This perceptive book studies the Victorian woman in the home and in the family. One of the central purposes is to rescue Victorian woman from the realm of myth where her life was spent in frivolous trifles and instead to show how she had a major part to play in the practical management of the home. The author makes judicious use of domestic manuals and other material written specifically for middle-class women. With statistical data to quantify the image as well, this book presents a better understanding of what it was like to be a middle-class woman in nineteenth-century England. Looking at the middle-class woman's problems as mistress of the house, her problems with domestics, her problems as mother and her problems as woman we can begin not merely to characterise the middle-class woman but to define her as an element of British social history and as a silent but significant agent of change. The book was first published in 1975.

There is still much uncertainty about the role of nineteenth-century British women in social and political protest. As politics was a man's world virtually all official accounts and statistics of popular protest deal only with the men involved. It is well known that women participated in food riots and mobilised support for Chartism, and as the dramatic changes in the economy during this period greatly increased the demand for women's labour, this stimulated their widespread involvement in political and social agitation, particularly the parliamentary reform movement of 1819. First published in 1982, this book provides a descriptive account of the part played by women - mainly working class women - in a variety of social and political activities that can broadly be categorised as protest. It establishes the basic outlines and offers an interpretation of the course of events.

What are men doing in feminist discourse? Although many feminists have commented on the relation, actual or possible, of men to feminist thinking and practice, and although some male academics have written about feminism, there has so far been little shared discussion. Men in Feminism is the first substantial attempt to produce a dialogue between feminists and their male allies. This lively book, comprised of essays by both men and women, is a controversial sally in the current debate over the future of feminist theory. Its focus is one seemingly direct and yet surprisingly prickly question: the actual and potential relationship of men to the now impressive and widely recognized body of feminist writing. Each essay attempts to assess the benefits or damage of male participation in feminism; several of the contributions stand in direct dialogue with others. The editors present, mediate and reflect upon the agreements and arguments in the book, as well as between themselves as editors. Their dialogue-afterword draws together the questions at the heart of the volume. Offering few comfortable answers, Men in Feminism will open up discussion of this theoretical and thoroughly political issue.

For over a decade, feminist studies have occupied an extraordinary position in the United States. On the one hand, they have contributed to the development of a strong 'identity' politics; on the other, they have been part of the post-structuralist critique of the unified subject - its experience, truth and presence - and of the massive challenge to Western metaphysics and humanism. Along with race and ethnic studies, feminist enquiry has moved beyond the fiction of a unitary feminism to address the differences within the study of difference. The essays in this volume all address feminism's relationships to theory and politics at the level of the criticism and production of knowledge. Readers and students of politics, history, literature, philosophy, sociology and the sciences - anyone with a stake in theory and politics - will benefit from this powerful book.

The first comprehensive companion to the key contemporary analytic in US feminist thought includes a range of diverse scholars from a range on disciplinary fields outlines major debates and definitions of intersectionality

The Nazi's were implacably opposed to feminism and women's independence. Rosa Luxemburg became a symbol of all that most horrified them in German society, in particular because of her involvement in active politics. Nazi ideology saw women in the activist role of 'wives, mothers and home-makers', and their task was to support their fighting menfolk by providing food and making and mending uniforms and flags. The miscellany of women's organisations was dissolved and reunified by Gregor Strasser in 1931, and in 1934 Gertrud Scholtz-Klink became an overall leader of the Nazi Women's Group, after which it functioned primarily as a propaganda channel. Part of the policy of Gleichschaltung (co-ordination) meant that even to join a sewing group, women had to choose the party group or nothing. This book provides a detailed and fascinating picture of the origins, development and functions of the specifically women's organisations associated with the NSDAP from their beginnings in the early 1920s, until their demise in 1945. It traces the history of the Nazi Women's Group, the sources of its members and analyses their ambitions and hopes from the Frauenwerk. Its purpose is above all to make an important contribution to the study of National Socialism as a movement which attracted and held the enthusiasm of a small minority of Germans who, given the chance from 1933, attempted to impose their will on the majority.

