Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash: Britain, Ireland and Australia, 1890-1920
Sharon Crozier-De Rosa (Routledge, 2018)
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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.
Contents
Introduction
1. Shaming Unwomanly Women
2. Reversing the Shame of British Colonisation
3. Embarrassing the Imperial Centre
4. Shaming British-Australia
5. War and the Dishonourable British Feminist
6. Shaming Manhood to Embody Courage
7. The Shame of the Violent Woman.
Conclusion
Select reviews
1. Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash (Routledge 2018):
1.1. Mary McAuliffe, Women’s History Review, published online 11 February 2021
‘The transnational nature of this book is fascinating—the centre and the colonial peripheries approach to a gendered history of emotion at a particular and important time in nation formation (on the periphery) or threat to imperialism (at the centre) makes an excellent contribution to feminist historiography of politics, histories of emotions, shame and to the histories of suffrage and anti-suffrage.’
‘The transnational nature of both books will introduce the reader to histories which will serve to broaden and deepen research and understanding. Both books are excellent additions to women’s and gender history, as well as vital readings for our understanding of gender, shame, emotion, memory and memorialisation.’
1.2. Jonathan Shipe, Britain and the World, 14: 2 (September 2021) pp. 193–195
‘Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash, part of Routledge's Research in Gender and History series, occupies a unique place in the existing historiography, bridging numerous, often competing, historical genres... The inclusion of the history of emotions makes this work unique and worthy of further exploration.’
‘The seventh chapter focuses on the ‘Shame of Violent Women’ by exploring how women's violent actions interfered with typical codes of chivalry. The key exploration in this chapter revolves around the idea of a feminist ethics of violence, which is another critical intervention.’
‘This accessible book provides new insight into the fight for suffrage in the early twentieth century…this book would make an excellent addition for scholars interested in this period or advanced undergraduate courses’.
1.3. Pat Thane, Birkbeck College, London, published in Cercles, July 2020
Shame ‘presents a complex and fascinating set of stories…it opens up important questions’.
‘This book explores some previously underexplored dimensions of conservative anti-feminism at a significant historical moment for campaigns for gender equality, gaining from comparisons and contrasts across three related but diverse countries. It focusses upon the deployment in all three of the emotion of shame to defeat those whom women patriotic conservatives believed were betraying their nations.’
1.4. Marian Quartly, History Australia, 17: 1 (2020) pp. 203–204
‘Perhaps the most important contribution of Crozier-De Rosa’s research is to show how the gender order in society rests upon an emotional economy which is particularly resistant to social and economic change.’
‘Crozier-De Rosa does valuable service in bringing these neglected sources to the notice of international women’s history. Her generous use of quotation reveals that the lived world of these women was another country, hard for us to imagine: a world where men’s chivalry was premised upon women’s subordination, colonial subjects were necessarily inferior to those living in the imperial centre, and giving women the vote would bring down the Empire.’
1.5. Charlotte Skeet, University of Sussex, in Women’s History Review, published online 4 October 2019
‘These individual chapters are fascinating in their own right, but the monograph as a whole achieves something more by using the history of this period as a vehicle to convey the complexity of shame as a political tool and an emotion that forges social bonds…I hope someone will be able to write an equally compelling and complex history of the varieties of way that ‘shame’ has been understood and operationalised in our current period.’
The book ‘provides an invaluable contribution to the political context and contemporary debates around the campaigns for women’s suffrage in different geopolitical locations in the early twentieth century.’
1.6. Jane Haggis, LSE Review of Books, 13 February 2019
‘The book explores how shame and its synonyms, embarrassment and dishonour, articulated all three imperial sites of anti-suffrage struggle differently. The result is a history that turns, in compelling detail, on paradox, contradiction and irony.’ ‘As a whole, Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash makes an invaluable contribution to transnational history, the history of emotions and the feminist historiography of politics, not least through its ambition not simply to pursue a history of emotions or add emotion to an existing history, but, to paraphrase Johannes Lang, to incorporate emotion into new histories.’
1.7. Barbara Baird, University of Otago, in Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 49, No. 4 (2018) pp.555-557
‘The book is particularly good at delineating the different positions held by anti-suffragists according to their national context.’ ‘Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash succeeds in its larger aim of demonstrating the contested emotional terrains wrought by the suffrage debates. This telling analysis of three different sites widens our view of the complexity of anti-suffrage sentiments.’
1.8. Fidelma Breen, Hugo Centre for Migration and Population Research, University of Adelaide, in Australian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 18, 2018
‘In Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash Crozier-De Rosa exposes every possible facet of shame – its connection to gendered emotional regimes and honour, its role in ostracising code violators and, therefore, in defining true members of a community as well as the futility of using shaming on those who refuse to acknowledge any wrong-doing.’ ‘How the women in each place varied in the actions they took against their male counterparts in relation to national pride and honour is another fascinating aspect of this book.’ ‘Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash may well be a historical account of suffragist action and feminism, but it remains relevant as contemporary society struggles with inter-feminist shaming and notions of intersectionality where race, sexuality and class can combine with or eclipse gender.’