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The French Revolution opened a whole new stage in the history of
women, despite their conspicuous absence from the playbill. The
coming century would see women's subordination to men codified in
all manner of new laws and rules; and yet the period would also
witness the birth of feminism, the unprecedented emergence of women
as a collective force in the political arena. The fourth volume in
this world-acclaimed series covers the distance between these two
poles, between the French Revolution and World War I. It gives us a
vibrant picture of a bourgeois century, dynamic and expansive, in
which the role of woman in the home was stressed more and more,
even as the economic pressures and opportunities of the industrial
revolution drew her out of the house; in which woman's growing role
in the family as the center of all morals and virtues pressed her
into public service to fight social ills.
The nineteenth century was the golden age of private life, a time
when the tentative self-consciousness of the Renaissance and
earlier eras took recognizable form, and the supreme individual,
with a political, scientific, and above all existential value,
emerged. The present book, fourth in the popular series, chronicles
this development from the tumult of the French Revolution to the
outbreak of World War I-a century and a quarter of rapid,
ungovernable change culminating in a conflict that, at a stroke,
altered life in the Western world. Guided by six eminent
historians, we move from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth
century, which conceived of man as a noble creature of reason, into
nineteenth-century Romanticism with its affirmation of
distinctively individual creatures in all their mystery and
impulsiveness, exalting intuition as a mode of knowledge. More and
more, men and women wanted to sleep alone, to be left alone to read
and write, to dress as they pleased, to eat or drink anything they
liked, to consort with and love whomever they fancied. Growing
democracies advanced those wishes to the status of rights,
expanding markets stimulated them, and migration encouraged them.
That new frontier, the city, simultaneously weakened family and
community constraints, spurred personal ambitions, and attenuated
traditional beliefs. The authors dramatize the nineteenth century's
organized effort to stabilize the boundary between public and
private by mooring it to the family, with the father as sovereign.
Such chapters as "The Sweet Delights of Home," "The Family
Triumphant," and "Private Spaces" describe the new domestic ideal
of the private dwelling as a refuge from perils and temptations in
the public arena, the father as benevolent despot, the wife as
contented practitioner of domestic arts, the children as small
versions of adults, equipping themselves to follow in their
parents' righteous footsteps. Particularly in England, the middle
class was central to the formation of this homely standard, which
spread to the working classes through evangelical preaching,
utilitarian writings, and economic changes and improvements that
resulted in a separation of home and workplace. At the same time,
the gentry was transforming castles into country houses, knights
into foxhunters, and landowners into gentleman farmers. The
domesticating process also expressed itself in hygienic practices
(soap, waterclosets, bathtubs), fashions in clothing, and vogues in
sports, courtship, and lovemaking. From the time of the French
Revolution, when private or special interests were looked upon as
shadowy influences likely to foster conspiracy and treason, through
the rapid transformations of the nineteenth century, the authors
reveal the more radical forms of modernity that arrived with the
twentieth century, with its explosions of trade and technology.
Besides the external development of goods and conveniences, the
expanses of the psyche were also being reorganized, bringing a new
openness about sexuality liberated from procreation and marriage.
Feminism, a relatively sporadic movement in the nineteenth century,
became a more persistent force, while young people and the
avant-garde continued to break the rules and push for change as an
end in itself. As always, law lagged behind reality: in practice,
more and more people rebelled against communal and family
discipline. The declaration of war in 1917 put a hold on some of
the flowering of individuality, but the unstoppable trend toward
personality nurtured by private life was only temporarily curbed.
Volume III of A History of Women draws a richly detailed picture of
women in early modern Europe, considering them in a context of
work, marriage, and family. At the heart of this volume is "woman"
as she appears in a wealth of representations, from simple woodcuts
and popular literature to master paintings; and as the focal point
of a debate-sometimes humorous, sometimes acrimonious-conducted in
every field: letters, arts, philosophy, the sciences, and medicine.
Against oppressive experience, confining laws, and repetitious
claims about female "nature," women took initiative by quiet
maneuvers and outright dissidence. In conformity and resistance, in
image and reality, women from the sixteenth through the eighteenth
centuries emerge from these pages in remarkable diversity.
