The place of women in Shetland society is unique. In this isolated island group off the north of Scotland, women dominated the family, economy and the cultural imagination for 200 years. Here, women were numerically preponderant and economically vital. They maintained families and communities because men were absent. In their minds they constructed an identity of themselves as 'liberated' long before organised feminism was invented. This book examines how in the nineteenth century Shetland became a female place. Despite an appearance of outward masculinity, where contemporary identity still...

his is the first account in English of the entire, forty year military career of one of the most powerful women of the Middle Ages. Challenging the boundaries between military and gender history, it explains how one famous noblewoman rose to the defense of the reforming papacy, defeated the Holy Roman Emperor and turned the tide of the first great war between Church and State. Despite the neglect of Matilda in the English-speaking world, sources for her life are both abundant and diverse. She issued over 130 surviving diplomas, patronized an influential circle of scholars, corresponded...

Living in sin' is the first book-length study of cohabitation in nineteenth-century England, based on research into the lives of hundreds of couples. 'Common-law' marriages did not have any legal basis, so the Victorian courts had to wrestle with unions that resembled marriage in every way, yet did not meet its most basic requirements.
The majority of those who lived in irregular unions did so because they could not marry legally. Others chose not to marry, from indifference, from class differences, or because they dissented from marriage for philosophical reasons. This book looks at each...

Women have long been crucial to the provision of medical services, both in the treatment of sickness and in maintaining health. In this study, Susan Broomhall situates the practices and perceptions of women's medical work in France in the context of the sixteenth century and its medical evolution and innovations. She argues that early modern understandings of medical practice and authority were highly flexible and subject to change. She furthermore examines how a focus on female practitioners, who cut across most sectors of early modern medical practice, can reveal the multifaceted phenomenon...

This book is the first investigation on how official organizers built and sustained the national militant campaign of the Women's Social and Political Union between 1903 and 1918. Whilst the overall policy of the Union was devised by an ever-decreasing circle of women, centred around the mother-daughter team of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, much of its actual activity, including its more extreme militant actions such as arson, was devised and implemented by these organizers who worked in the provinces and in London. Women of the right spirit reveals organizers to be a diverse bunch of...

From 1600 to 1900 a growing consumerism fired the English economy, shaping the priorities of individuals, and determining the allocation of resources within families. Everyday business might mean making a trip to the pawnbroker, giving a loan to a trusted friend of selling off a coat, all to make ends meet. Both women and men engaged in this daily budgeting, but women's roles were especially important in achieving some level of comfort and avoiding penury. In some communities, the daily practices in place in the seventeenth century persisted into the twentieth, whilst other groups adopted new...

Women Police examines the professional roles, identities, activities and everyday experiences of women employed within the UK police service since the First World War against a backdrop of social and cultural change. As the first in-depth historical study of women's involvement in uniform, plain-clothes and undercover policing in the period before formal integration with male officers in the 1970s, it charts the relationship between gender, surveillance and penal-welfare strategies. For much of the twentieth century women police played a 'specialist' role in the detection and prevention of...

Modern women on trial looks at the highly publicised, sensational trials of several young female protagonists in the period 1918-24. These cases, all presented by the press as morality tales involving drugs, murder, adultery, miscegenation and sexual perversion, are used as a prism through which to identify concerns about modern femininity. There is a growing historiography on women and the First World War and interwar period, but this book uniquely places a series of virtually co-terminous trials and their reportage alongside each other so as to decipher the cultural work performed in...

This book provides the first full-length biography of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy (1833-1918) - someone referred to among contemporaries as 'the grey matter in the brain' of the late-Victorian women's movement. A pacifist, humanitarian 'free-thinker', Wolstenholme Elmy was a controversial character and the first woman ever to speak from a public platform on the topic of marital rape. Lauded by Emmeline Pankhurst as 'first' among the infamous militant suffragettes of the Women's Social and Political Union, Wolstenholme Elmy was one of Britain's great feminist pioneers and, in her own words, an...

Based on a new body of 160 oral history interviews, this fascinating volume offers the first comprehensive historical study of the experience of motherhood in the second half of the twentieth century. In her thematic study of an area where a number of discourses and practices meet, Davis sheds new light on aspects of mothers' lives such as education, health care, psychology, labour market trends and state intervention. Looking through the prism of motherhood to provide a way of understanding the complex social changes that have taken place in the post-war world, Davis considers how women's...