European Slavery Or Scenes From Married Life

The Englishwoman’s Review, which published from 1866 to 1910, participated in and recorded a great change in the range of possibilities open to women. The ideal of the magazine was the idea of the emerging emancipated middle-class woman: economic independence from men, choice of occupation, participation in the male enterprises of commerce and government, access to higher education, admittance to the male professions, particularly medicine, and, of course, the power of suffrage equal to that of men. First published in 1979, this fifteenth volume contains issues from 1882. With an informative introduction by Janet Horowitz Murray and Myra Stark, and an index compiled by Anna Clark, this set is an invaluable resource to those studying nineteenth and early twentieth-century feminism and the women’s movement in Britain.

In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas. As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.

The Englishwoman’s Review, which published from 1866 to 1910, participated in and recorded a great change in the range of possibilities open to women. The ideal of the magazine was the idea of the emerging emancipated middle-class woman: economic independence from men, choice of occupation, participation in the male enterprises of commerce and government, access to higher education, admittance to the male professions, particularly medicine, and, of course, the power of suffrage equal to that of men. First published in 1985, this final volume contains the index, which was compiled from the Table of Contents which appeared at the front of the yearly volumes. Along with the informative introduction, the index is a helpful tool for those studying the vast quantity of original material collected in the set, making it an invaluable resource to those studying nineteenth and early twentieth-century feminism and the women’s movement in Britain.