members of the Canadian Women’s Press Club worked across literary genres. Some of the books I ordered cohered to my expectations: non-fiction writing on conduct, etiquette and instruction. For example, member Emily P. Weaver’s A Canadian History for Boys and Girls (1900) is a chronological survey of Canada complete with black and white illustrations by her sister. Gertrude Pringle’s Etiquette in Canada, first published in 1932, was new to me, offering advice for a gamut of social situations from picnics to the opening of Parliament. Another lovely discovery was the beautiful cover of Louise Mason’s After the Honeymoon: One Hundred Hints on Husbandry, which offers a selection of comedic snippets of marriage advice.

Picture of book spines. The cover for 'Grey Knitting' depicts a woman knitting with the yarn reaching and connecting to a solider.
Covers for the books ‘Grey Knitting and Other Poems’ (11686.ee.46), ‘The House of Windows’ (012621.cc.34) and ‘Savour of Salt’ (NN.13499)

However, other titles I ordered were more unusual and unexpected. I am intrigued now, for instance, to delve more into The House of Windows (1912), MacKay’s own novel about the fates of an overworked department store shop girl. Member Katherine Hale’s Grey Knitting, and Other Poems (1914) is a collection about women’s experiences on the Home Front during World War I. It reminded me of a more recent Canadian acquisition, the textile work I Sit and Sew (2019) by artist Lise Melhorn-Boe. The Library holds member Florence Randal Livesay’s novel Savour of Salt (1927), which chronicles the experiences of Irish immigrants to Ontario. Mother of the award-winning poet Dorothy Livesay, Florence was clearly interested in the Canadian immigrant experience, collecting and translating a number of Ukrainian folk takes in her lifetime. The British Library holds her posthumously published collection, Down Singing Centuries: Folk Literature of Ukraine (1981), with striking illustrations by Stefan Czernecki. In summary, Verse and Reverse provided me with an avenue to open up a whole range of intriguing work I did not know we held and would otherwise have been hard to discover.

Double page spread with one full page colour illustration showing two men b y the edge of a pond with frogs and waterlillies, and a nude male and female figures bathing in the pond
Example of an illustration by Stefan Czernecki from ‘Down Singing Centuries’ (L.45/3357). The image accompanies Livesay’s translation of ‘Song of the Forest’ by Leisa Ukrainka (Olga Kossatch)

There are no grand conclusions to reach with a short project like this. However, it is indicative of the work one can achieve with ease thanks to the strength of the British Library’s Canadian collection. Much more work could be done with our microfilm, newspaper, and e-resources, where, armed with their names, one could pull together more of the work of Press Club members. Indeed, within our e-resources collection we hold digital copies of publications from branches of the Canadian Women’s Press Club in Alberta and Calgary. Each provides their own starting point to enrich our understanding of localised literary marketplaces, the ways in which women constructed their careers, and female authorship in Canada. The founders created the Canadian Women’s Press Club to foster professional solidarity and promote its members’ work. It is fitting, then, that Verse and Reverse, long past the point of the Club’s existence and the Toronto Branch’s poetry night, can continue to serve as a means through which we can draw their cultural production together and begin to bring the members their due attention.

Further Reading

  • Hale, Grey Knitting, and other poems (1914) held at 11686.ee.46.
  • Kay, The Sweet Sixteen: the journey that inspired the Canadian Women’s Press Club (2012) held at YD.2013.a.83.
  • Livesay, Savour of Salt (1927) held at NN.13499.
  • Livesay, Down Singing Centuries: folk literature of Ukraine (1981) held at L.45/3357.
  • MacKay, The House of Windows (1912) held at 012621.cc.34.
  • Mason, After the Honeymoon: One hundred hints on husbandry (1922) held 08416.bb.82.
  • Melhorn-Boe, I Sit and Sew: with poem by Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (2019) held at RF.2022.a.75.
  • Pringle, Etiquette in Canada: The Blue Book of Canadian social usage (1949) held at YA.1987.b.1605.
  • Toronto Women’s Press Club, Verse and Reverse (1921, 1922) held at 1168.c.57.
  • Weaver, A Canadian History for Boys and Girls (1900) held at 09555.aa.3.

By Hannah Graves 
Curator, North American Published Collections (post-1850)

23 February 2023

Transatlantic Mormon Connections and Historical Fiction

Naomi Krüger is a senior lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire and author of the novel May; she was a 2021 Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library.

My current research project is a historical novel set in 1842 in two very different cities: Nauvoo, Illinois and Preston, Lancashire. These places, though geographically distant, are linked by the arrival of Mormonism and its turbulent growth, movement, and ongoing legacy.

Growing up as a Mormon in Preston, I was acutely aware of this history. I regularly heard stories about the missionaries who crossed the Atlantic, arriving in England in 1837 and travelling straight from Liverpool to Preston due to a family connection. I was told of their astonishing success in baptising converts, finding an unexpectedly warm welcome in Lancashire, the Ribble Valley and beyond. Subsequently, there were thousands of baptisms, and these new members were very quickly encouraged to emigrate and join with the American Saints in Nauvoo – a growing city on the banks on the Mississippi. By 1844 over four thousand British converts had made this journey, making them a significant minority in a city that was about to face new challenges after the death of the founding prophet Joseph Smith.

While I was proud of living somewhere that had such historical significance, I also became aware that my access to stories of these early converts in Lancashire was circumscribed. In the official narratives found in lesson manuals and church histories, these people usually became nameless, swallowed into a wider mass of emigrants, and later assimilated into the ideal image of hardy pioneers who made the trek west to Utah. In this oversimplified narrative, Preston is Babylon - a place of smoke, corruption and exploitation - and Nauvoo is Zion - the land of promise, a place of hope, community, and righteousness. Missionaries are unfailingly heroic, intelligent, and filled with power. Converts, on the other hand, are poor, humble, and self-sacrificing.

As a writer and researcher, I am eager to move beyond this. What about the converts who stayed in Preston because they couldn’t afford to go, or wouldn’t make the sacrifice? What about those who lost their faith part-way through the journey or found that Zion was not exactly what they expected when they got there? What would it have felt like to be a missionary who began to doubt? How did the social, economic, and religious conditions of Preston at that time, intersect with the desire so many people had to start a new life elsewhere?

