Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash

Britain, Ireland and Australia, 1890-1920

Sharon Crozier-De Rosa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415635868
• eBook ISBN: 9781136200731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 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
• Bibliography
• Index