Feminism

Beauty contests are frequently dismissed as sexist exploitation which encourage audiences to judge women solely upon their looks. This criticism can be traced back to Women’s Liberation protests at the 1968 Miss America and 1970 Miss World contests in Atlantic City and London, respectively. One former protester recalled that the Miss America contest ‘taught young girls that the important thing in life…was to get a man, to be sexy, to be superficial’.

Such objections continue to be voiced today. Professor June Purvis recently opined that modern beauty pageants cannot be separated ‘from the decades of objectification and sexism that they are originally associated with…It has passed its sell by date’. For critics, Miss World is Miss Exploited, and should be Miss Anachronism.

These claims do hold truth. Contests often idealise highly conservative visions of youthful womanhood. Miss World cannot be divorced or have children. As a fig leaf to equality, neither can Mr England. Contest organisers also exercise extensive control over winners’ images. In 2019, Miss Nevada had her crown taken away for posting right-wing comments online. Likewise, Miss Crimea nearly lost her title for singing a song, perceived to be pro-Ukraine. Beauty queens, then, appear to be constrained by organisers’ desire for the role to be ‘apolitical’.

Yet, contests continue to be wildly popular. In 2019, almost 20,000 women entered the Miss England contest. When asked why they chose to participate, the buzzword refrain of most beauty queens is that they feel ‘empowered’ by competing. It is, however, left unsaid exactly how it empowers them. Taking these contestants seriously, it is worth considering how beauty contests can be perceived as a form of empowerment.

One means of answering this question is to look at one of the first major British beauty contests: the Railway Queen. Established in 1925 and running until 1975, Railway Queens were crowned annually at the Railway Employees’ Carnival at Belle Vue stadium, Manchester. Eligible candidates were daughters, aged between 12 and 16, of unionised railway employees. Wearing full regalia of tiara and velvet robe, Railway Queens served terms of a year performing sundry official engagements: giving speeches, cutting ribbons, and presiding over civic occasions.

The chief duty of Railway Queens was to serve as an ‘Ambassadress of Peace’ for the railway trade unions. After the devastations of the Great War, the Railway Queen advocated that no war could be ‘great’. Their chain of office was symbolic of this. Dubbed the ‘International Chain’, it was comprised of gold links given to each Railway Queen during official overseas visits. It symbolised the uniting of railway employees around the world in an ever-growing ‘chain of peace’.^[1]

During their international tours, Railway Queens undertook the role of diplomatic envoy. In 1935, fourteen-year-old Gracie Jones undertook a five-week tour of North America, travelling from New York to Montreal.^[2] The countless formal gift exchanges, speeches, and ceremonial duties Gracie performed were key to underpinning cordial transatlantic relations between Anglo-American trade unions. These overseas trips were also major media spectacles. When Railway Queen Audrey Mosson visited Moscow in 1936, she was filmed meeting Josef Stalin. This was then projected in cinemas across Britain and the Soviet Union.

Railway Queens’ own voices were palpably heard during such tours. Jones was interviewed by the Washington Post in the United States, where she stated ‘‘I had heard they [Americans] were rude and abrupt but I find them attractive, attentive, and altogether pleasing’.[3] During Railway Queen Ena Best’s 1928 visit to France, she was the only member of the party who could speak French. Alongside her many official speeches, she also had to order everyone’s meals. Railway Queens, then, were prominent trade union ambassadresses who undertook a demanding and skilled diplomatic role. Thus, becoming a Railway Queen was one of the few means by which young, working-class women could participate directly in international politics.

Serving as a beauty queen, therefore, did not reduce winners to objectified ornaments, nor ‘apolitical’ ciphers. For Railway Queens, it was an overtly political platform that enabled working-class women, typically overshadowed, a prominent, active role in transnational trade unionism.

So too, contemporary beauty queens continue to act as spokeswomen for various causes or ideals, whether supporting suicide prevention charities or campaigning for increased smear testing. Some women have even started to use beauty contests as a platform to diversify, even challenge, societal beauty standards. Women of colour participate to show beauty is not exclusively white; others project body positivity as Ms Curvaceous; still others compete without makeup to rail against convention.