My novel-in-progress follows a herbal physician converted to Mormonism and trying to establish himself in Nauvoo. He finds hope and spiritual sustenance there but is also drawn into a web of secrets, rituals, and unspoken rules. When he is challenged by the charismatic prophet to sacrifice his growing medical practice, travel to England, and persuade the converts in Lancashire to emigrate back to Zion, he discovers a town divided. Preston is still reeling from the aftermath of a massacre of striking millworkers and simultaneously preparing for a lavish, once-every-twenty-year celebration of civic pride. As he grapples with cultural differences, and his unsuccessful attempts to convert a woman still bitter after being left behind by a family member who has previously emigrated, disturbing dreams of Nauvoo begin to disrupt his present calling and his still fragile faith is put under increasing amounts of pressure.

The Eccles Centre's Mormon Americana bibliographic guide has been an invaluable tool for me as I explore these questions and develop my fictional world. From primary sources like pamphlets, hymnbooks, and scriptures, to a wealth of secondary texts that detail the challenges of life in Nauvoo as a frontier city, I have been able to gather important context - details that will not only inform my world-building, but even, in some cases, change the actions and decisions that my characters make.

Seeing illustrated plans of the Nauvoo temple during my research, for example, sparked new curiosity about ritual baptisms that has led to the development of an important subplot in the novel. 

A pen and ink drawing of the front of the Mormon temple in Nauvoo, Illinois.
Fig. 1: Thomas Carter, Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlement, 2015. British Library shelfmark: YC.2015.b.1139.

Reading letters written by women in Nauvoo discussing death and doctrine alongside recipes and household tips has enabled me to create a more detailed and textured picture of life in an unfamiliar place and time.

Handling a well-loved British hymnbook covered in the owner’s urgent annotations reminded me of the importance of honouring sacred experiences of faith as much as I seek to complicate them.

A handwritten note inside a book; the page also shows that the book was published in Liverpool by Richard James, and it also shows the British Museum accession stamp.
Fig. 2: B. Young, P. Pratt, and F. Taylor, A Collection of Sacred Hymns, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Europe, 1849. British Library shelfmark: 3437.a.16.

 

Hand written notes opposite the title page of a Mormon hymnbook.
Fig. 3: B. Young, P. Pratt, and F. Taylor, A Collection of Sacred Hymns, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Europe, 1849. British Library shelfmark: 3437.a.16.

The challenge of writing historical fiction is to negotiate a balance between research and imagination, the needs of a story alongside the demands of historical evidence. I am still in the middle of this complex process, but I have no doubt that the notes and images I have gathered from my time as an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow will continue to find their way into the creative work in unexpected and transformative ways.

17 January 2023

Sculptures, time machines and vampires: items from the Americas collections on display in Leeds

The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds is currently displaying seven items from British Library collections as part of their FREE exhibition, The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture – open until 26 February 2023

Two of the items in the Institutes’ main galleries for this spectacular exhibition are from the Americas collections held here at the British Library. It’s always great to be able to loan items from the Library to other museums and galleries. For starters, it means more people gain access to viewing the works, those who might not ordinarily consult collection items in the Library’s Reading Rooms, or be in the London vicinity to see items on display at our St Pancras site. Secondly, it’s wonderful to see the items interpreted by a multitude of experts and curators, often placing the item in a completely different context from the library setting we’re used to. In this case, as the title of the exhibition suggests, the books are alongside an array of fantastic sculptures as the display brings into focus a rich yet largely overlooked body of sculptural work collected in Britain between 1850 and 1900. The exhibition examines objects that introduced colour and new materials into the sculptural process, situating them within the context of the anxiety which often weighed upon Victorian society in the face of social change and scientific advances.

The exhibition has had great reviews from The Observer and The Telegraph so don’t miss out on seeing it. Here’s a quick peek at the items from the Library’s Americas collections on display – if you want to find out more and see some remarkable sculptures do make time for a visit to Leeds.

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (BL shelfmark: 012629.de.20.)

This science fiction novella by H. G. Wells is generally credited with popularising the concept of time travel by using a device to travel forward or backward through time. Indeed, the term itself, ‘time machine’, was coined by Wells and is now commonly used to refer to such a vehicle. This edition of The Time Machine was printed in New York in 1895 by the American book-publishing house Henry Holt and Company.

This first American edition, first issue, preceded the British edition and you’ll see the author’s name is misspelled as H. S. Wells on the title page and on the Authors Note as ‘H.S.W.’ – something that was later corrected in the British edition. Unable to let the error slide, a past reader ever in search of correctness has at some point noted in pencil the correction of ‘H. G. Wells’ on the title page under the misprint, initialled simply by the letter ‘K’. As well as the misspelling of Wells’s name being corrected for the English edition, according to science-fiction editor Mike Ashley, this American edition is a shorter version than the English but was published two weeks earlier and is regarded today as particularly collectable[1]. It will certainly be interesting to see this item on display in the Henry Moore Institute Galleries as just one example illustrating anxieties about rapid social change and developments in science that were occurring during the Victorian era.

Front cover of first American edition, first issue, of The Time Machine (012629.de.20.) showing original publisher's tan cloth cover
Front cover of first American edition, first issue, of The Time Machine (012629.de.20.) showing original publisher's tan cloth cover
Title page with H. S. Wells typo and pencil correction, initialled with a ‘K’
Title page with H. S. Wells typo and pencil correction, initialled with a ‘K’
Illustration from The Time Machine showing depiction of a sculpture of a white sphinx
Illustration from The Time Machine showing depiction of a sculpture of a white sphinx

The Vampire. A poem ... Written for a picture by Philip Burne-Jones exhibited at the New Gallery in London, 1897. [With a reproduction of the picture.] by Rudyard Kipling (BL shelfmark: Cup.402.a.30.)

