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Researching Women’s Sexual Narratives in 1920s Britain
| ‘A barrier of indescribable experience’ was how Vera Brittain saw the gulf between the sexes straight after the First World War. One manifestation of this gulf was a spiralling divorce rate in Britain (a five-fold increase between 1913 and 1919) and widespread concern with the blurring of gender boundaries, women’s supposedly ‘freer’ sexuality, and their attraction to men of colour. In the book I am currently writing I analyse certain sensational and scandalous court trials involving young female protagonists as a way-in to exploring the meaning or ‘cultural work’ of these various anxieties about women. These trials were a preoccupation of the time, breaking out from the confines of the page into lively public discussion about issues of morality/immorality, normality/deviance. One of my concerns is to access the voices of the women involved in these various trials – to try and hear their own accounts of sexuality, marriage, motherhood and men. The trials include those of Edith Thompson charged with murder, Christabel Russell charged with adultery, and a couple of women charged with drug dealing, but implicitly on trial for their involvement with Chinese men. Drugs were a particular concern in relation to women because they were thought to break down the ‘natural’ prohibitions existing between races. The press (and contemporary popular fiction) presented Chinese men and their deviant ‘Oriental’ sexuality as the ‘yellow peril’, vampirically preying upon passive women - a reworking of the white slave narrative, and one in tension with that of women who had actively chosen their ‘alien undesirables’. Some of the latter women contested such representations, and critiqued white/British male sexuality. I examine trial transcripts, letters, and reports in the press (which include quotes from the women as well as (possibly ghosted) autobiographical accounts). I will speculate as to the possible interpretations to be made of this material, as well as pointing to the various difficulties in interpretation.
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