Why were the Victorians so passionate about "History"? How did this passion relate to another Victorian obsession - the "woman question"? In a brilliant and provocative study, Christina Crosby investigates the links between the Victorians' fascination with "history" and with the nature of "women." Discussing both key novels and non-literary texts - Daniel Deronda and Hegel's Philosophy of History; Henry Esmond and Macaulay's History of England; Little Dorrit, Wilkie Collins' The Frozen Deep, and Mayhew's survey of "labour and the poor"; Villette, Patrick Fairburn's The Typology of Scripture and Ruskin's Modern Painters - she argues that the construction of middle-class Victorian "man" as the universal subject of history entailed the identification of "women" as those who are before, beyond, above, or below history. Crosby's analysis raises a crucial question for today's feminists - how can one read historically without replicating the problem of nineteenth century "history"? The book was first published in 1991.

When it was first published in 1984, this book filled an acknowledged gap in the social history of the period and made available hitherto inaccessible sources. The work draws on newspapers and journals, memoirs, diaries, courtesy books, county surveys and records, but also on the literature of the period, its novels, poetry and plays. It examines the role assigned to women in eighteenth-century society and the education thought fitting to perform it. It looks at attitudes to courtship and marriage, chastity and sexual passion. It explores the role of women as wives and mothers, as spinsters and widows, and focuses on the living and working experience of women whether in the home, agriculture, industry or domestic service. It contrasts the expectations of the rich and the poor, the leisured lady and the underpaid female agricultural labourer, the unmarried mother and the prostitute.

Rooted in the printed sources of the period, this book reconstructs the attitudes of a pioneer generation of young women to the conflicts brought about by their new experience of employment outside their homes, and to changes in work and family relationships. In the 1890s and after the still prevalent Victorian conception of respectable womanhood excluded wage-earning women. Yet working-class women themselves did not acquiesce in this judgement, and Eisenstein's exploration of Victorian ideas about women and work - using the contemporary middle-class literature of advice and prescription to this new workforce - makes a historical study which is a classic of its kind. The book was originally published in 1983.

The 'minority' feminist viewpoints have often been submerged in the interests of maintaining a mainstream, universal model of feminism. This anthology takes into account the various differences among women while looking at the important areas of feminist struggle. While sisterhood is indeed global, it certainly does not mean that all women are required to submerge their specific differences and assimilate to a universal model. Consequently, the collection includes essays by leaders in the field of post-structuralist enquiry as well as by those immersed in the new spirituality, and the social consequences of recent biological research. Other essays reflect the political struggles which continue to be waged with different strategies by socialist and radical feminists, and the self-searching analyses undertaken by feminists uneasy about their inclusion within educational institutions and the radical new interpretations of sexuality within the cultural domain. The collection begins with a critique of white mainstream feminism emanating from Aboriginal women in Australia. The implications of the critique indicate that there is a pervasive racism within the feminist movement.

Women and families within the criminal justice system (CJS) are increasingly the focus of research and this book considers the timely issues of intersectionality, violence and gender. With insights from frontline practice and from the lived experiences of women, the collection examines prison experiences in a post-COVID-19 world, domestic violence and the successes and failures of family support. A companion to the first edited collection, Critical Reflections on Women, Family, Crime and Justice, the book sheds new light on the challenges and experiences of women and families who encounter the CJS. Accessible to both academics and practitioners and with real-world policy recommendations, this collection demonstrates how positive change can be achieved.

Originally published in 1987, Out of the Cage brings vividly to life the experiences of working women from all social groups in the two World Wars. Telling a fascinating story, the authors emphasise what the women themselves have had to say, in diaries, memoirs, letters and recorded interviews about the call up, their personal reactions to war, their feelings about pay and the company at work, the effects of war on their health, their relations with men and their home lives; they speak too about how demobilisation affected them, and how they spent the years between two World Wars.

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 1974, this study offers valuable perspectives on the status and roles of women in Stuart England and in the newly settled colonies of North America, particularly Massachusetts and Virginia. Incorporating both new research on the subject, and the findings of other scholars on demographic and social history, the author examines the effects of sex ratios, economic opportunities, Puritanism and frontier conditions on the emancipation of American women in comparison with their English counterparts. He discusses the effects of these major differences on women's roles in courtship, marriage and the family, educational, legal and civic opportunities. In the final chapter, he compares the moral climate of the two cultures in the latter part of the seventeenth century.