Also on display from the British Library Americas collections is The Vampire by Rudyard Kipling, printed by Woodward & Lothrop of Washington DC in 1898. Whilst doing some digging in the archives for approving this outward loan, I discovered the item was acquired by the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum Library in the spring of 1961. Purchased from a second-hand bookstore based in New York for the handsome price of £5 it was bought along with a scarce pamphlet on Rudyard Kipling entitled American Oats (BL shelfmark: Cup.503.l.26.). The Vampire was catalogued by the British Museum Library team swiftly as is shown by the red Library stamp dated 15 May 1961.

Kipling wrote the poem to gather publicity for what was then considered a mildly pornographic painting by his cousin, the artist Philip Burne-Jones, entitled ‘The Vampire’ (1897) – the piece would become Burne-Jones’s most famous work. The painting depicts a woman leaning over an unconscious man and was believed to have been modelled by the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell – with whom Burne-Jones had been romantically linked. This painting is an example of how, despite Victorian ideals of virginity and chastity circulating at the time, male artists responded to and reinforced an increasingly sexualised representation of the female body in art, reflecting fears regarding the changing role of women. Indeed, Kipling’s poem echoes this notion also.

The Vampire: A Poem (Cup.402.a.30.) by Rudyard Kipling showing the painting of the same name by Philip Burne-Jones
The Vampire: A Poem (Cup.402.a.30.) by Rudyard Kipling showing the painting of the same name by Philip Burne-Jones
‘We called her the woman who did not care, But the fool he called her his lady fair…’: Opening page of Kipling’s The Vampire
‘We called her the woman who did not care, But the fool he called her his lady fair…’: Opening page of Kipling’s The Vampire

Alongside items from British Library collections, visitors to The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture will be able to see artworks from the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Collection Trust and Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries and pieces created by artists sculpting during the Victorian period, as well as more contemporary spectacles from the likes of Sanford Biggers and Maud Sulter. The exhibition runs until 26 February 2023 and is free to visit. Find out more and plan your visit via the Henry Moore Institute website.

Blog by Rachael, Curator for North American Published Collections Post-1850

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[1] Out of this world: Science fiction but not as you know it by Mike Ashley, page 49 (London: British Library, 2011), BL shelfmark: YK.2011.b.8873

28 November 2022

Tracing Italian Opera Performers in the Nineteenth Century Americas

Barry Robinson is the Robert Haywood Morrison Professor of History at Queens University of Charlotte and was a 2020 British Library Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow.

In August 1895 a committee of prominent musicians and members of the Italian community in Lima, Peru announced a benefit concert to be held on behalf of the seventy-seven-year-old composer Carlos Enrique Pasta. Their stated purpose was “to alleviate the pitiful situation in which the well-known and respectable maestro finds himself in his old age.”1 Pasta had first come to Lima in 1855 as part of the many waves of Italian performers who travelled through and to the Americas during the nineteenth century.

Italian migrants like Pasta brought European content to American audiences, but they also created new performances that drew from local themes and contemporary politics. Pasta’s zarzuela ¡Pobre indio! debuted in Lima on 3 March 1868. The performance included two yaravies and a huayno (indigenous Andean folk ballads and dance, respectively), with the overture incorporating the chorus of the Peruvian National Anthem.2 This cultural exchange filtered back across the Atlantic, with productions of American-inspired work making their way to the most prominent opera houses of Europe.

Pasta’s best remembered work, the opera Atahualpa, recast the Inca emperor as a tragic and nuanced figure, set to a melancholy and melodious score. His librettist, Antonio Ghislanzoni, also authored the libretto for Verdi’s Aida. Pasta returned to Italy for the debut of Atahualpa in November 1875 at Genoa’s Teatro Paganini, where critics reported “applause galore – more than twenty calls to the maestro – Bravo Maestro Pasta!”3 Atahualpa’s success continued at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, but by January 1877 Pasta had returned to Lima for the opera’s Peruvian debut at the Teatro Principal.4 He continued to compose zarzuelas over the next few years. As of 1887 he was offering his services to the citizens of Lima as a piano and voice teacher.5

Newspaper cutting
Image 1: Pasta’s announcement of his musical services in 1887. 'El Comercio' (Lima, Peru) 9 October 1887. British Library e-resources, Readex: World Newspaper Archive.

Along with my colleague, Dr. Lucia Galleno, I have been constructing a database of hundreds of individuals like Carlo Enrico Pasta to track the movement of Italian opera performers (singers, musicians, and empresarios) from Italy to the Americas in the nineteenth century. We are employing traditional historical research along with techniques from the digital humanities and geospatial analysis to identify broader patterns among the companies, theatres, and performers who formed part of this influential cultural transference. Their stories might best be visualized as a fluid network of journeys spanning the Atlantic and centering on urban hubs with theatres connecting to the international tour circuits.6

Lima makes for a revealing node from which to begin charting these transatlantic opera networks. Italian opera served as a vibrant element of the city’s cultural life, drawing large crowds of passionate supporters who often engaged in vigorous public critiques and debates, occasionally spilling over into physical violence.7 In 1896, the year after the benefit concert for Maestro Pasta, famed Peruvian literary figure Manuel Moncloa y Covarrubias recalled the vigorous partisanship surrounding the career of soprano Clotilde Barilli in the 1850s, labelling it “a scandal of colossal proportions.”8 Barilli’s fans developed such a furious rivalry with those of the O’Loghlin theatre company that in the 1852 season grave wounds were delivered with a rapiers and firearms, to the point that General Pedro Cisneros de la Torre called in an infantry battalion to restore order. In his Mujeres de teatro, Moncloa y Covarrubias notes that, given the politically fluid nature of those times, this action put the inhabitants of the entire city in a state of great alarm.9

Title page of a book
Image 2: The British Library’s 1888 edition of Manuel y Covarrubia’s '¡Al fin solos!', signed by the author with a dedication to Don Pablo Patrón, found in a volume entitled 'Spanish and Portuguese Plays, etc: 1750-1896'. Moncloa y Covarrubias, Manuel. '¡Al Fin Solos!: Disparate cómico en un acto y en prosa', 1888, BL shelfmark: General Reference Collection 11726.b.13.(11.).