Despite the looks-focused nature of such competitions, for many women it is evident that beauty queens are not merely gratuitous objectification. Indeed, for those whose perspectives and identities are otherwise marginalised, competing is a vital means of securing the limelight. Ultimately, where some women decry Miss Anachronism, others see Miss Empowerment.

Conner Rivers Scott is a WRoCAH-funded PhD candidate in the department of history at the University of Sheffield. His doctoral research looks at British inter-war newsreels and their place in everyday life. In particular, this research will examine the ways in which newsreels (re)presented the public to itself between c.1920-c.1939, a time when the public was politically and socially reconstituted. More broadly, his research interests include twentieth-century British gender history, media history, and histories of everyday life.

[1] Daily News (21 Aug 1928), 10; Daily Herald (27 Aug 1928), 7.

[2]The New York Times (20 Jun 1934), p.22; Los Angeles Times (22 Jun 1934), p.5.

[3]The Washington Post (21 Jun 1934), p.12.

Image source: Joseph M. Maurer, ‘Miss Universe 1930 Winners’ (1930), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Miss_Universe_1930_Winners.jpg

During the past eight decades there have often been historical parallels with the Four Powers Conference and the so-called Munich Crisis of September 1938, when Britain, Germany, Italy and France met to decide the fate of Czechoslovakia and acceded to Hitler’s territorial demands for the Sudetenland in a bid to avert war in Europe.Munich—The Edge of War, out on Netflix on 21 January, is not a dramatization of this pivotal event but a work of ‘what if’ historical fiction, based on Robert Harris’s 2017 political thriller. What about the ‘what if’ women of Munich? The vast majority of ruminations about the historical plausibility of the film will focus on the characterisation of the leading great or guilty men. The fictional male leads Hugh Legat and Paul von Hartmann are loosely based on the British A.L. Rowse and the German Adam von Trott, a good deal of poetic licence taken regarding their respective political insights and foresight and their proximity to the centre stage of diplomatic events.

The film aims to be relatable by subtly but no less deliberately framing the strategic and ethical quandaries faced by the appeasers and the would-be-anti-Nazi resistors in ways that will resonate with audiences in our own age of crisis and rising extremism. Indeed, some commentators are comparing the current crisis in the Ukraine to the Munich Crisis.

The portrayal of Neville Chamberlain is nostalgic, highly sympathetic and (perhaps, too) attractive. Jeremy Irons’ Chamberlain is the saviour of peace, the epitome of respectability, good manners and tradition— a striking foil for the current resident of 10 Downing Street, a PM who uses the same austere spaces for, we now know, far less serious business. 

Munich-The Edge of War speaks to modern audiences in other ways too, for instance, with integrated casting (casting without consideration of the actor’s ethnicity). In a similar vein, the filmmakers have worked on what we might call ‘gender-blind’ casting. What I mean by this is creating strong, intelligent, well-informed women characters whose actions have a direct bearing on events. The ‘what if’ genre allows for an attempt to right the wrongs of the very real male-exclusivity and unexamined sexism of interwar diplomacy. 

There are four key but still supporting women characters in the film, serving important symbolic, romantic and dramatic functions. There is Lenya, the German-Jewish friend of both fictional male leads, whose body will eventually wear the marks of Nazi persecution. There is Pamela Legat, the protagonist’s wife, who stands in for British mothers, faced with the terrifying prospect of a war from the air, making wrenching decisions about evacuating children, and looking at this new world through the dehumanizing visor of newly acquired gasmasks. Third, the film takes one of Chamberlain’s typists on a flight of fancy, so to speak. She is given the name Joan Menzies. While women typists did accompany Chamberlain by airplane to the Munich Conference, as far as we know none served overt or covert functions in the negotiations. Fourth, on the German side, there is Helen Winter, widow of a General, holding some kind of administrative ministerial post, and both von Hartmann’s love interest and co-conspirator—the pretty face of German anti-Nazism. 

These token women are all ‘great’ rather than guilty women, with assorted qualities of courage, heroism, pathos, insight and intuition, not to mention sex appeal. They are all variations of the mythical Cassandra, speaking truth to power and issuing predictions about the consequences of the naive acts performed by men. 