Drawing on myriad sources--from the faint traces left by the
rocking of a cradle at the site of an early medieval home to an
antique illustration of Eve's fall from grace-this second volume in
the celebrated series offers new perspectives on women of the past.
Twelve distinguished historians from many countries examine the
image of women in the masculine mind, their social condition, and
their daily experience from the demise of the Roman Empire to the
genesis of the Italian Renaissance.
More than in any other era, a medieval woman's place in society
was determined by men; her sexuality was perceived as disruptive
and dangerous, her proper realm that of the home and cloister. The
authors draw upon the writings of bishops and abbots, moralists and
merchants, philosophers and legislators, to illuminate how men
controlled women's lives. Sumptuary laws regulating feminine dress
and ornament, pastoral letters admonishing women to keep silent and
remain chaste, and learned treatises with their fantastic theories
about women's physiology are fully explored in these pages. As
adoration of the Virgin Mary reached full flower by the year 1200,
ecclesiastics began to envision motherhood as a holy role;
misogyny, however, flourished unrestrained in local proverbs,
secular verses, and clerical thought throughout the period.
Were women's fates sealed by the dictates of church and
society? The authors investigate legal, economic, and demographic
aspects of family and communal life between the sixth and the
fifteenth centuries and bring to light the fleeting moments in
which women managed to seize some small measure of autonomy over
their lives. The notion that courtly love empowered feudalwomen is
discredited in this volume. The pattern of wear on a hearthstone,
fingerprints on a terra-cotta pot, and artifacts from everyday life
such as scissors, thimbles, spindles, and combs are used to
reconstruct in superb detail the commonplace tasks that shaped
women's existence inside and outside the home. As in antiquity,
male fantasies and fears are evident in art. Yet a growing number
of women rendered visions of their own gender in sumptuous
tapestries and illuminations. The authors look at the surviving
texts of female poets and mystics and document the stirrings of a
quiet revolution throughout the West, as a few daring women began
to preserve their thoughts in writing.
Has the worst of times for humanity--this century bloodied by wars
and revolutions without precedent in history--been the best of
times for women? How have the promises of freedom, parity with men,
full participation in society, actually been met amid all the
transformations and upheavals the twentieth century has witnessed?
This fifth volume in the world-acclaimed series brings the history
of women up to the present, placing it in the context of momentous
events and profound social changes that have marked our time.
Informed by the work of seventy-five distinguished historians, this
five-volume series sets before us an engaging, panoramic chronicle
that extends from antiquity to the present day. The inaugural
volume brings women from the margins of ancient history into the
fore. It offers fresh insight into more than twenty centuries of
Greek and Roman history and encompasses a landscape that stretches
from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and from the Pillars of
Hercules to the banks of the Indus. The authors draw upon a wide
range of sources including gravestones, floor plans, papyrus rolls,
vase paintings, and literary works to illustrate how
representations of women evolved during this age. They journey into
the minds of men and bring to light an imaginative history of women
and of the relations between the sexes.
An erudite and highly enjoyable exploration of the most intriguing
of personal spaces, from Greek and Roman antiquity through today
The winner of France's prestigious Prix Femina Essai (2009), this
imaginative and captivating book explores the many dimensions of
the room in which we spend so much of our lives--the bedroom.
Eminent cultural historian Michelle Perrot traces the evolution of
the bedroom from the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans to
today, examining its myriad forms and functions, from royal king's
chamber to child's sleeping quarters to lovers' trysting place to
monk's cell. The history of women, so eager for a room of their
own, and that of prisons, where the principal cause of suffering is
the lack of privacy, is interwoven with a reflection on secrecy,
walls, the night and its mysteries. Drawing from a wide range of
sources, including architectural and design treatises, private
journals, novels, memoirs, and correspondences, Perrot's engaging
book follows the many roads that lead to the bedroom--birth, sex,
illness, death--in its endeavor to expose the most intimate,
nocturnal side of human history.
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