Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

‘Woman’s Work’? What Debates about Policewomen in the Inter-War Period Tell Us about Contemporary Understandings of Sexual Violence

‘It’s a woman’s work.’ With these words, a 1939 leaflet encouraged women to join the Metropolitan Women Police, which at this point had existed for twenty years. While one of the photos in the brochure shows female officers learning self-defence, other pictures emphasize more gender-conformist tasks: a photo of a female officer comforting a child is captioned ‘Her first job’.1 Louise A. Jackson’s 2006 book on the history of female police officers in the UK has commented on their ambivalent position between welfare work and policing.2 Jackson has shown that the decision to recruit female police officers in the early twentieth century was influenced by the contemporary idea that victims of sexual assault should give their statements to women. According to her, the difference female police officers made was ‘structural rather than ideological’, as they operated on the basis of prejudices towards complainants of sexual violence that were similar to those of their male counterparts.3 Instead of discussing the practices of policewomen, however, my blog post focuses on the debates about the nature of their employment, as well as that of female doctors, and asks what these reveal about contemporary understandings of sexual violence and victimhood.

Graphic illustration of the head of a policewoman in profile, with Trafalgar Square in the background, under the headline 'It's a woman's work'.

Fig. 1: Leaflet: ‘It’s a Woman’s Work’. Courtesy of The Women’s Library at LSE, 4NVA/4/06/11

Continue reading ‘Woman’s Work’? What Debates about Policewomen in the Inter-War Period Tell Us about Contemporary Understandings of Sexual Violence
  1. The Women’s Library at LSE (hereafter TWL), 4NVA/4/06/11, Leaflet: ‘It’s a Woman’s Work’, 112 WP, The Metropolitan Women Police. A Career for Women (June 1939). []
  2. Louise Jackson, Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2006). []
  3. Louise Jackson, Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2006). P.171 []

An Intellectual Sufi between Empires: Muhammad Tawfīq al-Bakrī (1870–1932)

Public performance of the dawsa, a traditional Sufi ritual, was an inseparable part of the traditional mawlid festival1 held every year in Cairo. Mainly affiliated with and performed by the Saʿdiyya Sufi order, the ritual had several phases. The most striking part of the ritual was when the Shaykh of the Saʿdiyya Sufi order rode his stallion, on his way to his tent, over the backs of hundreds of dervishes (disciples) lying face-down in the streets of Cairo. According to some historical accounts, the Shaykh (Master) was also accompanied by other dervishes who performed various ‘radical’ practices such as piercing their bodies, eating broken glass, or swallowing burning coals.2

Continue reading An Intellectual Sufi between Empires: Muhammad Tawfīq al-Bakrī (1870–1932)
  1. The celebration of the birthday of the Prophet Muḥammad. []
  2. Frederick de Jong, Ṭuruq and Ṭuruq-Linked Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: A Historical Study in Organizational Dimensions of Islamic Mysticism (Leiden, 1978), 91. []

From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Part 3—Deindustrialization as Pollution Export: From Pittsburgh and Chicago to Baghdad and Delhi

In spring 1960, a senior city councillor from Frankfurt set off on a two-week trip to the USA to study the measures taken there to keep the air clean in industrial cities, and to bring them back to Germany if appropriate.1 From 7 to 23 May, he visited the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cleveland, OH. In New York, he visited the seventy-storey Rockefeller Centre, from where he could see no air pollution from either chemical or heavy industry—all that was visible was the smoke from the power stations. A visit to the city administration revealed that smoke inspections had been in operation since 1935 and had been conducted by an independent office with eleven employees and its own laboratories since 1952. Numerous ordinances and bans regulated inner-city combustion, prohibiting not only smoke, soot, dust, vapours, gases, and fly ash as ‘pollution of the air by noxious or unpleasant substances’, but also ‘odours that are detrimental or cause a nuisance to people.’2 Violations (in 1959 there were almost 5,000) were punished with fines or plant closures.

Continue reading From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
  1. See ISG FSA_3705, Hauptakten der Magistrat/Sozialverwaltung der Stadt Frankfurt a.M.: Bekämpfung von Lärm und Luftverunreinigung im Stadtgebiet: Obermagistratsrat Wiegand, ‘Reinhaltung der Luft in den Vereinigten Staaten: Bericht über eine Studienreise’, Frankfurt a. M., 1960. []
  2. Wiegand, ‘Reinhaltung der Luft’, 5. All quotes translated by Marielle Sutherland, GHIL []