To their credit, the filmmakers have included a number of reminders that the Munich Crisis was not an all-male affair in its impact on the population at large. Women are evoked as the ‘millions of mothers’ who will be thanking Chamberlain for saving the peace. Women are extras in the scenes of political protests. An anonymous German girl presents Chamberlain with a bouquet upon his arrival in Munich. Women are a high proportion of the jubilant crowds receiving Chamberlain when he arrives home with the document promising ‘Peace for our time’.  

To avoid giving away the plot, I won’t give any more detail. But in terms of the historical record, some spoilers are called for. Indeed, the main problem with plot devices and the dramatic functions assigned to these women characters is that women just did not have this kind of access to power, certainly not in an official capacity. 

To say that women would not have been able to act in the events as they do in the film is not to say that women were absent from the history, even at the level of high politics and diplomacy. I suspect elements of the life story of Shiela Grant Duff have been mined for the composite heroines. Grant Duff and von Trott developed a close friendship at the University of Oxford in the early 1930s. They fell out over politics when he became a supporter of the Nazi regime, and as a woman she blazed a trail as a foreign correspondent, and expert on and advocate of Czechoslovakia. Her best-selling Penguin Special Europe and the Czechs (1938) was published just days after the Munich Agreement was signed. 

Moreover, a small handful of women MPs from the small group of women who were MPs in the late 1930s were formidable critics of appeasement, including the Independent Eleanor Rathbone, Labour’s Ellen Wilkinson, and Chamberlain-scourge the Conservative Duchess of Atholl who made sure that all British MPs were presented with the unexpurgated translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Other women MPs led from the front as Chamberlain’s fan base, including Conservative MPs Nancy Astor, Florence Horsbrugh and Marjorie Graves, and the political hostess Edith Lady Londonderry. 

Munich—The Edge of War, a brooding and evocative fictionalisation of the Munich Crisis, does a commendable job of writing women into the drama and inviting audiences to take a gender-blind view of the event. It is also a welcome invitation to look more closely and carefully at the historical record, and acknowledge the opportunities as well as the significant constraints real women faced in the 1930s to play the kind of decisive roles created for them in this film.

Julie V. Gottlieb is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield. Her publications include ‘Guilty Women’ (see cover below), Foreign Policy and Appeasement (Palgrave, 2015), and she is co-editor of The Munich Crisis, Politics and the People (Manchester University Press, 2021).

A slightly different version of this blog post was published earlier on The Conversation.

Cover image: Lenya in Munich— The Edge of War, Netflix (2022)

Vita and Virginia

In the summer of 1940, as the German invasion of Britain seemed imminent, Vita Sackville-West sent her most treasured possessions to safety.  Vita was living at Sissinghurst, a grand but now ruined Elizabethan house, in the heart of the Kent countryside. The county was exposed to regular air raids and British soldiers were stationed in Sissinghurst Tower on the lookout for German parachutists. With the fear of invasion hanging over her, Vita sent away her jewels, her will, and a book manuscript. 

While Vita was a celebrated author, the manuscript was not her own. The pages of purple ink were the manuscript of Orlando, given to her in October 1928 by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf. Vita’s son Nigel would later describe the novel as ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’.

Vita and Virginia first met in December 1922, with the latter noting afterwards that she had felt ‘shy and schoolgirlish’ in the presence of the ‘lovely gifted aristocratic Sackville West’. After this meeting their relationship grew, as the two women continued to dine together and write to one another. Vita later noted that whilst they did occasionally ‘sleep’ together, their relationship was more ‘a spiritual thing… an intellectual thing’. 

Virginia was invited to Knole House, Vita’s Elizabethan ancestral home, in the summer of 1924. Virginia was both in awe of Knole and Vita, writing that ‘all those ancestors and centuries, and silver and gold, have bred a perfect body’. The visit inspired Virginia’s Orlando which embodied her love for history, for Knole, and for Vita. 

Orlando

Virginia first started to write Orlando, a novel about a 16th century nobleman who lives for over 400 years and changes biological sex along the way, in March 1927. Virginia’s progressive attitude towards gender is clear in Orlando, as she views gender as a social construct and takes care with Orlando’s pronouns. After his transition she states that ‘for convention’s sake, say “her” for “his”, and “she” for “he”’. It is ‘simple fact’ that ‘Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; [then] he became a woman.’

