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 19th century social history and women's studies, to those studying the Victorian novel and to sociologists.

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...