The British Library Reader Pass has provided an invaluable opportunity to connect nineteenth century Italian migrants more fully to the communities in which they lived and performed, and to trace their movement across the Atlantic from cities like London, Madrid, and Milan through our focal point of Lima, Peru, and around the Americas to cultural hubs such as New York, Havana, and New Orleans.

The career of Clorinda Corradi Pantanelli, credited by Basadre with “definitively popularizing” Italian opera in Peru during the season that began on 2 September, 1840, illustrates the scope of this movement.10 After initiating her career in Italy and Spain in the 1820s and 1830s, Corradi Pantanelli sang in Havana, Cuba as a part of a company managed by her husband, Raffaele Pantanelli, from 1836 to 1839. During an interim 1837 season at the St. Charles Theatre in New Orleans, two other performers “absconded” from the company and the empresario engaged in a heated financial dispute with the owner of the St. Charles.11

Opening pages of a libretto
Image 3: Libretto for Clorinda Corradi Pantanelli’s performance of 'La Vendetta' at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan during the 1831-1832 season. Bassi, Calisto. 'La vendetta: melodramma tragico in due atti: da rappresentarsi nell'I.R. Teatro alla Scala il Carnevale dell'anno 1831-32', 1832, BL shelfmark: General Reference Collection DRT Digital Store 906.g.2.(1.).

Corradi Pantanelli’s company arrived in Peru in 1840. The immediate popularity of Corradi Pantanelli’s performance in Lima prompted conservative literary figure Felipe Pardo y Aliaga to publish an essay entitled “Opera y nacionalismo” in October 1840, in which he critiqued what he viewed as a liberal, mercantile fascination with this foreign art form as an ornament of national modernity. Pardo y Aliaga protested that “Nonsensical nationalism has produced few more original phenomena than the one observed on the occasion of the arrival of the Italian company that today charms this capital.”12

Corradi Pantanelli’s company remained in Lima until April 1844, when they continued southward to Chile. They opened the newly constructed Teatro Victoria in Valparaiso in December.13 Corradi Pantanelli continued to perform in Chile over the next decade. Records of the University of Chile show that she took a post as a professor at the National Conservatory of Music in May of 1861.14

The career of mezzo-soprano Estefanía Collamarini provides a final example of the migrant trajectories of these performers. In 1898 Moncloa y Covarrubias characterized Collamarini as “the most splendidly beautiful Carmen we have had [in Lima]”.15 The following year Collamarini ranged as widely as Mexico City, San Francisco, and even Kansas City, Missouri, where she personally funded a reorganization of the stranded Lombardi Opera Company to enable it to complete its tour of the United States.16 Collamarini returned to South America where she continued to perform through at least 1905, when she performed at the Teatro de Sao Pedro d’Alcantara in Rio de Janeiro.17

Portrait of a woman
Image 4: Moncloa y Covarrubias, Manuel. 'Mujeres de teatro: apuntes, perfiles, y recuerdos' (Callao, Imp. El Progreso, 1910) p. 47.

The British Library affords world class access to a wealth of source material that is not accessible at our home institution, including memoirs, catalogues of performances, photos and paintings, diagrams of theatres, an outstanding general reference collection, and excellent nineteenth century newspaper collections (including both hard copy and digital databases). The Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship has enabled me to track the locations and management of theatres, the movement of individuals and opera companies, and the public reactions and responses to their performances in the major cities of South and North America. These materials help us to transcend the violence of abstraction by putting a personal and individual contour onto the data, adding a human voice to the historic drama that the performers experiences represent.

Notes:

1. El Comercio (Lima, Peru) 19 August 1895. British Library e-resources, Readex: World Newspaper Archive.
2. Jorge Basadre, Historia de la República del Perú (Lima, 1961-1968), Vol. IV, p. 1903, BL shelfmark: W31/3274. Basadre points out that this debut occurred during a period of heightened indigenismo in Lima. A zarzuela differs from an opera in that it intersperses the music and singing with sections of unaccompanied spoken verse. Vera Wolkowicz views the huayno and yaraví as part of the early foundation of national Peruvian music, and cites Pasta as the first composer of any nationality to incorporate Andean folk elements into his compositions. Vera Wolkowicz, Inca Music Reimagined: Indigenist Discourses in Latin American Art Music (Oxford University Press, 2022) p. 57.
3. Carlo Civallero, “Gazzetino di Genova,” 29 November and 9 Dicembre, in: Appolonio e Caprin, L'Arte: Rassegna di teatri, scienzi e lettere con annessa Agenzia. Trieste, 30 November 1875 No. 33, p. 3 and 13 December 1875, No. 34, p. 3.
4. On August 6, 2015, Lima’s Gran Teatro Nacional hosted a resurrected performance of Pasta’s Atahualpa for the first time since the nineteenth century. El Comercio (Lima, Peru) 7 August 2015. British Library e-resources, Readex: World Newspaper Archive.
5. El Comercio (Lima, Peru) 9 October 1887, British Library e-resources, Readex: World Newspaper Archive. The Hotel de Francia é Inglaterra was located at 204 Calle Judíos.
6. John Rosselli has identified a number of seasonal patterns to this movement, which he categorizes into three distinct circuits: 1) Austral America (including Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina), 2) the Circum-Caribbean, including Havana, Caracas, and major cities in the Eastern United States, and 3) a Pacific circuit extending from Mexico up to San Francisco and down through Central America to Peru and Chile. John Roselli, “The Opera Business and the Italian Immigrant Community in Latin America 1820-1930: The Example of Buenos Aires.” Past & Present, May, 1990, No. 127, pp 165-166.
7. Robert Stevenson’s Foundations of New World Opera (Lima: Pacific Press, 1973) BL shelfmark YM.1991.b.9 and Chad Gasta’s Transatlantic Arias: Early Opera in Spain and the New World (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2013) BL shelfmark YD.2014.a.786, identify Peru as a center of early New World Opera through the eighteenth century, but scholars of nineteenth century opera tend to overlook Peru.
8. Moncloa y Covarrubias often used the pen name M. Cloamón. M. Cloamón, “De telón adentro,” El Comercio (Lima, Peru) 29 May, 1896, British Library e-resources, Readex: World Newspaper Archive. His extensive Diccionario teatral del Perú (Badiola y Berrio, 1905) offers a vital foundation for identifying specific Italian opera performers at a date and theatre in Lima, and identifying their company and the works they performed.
9. Enrica Jemma Glickman, “Italian Dramatic Companies and the Peruvian Stage in the 1870s,” Latin American Theatre Review, Spring 1973, p. 43; Manuel Moncloa y Covarrubias, Mujeres de teatro: apuntes, perfiles, y recuerdos (Callao, Imp. El Progreso, 1910) p. 11.
10. Jorge Basadre, Historia de la República del Perú (Lima, 1961-1968), Vol. II, p. 399, BL shelfmark W31/3272.
11. Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana) 8 June 1837. British Library e-resources, Readex: World Newspaper Archive; Katherine K. Preston, Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825-60. (Music in American Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993) pp. 113-117, BL shelfmark 93/24434.
12. Felipe Pardo y Aliaga, “Opera y nacionalismo,” in: El espejo de mi tierra. Edición y estudio preliminar de Alberto Tauro (Lima: Editorial Universo, 1971) pp. 74-89, BL shelfmark X.907/12764.
13. José Manuel Izquierdo Konig details the process of constructing the Teatro Victoria in: “The Invention of an Opera House: The 1844 Teatro Victoria in Valparaiso, Chile,” Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 32, 2021, p. 140.
14. Anales de la Universidad de Chile: memorias científicas y literarias, Volume 18 (Universidad de Chile, 1861) p. 603, BL shelfmark Ac.2693.
15. Moncloa y Covarrubias, Diccionario teatral del Perú (Badiola y Berrio, 1905) p. 51.
16. Manuel Mañon, Historia del Teatro Principal de México (México, 1932) p. 209, BL shelfmark, 11795.tt.36; “Stranded Opera Company Reorganizes.” New York Times (1857-1922); Oct 24, 1899.
17. Richard Langham Smith and Clair Rowden, eds. Carmen Abroad: Bizet's Opera on the Global Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2020) p. 162, BL shelfmark YC.2022.b.205.