The character of Orlando was based on Vita, ‘the lusts of [her] flesh and the lure of [her] mind’, her portrait became Orlando’s likeness. Vita, like Orlando, flouted the rules of gender and had many lovers. Her husband Harold Nicolson once commented that ‘I don’t mind who you sleep with, so long as I may keep your heart’. Harold also had his fair share of same-sex lovers. 

Virginia explores same-sex ‘Sapphist’ attraction in Orlando, with the protagonist noting that ‘being of the same sex… [did] quicken and deepen those feelings’ which she felt towards women. 

However, her tone is also wary. Virginia notes that Orlando’s poetry about ‘Egyptian girls’, a verse taken from Vita’s The Land, was risky when she has ‘a husband’ at home. Virginia’s message to Vita is clear, she ‘had only escaped by the skin of her teeth’ as she had put on a wedding ‘ring’ and found ‘a man’.  Homosexual acts between men were illegal, but queer women would be outcast by society and Vita had much to lose. 

The main setting of Orlando is the ‘great’ Elizabethan house, ‘more like a town than a house’, with its ‘halls… galleries… courts… bedrooms’. This house was clearly based on Knole with both houses—the real one and the fictional one—being said to have 365 rooms and 52 staircases. In Orlando, Sackville-West’s ancestral ‘leopards’ appear on the stained-glass windows and Orlando brushes her hair with ‘King James’ silver brush’ which is kept in The King’s Room at Knole. 

While Orlando preserved Vita’s character, it also preserved the essence of Knole for Vita. This was Virginia’s greatest gift to her lover, saving Knole’s soul within the pages of her book. On 28 January 1928 Vita’s father died and the ancestral home passed to Vita’s uncle. Vita couldn’t inherit because she was a woman. The 1000-acre deer park and four-acre house had been Vita’s childhood home. She had ‘loved it; and took it for granted that Knole loved’ her. After her father died, she only had a few days to rule Knole. After that she lost Knole ‘forever’ and faced a ‘turning point in [her] life’. 

One cannot fully comprehend Vita’s loss without visiting Knole in person. Once you enter the gates it takes a few minutes to drive up the winding road to the house. You pass through fields and woodland, all dotted with herds of deer. The house itself is imposing and expansive, with hundreds of grand rooms all furnished with expensive furniture. 

Most significantly the house is packed with Sackville-West heirlooms and portraits. Their wealth and their history bleeds through the walls. The power that Knole holds is palpable. Vita could have lived like a Queen if being a man had not been the key to unlocking Knole. 

Sissinghurst 

In 1930, following her loss of Knole, Vita and Harold purchased Sissinghurst. This was a cluster of derelict Elizabethan farm buildings, two cottages and a tower. When they moved in ‘not a single room was habitable’ but over the years they transformed Sissinghurst into a world-famous English garden and a romantic castle. 

Vita filled Sissinghurst with items from Knole, her bed, her amber flasks from her childhood windowsill, her mirror. Yet, it would be inaccurate to suggest that Sissinghurst simply became a copy of Knole. While both were Elizabethan mansions with a connection to the Sackville-Wests, Sissinghurst became its own entity shaped by Harold and Vita. 

Perhaps in response to Orlando Vita wrote the poem Sissinghurst, dedicating it to Virginia. She wrote of ‘a tired swimmer in the waves of time’ who finds the ‘castle… buried in time and sleep’. Vita painted Sissinghurst in a rose-tinted light, as Virginia had done for Knole. Both used their words to preserve these houses and their love for one another.

Eventually, both Knole and Sissinghurst would meet the same fate and were handed over to the National Trust. At the time Vita was reluctant to hand over her ‘darlings’ but as Orlando notes ‘the house… belonged to time now; to history’. Yet, the combination of the National Trust’s vital conservation and Vita and Virginia’s writing has prevented these houses from slipping under the ‘waves of time’. 

Hannah McCann is a history undergraduate student at the University of Sheffield. She recently completed the Sheffield Undergraduate Research Project which provides undergraduate students with an opportunity to research an area of special interest. In her project she chose to look at how Vita and Virginia’s Queer relationship manifests itself in their literature and at their National Trust Properties. 

