Writing in the US in the early twentieth century, Leonor Villegas de Magnón was a Mexican American activist, educator, nurse, and founder of La Cruz Blanca Constitucionalista, a group of nurses established during the Mexican Revolution. Her most comprehensive text is her autobiography, which chronicles the contributions of La Cruz Blanca and which she essentially writes twice, once in Spanish for the Mexican and Mexican American reader, and then in English for the English-speaking readers of the US. What becomes apparent as she shifts audiences, in her writing and in her archive, is a preoccupation not only with the preservation of history and culture, but with its translation. This chapter proposes that this question of translation (across languages, generations, nations, and cultures) is one equally applicable to the task of digitizing archival material. In making the physical archive digitally accessible, digital humanists are enacting translation and must wrestle with questions regarding the responsibilities of the translator. Guided by the question of the ethics of translation, this chapter outlines the process of creating an online exhibit of Villegas de Magnon’s archive, finally claiming that the project of Latinx Digital Humanities is itself an urgent but complex task of translation.

In twentieth-century Europe, work was related to individual freedom in different ways. Rationalized, large-scale production imposed disciplinary constraints on men and women and threatened to undermine their independence, yet other developments promised to safeguard independence and raised the prospect of choice. Moreover, the relationship between work and individual freedom was subject to diverging definitions and contrasting political agendas. Some of these definitions and agendas stemmed from the nineteenth century, but now had to be pursued under very different conditions. Others rose to prominence in the twentieth century, as capitalist, extreme-right, and Communist promises to enhance freedom at work competed with each other. These ambitious projects, however, were confronted with structural contradictions and subversive behaviors. The three major aspects treated in this chapter are how farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers endeavored to defend their economic independence at a time of capitalist pressure and Communist hostility; how millions of Europeans, having entered factories for want of a better alternative, strove to create a shop floor of their own; and, finally, how women (and, to a lesser extent, men) balanced chores and choices when carrying out domestic tasks and reflecting on their meaning.

The quest for individual freedom was defined and pursued in the twentieth century in an environment shaped by moral norms that were established in the nineteenth century, if not before, but continued to be staunchly defended before undergoing a process of adjustment. At the same time, the question arose of what life would be like once these norms had been shaken off or decisively weakened. Furthermore, the selfhood of those who pushed for liberation was contested between coherence and control, on the one hand, and various modes of transgression, on the other. While such issues were first debated and probed in countercultural circles, they had become a mainstream concern by the end of the century, leading to new uncertainties about how far individual freedom should go and whom it should benefit. This chapter explores how sexuality was restrained by a morality that came to be adjusted in the decades after World War II; how the prospect of a “liberated” life emerged, leading to new expectations, but also creating imbalances and bringing disappointments alongside gains; and how the transgressive urge to expand the ego questioned the norm of coherent selfhood before eventually revealing its darker side.

Science is part of society, and scientific culture is part of a broader culture from which it gets much of its character. Sexism and patriarchy have been pervasive influences throughout the historical process that leads to our present scientific culture, with significant effects on science and scientists. Feminist thinkers have grappled with the problem of sexism in science and have developed a variety of philosophical responses to it. This chapter surveys some of those responses, with a focus on the ideas of feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory. Both approaches argue that incorporating feminist ideas will enable scientific communities to better achieve scientific aims of knowledge and objectivity, although they disagree on which feminist ideas are best suited to achieve this. The chapter also considers ways in which the two approaches have become more alike as they developed over the past several decades, hinting at a possible synthesis of the two approaches.

The modern papacy emerged from the clash with the values of Enlightenment and the pope’s loss of temporal power. In a way, popes established themselves as a renovated source of moral authority on bioethics. This chapter aims to trace the history of papal pronouncements on contraception and abortion. It examines the historical roots of Christian sexual ethics from antiquity. It focuses on the early modern origin of the questions concerning the beginning of life and on the modern idea of immediate ensoulment. It shows how modern medical knowledge and eugenics contributed to a new view of reproduction as separate from sexuality, which called into question the traditional sense of marriage and gender roles. In this context, in which anti-modernism certainly played a role, popes condemned birth control, abortion, and women’s emancipation, revealing a huge hiatus between the experience of laity and the inflexible authority of the Catholic Church.

