This chapter investigates Gwen Harwood’s subversion of gendered presumptions of authorship and style. After discussing her skilful redress of a male-dominant literary culture through hoax poetry, it considers how Harwood mobilised male personae to critique the cultural valuing of science and reason, explore sexual immorality, and address women’s experience of domesticity. It discusses how Harwood celebrated motherhood but was also one of the earliest writers to articulate its associated realities of exhaustion, loss of self, and feelings of despair and rage. The chapter argues that Harwood lays important groundwork for second-wave feminism while representing the ambiguities of care and connection. The chapter also engages with Harwood’s later exploration of death and the dynamic between sex and spirituality.

This chapter examines how, particularly in response to their growing middle-class population, the Inns of Court relied on their architectural spaces and social practices to ensure that all members of the bar embodied the ideal of the gentlemanly professional. In the absence of required classes, the societies stressed fraternization with older generations to inculcate new members with legal knowledge and the values appropriate to British barristers. The societies emphasized affective bonds and tried to cultivate fraternal relationships between their members. Yet in the mid-nineteenth century, the category of gentlemanliness was itself in flux, subject to divergent ideas of who could be a gentleman and how a gentleman should behave. Competing ideas of who belonged at the societies or what counted as gentlemanly behavior could result in unanticipated affective registers, including anger, indignation, and shame.

This chapter accounts for how animals appear in Victorian literature in connection with two overarching themes: shifting definitions of the animal and the human, especially in relationship to racialization and empire, and the incorporation of animals into the political sphere, especially as they proliferate throughout daily life. Both themes offer a productive and foundational lens to analyze the vast representations of animals across Victorian literature, and relate to a variety of other topics such as care and control, domesticity and the family, class and gender, and imperial strategies. Through examining a range of genres, from realist texts and animal autobiography to travel narratives and the literature of empire, this chapter demonstrates how relationships with animals shifted how Victorians saw themselves, their animals, and those across the empire. The chapter argues that texts by authors such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Anna Sewell, Thomas Hardy, Olive Schriener, H. Rider Haggard, Mary Kingsley, and Richard Marsh, among others, illuminate the broader implications of extending political care to animals, controlling them across the empire, and using them to account for human difference through demarcating racial categories and structuring the borders of the human.

This chapter focuses on the cantonment of Rawalpindi and its associated hill station of Murree, where we see working-class and elite ideas about family, respectability, sexuality, and race collide. Across British India, men, women, and children of different classes and races were thrown together in army cantonments. Military policy coded the physical spaces that comprised the cantonment – the Army barracks and civil lines, mess halls and married soldiers’ quarters, bazaars, and red-light districts – as sites of potential dissolution, destructive to British prestige. Thousands of soldiers, officers, camp followers, and army wives passed through these installations. As they did so, they created domestic worlds within militarized spaces. Domestication of military space did not, however, assuage official fears about the destructive potential of a population of non-elite whites, but rather expanded those fears to encompass not only single men but also families and children.

Poverty is a contentious and complex construct, an archetypal “thick” discourse, encapsulating the traces of social, economic, political, and historical struggles. Diverse poverty scenarios past and present all share a gendered core with specific cultural form and meaning. The author argues that gendering, the most powerful technique of social ordering at the heart of modernity, helped launch European poverty discourses and policies into the global orbit. From medieval Europe to the present and following the pathways of “poverty” projects across cultures, gender dynamically draws around itself a changing cloak of corporality, values, dispositions, practices, materialities, and legal regulations. At defining historical moments, these gendered forms became attached to other social arrangements of inequality, like class and race, but also to spatial divisions between “private” and “public” and a temporal contrast between the so-called primitive and civilized. Interventions in the name of Western poverty constructs led to an increasing feminization of poverty and the poor worldwide, woven from perceived attributes of domesticity, dependency, and deviancy.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian fiction dramatizes her reform agenda, which turned on redressing an “unnatural” division back in human history that resulted in the excessively feminine women and humanized men who defined the norm in her own day. Her 1915 novel Herland challenges by flipping traditional gender hierarchies and roles even as it retains while naturalizing other forms of privileged status. Throughout her career, Gilman grounded her politics in the domain of biological existence, initially endorsing the view that natural laws and processes left unimpeded would inevitably work to facilitate the progressively meliorative course of evolution. But the more she became convinced that humans had deviated from this course, the more ardently she advocated for an interventionist, biopolitical approach. By the time she wrote Herland, she was diagnosing a nation’s “health and vitality” based on the extent of degeneracy and impurity she detected in the social body under examination and prescribing drastic cures as needed. Herland thus reveals the author’s conservative tendencies; these increased as she aged and soured on the prospect of sweeping social reform, but they had been there all along, even in her seemingly radical theories of gender.

