This collection focuses on generations of early women historians, seeking to identify the intellectual milieu and professional realities that framed their lives. It moves beyond treating them as simply individuals and looks to the social and intellectual forces that encouraged them to study history and, at the same time, would often limit the reach and define the nature of their study. This collection of essays speaks to female practitioners of history over the past four centuries that published original histories, some within a university setting and some outside. By analysing the values these early women scholars faced, readers can understand the broader social values that led women historians to exist as a unit apart from the career path of their male colleagues.

Includes a variety of women's political writings from the Seventeenth Century. This collection highlights the principles inherent in female political action in its many and varied forms, from women's Civil War petitioning, to the efforts of Quaker women to reform prisons.

Includes a variety of women's political writings from the Seventeenth Century. This collection highlights the principles inherent in female political action in its many and varied forms, from women's Civil War petitioning, to the efforts of Quaker women to reform prisons.

Includes a variety of women's political writings from the Seventeenth Century. This collection highlights the principles inherent in female political action in its many and varied forms, from women's Civil War petitioning, to the efforts of Quaker women to reform prisons.

Includes a variety of women's political writings from the Seventeenth Century. This collection highlights the principles inherent in female political action in its many and varied forms, from women's Civil War petitioning, to the efforts of Quaker women to reform prisons.

This collection focuses on generations of early women historians, seeking to identify the intellectual milieu and professional realities that framed their lives. It moves beyond treating them as simply individuals and looks to the social and intellectual forces that encouraged them to study history and, at the same time, would often limit the reach and define the nature of their study. This collection of essays speaks to female practitioners of history over the past four centuries that published original histories, some within a university setting and some outside. By analysing the values these early women scholars faced, readers can understand the broader social values that led women historians to exist as a unit apart from the career path of their male colleagues.

This collection of essays studies political writings by women from 1400 to 1800, and moves beyond the much more common discussion of women's literary works, political roles, or the operation of gender in politics generally. The book has a novel, dual purpose: to focus on women's political writings during a period when women were discouraged from expressing political thoughts, and to analyze how the intellectual and social institutions of the age directed both women's political (or nonpolitical) existence and their ability to express, and to have heard by others, their political opinions.

All Men and Both Sexes explores the use of such universal terms as "people, " "man, " or "human" in early modern England, from the civil war through the Enlightenment. Such language falsely implies inclusion of both men and women when actually it excludes women.

Recent scholarship has focused on the Rights of Man doctrine from the Enlightenment arid the French Revolution as explanation for women's exclusion from citizenship. According to Hilda Smith, we need to go back further, to the English Revolution and the more grounded (but equally restricted) values tied to the "free-born Englishman." Citing educational treatises, advice literature to young people, guild records, popular periodicals, and parliamentary debates, she demonstrates how the "male maturation process" came to define the qualities attached to citizenship and responsible adulthood, which in turn became the basis for modern individualism and liberalism. By the eighteenth century a new discourse of sensibility was describing women as dependent beings outside the state, in a separate sphere and in need of protection. This excluded women from reform debates, forcing them to seek not an extension of a democratic franchise but a specific women's suffrage focused on gender difference.

This new collection makes available a wide variety of women's political writings from the seventeenth century. It highlights the principles inherent in female political action such as women's Civil War petitioning and Quaker women's efforts to reform prison and tithing practices.