In Victorian England, the perception of girlhood arose not in isolation, but as one manifestation of the prevailing conception of femininity. Examining the assumptions that underlay the education and upbringing of middle-class girls, this book is also a study of the learning of gender roles in theory and reality. It was originally published in 1982.The first two sections examine the image of women in the Victorian family, and the advice offered in printed sources on the rearing of ...

Marion Dewar could never ignore a person who was begging in the street. Along with money, she would offer words of encouragement and friendship. Perhaps it was her training as a nurse, her devout Catholic upbringing, or maybe it was simply because she was a genuinely compassionate woman. As mayor of Ottawa from 1978-1985, Marion Dewar worked tirelessly to bring about non-profit housing, better public transportation, support and encouragement for the arts, for peace, and for women’s rights....

This collection of essays takes the reader from the early 19th century struggle between female midwives and male physicians right up to the late 20th century emergence of professionally trained women physicians vying for a place in the medical hierarchy. The bitter conflict for control of birthing and other aspects of domestic health care between female lay healers, particularly midwives, and the emerging male-dominated medical profession is examined from new perspectives.

How much have women's lives really changed? In the West women still come up against the 'glass ceiling' at work, most earning considerably less than their male counterparts. What are we to make of the now commonplace insistence that feminism deprives men of their rights and dignities? And how does one tackle the issue of female emancipation in different cultural and economic environments - in, for example, the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, and Africa? This book provides an histori...

THE NEW BOOK FROM ELINOR CLEGHORN: A WOMAN'S WORK IS OUT NOW 'An essential history' - Leah Hazard'Powerful' NEW YORK TIMES'A passionate and indignant history' THE TIMES'Unputdownable' TELEGRAPHMedicine carries the burden of its own troubling history. Over centuries, women's bodies have been demonised and demeaned until we feared them, felt asham...

A Sunday Telegraph and Times Higher Education 'Book of the Week', Deborah Cohen's Family Secrets is a gripping book about what families - Victorian and modern - try to hide, and why.In an Edinburgh town house, a genteel maiden lady frets with her brother over their niece's downy upper lip. Would the darkening shadow betray the girl's Eurasian heritage? On a Liverpool railway platform, a heartbroken mother hands over her eight-year old ill...

'A brilliant cultural history.'Irish ExaminerGirls behave badly. If they're not obscenity-shouting, pint-swigging ladettes, they're narcissistic, living dolls floating around in a cloud of self-obsession, far too busy twerking to care. And this is news.In this witty and wonderful book, Carol Dyhouse shows that where there's a social scandal or a wave of moral outrage, you can bet a girl is to blame. Whether it be stories of 'brazen flappers' staying out and ...

The classic work on women's health and how the medical establishment helped to justify sexism, by the authors of Witches, Midwives, and Nurses.From Barbara Ehrenrich, New York Times-bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, Bright-Sided, and other titles, and Deirdre English, former editor of Mother Jones, this book delves into the history of how women have been diagnosed, defined, and often dismissed, by doctors, a proble...

A provocative and debate-inspiring book which explores the pressure, politics, philosophy and culture of motherhood in today’s society.Motherhood has changed. For several decades there has been tension between traditional ideas and modern values of mothering. For years the trend was away from the constraints which bound down our own mothers and towards liberating women. But in the 1980s and 1990s the momentum has shifted into sharp reverse.Mother of All Myths documents the ...

Domesticity is generally treated as an aspect of women’s history. In this fascinating study of the nineteenth-century middle class, John Tosh shows how profoundly men’s lives were conditioned by the Victorian ideal and how they negotiated its many contradictions.Tosh begins by looking at the experience of boyhood, married life, sex, and fatherhood in the early decades of the nineteenth century—illustrated by case studies representing a variety of backgrounds—and then contrasts th...

The definitive history of abortion in the United States, with a new preface that equips readers for what’s to come.When Abortion Was a Crime is the must-read book on abortion history. Originally published ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this award-winning study was the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with that monumental...

In the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst into popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it change...