Forum: Victoria and the Politics of Representation

""In the closing decades of the nineteenth century the idea of Greater Britain, of the unity of the 'Anglo-Saxon' colonies and the ‘mother country’, became a topic of considerable interest and controversy amongst the metropolitan intellectual and political elite. This article examines the roles played by the monarchy in the debates. Queen Victoria, as both idea and institution, assumed two central functions. First, it was argued that the institution of the monarchy, stretching back over centuries, could supply an anchor of permanence and constitutional fidelity in a redesigned global polity. This would reassure critics of such schemes that their fears about fundamental transformation were unfounded; that a thread of historical continuity ran through the proposals. Secondly, Victoria – or at least an idealised representation of her – acted as the linchpin for a sense of global national identity. The prestige and admiration that she (and the institution of the monarchy itself) generated, it was contended, bound the distant peoples of her realm iin close communion. Moreover, the way in which she was sometimes represented in imperial debate harked back to (while modifying) an older civic humanist language of ‘patriot kingship’.""

qui fut fondée au cours du long intervalle entre la première et la deuxième vague du mouvement féministe. S'appuyant en grande partie sur les documents de la sénatrice Muriel McQueen Fergusson, une figure marquante d'une génération de femmes activistes dont les vastes contributions au mouvement féministe, bien que reconnues, ont rarement retenu l'attention des chercheurs, il remet en question la tendance des chercheurs à négliger et à essentialiser la signification du féminisme de ces activistes de la période intermédiaire. Through the lens of an alternative narrative, this article traces the creation and evolution of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada, which was established during the long interval between the first and second waves of the women's movement. Based largely on the papers of Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson, a leading member of a generation of women activists whose broader contributions to the women's movement, while acknowledged, have rarely captured the imagination of scholars, it challenges scholars' tendency to overlook the significance and essentialize the feminism of these inter-wave activists. STUDIES OF THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN CANADA have identified a number of individual women who might be thought of as the principal players in a historical drama that was to have far-reaching effects. In the beginning, Judy LaMarsh and Laura Sabia played "complementary roles of behindthe-scenes pressure and public advocacy" in persuading the government to establish a commission. 1 Once the commission was appointed, Florence Bird (its chair) and, to a lesser extent, Elsie Gregory MacGill, moved into the spotlight. It is these four women, along with Monique Bégin, the commission's executive secretary, whose names most often surface in the historical narrative. 2 In the discussion that follows, I offer a 1 Cerise Morris, "Determination and Thoroughness: The Movement for a Royal Commission on the

The book investigates the representations of Canada circulating at the heart of the British Empire, in the "metropolis", during the three decades preceding Canadian Confederation. The author uses Canada as an epitome for the "white" Empire. Readers will be interested in discovering which representations the Victorian public read and conceived about Canada, at the beginning of the “second” British Empire, through popular women’s travelogs and emigration narratives. The book analyses the general debate on empire building circulating in the public sphere, by taking into account its Canadian margins and their representation, through books published by well-known London publishing houses whose involvement in such “colonial” works is also examined in the course of the book.

Australian Journal of Public Administration, 2009

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Ideas in History, 2012

This article examines the Queen Victoria Building through the union of tradition and modernity, in order to develop a better understanding of the site's contradictory nature and the ideologies that inform it and social structures more generally. By comprehensively analysing the site's architectural components and its contemporary functioning against theories of cultural identity, enlightenment, and capitalism, the Queen Victoria Building is discussed as a union of tradition and modernity exemplified. The article thus argues that rather than being two opposing concepts, tradition and modernity are inextricably linked. Tradition indeed exists in the present moment, evident in the architecture of the Queen Victoria Building and the economic operations of our societal structures, but it is through modern ideals that this perseverance occurs, with traditions constantly evolving in order to remain relevant in the present. It is within the union of tradition and modernity that the Queen Victoria Building and contemporary society are situated, and their paradoxical natures informed.

Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2023

Political women who lead with firmness get castigated as heartless. Margaret Thatcher represents that stereotype, most concisely captured in the sobriquet "Iron Lady." We argue that the film The Iron Lady and the Netflix series The Crown offer versions of Thatcher that critique Thatcher's supposed failures of femininity. Rather than centering their framing of Thatcher on the harms of her policies, these texts excoriate her for her parenting and her inappropriately masculine style. We conclude by asking how we might remember public figures in ways that offer critical analyses of policies without resorting to sexist tropes.

Royal tourists, colonial subjects and the making of a British world, 1860-1911

British royals at home with the empire We were so frightened to hear that our husbands were going to war.… We had no slight idea what the war was about, the thing is, we only heard that Queen [Victoria] has asked for help, so they are going to fight for the Queen. We then know that this involves us, if they [the Germans] are fighting the Queen, as we were her people. We were under her, and she helped us against our enemies and with other things, so we had to help her. We didn't know how long they were going to take there. Even if we were afraid we just encouraged them to go in the name of God, we will also pray for them whilst gone, so that they can help the Queen as she helped us. Miriam Pilane of Bechuanaland, postwar interview 1 As Miriam Pilane saw it, the Tswana-speaking peoples of southern Africa were motivated to serve the British war effort during the Second World War because of their loyalty to a long-dead British Queen. While her invoking of the Great White Queen was, at some level, simply an instance of confusion, it also demonstrates the longevity of Queen Victoria as a symbol of British justice and benevolence, the image carefully nurtured by colonial officials and imperial stakeholders of the Queen as the mother of empire. Despite anti-colonial movements of the interwar period and imperial betrayals from the Union of South Africa to the Amritsar Massacre, this image managed to survive, a testament to the effectiveness of imperial propaganda. Through the ideological work of colonial officials, Queen Victoria's subjects across the empire imagined her to be a justice-giving imperial mother. There are perhaps more statues of Victoria on earth than of any other non-religious figure in history. She sits or stands among whizzing automobiles in Auckland, in front of neo-Gothic façades in Mumbai, and near the waterfront that bears her name in Cape Town-in bustling metropolises and provincial towns, near churches, mosques, and temples. In 1876, using the successes of the Prince of

International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2018

'Women have mostly been left out of history', boldly asserted Elizabeth Willis in her exhibition text for The Story of Victoria in 1985. Taking Willis' statement as a starting point, this article aims to trace firstly how women have been rewritten into Australia's social history exhibitions focusing on the use of voice as a strategy to do so, and secondly how these voices have changed historical master narrativesby allowing a shift from a big picture history to intimate and deeply personal stories that recast our understanding of the past in ways that are inclusive of gendered experiences. We investigate the use of the curatorial voice as reflected in Willis' work, aligning it with the notion of curatorial activism, before exploring the changing curatorial practices that expanded the potential for an interpretive approach that incorporated the voice of the subjects themselves as a central component in the telling of history. We then analyse the impact of these strategies on traditional understandings of the past through three exhibitions developed by Melbourne Museum over 30 years: The Story of Victoria, a successor exhibition The Melbourne Story, and their Great War centenary exhibition, WWI: Love & Sorrow.

McGill Law Journal, 2011

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The American Historical Review, 2015