This chapter notes that first-wave feminism involved a fierce battle of ideas over religion, a battle which was itself crucial in the creation of modern understandings of religion and secularisation. It suggests that Freethought was a significant current in the women's movement, existing alongside and in competition with the Christian values which dominated it. The Woman Question became a key ground upon which Christians clashed with Secularists over which belief system offered most to women. The stories of the Freethinking feminists traced a distinctive and continuous tradition of Freethinking feminism from the 1830s through to the First World War. The chapter concludes that the Secularist rejection of God-given gender roles and Christian-influenced ideas about marriage, birth control and sexual morality enabled alternative visions of relations between the sexes.

This chapter focuses on the civilian mobilization of nature, which turned militarized environments into zones of conflict between civilians and the military. Cries of alarm from civilian officials and local populations greeted the government's 1962 decision to create France's largest military base on Canjuers plateau in the Provencal hinterland north of Draguignan. The decision to create Canjuers was a fait accompli. Protesters therefore turned their attention to securing maximum compensation rates. Efforts to maintain hunting rights fitted seamlessly within long-standing concerns of civilian protests against militarization. Although the army tried to gloss its activities at Canjuers as environmentally friendly, it faced other criticisms regarding its stewardship of the French countryside. Despite some local cooperation, foresters across France attacked the army's environmental credentials in the early 1970s. In Cold War France, military planners repeatedly toyed with the idea of expanding Larzac Camp.

Wars represented in Western cinema are almost universally gendered as male, which corresponds to the battlefield history of twentieth-century warfare. War films, from The Big Parade to Saving Private Ryan, have always privileged the male point of view, masculine initiation rituals, and male spectatorship. In the cinematic representation of women warriors the gender of the director, in theory, should be significant. War films of the mid- to late 1990s supply a muted coda to the jingoistic war films of the previous decade by revisioning male soldiers in a less sexist, homophobic and confrontational manner. A contributor to feminist debate about masculinity in war texts, including films, whose work is both cogently written and theoretically sophisticated, is Susan Jeffords. By exploring the strategies that achieve the revitalisation of patriarchy as evident in film and other narratives, Jeffords offers a valuable set of categories, methodological practices and theoretical frameworks for other scholars.

From the beginning, the Pace case was more than simply a legal (or local) matter. Up to the inquest verdict, most of its key events took place within a few miles of Rose Cottage yet were followed throughout Britain and beyond. Press coverage created a figure known to millions of newspaper readers: 'Mrs Pace'. The case's rise into a press sensation is the subject of this chapter: during this 'golden age' of the press 'human interest' stories were driving increasing newspaper sales, and crime was central to this world of press sensationalism. All things considered, Beatrice Annie Pace was in an ambiguous position on the eve of her trial. She not only faced a capital charge but, since Harry Pace's death, had endured grinding poverty, hostile gossip, a police investigation, an extended coroner's inquest and weeks in prison.

Philip Caputo's memoir, A Rumor of War, debates issues such as heroism, masculinity, violence and sexuality. These issues were identified and linked by Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century, but more confidently verbalised in the aftermath of Vietnam than after any previous war. This chapter seeks to explore this verbalisation, through an examination of a range of textual representations of Vietnam: novels and memoirs by both men and women from both the West and the East. Joanna Bourke has suggested that in the past many men have been reticent about telling their war stories as much because of the pleasure of war as of the horror. The effects of the Vietnam War were double-edged for Le Ly Hayslip. Her narrative, Heaven and Earth, attempts to explain the war from multiple perspectives.

Improvement, as an ideology, fitted perfectly with Francis Hutchinson's Latitudinarian-Whig views, which envisaged a stable, commercial, ordered society, guided by a sociable and reasonable national religion. During the 1720s, Hutchinson published a number of economic tracts that suggested ways in which Ireland could escape its economic backwardness by developing its indigenous resource. In the period 1721-1723, Hutchinson's involvement with improvement went beyond the publication of the bank and poor tracts. Hutchinson moved beyond pamphleteering, to embark on a more practical improvement programme, by disseminating a culture of improvement on his newly purchased private estate near Portglenone and by playing a prominent and active role in the newly founded Dublin Society. The Society was regarded by contemporaries as a perfect practical complement to the efforts of Parliament and the Irish gentry to develop Ireland.

B. S. Johnson produced seven novels, two volumes of poetry and a collection of short stories, as well as several plays, screenplays and television scripts, and miscellaneous joint projects. He received awards for Travelling People, Trawl and the short film You're Human like the Rest of Them. Authorial powers, not substantively different from those of an omniscient author in a more conventional novel, are explicitly flaunted in Travelling People in a number of ways that to demonstrate what the convention involves. The major graphic elements of Travelling People appear within the chapters composed of interior monologues. Initially the use of the graphic surface in Albert Angelo does seem to be designed to attract the attention of the reader to the conventions of mimetic representation. One example is the 'specially-designed type-characters' that frame physical descriptions of Albert's pupils.

This chapter examines the contributions of Freethinking feminists to the women's rights movement and how they negotiated its predominantly Christian culture. The Freethinking emphasis on the sanctity of individual private judgement and moral autonomy shaped attitudes towards the social purity campaigns that came out of repeal work, deterring some Secularists from endorsing the more repressive aspects of this movement. Remaining true to a longstanding, ultra-democratic tradition, Freethinking feminists tended to cohere around the radical fringes of the new suffrage organisations emerging in the early 1900s. The legacy of their commitment to female enfranchisement was evident across the twentieth-century suffrage movement.

This chapter examines the world of the Victorian diplomat through the life and work of Austen Henry Layard and his circle in Constantinople. Best known for his excavations of Assyrian artifacts at Mosul (now in the British Museum), Layard parlayed his fame as an adventurer-archeologist into a position as Disraeli’s Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. At Constantinople, Layard found himself at the center of a humanitarian and diplomatic crisis. The slaughter of Bulgarian civilians by Ottoman forces on the eve of the 1878 Russo-Turkish War sparked outrage at home over the “Bulgarian Atrocities.” His life as a diplomat at the Sublime Porte placed him at the center of a network of philanthropists, consuls, and other diplomats who attempted to reconcile Britain’s humanitarian commitments with geopolitical realities.