During the nineteenth century, European women experienced dramatic and enduring changes in their familial, working and political lives. Breaking away from traditional categories, the authors of this book provide a sense of the variety and complexity of women's lives across national and regional boundaries, juxtaposing the experiences of women with their perceptions of their lives. Three themes unite this study: the tension between tradition and modernity, the changing relationship between the community and individual, and the shifting boundaries between public and private.

This groundbreaking study explores the role of those involved in various aspects of the care, comfort and appearance of the body in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to light the strong cultural affinities and social ties between barber-surgeons and the apparently distant trades of jeweller, tailor, wigmaker and upholsterer.
Drawing on contemporary understandings of the body, the author shows that shared concerns about health and well-being permeated the professional cultures of these medical and non-medical occupations. At the same time the detailed analysis of the...

Shani D'Cruze and Louise Jackson introduce students to key debates and trends in the study of women and crime in Britain over the last three hundred years. While focusing specifically on women and crime, they reflect recent developments in gender studies and argue that men and women cannot be studied in isolation.

This account examines some of the areas of women's political activity in Britain from the Glorious Revolution to the election of the first female Prime Minister in 1979. It shows how women had worked in a variety of arenas and organizations before the suffrage campaign and explores the directions their political activity took afterwards.

This timely collection of essays, from an international team of authors, spans a wide geographical and chronological spectrumand focuseson female relationships with piety and religious vocations. Ideal for students, each chapter introduces new research and offers a guide to historiographical debates and methodologies."

A narrative and analytical account of Chinese women's experiences during the twentieth century. Synthesizing and incorporating the latest research, Paul J. Bailey assesses in particular the impact of political, cultural and social change in Chinese women's lives, and explores the evolution of gender discourses during this period.

This timely edited collection brings together a team of scholars to consider the theme of gender and conflict since World War I. Covering a range of wars and armed struggles, the volume asks what has changed, what has continued, and how does understanding gender in times of conflict have ongoing relevance across the 20th and 21st centuries?

Sexual attitudes and behaviour have changed radically in Britain between the Victorian era and the twenty-first century. However, Lesley A. Hall reveals how slow and halting the processes of change have been, and how many continuities have persisted under a facade of modernity.
Thoroughly revised, updated and expanded, the second edition of this established text:
explores a wide range of relevant topics including marriage, homosexuality, commercial sex, media representations, censorship, sexually transmitted diseases and sex education
features an entirely new last chapter which...

What does material culture tell us about gendered identities and how does gender reveal the meaning of spaces and things?

If we look at the objects that we own, covet and which surround us in our everyday culture, there is a clear connection between ideas about gender and the material world. This book explores the material culture of the past to shed light on historical experiences and identities. Some essays focus on specific objects, such as an eighteenth-century jug or a twentieth-century powder puff, others on broader material environments, such as the sixteenth-century guild or the...

What does material culture tell us about gendered identities and how does gender reveal the meaning of spaces and things?

If we look at the objects that we own, covet and which surround us in our everyday culture, there is a clear connection between ideas about gender and the material world. This book explores the material culture of the past to shed light on historical experiences and identities. Some essays focus on specific objects, such as an eighteenth-century jug or a twentieth-century powder puff, others on broader material environments, such as the sixteenth-century guild or the...