Women's Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies: Patriarchy, Partnership and Patronage

ISBN-13: 9780582294639 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 504 str.

Rosemary O'Day

Opis

In examining the differing lives of married women in the old and new worlds O'Day challenges the assumption that women of the North American colonies had more agency than those in Britain. She demonstrates that gender is indeed a social construct and that different societies will construct it differently. However, far from leading us into the realms of abstract speculation, O'Day focuses on the real lives of real women, exploring how far their experience was determined by their family roles and to what extent they existed as individuals, expanding their own horizons and those of future women.

Spis treści

1. General introduction 2. How and where were marriages solemnised? 3. What was marriage? What was its purpose?4. Finding a partner among the landed aristocracy 5. Making marriages among women of the professional and the middling sorts 6. Attitudes to marriage 7. Patriarchy 8. Partnership and separation 9. Mistress of the household: what wives did all day 10. Mothers 11. Wives and property 12. Widows and widowhood 13. Women's formal and informal education 14. Women and religion 15. Contemporary culture: print and non-print, public and private 16. Women's cultural lives: participation

O autorze

Rosemary O'Day