23 November 2022

Black Theatre Makers: Una Marson

The British Library has digitised and made available online the only known copy of Una Marson’s pioneering play ‘At What a Price’ (1932).

Una Maud Marson was born in Jamaica in 1905. Throughout her lifetime she would live and work in the Caribbean, the UK and the USA. An editor, poet, playwright, activist, writer and BBC producer, Marson had a versatile and prolific career. The phenomenal breadth and range of Una Marson’s creative and critical outputs are yet to be fully appreciated, but there has been a recent renewed interest in the contributions she made to the cultural landscape of the British Empire and North America. Una Marson was the subject of a BBC production, Una Marson: Our Lost Caribbean Voice, which brought to life her incredible career and creations. Many of those creations can be found here, in the British Library, including her poetry collections. However, some of her works are a little harder to find.

A young woman wearing a check dress standing and reading the West Indian Radio Newspaper.
Fig. 1: Una Maud Victoria Marson (1905–1965) by unknown photographer BBC Picture Archives, public domain.

Through a recent project at the British Library, the Eccles Centre for American Studies has been supporting the research of Professor Kate Dossett and her project ‘Black Cultural Archives & the Making of Black Histories’. Part of this project involved examining the Lord Chamberlain’s Play’s (LCP) collection for plays produced in Britain written by Black playwrights. The LCP’s are the largest collection of manuscripts in the British Library. The collection consists of plays collected by the Office of the Lord Chamberlain from the years 1824 to 1968. They were collected because the censorship laws which existed at the time specified that plays had to be approved for a licence before a performance. This collection therefore provides an illuminating record of drama performed in the UK up to 1968. The research project has utilised this collection to find and promote the, often hidden, work of Black theatre makers in the early twentieth century.

One of the plays within the collection is Una Marson’s, ‘At What a Price’. Marson first wrote this play whilst living in Jamaica where it staged in 1932. The play was so successful that she used the profits to travel to London, England, where it was staged before British audiences. In London she got involved in anti-racist activism and became secretary to the League of Coloured Peoples, which fought for racial equality in the UK. The league and its founder, Harold Moody, sponsored Marson’s London production of her play in 1933. Yet, despite its international popularity no copy of the play’s script is known to have survived beyond the one kept in the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays collection.

The typescript of the play At What a Price; the ink is blue.
Fig. 2: Add MS 66878 D, f.1. of ‘At What a Price’, by Una Marson, now available on BL Digitised Manuscripts.

The play follows Ruth Maitland, a young Jamaican woman who moves from the countryside to Kingston, Jamaica, to work as a stenographer where she is pursued by a white Englishman. The play examines women’s agency in love and work, as well as issues of interracial relations and sexual harassment. The unique play script that Una Marson and her production team sent to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office has now been digitised in its entirety and has been made accessible through the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts website. Researchers can now view this play and the related reader’s report from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office which outlines the department’s response in terms of whether the play was suitable for licensing. These images are available to view here

With the digitisation of this play and related Lord Chamberlain’s Office correspondence, we hope to preserve and widen access to Una Marson’s many and varied cultural outputs. With the digitisation of this play, and others created by black theatre makers, researchers and audiences can discover ways in which black playwrights across the British Empire and Americas were frequently creating new cultural narratives and were at the forefront of movements for change that were an integral part of the British theatrical landscape in the early 20th century.

Jessica Gregory, Project Officer, Modern Archives and Manuscripts

Digitisation funded by the Eccles Centre for American Studies.


Further Reading:
Una Marson | The British Library (bl.uk)
The British Library MS Viewer (bl.uk)
Black Theatre and the Archive: Making Women Visible, 1900-1950 - Digital scholarship blog

08 August 2022

Black Women’s Activism in the Americas

The Eccles Centre recently hosted a one-day symposium on Black Women’s Activism in the Americas, in collaboration with the Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW). The day included a Show and Tell for the delegates, inspired by some of the topics under discussion. Here are some highlights from the display.

