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Course title:WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT AND REFORM POLITICS
IN THE EARLY 20th CENTURY: BRITISH AND RUSSIAN CASES
Natalia Novikova
Department of History
Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University
Yaroslavl, Russia
Journal of course implementation
I would like to present my journal in the form of narrative focusing on detailed description of my aims at specific sessions and what was actually going on in class as the course unfolds.
February 11.
The first meeting had only organizational purposes. Usually, at the beginning of spring semester, all students of the third year of study are invited to a kind of presentation of all optional courses to make their choice more conscious. After all instructors gave short overviews of their courses, students select one. This year, together with my course, four other courses were proposed on local history, history of colonialism, political propaganda and on teaching of history.
The fact that fifteen students selected my course (while each instructor was supposed to have only twelve) attested great expectations students had of these lessons. I decided to study out the students’ motivation, and, instead of traditional introductory conversation I usually have with my students before the course starts, I offered them to fill the form (anonymously) with four questions:
-What was the main reason for selecting this particular course?
-What do you know about the course subject?
-Did you take other courses on women’s and gender history? If yes, please, specify.
-What kind of skills and knowledge do you expect from this course?
The questionnaire shows the following results:
-73% of students chose the course because they liked the topic. They found it interesting, innovative, provocative (as a vehicle for feminist propaganda), and useful (in case when a students’ research paper has close links to the course subject). The rest of the students chose the instructor as they had a positive experience from our previous collaboration. These figures show students’ strong motivation to study what I consider as a good precondition for the course.
-53% of students have already taken courses on women’s and/or gender history. It gives me a feeling of invigoration because I have a core group of students who can help me to develop the course.
-33% (or 1/3) of students are males what is the highest index in my practice of teaching similar courses.
Here are some of the most attention-grabbing excerptions from answers:
“I would like to find out something about that age-long antagonism between men and women, and about possible ways to overcome it…”
“It would be important to try to understand how women struggled for their rights because in our own day, when everybody has equal rights and duties with others, it is so difficult to imagine that women were deprived those rights…”
“I want to find out how to gain my point with the help of law so that nobody could aggrieve my civic and political rights…”
In the end of our first meeting we looked through the syllabus, and I asked the students to read an article by Renate Hof that would be the base for group discussion next time.
February 18.
Women’s movement as a social movement: theoretical and methodological approaches
The main purpose of the first class is to establish a theoretical framework for further discussions. The principal working categories of the course are notions of gender and gender order. As my practice shows, students understand these concepts more adequately when they filter their knowledge through their personal experience or some historical examples. That is why inductive reasoning was the basis for the first class discussion.
We started with well-known definitions of social movements and defining the place of the women’s movements in the process of social change. The discussion was centered on the following questions:
1)Where women engaged in social movements in the same ways as men?
2)What is the difference between sex-role and gender approaches to social phenomena?
3)Do gender relations change over time?
4)How does gender change our view of social movements?
Gradually we got down to arguments developed in the Hof’s article “Genesis and development of gender studies”. I had chosen this text because, on the one hand, it discusses main concepts in the most appropriate way, to my mind (competently and logically, in plane words), and, on the other hand, it touches so important for our course problem of transferring concepts and ideas developed in “the West” to our social and cultural reality.
However, contrary to my expectations, students found it not easy to follow the author’s argumentation. I had to give some commentaries to make clear some definitions and theses. This discussion gave me information that the text I chose for students was a bit complicated, and also it uncovered the fact that what I had regarded as a favorable condition turned to be an obstacle slowing down the debate as I felt a necessity to bridge a gap between students who attended my classes before and newcomers.
February 25.
Reform politics in Great Britain and Russia in the beginning of the 20th century:
Origins and content
Our task for this class is to set up a historical background for further work. In the course of discussion students have to come to conclusions on sources and character of reform politics in both countries, to show up the influence of the reforms on women and to make comparisons between Russian and British experiences. Students are expected to reason about peculiarities of gender order in two states and its impact on national political discourse.
In the beginning of this session all students were divided into two groups, “British” and “Russians” (according to their preferences). Groups got the following assignment:
Draw out a plot reflecting the causes and reform processes in both countries; follow the plan: a) reforms’ dates; b) reforms’ content; c) reasons for reforming; d) reforms’ consequences. After 20 minutes of group discussion they were required to present its results (they got big sheets of paper and markers for this purpose).