This chapter traces the influence of second-wave feminist activism, scholarship, and fiction in the US on women’s fiction of the 1990s. The first half examines a selection of literary texts published between the late 1960s and late 1980s that attest to the innovative techniques that women and genderqueer writers developed in this period to articulate feminist ideas, record the movement’s reception by the public, and recuperate aspects of American history long overlooked by a male-dominated academy. The second half turns to two novels by women published at the twentieth century’s close, both of which move between the 1990s and the previous six decades: Whitney Otto’s How to Make an American Quilt and Paule Marshall’s Daughters. The narrative strategies these novels use to challenge universalist accounts of history are revealed. These two novels featuring female protagonists who abandoned PhD projects dismissed as trivial by their white male supervisors are representative of a broader tendency in women’s fiction of the period, which is best approached as a repository for the historiographic narratives rejected by a white male-dominated academy.

The Black press was produced almost exclusively by male writers and editors. Those writers, joined by a small number of women authors, frequently addressed themselves to women readers or took up women’s issues. While the papers often invoked the ideal of Black women leading fulfilled lives in the home, caring for their husbands and children, they also acknowledged that for most Afrodescendants, that ideal was simply unattainable. Writers supported the efforts of Black (and White) domestic workers to organize and achieve the workplace protections enjoyed by industrial and commercial workers.Motherhood was a fraught and frequent topic in the Black press. The papers worried about high rates of illegitimacy and single motherhood in their communities, and enjoined mothers to prepare their children to lead honorable and productive lives.Women’s contributions to the papers offer evidence of Black women's political participation, before and after the advent of female suffrage, and the limits of that participation. Finally, female beauty was a regular topic in the Black press, which offered advice on how to achieve it, public contests to determine who best embodied it, and debate over fashion from the perspective of both morality and women’s equality.

This chapter examines the literary afterlives of white Confederates' household possessions, especially those damaged during military invasion, or degraded by the impoverishment experienced by elite white southerners in the Civil War’s aftermath. It argues that, alongside emancipation's arrival, the military incursion into southern plantations and wealthy households altered the premises of white possession beyond recall. The damaged objects left behind became more than just traces of enemy invasion to the privileged slaveholding women left to pick up the pieces. As these women revealed in their private journals, their own belongings represented a threat to the forms of selfhood and racial pedigree that had defined their antebellum lives. In exploring how ex-Confederate women, writing during Reconstruction, used fiction to reorganize and display their sullied possessions, this chapter outlines a material history integral to the myth of Confederate exceptionalism—a myth more recognizably reified by monuments to the Lost Cause.

Historians and archaeologists habitually describe ancient households as domestic contexts without explaining what the neologism means or how it relates to Greek and Roman household organization. This chapter interrogates the disciplinary usage of the term by exploring how the category of the ‘domestic’ has evolved at the intersection between representations of private life in modern museum galleries and Athenian vase-painting, on the one hand, and normative evaluations of significant and insignificant human action, on the other. A survey of three museum displays (in the Museo Ercolanese, the British Museum and the Getty Villa) reveals a shift in how the domestic sphere was defined, substituting for the models provided by the architecture of European noble estates the home of the Victorian citizen, with its gendered distinctions between private and public. To understand this shift the discussion extends from the factors of industrialization and middle-class consumption foregrounded in social histories of the 19th century to the contemporaneous discovery of non-mythological scenes in Athenian vase-painting as depictions of ‘everyday life’.