Claudia Jones
A few years ago the Library acquired a number of issues of Spotlight magazine. Produced by American Youth for Democracy during World War Two (formerly the Young Communist League), it was edited by Claudia Jones, the Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist who emigrated to the US as a child.

Spotlight combined
Left: Spotlight cover, Right: editorial column by Claudia Jones; ‘Spotlight: 1776. The Glorious Fourth. 1944’; July 1944, by American Youth for Democracy; edited by Claudia Jones. (New York, NY : New Age Publisher, 1944.) Shelfmark: RF.2018.b.176

Following the persecution of Communists by the US Government, Jones was deported to Britain in 1955. She continued her Communist activism in the UK and went on to found Britain’s first major black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, in 1958, and played a major role in founding the Notting Hill Carnival. You can read more about Jones’ life and work in the British Library’s Windrush Stories online exhibition here. As with many histories of activism by women of colour, Jones’ legacy was maintained for many years by community activists and historians, through works such as Claudia Jones, 1915-1964: A Woman of Our Times [researched and compiled by Jennifer Tyson], published by Camden Black Sisters Publications in c1988.

Claudia Jones pamphlet

Claudia Jones pamphlet
‘Claudia Jones, 1915-1964: a woman of our times’ [researched and compiled by Jennifer Tyson] (London: Camden Black Sisters Publications, c1988). Shelfmark: LD.37.a.200


Angela Davis
Later US Communist activist and scholar Angela Davis was also represented with the Show and Tell including a number of works produced around her imprisonment in 1971 on murder and kidnapping charges. The case generated interest around the world and the display included items published in the UK and Germany demonstrating solidarity with her case, as well as a booklet produced by the United States Information Service and distributed by the US Embassy in London which endeavoured to present the ‘legal background’ to the case.

Angela Davis International response
Left: ‘Angela Davis on trial’ (London: Angela Davis Defence Committee, [1970]), Shelfmark: Collection YD.2010.a.4174; Right: ‘Free Angela Davis: Hero of the other America = Freiheit für Angela Davis!: Heldin des Anderen Amerika’, by Dr. Klaus Steiniger ([Germany]: National Council of the National Front of the German Democratic Republic, [1972?]), Shelfmark: YD.2005.a.446

 

Angela Davis USIS Legal Background
‘The Angela Davis case. The legal background.’ United States. United States Information Service. London, [1972]; Shelfmark: A.S.975/73



Alongside Official Government Publications, such as the USIS booklet shown above, another type of collection item which may be less familiar to British Library researchers are examples of political ephemera. The Library continues to acquire a range of this type of material including this striking broadside “I Am A Black Woman Communist”, featuring a portrait of Angela Davis, which was produced for the 20th Convention of the Communist Party USA in New York in February 1972. The following quote is printed beneath her portrait: "I am a black woman Communist / the corrupt government of this country could not accept such a combination / this is why they launch an effort to murder me." The artist's signature, identified only as ‘Sherman,’ is printed at upper right corner.

Angela Davis broadside
Broadside: "I Am A Black Woman Communist...". (New York: CPUSA, 1972). Shelfmark: RF.2020.b.53



Léila Gonzalez
The political ephemera continued with election pamphlets produced by the Worker’s Party (PT, Partido dos Trabalhadores) during Brazilian federal elections in 1982. Included amongst those standing for office was Lélia Gonzalez, the leading Afro-Brazilian feminist, intellectual, politician, professor, anthropologist and Black and women’s rights activist. Her influential concept of Amefricanidade or ‘Amefricanity’ references both the black diaspora and indigenous populations of the Americas, signalling their histories of resistance as colonised peoples. Among a long career in activism and education, she ran as a federal candidate for the Worker’s Party in 1982. The broader context of the PT slate of candidates (included at the same shelfmark) provide fascinating insights in to the range of social justice concerns active in Brazilian politics in the early 1980s, including gay rights.

Leila Gonzalez election pamphlet & other PT pamphlets v2
A political pamphlet of Lélia Gonzalez [centre]. Partido dos Trabalhadores Election Pamphlets (Brazil: O Partido, [1982]), Shelfmark X.0520/785; other pamphlets produced in support of other PT candidates in the same election can be seen behind (all stored at the same shelfmark)



Philatelic Collections
An underused part of the Library’s holdings, the Philatelic Collections offer a fascinating way into many different aspects of social and political histories. The Show and Tell was enriched by items from our Philatelic colleagues which illustrated the way black women’s activism has been commemorated on stamps, in turn helping to construct national and international conversations about women’s history and achievements. To find out more about Philately at the British Library, visit their subject page or their social media channels.

Stamps
From the top: Carrie Best: Canada 2011; Harriet Tubman: USA 1978; Mary McLeod Bethune: USA 1988; Sojourner Truth: USA 1986; Ida Bell Wells-Barnett: USA 1990; Gladys Bustamante: Jamaica 1968; Mary Seacole: Jamaica 1991; Mabel Alice 'Cissie' Cauderion: Dominica 1982; Phillis Wheatley: Senegal 1971



By Cara Rodway, Eccles Centre, August 2022 (with thanks to my Eccles and Americas colleagues for their help developing and mounting the Show and Tell)



07 February 2022

E-resources for Women in the United States

This fourth instalment of our Americas e-resources blog series focuses on women in the US, both historic and contemporary, but may also prove a useful starting point for exploring women’s lives and experiences in other parts of the Americas and Oceania.1 

Having recently curated a large exhibition on women’s rights in the UK at the British Library, we are well aware of the challenges involved in organising a topic as varied, contested and capacious as ‘women.’ It has been interesting to see, therefore, how some of the major digital recourses have been organised into different thematic strands.

On Adams Matthews's Gender: Identity and Social Change, for instance, themes include women’s suffrage, feminism and the men’s movement as well as employment and labour, education and the body.

Image of a woman in dungarees driving an old-fashioned harvesting machine. Other agricultural labourers and haystacks are in the background.
'Gender: Identity and Social Change'; an e-resource available at the British Library.

