ABSTRACT
Scholars of shame have noted that shame has had a complicated relationship with modernising forces. ‘Shaming Unwomanly Women’ looks at how patriotic women across Britain, Ireland, and Australia at the turn of the twentieth century understood and articulated the relationship between shame and modernising concepts of womanhood. British anti-feminists promoted a concept of womanhood that they believed was transnational in character and therefore appropriate for women across the British Empire. They attempted to shame women—at home and abroad—who transgressed this model of femininity. This chapter examines British anti-feminist shaming. It also analyses reactions to this shaming by patriotic women in Ireland and Australia. Nationalist Irish women fiercely rejected the relevancy of British concepts of femininity in anti-colonial Ireland. They promoted a locally relevant model of womanhood that drew on an ancient Irish past. Newly enfranchised women in the new white Australian nation responded differently. Although eager to demonstrate their empire loyalty, patriotic Australian women also fervently denied anti-feminist shaming emanating from the imperial centre. Instead, they lauded modernising elements of Australian womanhood over archaic aspects of imperial femininity.
