Call for Papers: Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls

Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls Conference
13-15 June 2012, The University of Melbourne, Australia
(PDF of Call for Papers poster)

Settler colonies and colonies of occupation, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Ireland, South Africa, and the Caribbean, held out the possibility for girls to experience freedom from, and the potential to reconfigure, British norms of femininity. ‘Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls’ seeks to draw together international scholars for a multi-disciplinary examination of how colonial girlhood was constructed, and redefined, in both British and colonial texts and cultures. Since girlhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries extends from childhood to the age of marriage, it represents a complex category encompassing various life stages and kinds of femininity, as well as differences based on class and race.

Colonial girls occupy an ambivalent and sometimes contested position in British and settler societies, They are sometimes seen as a destabilizing force that challenges conventional expectations of girls or as a disruption that can, and must, be contained. The emergent writings of British-born settlers about and for girls, which were usually published in England, contribute a further degree of complexity to the developing picture of the colonial girl. These texts both perpetuate and occasionally challenge British imperial and gender ideologies, reflecting loyalties torn between “home” and new dominions.

Across national boundaries, the malleability of colonial girlhoods is evident. In British print culture, Indian girls were often represented as victims of an unenlightened culture that offered poor educational opportunities, and Irish girls were frequently ‘hot-headed’ and untamed. In each national context, the workings of colonialism produced different models of idealised girlhood, from which Indigenous girlhoods were often marginalised.

Crucially, the Empire itself was in a state of dramatic flux across what is often called Britain’s “imperial century”. The Empire grew substantially in size and in population in the nineteenth century and its expansion was integral to eventual movements toward independence for white settler societies. Imaginings of Empire and girlhood are both subject to radical change across the century, and reading the intersections and synergies in these transformations will prove mutually illuminating

Scholars from Art History, English, Cultural Studies, History, Indigenous Studies, Education and cognate fields are invited to submit proposals that engage with any aspect of the intersection of British colonialism and girlhood in the period 1815-1930. Papers may be inspired by, but are certainly not limited to, the following themes:

• colonial girls as representative of British imperial ideals
• tensions between imperial and national/colonial identities
• the circulation of feminine ideals between colonies
• print culture and the development of gendered colonial ideals
• Indigenous girlhoods
• coming of age in the colonies
• colonial life as a threat to girlhood
• girlhoods and evolving nationalisms
• British representations of colonial femininity
• class and labour in the colonies
• the imagined role of colonial girls in the British Empire

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical statement to Dr Michelle Smith: msmith@unimelb.edu.au and Dr. Kristine Moruzi: moruzi@ualberta.ca by 15 September.

WWII Motorbike Daredevils

British Pathé has an amazing collection of film footage from the 1890s onward online and available to view free of charge. There is not much present from before the turn of the century, which is both logical and sad, yet there is a real treasure trove of newsreel footage that brings the period to life in a way that printed sources can't quite achieve. The clip above from 1944 shows girls training for the National Fire Service as despatch riders. Of course, they're not usurping male roles because it's war time, and they're still feminine because they don't neglect the styling of their hair.

British Library Rare Book Finds

I've just returned from a 3-week long jaunt around the world that included stops in Frankfurt, London, Winnipeg, Leipzig and Munich. In that order too, which meant a crazy loop of the globe in the middle of the already unbearable Australia to Northern Hemisphere journey.

In London, I had a brief stint at the British Library, a wonderland for researchers interested in somewhat ephemeral texts like Victorian girls' books. As the BL was a copyright library, the odds are that they hold one of every book commercially published in the United Kingdom. So where that frivolous, childish book of no account was thrown out, read to ruin or simply deemed unworthy of archiving elsewhere, one, usually-untouched copy, is usually hidden away in the St Pancras vaults.

For my current project on colonial girlhood, I wanted to see if I could find any books and magazines for British children about the colonies. I was congratulating myself for my sheer awesomeness in merely typing some terms into the catalogue when it returned the result, "The Child's Empire Annual" (1912). When I opened the book, I saw the amazing frontispiece pictured above. We have drovers running sheep in Australia, snow capped peaks in Canada, the astonishing Taj Mahal and an African tribe glancing out at the reader, prefiguring The Gods Must Be Crazy by 70 years. This was going to be it in showing British attitudes to Empire for children. Strangely, the volume, and the subsequent ones I looked at, made nary a mention of the countries of Empire. There were a few token references in the first volume, so as to live up to the title, but it seemed that the idea of an Empire annual was more important than the practice. Unless the idea was that the children of the Empire should read the annual?

The story was the same for The Empire Annual for Girls (1909), whose cover featuring heart-shaped topiary intimated how little rough-and-ready content the book would contain.