During the thirteenth century, stories began to circulate in Rome of the existence of a female pope. What likely began as popular satire was eagerly picked up by monastic chroniclers who had their own axes to grind. For the papacy, the existence of a female pope – most commonly called Joan – only became problematic after the Reformation, when Protestants saw an opportunity to use these medieval (and therefore Catholic) authorities to challenge the papal apostolic succession and identify the papacy with the biblical Whore of Babylon. The arguments employed by both sides are hugely revealing of how Catholics and Protestants saw themselves and each other. More recently, Pope Joan has moved into the realm of fiction: in film and literature she became a feminist icon. Transgender readings – Joan as man in a woman’s body, rather than a woman in a man’s garment – are bound to inspire new interpretations of her story.

This chapter argues that scholars of sex, sexuality, and gender have begun to engage with global histories, but in a selective manner and often characterised by ideas of one-way dissemination from Europe to locations beyond its borders. It suggests some entry points for a richer, multidirectional historiography, including the movements of indigenous and colonised peoples, economies of trading sex, the regulation of reproduction, and new histories of feminisms. Non-binary forms of gender and queer sexualities are prominent within such literatures and help to complicate established narratives. The chapter also highlights historiographical contributions that diversify our histories away from ‘great power’ geopolitics and draw out the specificity of regions such as eastern and central Europe and the experiences of ‘non-aligned’ states and of non-state actors such as religious organizations and racialized historical actors.

This chapter is a brief history of the nineteenth-century efforts to expand voting and other political rights, interspersed with analysis of key literary texts in which the question of voting rights is a palpable concern, even though it is sometimes not overtly addressed. It takes as its starting point an early nineteenth-century shift in ideas about qualifications for suffrage, during which the prerequisite of land ownership was replaced by the qualities of “virtue and intelligence.” While this shift ensured almost universal white male suffrage by the 1840s, it also provided an opening – albeit a problematic one – for white women and some African American men and women to agitate for enfranchisement. This chapter demonstrates that literature from the 1830s until the early twentieth century reflected and often intervened in the conversation about the “nature” of women and black men, and whether or not they were suited for integration into the public sphere and specifically into the political realm through voting. Authors such as Margaret Fuller, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Charles Chesnutt (among many others) represented the women’s suffrage and black suffrage movements in ways designed to change readers’ ideas about the “virtue and intelligence” of the disenfranchised.

This chapter uses the histories of baseball (Ty Cobb vs. Babe Ruth) and presidential power rankings, and the reception history of Eleanor Roosevelt to unearth a sea change in greatness conversations. During the 1950s, America swapped Ty Cobb for Babe Ruth and Washington for FDR to signal a change in the value of greatness. Whereas Americans had valued greatness as a shorthand for changemaking, the postwar period witnessed a search for nostalgic heroes meant to confirm already-established ideals of this generation, later to be designated the “Greatest Generation.”

Following a brief historical overview of the birth of the organised movement, Chapter 1 introduces literary figures and texts promoted by antivivisection periodicals such as the Zoophilist, the Home Chronicler, and the Animals Guardian. Adopting a literary-critical approach offers a fresh perspective on the movement’s association pamphlets and periodicals which have, thus far, largely been examined as historical documents. Poems, stories, and ‘humane words’ from notable writers were sourced and deployed to shape a common antivivisectionist identity, articulate the movement’s ideology, and mobilise activists. Analysis of antivivisection poems by Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Buchanan is complemented by attention to the framing and reception of these works in antivivisection publications and the wider press.

The 1870s were a watershed decade for British feminism. Major changes were afoot that had a profound impact on women’s legal, educational, and social status. The first bill aiming to give women the vote may have failed in Parliament in 1870, but it was the start of a decade that saw enormous progress in women’s position in society at large, from the establishment of the first women’s colleges in Oxbridge to opportunities for employment in the civil service. Feminist campaigners including Annie Besant, Josephine Butler, Frances Power Cobbe, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett advocated for women’s increasing economic, educational, and bodily autonomy in public speaking and journalism. Writers including George Eliot, Dinah Craik, and Augusta Webster wrote novels and poetry to intervene in parliamentary debates ranging from the right of married women to own property to the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. Combining data on women writers with close reading, this chapter explores the powerful role that women’s writing played in imagining and advocating for women’s rights in the 1870s