This book examines the marriages of British peers to American women within the context of the opening up of London and New York society and the growing competitiveness for high social status. In London, American women were often blamed for the growing hedonism and materialism of smart society and for poaching in the marriage market. They were invariably described as frivolous, vain and calculating - a description which points to the simmering anti-American sentiment in Britain. It was even suggested that titled Americans were having a detrimental effect on the British peerage because of their failure to produce male heirs. A brilliant analysis of the reasons why American women were viewed pejoratively not only in terms of anti-American feeling and the social transformation of the British upper class, but also the threat of women who did not appear to conform to aristocratic notions of a peeress's duties as a wife and mother. Originally published in 1989, this book has unique appendices listing details of peer marriages in this 1870-1914 period.

The essays collected in this volume reflect the upsurge of interest in the research and writing of feminist history in the 1970s/80s and illustrate the developments which have taken place - in the types of questions asked, the methodologies employed, and the scope and sophistication of the analytical approaches which have been adopted. Focusing on women in nineteenth-century Britain and America, this book includes work by scholars in both countries and takes its place in a long history of Anglo-American debate. The collection adopts 'the doubled vision of feminist theory', the view that it is the simultaneous operation of relations of class and of sex/gender that perpetuate both patriarchy and capitalism. This view informs a wide variety of contributions from 'Class and Gender in Victorian England', to 'Servants, Sexual Relations and the Risks of Illegitimacy', 'Free Black Women', 'The Power of Women's Networks', and 'Socialism, Feminism and Sexual Antagonism in the London Tailoring Trade'. Both the vigour and the urgency of scholarship infused with social aims can be clearly felt in the essays collected here.

This lively and controversial collection of essays sets out to theorize and practice a 'materialist-feminist' criticism of literature and culture. Such a criticism is based on the view that the material conditions in which men and women live are central to an understanding of culture and society. It emphasises the relation of gender to other categories of analysis, such as class and race, and considers the connection between ideology and cultural practice, and the ways in which all relations of power change with changing social and economic conditions. By presenting a wide range of work by major feminist scholars, this anthology in effect defines as well as illustrates the materialist-feminist tendency in current literary criticism. The essays in the first part of the book examine race, ideology, and the literary canon and explore the ways in which other critical discourse, such as those of deconstruction and French feminism, might be useful to a feminist and materialist criticism. The second part of the book contains examples of such criticism in practice, with studies of individual works, writers and ideas. An introduction by the editors situates the collected essays in relation both to one another and to a shared materialist/feminist project. Feminist Criticism and Social Change demonstrates the important contribution of materialist-feminist criticism to our understanding of literature and society, and fulfils a crucial need among those concerned with gender and its relation to criticism.

The phrase 'feminist pedagogy' couples the contemporary and the traditional, joining current political movements with a concern for the transmission of knowledge more ancient than the Greek word for teaching. Now, two decades after the first Women's Studies courses appeared on campuses, their place in higher education happily needs little demonstration. Gendered Subjects combines a number of classic statements on feminist pedagogy from the 1970s with recent original essays making significant and original contributions to the field. As the new scholarship on women has changed the content and structure of knowledge in every field, so this collection aims to mirror this impact on feminist pedagogy, with articles ranging from broad theoretical perspectives on the realities of the classroom to international explorations on how race, gender and class, and political orientation inform feminist enquiry.

Dissatisfaction with the present can cause people to gaze nostalgically back to an idealized past; that nostalgia pervades contemporary rhetoric. In lamenting the 'degeneracy' of present-day America, social and literary critics as well as contemporary novelists often choose as their scapegoat the women's movement and its increasing influence. Doane and Hodges show us how these social observers seek to 'reinstate' America and American values in ways that, overtly or covertly, do battle with the feminist movement for control of rhetoric, the power of language.