Students were doing their work enthusiastically as they had to handle familiar facts and they expressed their opinions more openly within the group. I drew my attention to a fact that all students participated in this group work, although with different level of emotional involvement and intellectual contribution.
Group presentations took other 20 minutes. As a conclusion of this part of the session, students compared the character of British and Russian reforms and their results trying to explain the differences. Then, having students’ graphics as a base, I started asking questions and suggesting points for consideration in order to deepen the problem and to shift the discussion to reflections on women’s experiences in two countries. In such a way we approached to defining the main characteristics of gender order in Britain and Russia at that particular historical period.
As I expected, such issues evoked great interest of class participants; they had questions and commentaries concerning the modern state of things in Russia, pointing at many similarities and just a few differences between Russian political cultures and gender systems of the early 20th and early 21st centuries. I find such dialogs very important and useful for our students, for their personal and professional development, even if it may be regarded as a departure from the main purpose of the session.
March 4.
Women’s movements in Great Britain and Russia: stages and character
As students have decided, the next two sessions aimed at placing women’s movements in national politics’ contexts are focused on group projects. Students were free to select and organize materials as well as the way of presentation. The only requirement was that projects should cover such issues as short history of the movement, its ideology and rhetoric, symbols and rituals, place in the national political structure. Students decided to act in the same groups, which were formed during the previous session – “British” and “Russian”. The former consisted of 8, the latter of 7 students.
This session was devoted to the British women’s movement. Students of this group split up into four pairs; each pair had one week to elaborate one topic and up to 15 minutes to present the findings to others. The group participants formulated problems in the following way:
- Constitutional women’s movement.
- Militants.
- Movement’s leadership.
- Women’s question in the Parliament.
Students’ presentations had mainly a narrative form and were accompanied by occasional notes on the blackboard and demonstrations of the leaders of the movement portraits. If the presentations were not a great show, the content of the students’ speech was rather satisfactory: it was based on a solid historical data and had attempts of its analysis. I can explain it pointing at deep-rooted tradition in Russian academy to regard written-text-oriented approach as the most reliable one, while other kinds of historical sources are not viewed as “texts” and other ways of argumentation then oral report are considered as less convincing. Partially because of that reason, our students, preoccupied by their assumption of academic work, put great emphasis on logical reasoning and evidences taken from primary and secondary texts. I think the central failing of such approach is that students don’t have enough room to express their own thoughts and ideas.
Another weak point is that usually students’ “narrative” presentations take all the time and don’t leave any space for group discussions and questions. This was the case on March 4.
March 11.
Women’s movements in Great Britain and Russia: stages and character
This time the group of “Russians” was to present its findings. As it turned out, it was rather problematic for students to collect source materials on the Russian women’s movement, especially visuals and primary texts. Indeed, in spite of availability of a vast number of published works on Russian women, the activity of the feminist («bourgeois») parties have been totally ignored for decades; publications that have appeared in the last years cover a broad range of topics that offered new perspectives on women’s experience and on the role of gender in structuring historical change. However, there are only sporadic attempts to examine the Russian feminist history and heritage. Consequently the sources related to it are still very limited.
Out of 7 students only four of them took active part in preparation for the session and group presentation. Those three explained themselves later stressing the difficulties in searching for materials. The small group of four presented the topic focusing on two stages of the Russian women’s movement development: 1) late 19th century struggle for higher education and charitable activity; 2) struggle for political rights in the course and after the First Russian revolution of 1905-1907.
These presentations also had a narrative form, but were shorter so that we have enough time to ask questions and to bring the discussion to a logical conclusion and a general understanding of strategy and representation surrounding the suffrage campaigns, its dependence on national political and gender discourses.
March 18.
Women’s voice in politics: British liberal feminism
This is the beginning of the second part of the course, which has general aims to examine the positions and politics that have led to competing readings of women’s actions, and to explore the specific ways of constructing women’s political identity in Great Britain and Russia.
Beginning with this session we put in the center of our attention a set of primary sources as a way to explore liberal feminists’ and their opponents’ argumentation. Firstly, students interpreted texts pertaining to so-called “law-abiding” British suffragists. Before coming to class students were required to read assigned texts to be able make historically correct conclusions.
All class participants were split up into pairs (5 pairs total); each pair got a short text (a leaflet of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, 1912-1914) to read and analyze in class.