The Girl's Realm was an amazing magazine for girls that was published from 1898 (you can read a whole article about it in relation to the Boer War here). In comparison with the Girl's Own Paper, it is so much more progressive and interested in girls' lives beyond the home. Perhaps, as my scholarly friend and author of the above article, Kristine Moruzi, suggested, this is explained by the 18-year distance in its debut in comparison with the first edition of the GOP, but it was exciting to come upon lengthy articles with photographs of girls in New Zealand and Australia from 1899/1900. Not only that, but they included Aboriginal and Maori girls within them!



There's also room in the magazine for a story by boys' adventure fiction writer G.A. Henty in 1901 called "A Frontier Girl: A Tale of the Backwood Settlement". It features two illustrations of the heroine, Mary, boldly wielding a rifle. She can shoot "with a skill equal" to her father, and no wonder that's she's perfected her aim with all the "Indian attacks" that are crammed into the tale's five pages.

Child Beauty Pageants Down Under

I had an article published in The Age yesterday about the ways in which women are judged on their appearance. I aimed to connect two superficially unrelated things, SlutWalks and the upcoming protests about American-style child beauty pageants arriving in Australia.

After I'd finished the initial draft of the piece, an item kept popping up on the news about a woman in the United States who had apparently injected her 8-year-old daughter with Botox. It seemed like a perfect, though rare, example of actual physical abuse related to pageants, like the videos that had been circulating of a woman waxing her young daughter's eyebrows for a pageant.

The next development reported on Good Morning America was that the girl's mother, "Kerry Campbell", was being investigated for cruel treatment of her daughter, Britney, and that the child had been removed from the family home. Recalling such fame-seeking lows as the "balloon boy" hoax, "Kerry" is actually Sheena Upton, a woman who claims not to know what Botox is.

The revised story has it that Sheena was paid by the tabloid The Sun to fabricate her tale of taking to her daughter's "wrinkles" with Botox. For what ended up being a fairly extensive media blitz, she received a paltry $200 from the paper, but I believe far more from the television programs who eagerly interviewed her, curious to speak with a mother who caused pain to her daughter in the pursuit of beauty.

In response, Jezebel suggests that our instincts should have told us that no mother would really have hurt her child in this way. It should, perhaps, have been obvious that this was a hoax. If it is the case that The Sun has a recent history of fabricating other stories along these lines, I wonder why this is. What kind of popular desire are these invented tall-tales about syringe-wielding mothers filling?

Though the landscape changes with this particular story with each day, making it hard to attempt any kind of analysis, it seems much like we want to believe that pageant mothers will go to any lengths to have their daughters be recognised as winners. The Sun, which is alleged to have staged the hoax, is a British tabloid. Perhaps both Britons and Australians are eager for stories that provide support to their scepticism about American-style child beauty pageants and fabricated stories like this are seen to meet a desire to tar pageant mothers as so competitive that there is no line that they will not cross?

It does not seem too far-fetched to imagine that if a mother is willing to spend thousands of dollars on a pageant dress, insert false teeth into her daughter's mouth, wax her legs, have her photos retouched and perhaps most offensively of all, have her learn a song like "Cutie Patootie" that she might go one step further and inject her with Botox. It seems patently ridiculous that an 8-year-old would have any discernible "wrinkles" to speak of, but so many other standard elements of American beauty pageants for girls seem similarly unthinkable to me that it is indeed hard to know when you're being taken for a ride.

The Royal Wedding and the Princess Myth

I've been a one-woman media blitz today commenting on the Royal Wedding and princess culture for girls. The video above is from a TV spot on ABC's News Breakfast program. And here is an article in The Conversation that allows me to say what I really mean without the pressure of live-to-air television.

Yesterday I did an interview on Life Matters for ABC Radio and you can hear the audio at this link. It's a shame there's not a Royal wedding more often as I'm finally getting the hang of talking about it. I'm actually amazed that Australians are so interested in it, given our usual blase attitude to the monarchy. Then again, we have wrangled Fitzy and Dame Edna into the commentary so it's not exactly reverent adoration.

Because I am a Girl

It's ANZAC day here in Australia. I do tear up a little thinking of the boys and young men who volunteered to fight without really knowing what they had gotten themselves into, or of those who were conscripted and had no say in the matter at all. It's worthwhile to have a day to reflect on the horrors of war and on the impact it has made on each individual who chose to participate or who were forced to take part. I always find the day to provide the perfect answer to why we should avoid armed conflict, rather than finding that it glorifies the concept of war, though I know the ANZAC mythology has been misused at times.

Plan International has been running a major international campaign, "Because I am Girl", for several years now and they're currently lobbying the United Nations to make 22 September International Day of the Girl. While women have aided in armed conflicts as nurses and combatants, ANZAC day is largely about men's involvement in war. International Women's Day is cause for us to reflect on what women have achieved in fighting for equal rights to vote and to work, and on the continued struggle for broader equality. A day to reflect on what it means to grow up as a girl in the developing world seems like a real priority at this moment. The struggle for girls' and women's welfare is more urgent in the developing countries where they are more likely to be malnourished, uneducated, afflicted with HIV, married young or sexually exploited.

