Women in European Culture and Society : Gender, Skill and Identity from 1700

ISBN-13: 9780415213073 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 432 str.

Deborah Simonton

Opis

This volume provides readers with an overview of women's role and place in Western Europe from the beginning of the eighteenth century, with essays covering the key themes in women's history.

A new and major contribution to the field, Women in European Culture and Society is a transnational history of women in Europe from the beginning of the eighteenth century that pushes women’s history beyond national studies to create an integrated view of three hundred years of women in Europe. While highlighting areas of common European experience, it is also sensitive to important differences. Using a longue durée, the book disentangles of the accounts of industrialisation and bourgeois femininity which tend to dominate women’s studies, and regularly questions the dominant narratives of history.

A central theme of the book is to explore how women operated within gendered worlds and used their skills and abilities to shape and claim their own identities. Drawing on women’s own writing and cultural production, it presents women as agents of change as well as exploring cultural perceptions of women and the ways in which women have been have been represented by these discourses. It explicitly engages with how women contributed as practitioners to shaping the culture and society of western Europe.

The geographical range and generational breadth of this study provides a cohesive vision of women’s lives up to the present day. Women in European Culture and Society is an invaluable and essential guide to the conditions, circumstances and understandings of how women lived throughout Europe.

Spis treści

Overture  Part 1: Rights of Man and Duties of Woman.  Prelude: Women's Identity in Eighteenth-century Culture.  Timeline.  1. Intimate Lives: Self, Sex and Family  2. Community Spaces  3. Wider Worlds: Gendering the Enlightenment  Intermezzo: The Revolutionary Era.  Timeline.  Part 2: Domesticity and Industrialism  Prelude: The Legacy of the Enlightenment.  Timeline.  4. Intimate Worlds: Our Mothers' Daughters  5. Community Spaces: Labour, Leisure and Consumption  6. Shaping wider worlds  Intermezzo: La Belle Époque or Fin de Siècle?  Timeline.  Part 3: Modern Times  Prelude: Carrying Linda’s Stones.  Timeline.  7. Intimacy and Independence  8. The Transitional Community  9. Women Go Public Coda: Gender, skill and Identity.  Further reading

O autorze

Deborah Simonton is Associate Professor of British History at the University of Southern Denmark and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her publications include The Routledge History of Women in Modern Europe (2006), A History of European Women’s Work (1998), co-editor of Gender in Scottish History (2006).