Divided by the Ballot Box: The Montreal Council of Women and the 1917 Election

Prime Minister Robert Borden created the Wartime Elections Act in September 1917 – a move that granted temporary voting rights to women who had close relatives serving in the military. Their votes were positioned as key to winning the war because it was assumed that newly enfranchised wives and mothers would support Borden’s controversial conscription plans to reinforce their husbands and sons at the front. Suffragists across the country were divided by the act’s limited enfranchisement and its connection to conscription. This turmoil reached its pinnacle in Montreal, a city that was at the centre of nationalistic and ethnic strife caused by the war, and triggered rifts within the city’s largest Anglophone women’s organization, the Montreal Council of Women. One result of this tension was the impeachment trial of the council’s long-time president, Dr Grace Ritchie-England, for her criticism of the Wartime Elections Act and conscription during the 1917 federal election. Calling attention to the resistance of and conflicts between middle-class club women who were normally viewed as hegemonically supportive of the war effort widens our understanding of women’s disparate opinions and activism during the First World War and the fragile nature of suffragists” political unity.

“A Superior Kind of Working Woman”: The Contested Meaning of Vocational Education for Girls in Progressive Era Chicago

Progressive Era school officials transformed public education in American cities by teaching male students trades like foundry, carpentry, and mechanics in classrooms outfitted like factories. Historians have demonstrated how this “vocational education movement” was championed by male administrators and business leaders anxious to train the next generation of expert tradesmen. But women also hoped vocational education could prepare female students for industrial careers. In the early twentieth century, members of the National Women’s Trade Union League demanded that public schools open trade programs to female students and teach future working women the history of capitalism and the philosophy of collective bargaining. Their ambitious goals were tempered by some middle-class reformers and club women who argued vocational programs should also prepare female students for homemaking and motherhood. This article uses Chicago as a case study to explore how Progressive Era women competed and collaborated to reform vocational education for girls, and how female students responded to new school programs designed to prepare them for work both in and outside the home.

The Ultimate Home

This chapter analyzes, as a performance text, Michelle Obama’s public persona as first lady. Proclaiming herself Mom-in-Chief, Mrs. Obama embodied a variation of the strong black woman, and her strategies for inspiring others resembled those of black club women of the 1890s and early 1900s. Club women taught other women best practices for caring for their families and homes. They also gave advice about, and considered themselves models for, how best to style one’s hair and dress appropriately. Likewise, Mrs. Obama made deliberate choices about hair, clothes, and overall bodily presentation, and she decorated the White House in ways that continued Jacqueline Kennedy’s legacy but that also acknowledged the hostility hounding her first family because it was not white. [119 of 125 words]

A Dream Becomes a Company

Chapter 6 describes Headen’s successful application of Wood’s “coalition economics” to the automotive industry. Focusing on the Headen Motor Company, which Headen founded in Chicago in 1921, the chapter describes his amassing of a diverse coalition to finance the effort. Attracting investors, black and white, male and female, Northern and Southern, his coalition included business owners, ministers, political figures, journalists, fraternal and civic leaders, club women, and auto racing enthusiasts. Prominent members included national figures Robert S. Abbott, publisher of the Chicago Defender, former Carolina Congressman George Washington Murray, and Florida educator Blanche Armwood Beatty. The chapter also addresses Headen’s emergence as a leading proponent of transportation technologies in the black press; his technological vision; his growing interest in dirt-track racing; and his establishment in 1924 of the Afro-American Automobile Association, a motorist’s support organization.

‘Hockey becomes like a family in itself’: Re-examining social capital through women’s experiences of a sport club undergoing quasi-professionalisation

The community-based sports club is often recognised as a key site for the development of social capital. Intergenerational ties and connections to place can generate a strong sense of identity and can foster practices of psychological and material support. In this sense, community sports clubs can also be seen as an extension of the family. We examine social capital and Ray Pahl’s ‘personal communities’ through an ethnographic study of women hockey players’ discussions about their intimate connections and engagement in family-like practices in an Australian metropolitan field hockey club. Women hockey players’ experiences of family-like bonds are threatened by the drive towards competitive growth and increasing professionalisation as local sporting bodies strive for survival and success. Their narratives reveal experiences of loss and conflicted relationships in the context of these broader structural changes in the club’s organisation and operations. Ultimately, the strength of a local sports club as a site for the development of social capital is called into question as traditional networks are eroded in the drive for growth, professionalisation and economic survival.

Women, Militarized Domesticity, and Transnationality in the U.S. Occupation of Okinawa

After World War II, Okinawa was placed under U.S. military rule and administratively separated from mainland Japan. This occupation lasted from 1945 to 1972, and in these decades Okinawa became the “Keystone of the Pacific,” a leading strategic site in U.S. military expansionism in Asia and the Pacific. U.S. rule during this Cold War period was characterized by violence and coercion, resulting in an especially staggering scale of sexual violence against Okinawan women by U.S. military personnel. At the same time, the occupation also facilitated numerous cultural encounters between the occupiers and the occupied, leading to a flourishing cross-cultural grassroots exchange. A movement to establish American-style domestic science (i.e., home economics) in the occupied territory became a particularly important feature of this exchange, one that mobilized an assortment of women—home economists, military wives, club women, university students, homemakers—from the United States, Okinawa, and mainland Japan. The postwar domestic science movement turned Okinawa into a vibrant theater of Cold War cultural performance where women of diverse backgrounds collaborated to promote modern homemaking and build friendship across racial and national divides. As these women took their commitment to domesticity and multiculturalism into the larger terrain of the Pacific, they articulated the complex intertwining that occurred among women, domesticity, the military, and empire.