Does anyone know how to find a copy of 'Female Suffrage' 1867 written by Lydia Becker?

Question

Published in Contemporary Review

Answer 1

Your best bet is a good reference library, probably at a nearby university. If I knew where you were, I might be of more help. Call the reference librarian at such a place. They might have the Contemporary Review on microfiche if nothing else.

The piece has also been reprinted in various anthologies, although sometimes only in excerpts. I believe the whole piece is contained in the anthology The Suffragists: Towards the Vote ed. Marie Mulvey Roberts & Tamae Mitzuta. I think you might have better luck finding this book in a library than for sale. (Don't forget about inter-library loan.)

This is just the kind of question a reference librarian should be happy to help with.

Answer 2

i dont know if this is any use to you
http://www.adam-matthew-publications.co.uk/digital_guides/w.aspx

Answer 3

try amazon.com

Answer 4

A Eylem Atakav
Writing on Ice: Patriarchy and Feminist Films

“…the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language formed critically at the moment of arrival of language while still caught within the language of patriarchy. There is no way in which women can produce an alternative out of the blue.” Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (London: British Film Institute, 1998), p.78.


The ultimate challenge is continuous and women did produce a lot. Feminist cinema has profoundly transformed the traditional field of visual representation by discarding and dismantling old forms. Feminist filmmakers have sought new ways of representing women’s lives and experiences, of imaging female subjectivity, and addressing the female spectator. This presentation intends to work out the contradiction between the way patriarchal order permeates through feminist films and the way sexual difference is represented in these films, in the context of Jane Campion’s The Piano, as a case study. Hence, at the heart of this analysis is the claim that feminist films represent the signs and significations of ‘woman’ and of ‘femininity’ differently from the codes and conventions of dominant cinema, while they still employ and deploy rather than deconstruct visual and narrative pleasure. In this context, the project aims at analysing the ways in which feminist filmmakers use and transform conventional cinematic means for communicating their non-conventional ideas. Therefore, the questions that that frame this presentation are: how do feminist filmmakers ‘make a difference’ in their films?; how do they change images, narratives, and representations in a positive manner?; and most crucial of all, can they indeed change it and counter patriarchy by not employing its norms and discourse, in other words, can feminist films save themselves from being caught in patriarchal order? Is feminist filmmaking an action of writing on ice, which requires hard work, subtlety, and female sensitivity, and can be melted away by patriarchy?

In this presentation’s attempt to account for the changes that feminist cinema has brought about in the field of visual representation and cinematic narration, it will relate The Piano to relevant theoretical framework, mainly referring to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. The reason why The Piano is chosen as the case study derives from the fact that it not only meets the criteria of the aforementioned definition and constructs a feminist position through alternative cinematic codes, but also it is the most significant feminist dubbed film to work out the contradiction between feminist films and permeation of patriarchy into film form.

Nina Baker
Scotswomen as Housepainters and Decorators from 1820

In the early 21st century it is still considered unusual to find a woman in paid employment as a skilled housepainter and decorator. Tradeswomen, in these most domestic of building trades, were working throughout Scotland during the 19th and 20th centuries. The women were those whose work self-identities were sufficiently strong to be recorded in directories and census returns. These are women who worked, not middle class dilettante or amateur women interior decorators dabbling in the arts and crafts because it was fashionable. The historical record is compared with contemporary records of women taking paid employment in these fields and also with the strong market created in modern times by the many DIY programmes on TV encouraging women into DIY. The high level of present and past involvement of women in housepainting and decorating shows that the aptitude and ability exists at both the professional and amateur levels. The factual reality is compared with perception and prejudice within the industry and the barriers that were and are placed in front of women wishing to do this work.

Teresa Barnard
“An exact resemblance of the Original”: Anna Seward’s symbolic genealogical line.

Unlike her contemporary, middle-class, female testators, who tended to impart their family history through the personal heirlooms and household effects that defined their status and self-worth, the eighteenth-century poet and letter-writer Anna Seward intended to leave a literary legacy to provide herself with the lasting imagery of a writer. In the absence of natural heirs, however, she used her last will and testament to structure a symbolic genealogical line through portraiture.

Seward’s portraits were more than a collection of art. They proved to be her expression of family history and tradition. She was unmarried and without a natural genetic line of inheritance, so the portraits convey a form of continuity. Moreover, her remarkable talent for painting ‘word-portraits’ complements the painted images.
My paper focuses on the portraits in the will that were of special significance to Seward. A John Smart miniature of her long-term, platonic partner, John Saville, depicts him fashionably as the ‘man of sensibility‘. Seward gives this portrait a female line of inheritance, leaving detailed instructions for its care. There are also portraits of her foster-sister, Honora Sneyd, including one of a pair of miniatures that was given to Seward by Honora’s admirer, John André, who fought in the American wars and was hanged as a spy. While awaiting his execution, his only possession was his own portrait of Honora, which he kept hidden in his mouth.

Seward’s preferred portrait of herself was painted by George Romney. As the visual representation of the author, and therefore part of her literary heritage, it was placed under her solicitor’s official protection for posterity. Her carefully organised plans for this image to be attached to her posthumous poetry edition were sabotaged by her editor, Walter Scott, who refused to have the portrait altered according to her wishes. Subsequently, there was no image to preface the poetry volumes and what has come down to us through history is not at all what she intended.

Sally Bayley
Sylvia Plath: A Performance in Colour

The fact that American poet, Sylvia Plath was also a visual artist, is a little known fact. This paper will explore Plath’s relationship with the visual as an intrinsic part of her development as a writer. I will sketch Plath’s involvement with a form of visual self-construction as an inherent part of her construction as writer. Central to this process will be Plath’s adoption of a particular palette, influenced by the commercial aesthetic of the 1950’s; in particular, the “powerful vocabulary” of colour involved in advertising: “printing inks in a rainbow range or colors . . art and illustrations which use just the right colors in the right places” (Advert for the Hawaii Tourist Board, Plath Mss. Oversize: Scrapbook 3, Lilly Library).

Plath’s involvement with the commercial aesthetic begins in her childhood where her homemade cards to family and friends signal a definite imitation of the Technicolor of Disney. This fascination with the way in which colour operates to produce relations of power continues into her young adulthood; her letters to her boyfriend Gordon Lamayer are filled with allusions to an exchange of colour: “I can look around me and find enjoyment in simple shapes and colors” (Letter from Gordon Lamayer, 1954”. This exchange of “shapes and colors” forms the basis of much of their relationship and continues into her academic career at Smith. In her 1954 essay, ‘The Arts in America’, Plath writes of her involvement the process of observing art: “the colors and sounds” that “shape themselves” in her imagination. I will argue that ultimately, Plath takes these colours into her final performances in colour: the spectacularly flamboyant, self-promoting personae of her late Ariel poems

Alice Beard
‘If you have a life beyond your own four walls’:
How women found themselves in Nova magazine

‘I first bought Nova magazine at Grimsby station going home from art college and it really stood out on the table. It was a different format and it was very striking and it just looked like something very special and I felt quite special buying it because nobody else did up in Grimsby. I can remember that feeling, I felt I was progressive by buying something like that, that I was entering a more grown up, intellectual and sophisticated world.’ (Liz: Reader)

Oral history interviews with readers of Nova Magazine, published in Britain from 1965-1975, reveal a common thread; that wherever they were located, across Britain or abroad, the magazine helped them to ‘find themselves’, it identified and crystallised changes in the experiences and expectations of women in the Sixties.