Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter-Writing, 1750û2000

by Bland,Caroline

• ISBN13: 9780754638513
• ISBN10: 0754638510
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-05-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Letter writers have frequently articulated both the personal politics of the daily routine and the political views of individuals who witness or participate in dramatic events. In addition, letters can be an unusually revealing record of the relations between men and women. The three-dimensional relationship of politics, gender, and letters for the first time receives sustained attention in this volume, in which the gendered nature of political literacy is revealed over a 250-year period. Ranging wide in terms of subject matter and geography, the contributors examine correspondence from the famous and the unknown, the political prisoner and the political militant, while the writers are shown pondering familial concerns and providing political commentary on the effects of war or revolution on everyday life. Among the impressive group of international scholars are Jim Allen, Clare Brant, Edith Gelles, Jane Rendall, and Si'n Reynolds.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	vii
Acknowledgements	xi
PART I: 1750-1850: EPISTOLARY CONNECTIONS IN ENLIGHTENMENT AND REVOLUTION
1 Gender Politics: Breathing New Life into Old Letters
Máire Cross and Caroline Bland	3	(12)
2 'The Tribunal of the Public': Eighteenth-Century Letters and the Politics of Vindication
Clare Brant	15	(14)
3 Parenthood and Gender Roles as Seen in Diderot's Correspondance
Ursula Yvonne Roberts	29	(14)
4 Deconstructing Gender: Heru-iette's Correspondence with Rousseau
Anne-Françoise Gilbert	43	(12)
5 Third Person Singular: the Liberation of the Marquise de Sade, 1789-1790
David McCallam	55	(12)
6 'Remember the Ladies': Politics in the Letters of Abigail Adams
Edith B. Gelles	67	(10)
7 'Friends of Liberty & Virtue': Women Radicals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1789-1848
Jane Rendall	77	(16)
8 The Correspondence of a 'Sister in Humanity'
Máire Cross	93	(22)
PART II: 1850-2000: CORRESPONDENCE IN TIMES OF TRIAL
9 Requests, Complaints, Demands. Preliminary Thoughts on the Petitioning Letters of Lower-Class Austrian Women, 1865-1918
Christa Hämmerle	115	(20)
10 A History in Letters: the Allemane Family's Letters During and After the Paris Commune, 1871-1880
Sian Reynolds	135	(12)
11 Across the Divide: a Correspondence During the Dreyfus Affair
David H. Walker	147	(14)
12 The Gendered Politics of Correspondence: the Curious Case of Celine Renooz, 1840-1928
James Smith Allen	161	(12)
13 Reading Between the Lines. Letters to Eleanor Keeling Edwards, 1890-1900
Krista Cowman	173	(12)
14 More than Just `a Sporting Couple': the Letters of a Militant Marriage
June Balshaw	185	(16)
15 Slinging the Ink About: Ellen Terry and Women's Suffrage Agitation
Katharine Cockin	201	(12)
16 'In Great Haste': the Personal and Political in the Letters of F.W. Stella Browne (1880-1955), Feminist Socialist Sex Radical
Lesley A. Hall	213	(12)
17 'In Case the Worst Comes to the Worst': Letters home from Berlin, 1942-1945
Caroline Bland	225	(16)
18 Constructing Identities and Remembering Fascism: the Published Letters of Elisabeth Langgasser
Joanne Sayner	241	(12)
19 Corresponding in the Sex and Gender Revolution: Desire, Education and Feminist Letters, 1970-2000
Margaretta Jolly	253	(18)
Index of Proper Names	271