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.

This study explores the role of women in the representation of leisure in turn-of-the-century New York. To see and be seen was one of the fundamental principles in the aesthetic display of New York's fashionable society at the turn of the century. Women, in particular, embraced rituals of display, on Fifth Avenue and Broadway, in Central Park, at the Opera and in the fashionable uptown hotels and restaurants. The book argues for a reconsideration of the role of women in the bourgeois elite in 19th-century America. By contrasting multiple images of women drawn from newspapers, society and women's magazines, etiquette manuals and the New York fiction of Edith Wharton, the author offers an antidote to the long-standing tendency in women's history to overlook women whose class affiliations have put them in a position of power. The study seeks to make a contribution to social and cultural history, as well as to women's studies and literary criticism.

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.