Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash

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.

Sharon Crozier-De Rosa is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Wollongong.

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