Books in the Gender in History series

This book explores the marital relationships of the Scottish elites, 1650-1850, looking at how they negotiated love, intimacy and power in a patriarchal culture.

A new gendered approach to the rise of the modern state in Sweden over the long eighteenth century. -- .

This study places official discourse regarding urban amusement into the context of broader cultural understandings -- .

Explores British women's journeys abroad on steamships and trains during a period of great social, cultural and technical change, using a wide variety of sources including women's letters and diaries, contemporary art, advertising, fiction and etiquette guides. -- .

A response to the prominent Methodist historian David Hempton's call to analyse women's experience within Methodism, this book is the first to deal with British Methodist women preachers over the entire nineteenth century. The author covers women preachers in Wesley's lifetime, the reason why some Methodist sects allowed women to preach and others did not, and the experience of Bible Christian and Primitive Methodist female evangelists before 1850. She also describes the many other ways in which women supported their chapel communities. The book also includes discussion of the careers of mid-century women revivalists, the opportunities home and foreign missions offered for female evangelism, the emergence of deaconess evangelists and Sisters of the People in late century, and the brief revival of female itinerancy among the Bible Christians.

The first in-depth study of a distinctive brand of women's rights that emerged out of the Victorian Secularist movement. It looks at the lives and work of a number of female activists, whose renunciation of religion shaped their struggle for emancipation. Anti-religious or secular ideas were fundamental to the development of feminist thought. -- .

The book explores the previously under-researched patterns and practices that fashioned a modern consumer society, charting the evolving habits among English men and women across three centuries. -- .

This book explores changing notions of political and personal virtue in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and offers a new account of masculinity and citizenship in English culture. -- .

The first study of how a group of diverse women spread, built and sustained a national network of branches supporting the militant suffrage campaign in Britain in the years before the First World War -- .

This book examines women's experiences of motherhood in England in the years between 1945 and 2000. Based on a new body of 160 oral history interviews, the book offers the first comprehensive historical study of the experience of motherhood in the second half of the twentieth century. -- .

Looks at the relationships between men and women within Jewish communities living in Germany, northern France and England in the late Middle Ages. -- .

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. The book argues that early modern understandings of medical practice and authority were highly flexible and subject to change. -- .

Offers a fresh and original approach to the masculinities, subjectivities and emotions of working-class young men, and makes a distinctive contribution to the history of leisure and interwar youth. -- .

This study of the construction of black womanhood in Jamaica between 1865 and 1938 sheds new light on the struggle for full and equal citizenship of people of African descent in the post-emancipation British Caribbean. -- .

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 motivation in turn, highlighting class, gender and generational differences, as well as the reactions of wider kin and community. Frost shows how these couples slowly widened the definition of legal marriage, preparing the way for the more substantial changes of the twentieth century, making this a valuable resource for all those interested in Gender and Social History.

Examines the links between beauty and politics in the Anglophone Caribbean -- .

Examines labouring-status women in late medieval Valencia as they negotiated the fundamentally defining experience of their lives: marriage -- .

This book explores the contribution that five conservative, voluntary and popular women's organisations made to women's lives and to the campaign for women's rights throughout the period 1928-64. -- .

Detailed study of same-sex desire and military authority in the British Armed Forces between 1939 and 1945 -- .

This book explores the housing problem throughout the 70 years of Soviet history, looking at changing political ideology on appropriate forms of housing under socialism, successive government policies on housing, and the meaning and experience of 'home' for Soviet citizens. Attwood examines the use of housing to alter gender relations, and the ways in which domestic space was differentially experienced by men and women. Much of Attwood's material comes from Soviet magazines and journals, which enables her to demonstrate how official ideas on housing and daily life changed during the course of the Soviet era, and were propagandised to the population. Through a series of in-depth interviews, she also draws on the memories of people with direct experience of Soviet housing and domestic life. Attwood has produced not just a history of housing, but a social history of daily life which will appeal both to scholars and those with a general interest in Soviet history.

This investigation of women's part in civic life provides a fresh approach to the 'public sphere', illuminates women as agents of a middle-class identity and develops the notion of a 'feminine public sphere', or the web of associations, institutions and discourses used by disenfranchised middle-class women to express their citizenship.

Explores the life of Madeleine Smith, who in 1857 was tried for poisoning her secret lover. Charting the course of this illicit relationship and Madeleine's subsequent trial, this title draws on a range of sources to pursue themes such as the nature of gender relations and the extent of women's social and commercial activities.

List of tables and figures; List of Illustrations; Glossary; Note on Shetland dialect; Map; Preface and acknowledgements; 1. Pasts, peoples, selves; 2. Stories; 3. Place; 4. Work; 5. Culture; 6. Sexualities; 7. Power; 8. Reflections; Bibliography; Index

This book opens up new avenues in gender history by mapping masculinity's part in making revolution, waging war, building nations, and constructing welfare states. Written in a highly accessible style, targeted at both students, professional historians and the interested general reader. -- .

Uses court records to re-evaluate women's economic roles in early modern Scotland. -- .

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 'initiator' of many high-profile campaigns from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Wright draws on an extensive resource of unpublished correspondence and other sources to produce an enduring portrait that does justice to Wolstenholme Elmy's momentous achievements.

This study of barbers-surgeons and other artisans involved in the care and appearance of the body - jewellers, tailors, wigmakers, upholsterers - sheds light on the strong sociocultural affinities that existed in the Early Modern period between these apparently unrelated trades, challenging the divide between medical and non-medical occupations. -- .

Investigates women's employment in the British Civil Service and London County Council during the twentieth century, providing a new perspective on the development of the women's movement. -- .