Cover Image: Knole House. Photographer: Hannah McCann

In an increasingly interconnected world, the mass media has impacted how many of us perceive ourselves. Growing up in the 2000s, aspects of my own identity have been shaped by my engagement with popular culture as a young girl. Reading magazines such as Girl Talk and Mizz, I developed a gender-based identity defined by popular representations of what it means to be a girl. 

Featuring fashion advice, celebrity gossip, and real-life stories of readers, girls’ magazines of the 21st century are loaded with gender assumptions that mark them as quite different from boys’ reading material. As a historian interested in gender issues, I am drawn to explore how understandings of gender roles have shaped ‘modern’ society and, in particular, how the media has defined gender-based identities in Britain.

It was in the final decades of the 19th century that girlhood began to be regarded as an important stage in life, one with its own distinct culture, located in between, but separated from both childhood and adulthood.^[1] This point of view formed part of a reaction to popular anxieties about ‘modernity’ and its potential to create social and moral disorder, with gender considered a category through which this disorder could manifest itself. The image of the ‘New Woman’, associated with growing independence and new opportunities for women in the 1890s, challenged the accepted ideal that the primary responsibilities of women and girls were in the home. Importance was therefore placed on girlhood, a time during which young women were taught the acceptable boundaries of their gender.

Starting out as a penny weekly in 1880, the Girl’s Own Paper is just one example of the numerous periodicals of the fin de siècle which stressed gender dichotomies to its readers.^[2] As the most popular and longest running periodical of its kind, the Girl’s Own is an important historical source for understanding how modern girls’ culture has evolved.

Containing nonfiction articles, stories, and a regular correspondence section, in its pages the Girl’s Own crafted its own vision of acceptable girlhood. Between 1880 and 1900, several articles in the paper expressed the need for girls to follow the traditional obligations of their sex. Readers were encouraged to live by traditional feminine values and were exposed to advertisements for household products, soaps, sewing materials, and other domestic necessities.^[3]Stories also explicitly warned girls that to follow in the footsteps of the ‘New Woman’ would inevitably lead to unhappy spinsterhood.^[4]

In an ever-growing market of gendered periodicals, however, the Girl’s Own also accepted the need to discuss more progressive ideas on girlhood in order to remain popular with readers. By the turn of the century, an increasing number of informative articles appeared on matters such as higher education and work opportunities. The justification given for such articles was that these were a response to the large number of girls requesting advice on ‘new departures, new training, and new careers’.^[5]

Advertisements for leisure pursuits also allowed for a more ‘modern’ vision of girlhood to be represented. Products were marketed as being suitable for ‘lawn tennis, badminton, and croquet wear’, activities associated with modern representations of girlhood which distinguished fin de siècle girls from older generations.^[6]

In 1890, however, readers were reminded to ‘enjoy your lawn tennis; but remember the obligations of your sex and your self respect’.^[7] This phrasing summarises well the tone used in the Girl’s Own between 1880 and 1900, as traditional ideas on girlhood and femininity were renegotiated alongside the opportunities of modern life. The author cautioning readers to ‘remember [their] obligations’ demonstrated both tolerance for the new opportunities available to girls, such as new leisure pursuits like lawn tennis, and an awareness of the simultaneous opening-up of new educational and professional fields. Nevertheless, it was also stressed that these new opportunities should be enjoyed in moderation. An image of the ideal reader was thus created within the magazine which embodied the Christian, and traditionally feminine values of the magazine’s publisher but which also considered the demands of its readership. 

Many girls engaged in the correspondence of the magazine, and anticipated a reply from their ‘dear, faithful friend’, the editor.^[8] This was yet another way in which the magazine acted as a tool with which its consumers formed understandings of their own lives and of the world around them. Experiences and understandings at such a fundamental life stage—girlhood—shaped the readers’ worldview on their way to adulthood. 

In today’s society, the mass media still acts as a vehicle with which individual identities are shaped and connected. More than a hundred years on, possibilities have increased exponentially, not only through the printed word but also because of the endless opportunities which the internet provides. The rise of social media is reflective of an increasingly globalised society, in which individuals can connect on deeper and more meaningful levels than earlier printed periodicals could provide. Yet, these older forms of communication remain important and relevant sources. They can teach us much about how our society has evolved, and how gender ideals which still exist today have been negotiated and understood in the past.

