Page 255 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

244 ENGLISH STUDIES

the field and the ideological practice of reading/ writing which is meant by
‘exposing and understanding the social and cultural relations of literary
production’.
Examining the processes of the exclusion and marginalization of women in
their literary and social histories and their specific response at the time is one
important aspect of our overall work on the construction of a decade and its
literature. Another aspect is reading women’s writing for the presence of sexual
ideologies and the effects of gender discrimination in access to literary
production. This further complexifies the relations between institutional
determinations and textual processes which we seek to elucidate. Such analysis
is new and difficult, and this piece is marked by that difficulty. We do, however,
attempt to show how obstacles which women encounter in the family, in
education, in work and in politics appear in one novel, South Riding, in a quite
specific way. The novel is placed in an ambiguous, though clearly critical,
relation to both the literary and the political fields of the period. As we will show,
Holtby’s self-identification as a middlebrow writer is not simply an individual
choice taken between literary kinds but is determined by her political
commitment to a feminist politics grounded in the concept of equal citizenship.
We also want to begin to redress two distortions relating to women’s history in
the 1930s. In general, we aim to challenge the misrepresentation of women in
history, the way in which they are not simply located as a forgotten half but
relegated to a domestic sphere, painted as an eternal backcloth to the ‘real’,
man’s world of historical activity. Secondly, we question the common
assumption that there is a hiatus in women’s organization which stretches from
suffrage to the present day. We did not take our own form of feminist politics as
the acid test for all previous contenders. Instead, we began to uncover the forms
of women’s understanding at the time as to what they were doing and to the
available forms of politics generally. The substance of this work can only be
indicated here through a brief listing of some key organizations, groupings and
publications: Time and Tide (1920s, 1930s); the Women’s Publicity Planning
Association (1940s); the Woman Power Committee of 1942; the Feminine Point
52
of View Conference of 1952; The Woman’s Side; What Fools We Women Be; 53
54
The Lesser Half; Mainly Mainly for Men. 55

Women’s place: institutions and ideologies
From our work on social institutions in relation to women and literary production
we aimed to uncover the important developments and shifts in sexual ideologies
and forms of resistance to them. These formed the material conditions of
existence for women’s access to ‘literary’ culture and for women’s writing in
general in the period. We intend here to give a brief and provisional account of
these developments in relation to gender difference. What follows does not make
any claims to be a definitive statement about women’s position in the thirties. It