Englishwoman's Review 15 October 1900

International Journal of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences Studies, 2022

This article traces the changes that came in the social, domestic and educational conditions of women in the 19th century England. It dissects the information into the three above-mentioned spheres and tries to analyse the conditions of women"s lives. The study also links the various biological and evolutionary aspects of gender divisions to the literature studied in an effort to explore the medical side, if any, of women"s subordination. Aims: The aim was to analyse if the 19th century-a period of changing family values, Industrialisation, and reform in various fields like Medicine, Law and Education-reformed the secluded and restricted lives of English women. Methods and materials: The information within the article has been gained from three literary works of the early, middle and late 19th century periods. The analysis is based on information presented within the given literature, and is supplemented by various studies listed within the references. Results and Conclusion: The results indicate that there was more acceptance of spinsterhood and remarriage, and working-rights for women were being enforced, giving them more autonomy. However, women were confined to unskilled work and not allowed to branch off into professional fields. There was a need for conserving the chastity of women for marriage, and financial conditions generally dictated a woman"s capabilities and marital prospects. In this sense, true autonomy was still a long way off. All throughout, a repetitive pattern was observed-various unfounded claims to men"s superiority were made in reference to evolutionary aspects and the theory of Social Darwinism, whereas actual evidence for such claims was found lacking.

Nineteenth-Century British Women's Education, 1840–1900, 2020

2017

University <1>Within Victorian culture, agingand, in particular, aging among womenwas often associated with the loss of physical and mental capacities, social isolation, and dependence on others. As Lisa Niles explains, "described in terms of adversity, melancholia, insanity, disease, and hysteria, the woman who had passed into menopause had relinquished her possession of power: power over her desires, her body, even possibly her mind" (295). According to Looser, "old age was more like to be experienced as a period of loss [as compared to men's aging experiences]both in terms of property and law and in terms of the perceptions of physical decay. The culture's fixation on a youthful physical ideas was especially directed towards women" (2). Or, as W. R. Greg wrote in Why are Women Redundant (1869), the lives of elderly women are: "wretched and deteriorating, their minds narrowing and their hearts withering, because they have nothing to do and none to love, cherish, and obey" (6). As all of the abovequoted material suggests, often in the nineteenth century aging and elderly women were associated with helplessness, senility, and redundancy.

American Journal of Legal History, 1998

The Historian, 2006

Women's Federation in the period 1917-1930 and a fascinating essay by Claire Jones on laboratory culture. Not surprisingly, the laboratory tended to be represented as a "site of manly display, heroic endeavor and moral bravery," (182) making it particularly difficult for women to follow a career in the physical sciences. The final section, women and war, has an informative essay by Angela Smith on the representation of women munitions workers in literature and culture, an essay by Lucy Noakes on women in the British military, and a slighter contribution by David Sheridan on women musicians in the war. Edited collections are notoriously difficult to review and this one is no exception. Not surprisingly, the essays vary somewhat in quality. More important, the collection seems to have as much to do with the particular essays that the editors had in hand than any attempt at completeness. That criticism aside, this remains a useful collection. A number of the essays are excellent. It has a helpful introduction that introduces readers to the latest research on women, work, and culture, as well as to the relevant theoretical discussions. And most, if not all, of the essays are linked thematically around a number of shared concerns, including women's work identities and attempts to negotiate masculine institutional and cultural practices, the ways women have negotiated work and domestic obligations and identities, and the construction of women's work in the wider culture. The outcome is a series of snapshots that show both women's agency as well as the cultural world that both shaped and constrained it. Readers will find it a good place to begin a study of issues about women and work culture.

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2007

Women's Federation in the period 1917-1930 and a fascinating essay by Claire Jones on laboratory culture. Not surprisingly, the laboratory tended to be represented as a "site of manly display, heroic endeavor and moral bravery," (182) making it particularly difficult for women to follow a career in the physical sciences. The final section, women and war, has an informative essay by Angela Smith on the representation of women munitions workers in literature and culture, an essay by Lucy Noakes on women in the British military, and a slighter contribution by David Sheridan on women musicians in the war. Edited collections are notoriously difficult to review and this one is no exception. Not surprisingly, the essays vary somewhat in quality. More important, the collection seems to have as much to do with the particular essays that the editors had in hand than any attempt at completeness. That criticism aside, this remains a useful collection. A number of the essays are excellent. It has a helpful introduction that introduces readers to the latest research on women, work, and culture, as well as to the relevant theoretical discussions. And most, if not all, of the essays are linked thematically around a number of shared concerns, including women's work identities and attempts to negotiate masculine institutional and cultural practices, the ways women have negotiated work and domestic obligations and identities, and the construction of women's work in the wider culture. The outcome is a series of snapshots that show both women's agency as well as the cultural world that both shaped and constrained it. Readers will find it a good place to begin a study of issues about women and work culture.

2021

Focusing on the body in every chapter, this book examines the changing meanings and profound significance of the physical form among the Anglo-Saxons from 1880 to 1920. They formed an imaginary-but, in many ways, quite real-community that ruled much of the world. Among them, racism became more virulent. To probe the importance of the body, this book brings together for the first time the many areas in which the physical form was newly or more extensively featured, from photography through literature, frontier wars, violent sports, and the global circus. Sex, sexuality, concepts of gender including women's possibilities in all areas of life, and the meanings of race and of civilization figured regularly in Anglo discussions. Black people challenged racism by presenting their own photos of respectable folk. As all this unfolded, Anglo men and women faced the problem of maintaining civilized control vs. the need to express uninhibited feeling. With these issues in mind, it is evident that the origins of today's debates about race and gender lie in the late nineteenth century.

