Shame and the Anti-feminist Backlash

Britain, Ireland and Australia, 1890-1920

• Author(s): Sharon Crozier-De Rosa,
• Publisher: Routledge
• Pages: 259
• ISBN_10: 0415635861
  ISBN_13: 9780415635868
  
• Language: en
• Categories: History / General , History / Europe / Great Britain / General , History / Modern / General , History / Modern / 19th Century , History / Modern / 20th Century / General , History / Social History , Psychology / Emotions , Social Science / Feminism & Feminist Theory , Social Science / Sociology / General , Social Science / Women's Studies , Social Science / Gender Studies ,

Description:...

Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash examines how women opposed to the feminist campaign for the vote in early twentieth-century Britain, Ireland, and Australia used shame as a political tool. It demonstrates just how proficient women were in employing a diverse vocabulary of emotions - drawing on concepts like embarrassment, humiliation, honour, courage, and chivalry - in the attempt to achieve their political goals. It looks at how far nationalist contexts informed each gendered emotional community at a time when British imperial networks were under extreme duress. The book presents a unique history of gender and shame which demonstrates just how versatile and ever-present this social emotion was in the feminist politics of the British Empire in the early decades of the twentieth century. It employs a fascinating new thematic lens to histories of anti-feminist/feminist entanglements by tracing national and transnational uses of emotions by women to police their own political communities. It also challenges the common notion that shame had little place in a modernizing world by revealing how far groups of patriotic womanhood, globally, deployed shame to combat the effects of feminist activism.