This book surveys women and work in English society before its transition to industrial capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The time span of the book from 1300 to 1800 allows comparison of women's work patterns across various phases of economic and social organisation. It was originally published in 1985. Several important themes are highlighted throughout the individual contributions in the book. The most significant is the association between home and work. Not only was trade and manufacture in the pre-industrial period carried out in close proximity to domestic life,...

Covering the period from the beginning of the twentieth century to the outbreak of the First World War, this entertaining account describes the lives of women in all classes of society: the entertainments they watched, the clothes they wore, their education and the effect it had on women's magazines, the work they did and the rise of the 'office' as the Mecca for working women. The author also considers the changing attitudes to contraception and sex. This period, particularly its latter part, saw the rejection of old leaders and old habits. In politics, in the trade unions, and especially in...

This collection of papers draws on insights from social anthropology to illuminate historical material, and presents a set of closely integrated studies on the inter-connections between feminism and medical, social and educational ideas in the nineteenth century. Throughout the book evidence from both the USA and UK shows that feminists had to operate in a restricting and complex social environment in which the concept of the lady and the ideal of the saintly mother defined the nineteenth-century woman's cultural and physical world.

Originally published in 1990, this book met the rising interest in the subject of women in pre-industrial England, bringing together a group of scholars with diverse and wide-ranging interests; experts in social and medical history, demography, women's studies, and the history of the family, whose work would not normally appear in one volume. Key aspects of motherhood in pre-industrial society are discussed, including women's concepts of maternity, the experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and wet nursing, the fostering and disciplining of children, and child abandonment and neglect. This...

This translation of the French Femme au dix-huitieme siecle from 1862, first published in English in 1928, traces the life of the Eighteenth Century woman in an historical account. Through discussion of evidence from paintings and memoirs, the book draws an intimate lifelike account of what lay behind these images for women in France of this time. The Goncourt brothers wrote several social histories but were also art critics and novelists. Here they offer portraits of upper, middle and working class women in France. This is one of the earliest accounts of life for women in this period.

The British feminist movement has often been studied, but so far nobody has written about its opponents. Dr Harrison argues that British feminism cannot be understood without appreciating the strength and even the contemporary plausibility of 'the Antis', as the opponents of women's suffrage were called. In a fully documented approach which combines political with social history, he unravels the complex politics, medical, diplomatic and social components of the anti-suffrage mind, and clarifies the Antis' central commitment to the idea of separate but complementary spheres for the two sexes....

Assembling a full and comprehensive collection of material which illustrates all aspects of the emergent women's movement during the years 1850-1900, this fascinating book will prove invaluable to students of nineteenth century social history and women's studies, to those studying the Victorian novel and to sociologists. Women's pamphlets and speeches, parliamentary debates and popular journalism, letters and memoirs, royal commissions and the leading reviews, are all used to document the conflicting images of women: 'surplus women' and the issue of emigration; women's work and male hostility...

Written in 1954 and published in 1981, this fascinating study remains authoritative as an account of a body of opinion about women's nature and role that was in vogue in America during the first half-century after independence. Combining intellectual and social history, this work was one of numerous attempts being made at the time to add depth to American social history dealing with women and women's experiences before feminism. The author explores British sources of American thought as well, presenting an early comparative history, and offers a focus on religion to show how processes of...

The nineteenth century witnessed a discursive explosion around the subject of sex. Historical evidence indicates that the sexual behaviour which had always been punishable began to be spoken of, regulated, and policed in new ways. Prostitutes were no longer dragged through the town, dunked in lakes, whipped and branded. Medieval forms of punishment shifted from the emphasis on punishing the body to punishing the mind. Building on the work of Foucault, Walkowitz, and Mort, Linda Mahood traces and examines new approached emerging throughout the nineteenth century towards prostitution and looks...