Laura Neilson is a recent graduate of the University of Sheffield, holding an MA in Modern History. She is particularly interested in gender history, and in making history accessible to the public.

Cover image: Masthead illustration for the Girl’s Own Paper in an 1886 edition. Source: Wikimedia Commons

^[1] K. Moruzi, Constructing Girlhood through the periodical press, 1850-1918 (Ashgate, 2012), p.9; S. Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880-1915 (Columbia University Press, 1995), pp.1-3.

^[2] D. Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Routledge, 2013), p.18.

^[3] “Multiple Classified Advertisements”, Girl’s Own Paper, 3rd September 1881, p.3.

^[4] “Varieties”, Girl’s Own Paper, 6th October 1894.

^[5] Lily Watson, “What is the London County Council doing for Girls?”, Girl’s Own Paper, 27th February 1897, p.4.

^[6] “Multiple Display Advertisements”, Girl’s Own Paper, 3rd January 1880, p.4.

^[7] S.F.A Caulfield, “Some Types of Girlhood; or, Our Juvenile Spinsters”, Girl’s Own Paper, 4th October 1890, p.5.

^[8] “A Dip Into the Editor’s Correspondence”, Girl’s Own Paper, 16th June 1883, p.6.

In October 2016, Donald Trump created an unprecedentedly hostile-feeling presidential debate by following his opponent, Hilary Clinton, around the stage, looming over her and scowling as she spoke.  For many women watching the debate, the image of a large, unqualified candidate hovering behind an accomplished stateswoman as she attempted to speak knowledgeably to her audience was a familiar intimidation tactic. Using his height, imposing posture, scowling visage, and bravado, Trump projected aggressive power, playing on assumptions and biases about gender. Earlier, Trump had also attacked the masculinity of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s competitor in the race for the Democratic nomination. Trump claimed that Bernie was weak for allowing protestors to interrupt his speaking engagements, specifically when he let two women speak in front of him at his own rally.

As a historian of Jewish masculinity, watching the candidates announce in 2015 I did not think I would have any particular professional insight into the 2016 election or the following four years of Trump’s presidency. I was not expecting the combination of absurd obstreperousness and flagrant antisemitism of Donald Trump and his supporters, which made me feel I was living in a stress dream trapped inside my own historical manuscript. Trump demonstrates, in the image he projects to the public, the most heavy-handed displays of white masculinity imaginable. In addition, his attacks on his opponents are pointedly gendered, implying weakness and femininity in contrast to his own projected virility and bravado. And this approach appeals to his support base, consisting of both men and women, who cringe at new and more expansive views of gender and its role in American society.

Throughout Trump’s political rise, I was researching a book on Jewish masculinity in America in the twentieth century.  One of my core arguments is that Jews have attempted to acculturate in American society by changing the perceived image of Jewish men to better embody the American masculine ideals cultivated over the previous centuries. Despite these efforts, differences in perception of levels of manliness lingered. The most notable change in these perceptions has been growing since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, as Jewish Americans embrace (and at times, revel in) the reflected manliness of Jewish military victories in the Middle East. This is particularly the case of American Jews coming of age during or born after the Six Day War in 1967.  Bernie Sanders, however, embodies the more classic, continuing perceived difference in masculinity which has been maintained between Jewish and white American men throughout the twentieth century. A New York Jew, Sanders participated with many other young Jews in the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, and considers his Judaism a link to a past of oppression, far more than a path to Zionism and Israeli strength. Sanders, as a child of the Holocaust survivor generation (though his father left Poland before Hitler invaded) identifies with a Jewish past that feels connected to a long history of oppression and recognizes the need to support other oppressed peoples. 