Science and the Construction of Women is a multi-disciplinary exploration of the major questions currently challenging feminist scholars of science. The authors ask key questions: What constitutes science? How have feminists investigated it? How does science 'construct' women? How can we create a feminist discourse of science? Are the current developments to women's advantage or disadvantage? Their answers draw on material from a wide range of natural scientific, humanities and social science sources, critically examining theoretical approaches from the postmodern to the materialist to the cyborgian. A key argument of the book is that there are strong intellectual and pragmatic reasons - the rapid development of information technology, advances in fertility treatment and genetic engineering, feminist concern for environmental issues - why feminism must rigorously engage with issues of a scientific and technological nature. Science and the Construction of Women provides an important contribution to the opening-up and broadening of debate in the field. This book will be an important text for students of gender and women's studies, and science studies. It is also designed to be read by feminists both inside and outside the academy and to appeal to all those with interests in the sociology of knowledge and the history of ideas.

A systematic and original study of feminist issues, The Sceptical Feminist fights a battle on two fronts: against the view that little or nothing is wrong with women's position, and at the same time against much current feminist dogma. It is written by a philosopher who, in the tradition of John Stuart Mill's classic The Subjection of Women, avoids the psychological and sociological speculation characteristic of much recent feminism and concentrates on the analysis of arguments. By these means she constructs a powerful and often unexpected case for radical change in the position of women, as well as for a change of attitude among many feminists. From her analysis, Janet Radcliffe Richards argues that positive discrimination in favour of women is essential for justice, that traditional sexual roles never had anything to do with beliefs about each sex's capabilities, that current abortion practice reflects a disguised wish to punish women's sexual activity, that 'women's work' is rightly little valued, and that traditional ideals of femininity are inherently pernicious. But she also argues that a movement for sexual justice cannot 'take the woman's side in everything', that feminism should not be thought of as the primary struggle, that dismissing 'male' logic and science will undermine feminists' own intentions, that the state should not subsidise motherhood, that ever available creches would be disastrous for women, that there is no inherent degradation in prostitution, and that contempt for beauty and adornment has nothing to do with feminism. This is a book for feminists, for their critics, and for students of moral, political and social philosophy.

Routledge Library Editions: Feminist Theory brings together as one set, or individual volumes, a series of previously out-of-print classics from a variety of academic imprints. With titles ranging from The Liberation of Women to Feminists and State Welfare, from Married to the Job to Julia Kristeva, this set provides in one place a wealth of important reference sources from the diverse field of gender studies.

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, many household activities also overlapped with commercial ones. The second key theme is the importance of the local social and economic environment in shaping the nature and extent of women's work. The book also demonstrates the similarity between certain aspects of women's work before and after industrialisation. The industrial revolution may have made sexual divisions of labour more apparent but their origins lie firmly in the pre-industrial period.

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 to it; the opening of education by Emily Davies; the claim to equity at law; the attack on the sexual double standard, led by Josephine Butler; women's public service from philanthropy - exemplified in a Mary Carpenter or Louisa Twining or Octavia Hill - to local government; and finally women's entry into politics led by Lydia Becker. The contents range from Caroline Norton on her battle for child custody in the 1830s to Annie Besant's inspiration of the match-girl's strike in 1888, and from W. T. Stead on child prostitution to Mrs Humphrey War's Appeal against female suffrage in 1889. The book was originally published in 1979.

This book presents a collection of papers which discuss the origins of the domestic ideal and its effects on activities usually undertaken by women: not only on women's wage work, but also on activities either not defined as work or accorded an ambiguous status. It discusses the formation of the ideology of domesticity, philanthropy and its effects on official policy and on women, landladies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, working-class radical suffragists, and Labour Party and trade union attitudes to feminists. Modern society of 1979, when the book was first published, is analysed in a discussion of militancy and acquiescence among women wage workers, a look at how and why the legal system reinforces activity specialisation according to gender, and an examination of why both pre-pre-war capitalism and the modern Welfare State have been unable to meet the needs of dependents. This collection reflects the increasing recognition that in order to understand women's roles today, it is necessary to examine not only their current manifestations, but also their origins and early development.