Search results

Purpose – This chapter explores the significance of emotional exchanges between historians and their research participants in the production of critical histories of the late twentieth-century British women’s movement. It argues for the importance of exploring the ways in which positive emotions, including feelings of excitement, reverence and commonality, influence the research process and potentially complicate historians’ capacity to produce histories that critically assess popular narratives of the development of the women’s movement.

Methodology/Approach – This chapter draws on qualitative assessments of my own experiences carrying out oral history interviews with women’s movement members to explore the emotional exchanges that take place during the research process. It utilises several historiographical concepts, including being a ‘fan of feminism’, discussions about historical subjectivity and oral history debates about empathy, to reflect on my emotional responses whilst carrying out research.

Findings – This chapter demonstrates that positive emotional exchanges between historians and their research participants influence the production of critical histories of the women’s movement. It highlights how historians’ personal identifications with their areas of study impact on their emotional engagement with research participants, potentially complicating or contravening their wider historical aims.

Originality/Value – Several historians have explored how negative emotional exchanges with research participants influenced their production of critical histories of the women’s movement. By focusing on the influence of positive emotional exchanges, this chapter provides an original contribution to this area of reflexive discussion, as well as wider assessments of historical subjectivity and researcher empathy.

Can we broaden the boundaries of the history of economic thought to include positionalities articulated by grassroots movements? Following Keynes’s famous remark from General Theory that ‘practical men […] are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,’ we might be wont to dismiss such a push from below. While it is sometimes true that grassroots movements channel preexisting economic thought, I wish to argue that grassroots economic thought can also precede developments subsequently elaborated by economists. This paper considers such a case: by women at the intersection of the women’s liberation movement and the claimants’ unions movement in 1970s Britain. Oral historical and archival work on these working-class women and on achievements such as their succeeding to establish unconditional basic income as an official demand of the British Women’s Liberation Movement forms the springboard for my reconstruction of the grassroots feminist economic thought underpinning the women’s basic income demand. I hope to demonstrate, firstly, how this was a prefiguration of ideas later developed by feminist economists and philosophers; secondly, how unique it was for its time and a consequence of the intersectionality of class, gender, race, and dis/ability. Thirdly, I should like to suggest that bringing into the fold this particular grassroots feminist economic thought on basic income would widen the mainstream understanding and historiography of the idea of basic income. Lastly, I hope to make the point that, within the history of economic thought, grassroots economic thought ought to be heeded far more than it currently is.

This chapter introduces and sets the scene for a discussion on women's sport in a professional era. Initiated in the wake of the second-wave feminist movement in America in the 1950s with the professionalisation of golf and tennis, the move for other women's sports to be professionalised has been slow, sporadic and marred with difficulties. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, there have been significant changes in the landscape of elite women's sport. Alongside an overview of the developments in elite level women's sport, we conceptualise the terms ‘professionalisation’, ‘professional’ and ‘professionalism’. Furthermore, the chapter identifies the scope of the book, drawing upon the importance to consider women's sport as distinct from men's sport and identifying issues that are specific to female athletes, such as maternity and the gender pay gap. We also recognise the diverse and multiple nature of women's identities, highlighting the intersectionality of female athletes in professional sport (specifically around race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and national identity).

In 1993, the Sports Council's new policy document, Women and Sport, recommended that all national governing bodies of sport ‘establish a single governing body’. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, almost all women sports that were administered separately to their male counterparts therefore ‘merged’ with the men's governing body: squash in 1989, football and athletics in 1992, lacrosse and hockey in 1996 and cricket in 1998. In practice, these mergers became ‘takeovers’, whereby female administrators were forced to cede governance of their sports to male-run bodies whose priority and focus remained men's sport. Work has been conducted on the impact of this process on individual sports, while internationally, studies of similar amalgamations between men's and women's sporting organisations have found that such processes increase male control at the expense of female autonomy. However, there has been no study which considers the impact of the Sports Council's policy on the UK sporting landscape as a whole. Via use of oral histories and archival material, this chapter seeks to begin this process, assessing the impact of a government policy of forced integration of women's and men's sport, which still has potent ramifications in sport governance today.

Since the 1970s there have been extraordinary changes and growth in Canadian sport in terms of access, opportunity and recognition. Yet, the gains and successes of girls and women’s sport are often written, told and retold as uncomplicated success stories, as progress, with the battles fought and the complex negotiations of the past eerily absent. In this chapter, we turn to the work of feminist poststructuralist Avery Gordon to consider gender, feminisms and sport in the Canadian context. We do this by putting various moments in time in conversation with one another and considering our current moment in light of what has come before but is often forgotten, overlooked or even suppressed. We argue that the need for feminist praxis remains significant in Canadian sport and it is imperative that we continue to shed light on ghostly (dis)appearances in narratives of sport in Canada.

Purpose – This chapter explores various approaches to historical methods as they relate to sport and physical culture research.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter discusses various paradigmatic approaches to historical methods (reconstructionist, constructionist and deconstructionist) and takes up current debates related to archives, newspapers, photographs and oral history as they relate to the method. Drawing on these discussions, I outline various approaches to designing a sport and physical culture project using historical methods, focusing on my work on women's industrial sport in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Findings – I discuss how data evolved from the method and how I made choices about the inclusion and exclusion of materials. The chapter concludes that historical methods are tedious, complex and messy but also exciting and insightful ways to do research. I also conclude by encouraging the researcher to be reflexive and aware of one's ‘positionality’ as a researcher and embrace the historical process.

Originality/value – The chapter is original work. It is not so much a prescriptive ‘how-to’ guide for historical research, but it works to take up current debates in historical methods. It also endeavours to engage students and scholars alike as they consider their research projects and the potential value of historical methods.

Institutional changes, in a historical context, through simultaneous evolutionary and metamorphic processes either deform or reform long-enduring institutions. The chapter delves into the Persian history from the early days of the reign of Nāṣer al-Dīn Shāh-e Qājār in 1848 to the recent years and traces Persian institutions' historical transformations, which culminated to the Persian women entrepreneurship. Thus, the chapter first sets the historical context in each period and then sheds light on the pivotal issues of each period's women. The undergirding base of the discussions is the assumption of the change in institutions as natural metamorphosis in the animate. Finally, the discussions contribute to the conceptualization of the Institutional Triangulation and in the case of Persia, a cultural-driven triangulation, which has paved the way to the formation of a stupendously hegemonic patriarchal and masculine sociopolitical economy in Persia, that has historically affected women's institutionalization, subjugation, subordination, marginalization, socialization, emancipation, and most recently Islamization phases.