Drawing from collections in the US, Canada, UK and Australia, the resource offers full text access to monographs, periodicals and archives from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. Among other riches is the archive of Betty Friedan, feminist activist and co-founder of both the National Organisation for Women and the National Abortion Rights League (digitised from the Schlesinger Library). The archive includes Friedan's survey and accompanying notes about the satisfaction of female graduates in 1957, a piece of work which informed her seminal 1963 publication The Feminine Mystique. As letters sent to Freidan shortly after the book’s publication reveal, some readers objected strongly to the notion of ‘the problem which has no name’, the existence of women’s malaise which The Feminine Mystique identified.

A type written letter to Betty Friedan from a reader opposed to these thesis she put forward in The Feminine Mystique.
Letters from original readers of The Feminine Mystique, 5 January - 24 December 1967, © Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Betty Friedan. Republished by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Accessible at the British Library on the e-resource 'Gender: Identity and Social Change'.

 

A yellow programme for the 6th Conference on Men & Masculinity; it is typewritten with two columns of text in the bottom half.
Programme for the 6th Men and Masculinity Conference, 17 September - 25 October 1979. Content compilation © 2017, by the MSU Library. All rights reserved. Accessible at the British Library on the e-resource 'Gender: Identity and Social Change'.

For an analysis of women and popular, commercial culture, Proquest’s Vogue Archive is hugely illuminating. With full of coverage of American Vogue from the magazine’s first issue in 1892 to the current month, the archive showcases evolving fashions, photography and design as well as being a record of culture, society and aspiration over more than a century. The subject search engine allows for close analysis and the outline statistics for coverage across years provides both a snapshot of topics and their popularity at any given time. A search for ‘abortion', for instance, reveals a peak of 158 mentions between 1990 and 1999, compared to 74 between 1970 and 1979, and 9 from 1960 to 1969. Careful indexing and high-resolution colour page images render the magazine accurately and allow for detailed searches as well as providing evidence of the frequency fashion, style, photography.

A magazine cover featuring a headshot of an African American woman smiling at the camera; on the left of the page are written hints about the articles within the magazine.
Beverly Johnson, the first African American woman to be photographed on the cover of Vogue. Vogue; New York Volume 164, Issue 2, (1 August, 1974): C1. Copyright Conde Nast Publications. Accessible at the British Library on the 'Vogue Archive' e-resource.

Everyday Life & Women in America is published by Adam Matthews and supports the study of American social, cultural and popular history. Offering access to rare primary source material from both the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History at Duke University and The New York Public Library, it includes fully searchable monographs, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home and family life, health, and pastimes. One of the periodicals on offer is Town Topics: The Journal of Society (1887 – 1923). In its day, this was an essential source of articles and commentary on art, music, literature, society, gossip and scandal not only for the socially ambitious, but also for established families like the Vanderbilts and Astors. Today, this full-run of issues provides a unique insight into the Gilded Age.

Everyday Life & Women in America is also rich in guides to social conduct and domestic management literature. One example from a vast selection is American Ladies' Memorial; an indispensable home-book for the wife, mother, sister; In fact, useful to every lady throughout the Unites States (1850). This covers topics such as embroidery and painting as well as etiquette and behavioural advice. In ‘A few Rules for the Wise’ the author advises ‘ladies’ should ‘Control the temper’ as well as ‘use but little ceremony, else your guests will not feel at ease.’

An elaborately decorated black and white cover for a women's periodical.
American Ladies' Memorial; an indispensable home-book for the wife; mother; sister; In fact; useful to every lady throughout the Unites States. Boston, MA. Accessible at the British Library on the e-resource 'Everyday Life & Women in America'.

For the records pertaining to suffrage and women’s rights organisations as well as women at work during the World War II, a good place to start is the History Vault women’s study module Struggle for Women's Rights: 1880-1990, Organizational Records. This includes financial records, letters, papers, diaries and scrapbooks and more taken from the University Publications of America Collections. Records include those from the National Women’s Party, League of Women Voters and the Women’s Action Alliance, the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor and the correspondence of the director of the Women’s Army Corps. A recent addition are the birth control campaigner, sex educator and nurse Margaret Sanger’s papers.

Three platforms worth exploring, despite being somewhat challenging to navigate, are The Gerritsen Collection, Travel Writing, Spectacle and World History, and North American Women’s Letters and Diaries. The latter contains the first-person experiences of 1,325 women through 150,000 pages of diaries and letters, while Travel Writing, Spectacle and World History brings together hundreds of accounts by women of their travels across the globe from the early 19th century to the late 20th century. A wide variety of forms of travel writing are included, from unique manuscripts, diaries and correspondence to drawings, guidebooks and photographs. The resource includes a slideshow with hundreds of items of visual material, including postcards, sketches and photographs.

Spanning four centuries, The Gerritson Collection draws together content from Europe, the US, the UK, Canada and New Zealand. This archive of books, pamphlets and periodicals on suffrage, women’s consciousness and feminism was originally collected by the nineteenth century Dutch physician and feminist Aletta Jacobs Gerritsen and her husband. Today, the collection contains more than 4,700 publications including a substantive body of material pertaining to anti-suffrage, for example Carrie Chapman Catt's Ought Women to Have Votes for Members of Parliament? (1879) and Anti-Suffrage Essays by Massachusetts Women (1916).

The black and white front cover of The Anti-Suffragist; under the title is the index of contents.
Anonymous : Front Cover; Anti suffragist, devoted to placing before the public the reasons why it is inexpedient to extend the ballot to women. Volume 4, Issue 2 (1912) pg. 0_1. Accessible at the British Library on the e-resource 'The Gerritson Collection'.

This is the tiniest snapshot of the material available via the Library’s electronic resources pertaining to women in the US, but hopefully it demonstrates the wealth of primary and secondary source material that have been collated from archives and libraries around the world and made available through single-access platforms.

Later this month, we will look at the Library's Americas literary e-resources!