This essay describes how the modern cookbook and recipe structure we know today emerges from its adolescent form in the early republic and argues that American notions of “good taste” are foregrounded in a transatlantic economic system. As a textual object, the cookbook functions in a number of registers: it creates a distinct American identity that is based on a value system; it equates eating with virtue and nation-building that develop notions of taste and taste-making; and it is predicated on a transatlantic system of production. Focusing on the ingredient list and accompanying paratextual elements of a recipe can illuminate a broader story of how slave labor in the Caribbean contributes to an early American culinary and cultural identity.

Material culture studies have long incorporated analysis of domestic environments and dynamics of home in shaping culture, rituals of power, and more. This chapter examines the centrality of home, domestic environments, and communal living experiments to understanding people.

Television is an innately Gothic medium, bringing immaterial figures and stories of the horrors of the past and present into the family home. Across the development of television it has engaged with the Gothic in style, technologies and narratives, embracing the medium’s potential to suggest horror, while occasionally daring to embrace the graphic with developments in effects and visual clarity. In this way the Gothic aspects of television have engaged multiple audiences in different ways. Current television particularly presents a gothicisation of history, informing viewers of the traumas of the past through factual and fictional programming, from Who Do You Think You Are? to Peaky Blinders. As this chapter argues, we can therefore find the Gothic not just in the expected places, but throughout the medium of television.

CH 2: Over the course of her fifty-year career writing serial fiction, short stories, and opinion pieces for an array of periodicals, Annie S. Swan repeatedly attempted to reconcile her prolific literary output and her extensive public commitments with a middle-class ideal of domestic femininity. She carefully created distinct authorial personae for each of her major publication venues, shaping both her self-representation and her fiction to address the class and gender of each periodical’s target audience. A comparison of the personae that Swan constructed and the type of fiction she wrote for the People’s Friend, the Woman at Home, and The British Weekly demonstrates how these three periodicals approached the issue of women’s work beyond the home – an issue that was particularly fraught for Swan as celebrity author, wife, and mother. Her most successful role was as counselor and role model to the primarily working-class female readership of The People’s Friend, for whom her fiction served a compensatory function, providing a much-needed escape from their daily toil within and without the home.

Often relegated to a parallel narrative in Frederick Douglass’s biography, family life played an integral role in his political life. He and his first wife, Anna Murray, formed a partnership defying their upbringing as a slave and as a free woman surrounded by slavery. They implicitly claimed citizenship by demanding the integrity and privacy of their free family, contradicting depictions of African Americans in popular culture and contemporary race science. By doing so, they politicized their household as much as when they provided a haven for militants, the self-emancipated, or extended kin in need. Anna and their daughter, Rosetta, navigated roles of domesticity and activism by serving the movement through support of Douglass, but Rosetta especially endured the conflicts between the patriarchal family and women’s rights ideology endorsed by her father. In his widowhood, Douglass further challenged racial definitions of family by marrying a white woman, Helen Pitts.

Modern womanhood was also a cultural project with implications for gender roles and masculinity. This chapter turns to dress as a visual code in the increasingly heterosocial public sphere. The women’s press promoted a model of stylistic progress from head-coverings and loose colorful dresses to makeup and heels, images reiterated in advertisements. Yet fashion catalyzed fears about women’s independence and sexualization as seen in the miniskirt. An iconic 1960s item, the mini provoked controversy around the globe from Greece to France to Tanzania. Attention to the hyper-politicization of women’s dress in the Middle East often focuses on the veil, yet beyond veils or unveiling, scrutiny over women’s dress perpetuated the political and cultural relevance of women’s appearance. The 1960s were also a quintessential decade of student protests, and the politicization of clothing included concerns about men’s appearance as an aspect of men’s behavior. While youthful fashions violated expectations of filial obedience to presidential authority, there was little consensus about the meanings of men’s dress. Adopting an apolitical guise, discussions about fashion in Tunisia’s women’s magazines situated textiles within a future of national industrialization with innovative understandings of style, identity, and authenticity.