By contrast, younger generations of American Jews, like Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, identify more with the international image of Israeli strength and self-protection than with the history of oppression which defined earlier generations. As a staunch defender of Israel, Trump himself courts Evangelical Christians, helping to cement Israeli-American relations while damaging Arab-American relations in the process, as well as, according to the Evangelicals, assisting to usher in the End of Days.^[1]  He praises Israel for its toughness, its defense, and its aggression.  Trump himself is not anyone’s definition of the American masculine ideal.  He is out of shape, non-athletic, avoided military service, and lacks dignity, humility, and generosity—necessary components of most iterations of ideal American manhood.  And yet he is praised by supporters, largely white working-class men, which is the demographic segment of society perhaps most outspoken about what a man should be.  According to a feature from the American Psychiatric Association, white, middle-class masculine ideology is “built on a set of gender norms that endorses features such as toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors.”  Admittedly, Trump indeed exhibits some of these behaviors, but he does so to their unmanly extreme.  His dominance becomes bullying, his self-reliance becomes isolationist, and his overt heterosexuality makes him an aggressive sexual predator. Why his support base of white men, confident and proud in their definition of masculinity, do not find his heavy-handed donning of their ideals (like a sort of white-heterosexual-drag) insulting is one of the most mysterious aspects of his support.

Playing to his base, who do, in fact, revel in his manifested hyper-masculinity, Trump attacks his adversaries one by one, giving them childish nicknames like a schoolyard bully.  He has dubbed opponents “Wild” Bill Clinton, “Cheatin’ Obama,” “Sleepy Joe” Biden, Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren, “little” Adam Schiff, “mini” Michael Bloomberg, “cryin’” Chuck Shumer, and “little” Jeff Zucker.  The last four, all diminutive/emasculating titles, are used to refer to Jews.  These nicknames jump out at me, as part of a continuing tradition of emasculating Jewish men.  It is only when Trump is speaking directly to groups of Jews that he abandons the attack on their manhood, though he certainly isn’t flattering.  In fact, when he is speaking about Israel, or to American Jews who support Israel, he assumes the hypermasculinity associated with the Jewish state. Trump told a room full of American Zionists in Hollywood, for example, that he knew Jews in business, and that they were “brutal killers, not nice people at all.”

Trump’s insults aside, it is worth recognizing that his rhetoric is not merely sexist or chauvinist, that his disrespect for women is not the core of his sexist language. Rather, he is on a constant mission to prove his masculinity, his vitality, his rigor, his strength, and even his physical manhood. If we take it for granted that one of Trump’s largest motivations for his unprepared statements and insults is his desperate need to prove his masculinity, his actions make fractionally more sense, even if they are still shocking and inscrutable. His rhetoric also serves as a reminder to those of us who follow such things, that in spite of his support for Israel and praise of Israeli hyper-masculine identity and politics, the kneejerk return to emasculating language when insulting or rebuffing a Jewish male opponent is ever-present.

Miriam Eve Mora is a historian of American Immigration and Ethnicity, Jewish America, Gender, the Holocaust, and Genocide. You can find her on Twitter @MiriamEveMora

Cover image: Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo by Gage Skidmore (29 October 2016)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Donald_Trump_(30354612000).jpg

^[1] For more on the Evangelical connection, see Till Kingdom Come, a new documentary by Maya Zinshtein. https://www.docnyc.net/film/til-kingdom-come/?fbclid=IwAR0L-Q5d5qsZX04m-WZHBabzagkBrw_P4rRjcQu3Dt4SAGMheYwsIToAyR4

‘Journalism is the first draft of history’ is a maxim amongst journalists. But as networking, campaigning, and training organisation Women in Journalism points out on its website, that draft of history too often excludes female points of view.

Evidence shows that while some women are working at senior levels in broadcast journalism, newspapers are lagging behind, with just 25% of news stories on front pages of national newspapers in Britain written by women, and only eight national newspapers employing female editors.

Run from Nottingham Trent University by Dr Catherine Clay and Dr Eleanor Reed, ‘Time and Tide: Connections and Legacies’ is a year-long project, publicising the ‘draft of history’ laid down by the influential and long-running feminist magazine Time and Tide. Founded in 1920 by Welsh businesswoman and feminist Lady Rhondda, this weekly review of politics and the arts was the only woman-controlled publication of its kind, competitive with the New Statesman. Time and Tide hosted contributions from many of the period’s leading political and literary figures, among them Vera Brittain, E. M. Delafield, Cicely Hamilton, Winifred Holtby, Rose Macaulay, George Bernard Shaw, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West, Ellen Wilkinson, and Virginia Woolf. During the interwar decades it was a beacon for feminism, a platform for women’s writing (both ‘high’ and ‘middlebrow’) and – as a leading ‘journal of opinion’ – offered perspectives on international as well as national politics from many of the most significant feminist thinkers and public intellectuals of the day.