1986

Though there has been in recent years a substantial development in the research and writing on women in early modern England, work on women's experience and status in this period is still at an early stage. Many of the other fine studies that have been published recently have focused on upper-class women. Mary Prior's edited collection, Women in English Society, 1500-1800, takes a different approach and centers on other socio-economic groups. It is a further example of the new work in feminist scholarship on such topics as religion, work, and family in early modern England from the vantage point of gender. Prior states that the purpose of her collection is to focus on generalized women's experiences through investigating small groups of women intensively using primarily methods of historical demography and local history. The book attempts to cover a wide range of women's activities and conditions, and, indeed, some of the essays present information on groups of women that is not otherwise easily accessible. Joan Thirsk's forward is an excellent and substantial piece that places the collected essays within the context of a historical analysis of the writing on the status of women in early modern England accomplished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She demonstrates how this writing reflected changing political and social status for women. A number of the essays in this collection support as well as modify earlier historians' assumptions. Dorothy McLaren's essay on marital fertility argues, as did Peter Laslett much earlier, that prolonged breastfeeding worked as a form of birth control for women of most lower classes. This lead to a very different reproductive pattern than for that of upper class women who, having abandoned breastfeeding, experienced far more pregnancies. Some historians have argued that in this period mothers did not feel strong attachments for their infants. McLaren's reading of women's diaries and other sources, however, convinces her "that there is good evidence of strong maternal instincts in women in history, especially those who nursed their own infants" (p. 26). Barbara Todd addresses another stereotype in her essay on the remarrying widow. Contemporary drama presented the widow as a figure of comic contempt, foolish and pathetic in her desire to remarry. Yet the independent widow was also an anomaly in a society that expected households to be headed by men. Todd focuses her essay on women in Abingden, Berkshire between 1540-1720. As well as concluding that throughout the early modern period widows came to be less likely to remarry, Todd also presents a subtle psychological analysis of the pressures on widows and how the larger society regarded them. Mary Prior's two essays, on women working in Oxford, 1500-1800 and on Tudor bishops' wives, also touch on the problems of widows both in the urban economy and among the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In her essay on Oxford Prior demonstrates how women often provided the family with continuity and economic stability. Her conclusions about the reasons why women worked have parallels for today: they did so because of necessity, even though work may also have provided enjoyment and achievement. Prior's essay on the Tudor bishops' wives is particularly useful in that it addresses an issue on which little material is available. She demonstrates the dilemma of these women, the difficulty in determining their status and role. Prior provides a useful background to

Journal of Victorian Culture, 2007

The Economic History Review, 2012

In her introduction, Humfrey argues that women in late seventeenth-and early eighteenthcentury London who called themselves domestic servants were not simply young women using service positions as a way to earn a dowry, get married, and quit service. Rather, these servants were independent women who could rely on service as a means of getting income throughout their adult lives-as single women, married women, and widows-thereby exhibiting 'a degree of agency that took them well beyond the prescribed ambit for early modern women in civic life' (p. 1). This agency, combined with the typical mobility of servant women, meant 'that the workforce of women in domestic service constituted an engine of capitalist proto-industrialization' (p. 28) in early modern London. Humfrey first assesses who domestic servants were and presents a focused consideration of the experience of domestic servants in London. There then follows a series of depositions and settlement examinations organized into five chapters. Chapters 1-3 are taken from the London Court of Arches records for the years 1667-75, 1690-1706, and 1715-35, respectively, while chapters 4 and 5 are taken from the St Margaret Westminster settlement examinations for 1718-25 and 1726-35. All extracts in chapters 1-3 are fully introduced, identifying the principal actors in the case, the purpose of the case, and any background information the reader may need fully to understand the contents of the depositions. Such supplemental information includes, but is not limited to, the importance of the city of Bath as a spa town, an explanation of the nature and importance of a baby's caul, and the origin and significance of 'stool ball', a medieval game similar to modern-day baseball. Such explanations are welcome, and help to elucidate the depositions. The cases show servants acting as deponents in a wide variety of actions: applications for separations between husbands and wives on grounds of adultery and cruelty; allegations of sexual incontinence; and accusations of defamation. More important than the testimony of these female servants in these cases, though, is what their depositions reveal about the experience of domestic service for women in London during this period. The introductions to the depositions typically identify the servant by name, marital status, and age, ably putting to rest the common supposition that female domestic servants were all young, unmarried women by the presence of servants who are identified as wives and widows, and are of advanced ages. Further, the depositions cast light on the networks servants established with employers and other servants, the wages they were paid, and the awareness they had, not only of the goings on of the household in which they served, but also the knowledge they gained of the values of the items in those households. The extracts in chapters 4-5 contain information about female domestic servants, given by themselves. This includes, but is not limited to, their marital status, present and former service contracts, and wages. The depositions and examinations are enthralling, and there is no doubt that it is valuable to have these extracts gathered together in one volume for ease of consultation and discussion of the role of servants. Indeed, the introduction and five chapters provide a fascinating glimpse into the experience of female domestic servants living in London in the latter half of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Far from being passive members of the households in which they were employed, these women are shown to bs_bs_banner