Introduction
from III - Womanhood, Whiteness and War
Summary
To what extent did Mann's and Ross's notions of working-class and labour-movement unity, socialist solidarity and internationalism include women and people of colour, or, to adopt the terminology of their times, ‘coloureds’? Did their attitudes and practices towards gender and race amount to what many recent historians have seen as the dominant patriarchal and white-racist attitudes of labour movements throughout the British, Anglophone and even global worlds of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? What were the overlaps between gender and race? How did Mann's and Ross's commitments to unity and solidarity fare during the period of World War I and the post-war years? This was a highly turbulent and volatile period when their opposition to the war in particular and militarism in general, combined with their warm welcome for the Bolshevik Revolution and post-war labour's sharp move to the left, were severely tested by the dominant pro-war and anti-German sentiments of the labour movement and working-class people in Britain and Australasia, and by the increasing importance of the conservative ‘politics of loyalism’. What were the differences, as well as the commonalities and similarities, of their attitudes and actions and how do we explain them? Finally, what light do their experiences shed on more general labour and other positions towards gender, race, class, war, nation, empire, revolution and reaction? These are the key questions to be addressed in Part III. Chapter 5 will consider the issues of women and gender, Chapter 6 those of race and whiteness, and Chapter 7, the final chapter, those of war, revolution and reaction.
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- Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017