Central to ‘Time and Tide: Connections and Legacies’ is a dedicated website, timeandtidemagazine.org. Alongside information about the magazine’s history, this website’s star attraction is a free, downloadable Souvenir Edition of Time and Tide, edited by Dr Clay and produced by Nottingham-based publishers Five Leaves Publications. Showcasing selected articles from interwar issues of Time and Tide and replicating as closely as possible the layout and fonts used by the original magazine, the Souvenir Edition gives contemporary readers a taste of its interwar content. This includes a discussion of ‘old’ and ‘new’ feminism by Winifred Holtby, observations on Nazism by Cicely Hamilton, short stories by E. M. Delafield and Marghanita Laski, poetry by Naomi Mitchison and Eleanor Farjeon, reviews of books, theatre, music and film by some of Time and Tide’s regular staff writers (among them Christopher St. John, Sylvia Lynd, Mary Agnes Hamilton and Theodora Bosanquet)  and ‘Our Men’s Page’ – a glorious send-up of the ‘women’s pages’ that appeared in popular publications at the time.

This content sits alongside advertisements for corsets, dressmaking silk, and magazines targeting professional women and feminists, which together invoke the complex, multifaceted identities represented by what was (during its early years) the magazine’s predominantly female readership. In her brilliant Foreword to the Souvenir Edition, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee draws out the connections between past and present: ‘A hundred years ago might seem an age away, and yet here women’s writings leap fresh from these pages, their causes all too familiar today.’

Giving context to the Souvenir Edition, the website hosts a timeline charting Time and Tide’s interwar history, and biographies of some of the key figures who directed and/or edited the magazine: Lady Rhondda, Helen Archdale, Rebecca West, Cicely Hamilton, Winifred Holtby, E. M. Delafield, Theodora Bosanquet, and Professor Winifred Cullis. Both timeline and biographies are illustrated with artwork and other visual material from the period, including a wonderful photograph of Lady Rhondda marching alongside Emmeline Pankhurst at the Equal Rights Political Demonstration of 1926, and a Time and Tide Christmas card from the 1930s, showing the magazine’s offices in Bloomsbury. This visual content brings the magazine and its female producers vividly to life, and enriches our sense of the era in which it was produced.

Throughout 2020, the website will be updated regularly. New biographies will introduce more of Time and Tide’s key figures, and we will be inviting blog posts from trainee women journalists in response to the Souvenir Edition. These posts will offer fresh insights into the magazine from diverse perspectives, and explore its relevance today. The website will also host resources for teaching and research: these will include film footage, of speakers and panellists at a Festival of Women Writers and Journalists, to be held in London and/or online in November 2020. Other exciting content will include highlights from an Exhibition of Interwar Women’s Magazines, to be hosted by The Women’s Library at the London School of Economics between January and April 2021. Details of the Festival and Exhibition, and future planned events, will be available on the website.

Today, in a media industry that continues to value women’s appearance more highly than their opinions, Time and Tide’s marketing slogan – ‘Time and Tide tells us what women think and not what they wear’ – still resonates strongly. To discover what this fascinating magazine can teach us about our present as well as our past, visit timeandtidemagazine.org.

You can also follow ‘Time and Tide: Connections and Legacies’ on Twitter: @timeandtidemag1

Dr Eleanor Reed is Project Officer for Time and Tide: Connections and Legacies. She is an early career researcher, specialising in early-mid twentieth-century domestic magazines. If you would like to find out about her research, you can read her chapter about ‘Lower-middle-class domestic leisure in Woman’s Weekly 1930’ in British Women’s Writing, 1930-1960: Between the Waves (edited by Jane Thomas and Sue Kennedy, Liverpool University Press). You can also find her on Twitter @ViolaChasm.

Cover image: Page from the Souvenir Edition of Time and Tide. Reproduced by kind permission of Five Leaves Publications.