Students had 20 minutes for working in pairs and up to 10 minutes for short presentation of their conclusions.
Frame questions for pair-work with texts:
-Define when this text was issued and who is the author of the text.
-What perspective does it use describing or interpreting events or people? Whose political views and attitudes does it reflect? Explain.
-Which words and arguments does it repeat more often? What kind of rhetorical devices and figures of speech are used here? What do they speak about?
-What questions does this document provoke?
Students fulfilled their tasks more or less successfully. Providing it was the first attempt of such experimental pair-work in this course, I would say that results were rather promising. Although about one third of students tend to just reproduce arguments rather then to analyze and interpret the content of the text, in the end we reflected on what we were doing in class and what is the difference between narrative, reproductive approach and discourse analysis, some elements of which we were trying to apply.
March 25.
Women’s voice in politics: militants’ challenge.
The task and design of this session is similar to previous one. Using the strategy of discourse analysis, we were aimed at defining meanings of militancy, but this time we had to focus on visual sources.
Again, students worked in pairs having got various visuals for interpretation. Discussion centered round the following questions:
-Who is the author of the picture and who is its prospective audience?
-Describe what you can see here and imagine what might be going on beyond the frame of the picture.
-Do you know people depictured here? What do you know about the context of the picture?
-What is the possible meaning of the picture’s design, details and colors?
-What is the main idea of the picture?
There were 6 pairs of students who worked with great excitement. Students showed good results discussing various ways of militants’ self-representation, their perception of politics and notion of womanhood. They produced interesting interpretations of pictures, some of them I would like to offer below.
Picture 1. Cat and Mouse.
Picture 2. Joan d’Arc.
In the final part of the session we addressed Mrs. Pankhurst’s My own story to vindicate what was said before.
May 13.
Women’s voice in politics: Russian “ravnopravki”.
It so happened that we had to interrupt the course for some time. This session should be focused on the Russian feminists’ arguments and on comparison of them with British feminists’ views. Students were required to do assigned readings in order to be ready for group discussion. However, most of them came unprepared. That is why we spent half of the time reading the texts. The group was divided into two, the first one read writings by Russian liberal feminists (“ravnopravki”, that means “equal-righters”); the second group worked with arguments of a social-democrat Aleksandra Kollontai.
It took us more than 40 minutes to go through texts and prepare for interpretation. The short discussion involved the questions:
-How Russian “ravnopravki” and women social democrats perceived the interrelation between national liberation revolutionary movement and “pure feminism”?
-What kind of feminist argumentation did “ravnopravki” prefer (“individualist” or “essentialist”)? Why?
We concluded with comparison of British and Russian feminisms. I provoked a debate, asking a question whether can we regard Russian feminism as “backward” or “undeveloped”, and students readily began to argue for such perception. But when I asked them whether could we regard British feminism as a “norm”, they seemed to turn their minds.
It was the first time when we were short of time.
May 18.
Contemporaries about British suffragists’ campaign
In the course of this session we had to trace relations between dominant interpretations of suffragists’ campaigns and political, scientific and public discourses.
I offered to read and compare two texts: an excerpt from H.Asquith’s Memoirs and Reflections and a famous letter by Mr. A.Wright The Unexpurgated Case Against Women’s Suffrage.
Some of the proposed questions for discussion were already used during earlier sessions:
-What perspective does the author use describing or interpreting events or people? Whose political views and attitudes he reflects? Explain.
-Which words and arguments does he repeat more often? What kind of rhetorical devices and discursive strategies are used here? What do they speak about?
-Which of the texts more sympathetic to women? How can you explain it?
I was trying to minimize my participation in the discussion, which went on quite successfully. Out of 13 students present this day only one was relatively passive and didn’t make any substantial contribution to the group work. I expected such a result, as the texts chosen for consideration are very interesting by content and provocative by main ideas. However, in the final part of the class, I took the stage to round off the argument with pointing at the role of language in the constructing of suffragettes’ collective image.
May 20.
Contemporaries about Russian “ravnopravki”
In many senses this class was to be a continuation of the previous discussion. In order to provoke students to make comments and judgments comparing Russian and British experiences, I started the class with a very short (15 minutes) lecture on the origin and nature of the women’s question in Russia emphasizing the role of political setting and culture for the women’s movement. I asked students to define social groups in the Russian context, which were involved in the women’s question debates.