British Women In The Nineteenth Century

This highly original synthesis is a clear and stimulating assessment of nineteenth-century British women. It aims to provide students with an in-depth understanding of the key historiographical debates and issues, placing particular emphasis upon recent, revisionist research. The book highlights not merely the ideologies and economic circumstances which shaped women's lives, but highlights the sheer diversity of women's own experiences and identities. In so doing, it presents a positive but nuanced interpretation of women's roles within their own families and communities, as well as stressing women's enormous contribution to the making of contemporary British culture and society.

Traditional analyses of nineteenth-century politics have assigned women a peripheral role. By adopting a broader interpretation of political participation, the author identifies how middle-class women were able to contribute to political affairs in the nineteenth century. Examining the contribution that women made to British political life in the period 1800-1870 stimulates debates about gender and politics, the nature of authority and the definition of political culture. This volume examines female engagement in both traditional and unconventional political arenas, including female sociability, salons, child-rearing and education, health, consumption, religious reform and nationalism. Richardson focuses on middle-class women’s social, cultural, intellectual and political authority, as implemented by a range of public figures and lesser-known campaigners. The activists discussed and their varying political, economic and religious backgrounds will demonstrate the significance of female interventions in shaping the political culture of the period and beyond.

An assessment of 19th-century British women that provides students with an in depth understanding of the key historiographical debates and issues, placing particular emphasis upon revisionist research. The book stresses women's enormous contribution to the making of contemporary British culture and

England in the nineteenth century became a predominantly middle-class society, with new opportunities for men, but new social and economic restrictions on "respectable" women. This book describes the emergence of exceptional women from their assigned domestic sphere to positions of public leadership, and finally to the cause of women's rights. Evangelical women in John Wesley's time preached publicly, but after his death were banished from the pulpits of mainstream Methodism. Other women, particularly Quakers, were soon heard in the anti-slavery movements and other reform causes of the 1820s, 30s, and 40s. In the middle of the century opposition to women entering public life was at its greatest. But some pathfinding women emboldened others by their leadership in the reforming missions and the revival campaigns of the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, especially within the temperance movement. By the last quarter of the century talented women were learning "unwomanly" skills of political leadership, particularly mastery of the public platform. In a succession of national women's organizations they applied the lessons learnt to women's issues, preparing for the final assault on "the key to all reform", women's suffrage. At the century's end the walls that had so long excluded women from public life were beginning to crumble.

Reveals Queen Victoria as a ruler who captivated feminist activists - with profound consequences for nineteenth-century culture and politics.

This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

A study of the 'New Woman' phenomenon, examining whether British women really achieved the economic independence to challenge social conventions.

The 'bonds of matrimony' describes with cruel precision the social and political status of married women in the nineteenth century. Women of all classes had only the most limited rights of possession in their own bodies and property yet, as this remarkable book shows, women of all classes found room to manoeuvre within the narrow limits imposed on them. Upper-class women frequently circumvented the onerous limitations of the law, while middle-class women sought through reform to change their legal status. For working-class women, such legal changes were irrelevant, but they too found ways to ameliorate their position. Joan Perkin demonstrates clearly in this outstanding book, full of human insights, that women were not content to remain inferior or subservient to men.

This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.