The 2010 Plan report on the state of the world's girls reminds us that the problem is not only confined to rural communities. Cities are also inhospitable places to girls and the cities of the developing world see five million more people added to them each month. While this rapid growth means the threat of violence in the street and slums increases, it also holds out some hope for improvement as city girls are more likely to attend school, have better access to health care, and to be able to enjoy their girlhood for a longer period without being married before they have had the chance to mature.

Astonishly, during the 2010 Street Child World Cup girls who had lived in shelters and on the streets in the UK, Tanzania, South Africa, the Philippines, Brazil and Nicaragua developed their own manifesto to lobby those in power. All seem like reasonable demands that we should feel more global responsibility to ensure:

"We the street girls have the following rights and we want them respected:
The Right to live in a shelter and home
The Right to have a family
The Right to be safe
The Right to be protected from sexual abuse
The Right to go to school and get free education
The Right to good health and access to free health services
The Right to be heard
The Right to belong
The Right to be treated with respect and decency
The Right to be treated as equal to boys
The Right to be allowed to grow normally."

So many girls have seen and endured things that rival the sufferings of soldiers in combat. Why don't we remember them too?

Glamour: Women, History, Feminism by Carol Dyhouse

There are two kinds of academic book. The kind you borrow from the library because you are researching a topic and just have to have some kind of authoritative quotation on ‘x’, for which you trawl the index, find your relevant term, persevere with the whole chapter to understand the context, and then move on. And then there is the kind that you willingly spend your own money on, with the express intent of reading it from cover to cover for *gasp* enjoyment. I’m guessing most people find the majority of academic monographs to fall into the first category. I’ve had a good run lately of two books read from beginning to end for leisure, Carol Dyhouse’s history of glamour and Marah Gubar’s history of children’s literature. I’ll leave Gubar for a subsequent post.

Carol Dyhouse was unfairly reduced to a name in my dissertation bibliography until I saw Glamour: Women, History and Feminism in a Zed Books catalogue. She has published several books on women and education, as well as the must-cite-in-literature-review Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Feminism and the Family in England, 1890-1939.

Dyhouse teases out what glamour encompasses, which she argues is not simply beauty or what is fashionable. Glamour speaks “of power, sexuality and transgression” (3). The fascinating first chapter on the origins of glamour shows its movement from a term referring to witchery to draw in ideas of the exotic. Advertisements from 1920s periodicals beautifully complement Dyhouse’s narrative, showing the allure of the orient. For instance, Shem-el-Nessim (The Scent of Araby) suggests “Oriental luxury”, while Wana-Ranee (The Purfume of Ceylon) “distinguishes the woman of taste”. The opening chapter also introduces one the central threads of the story of glamour: the rise and fall of women’s obsession with fur as a sign of luxury.

Glamour then zooms in on the popularisation of glamour on the silver screen, noting a return to shapely figures in the 1930s “with three sets of twin heart-shaped curves: lips, bosom, behind” (38). Cosmetics, and even cosmetic surgery, were integral to carefully constructing the illusion of glamour, along with an attitude of sexual confidence. Dyhouse also considers how British girls and young women were influenced by movie star fashion and lifestyle in magazines such as Girl’s Cinema, Women’s Filmfair, Film Fashionland and Picturegoer. And who said the obsession with the lives of celebrities was a recent phenomenon?

The book reads changes in perceptions of glamour alongside major historical transformations, such as that provoked by the Second World War with the emergence of the “New Look” (“a last look at a vanishing conception of femininity” (83). She also brings class differences to bear in her analysis, especially in considering the differences in how girls would be introduced into society and groomed for womanhood. Dress showed class credentials and gradually the dissolution of formal, matronly dress at the end of the 1950s (formerly a marker of appropriate class membership) allowed girls to wear more youthful clothing.

The sweep through the second half of the twentieth century is equally grounded in social change from beauty pageants to women in the boardroom and grunge. Perhaps revealing my own “period bias”, I was most intrigued by the first two chapters grounded in the 1920s and 1930s, yet the story that Dyhouse has to tell is a must-read from beginning to end in the same way as a gripping novel.

Sometimes popular reads dispense with scholarly rigour, but Dyhouse’s meticulous research is thoroughly detailed in her extensive notes and is evident in the wonderful examples she teases out. I was compelled to look up Evening in Paris perfume, created in 1929 by Bourjois, after reading that it still evokes vivid memories in the women who once wore it as young glamorous things, especially during World War Two. The sites that sell rare, unopened bottles of the scent show that one generation’s concept of glamour remains with them forever, even while ideals of femininity shift around them. Should we be stashing away Jean Paul Gaultier’s “Classique” in its corseted female torso bottles now in preparation for 2070?