Polly Russell, Head, The Eccles Centre

Endnotes:

1. All of the databases referred to here are full-text and need to be consulted on-site at the Library.

14 December 2021

Dystopian Fiction & Long Feminist Histories

This autumn the Eccles Centre has been hosting a series of events and activities for researchers interested in gender and US politics. The programme will conclude with two days of activities this week, including a public, online event exploring the process of communicating women’s history through exhibitions, Staging Women’s History, on Thursday 16 December at 17.00 GMT, which is free to attend and open to all.

In previous events, the group has explored different aspects of the British Library’s collections, including sheet music, poetry, and fiction, which network member, Dr Eir-Anne Edgar, explores in more detail in this post.

In October 2021, thousands came out to protest a restrictive new anti-abortion law in Texas, which allows individuals to sue anyone suspected in assisting in or receiving an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Images of the protests capture the scene – some women in bright pink pussy hats, many protestors armed with homemade signs and banners, and some wearing long red cloaks and large white wimples or bonnets that conceal much of the wearer’s face – the costume made famous by the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale and worn by the Handmaids of the novel’s title.

Mannequin wearing a black dress with red cape and white bonnet.
Homemade ‘handmaid’ Women’s March costume, featured in the British Library’s ‘Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Rights’ exhibition, 2020-21

Culturally, the costumes have come to be synonymous with the oppression of women by a Christian, patriarchal society that restricts women’s political and individual freedoms and punishes rule-breakers with physical and emotional violence. Even more significantly, the costumes represent the bravery and cunning exercised by women who have had enough and push back against oppression, as protagonist June/Offred does, rescuing children and women tormented in Gilead’s society.

Atwood’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, the highly anticipated 2019 novel, The Testaments, captures the zeitgeist of the Trump presidency. Without revealing too many spoilers, readers see Offred’s legacy via the brave actions of a few young women – some in Gilead, some across the border in Canada – as well as a surprising twist from characters familiar to readers from The Handmaid’s Tale. Told in alternating perspectives from three different women, it seems that Atwood is underscoring the way in which women must work together to implement societal change. In particular, The Testaments illustrates the power that narrative has. A secret library, tucked deep in the recesses of Gilead, contains forbidden books that portray “problematic women” who deviate from their social norms. “Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Paradise Lost, Lives of Girls and Women – what a moral panic each one of them would cause if set loose among the Supplicants!” (Atwood, 35).

Inside back cover showing envelop and extra content
Special edition of The Testaments (2019) from Pelee Island Bird Observatory. Inside back cover showing envelop for bonus material.

 

Handwritten list on lined notepaper
Special edition of The Testaments (2019) from Pelee Island Bird Observatory, featuring bonus content, including ‘Aunt Lydia’s Reading List’

These books, like 'The Testaments' itself, have the power to impact culture and society. As Atwood herself has noted, the Trump administration’s attempts to limit the rights of immigrants, women, LGBTQI people, and other members of marginalized groups have inspired her work.

In my research, I examine how dystopian fiction such as Atwood’s novels addresses contemporary feminist political issues and movements, including the #metoo movement and the fourth wave feminist movement’s drive for reproductive justice. Although my project focuses on recent iterations of women’s writing and their corresponding political issues, it is important to note that there is a much longer history of feminist dystopian novels that imaginatively reframe contemporaneous social and political issues. We can also see this in the work of authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose utopian trilogy (written in 1909, 1915, and 1916 – yet not published until the 1970’s) portrays a world without men, one in which women are breadwinners and are able to procreate without men, and emphasizes the necessity of community, education, and the malleability of gender roles. 

Three paperback books on a table
Selected editions of Gilman’s work, left to right: Herland (London: Woman's Press, 1979) General Reference Collection X.909/44756; Herland, The Yellow Wall-paper, and Selected Writings (New York : Penguin Books, 1999) Document Supply m03/42037; The Yellow Wallpaper (London: Virago Press, 2009) General Reference Collection H.2013/.5096

Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” arguably her most well-known story, was re-printed in 1973 by Feminist Press. Originally written in 1892 and, like her utopian trilogy, first published in her periodical The Forerunner, Gilman’s work was “rediscovered” by second wave feminists and struck a chord with a new generation of readers. The Yellow Wallpaper illustrates many 19th century women’s issues, such as the limitations of the domestic sphere, medical treatment for women’s mental and physical health issues, the pressures of motherhood and marriage, and more. For second wave feminist readers, the worlds that Gilman portrays in her work, imagined and real, resonate from the 19th century and into the 70’s, much in the same way that the Reagan-era issues captured in The Handmaid’s Tale reverberate in 2021.

The “Gender and US Politics” group discussed Gilman’s short story and Atwood’s latest novel during a meeting that focused on fiction. Given my current research project, I was very excited to discuss these materials with others. I am one of just a few literature scholars in the group, which is also composed of historians, political scientists, and members of diverse disciplines. Listening to those outside of my expertise was one of the most interesting (and inspiring) aspects of the meeting. For instance, several scholars research suffragism in the US and abroad, and their contributions shed light on new ways of thinking about the literature, particularly in considering Gilman’s work. The opportunity to be part of a transdisciplinary group of scholars with intersecting research interests has helped me “see” the literature I work with in new ways, such as making connections between Atwood’s novels and television adaptation with Gilman’s writing, first published almost one hundred years before. It has also helped me to see how literature resonates over time with readers and how political issues can morph or remain the same, despite the political progress women have made.

****

Dr Eir-Anne Edgar is Associate Professor of Literature in ILU at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. She is currently at work on her research project, Women in the Wastelands: The World-Making of Feminist Critical Dystopian Fiction, which explores the recent explosion of transnational, feminist dystopian novels and the ways in which they “re-make” or “re-see” real-world issues. Though the Wasteland may seem like a strange place to locate hope, this project finds that women authors have long located frustrations with the limitations placed against gender and sexuality within the pages of dystopian and utopian novels.

The Gender and US Politics project, coordinated by Cara Rodway (Eccles Centre) and Robert Mason (University of Edinburgh) is supported by the British Association for American Studies and the US Embassy London.

[Posted by Cara Rodway, Eccles Centre]

 

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