Author : Mary Lyndon Shanley
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 15,40 MB
Release : 2020-07-21
Category : History
ISBN : 0691215987
Bridging the fields of political theory and history, this comprehensive study of Victorian reforms in marriage law reshapes our understanding of the feminist movement of that period. As Mary Shanley shows, Victorian feminists argued that justice for women would not follow from public rights alone, but required a fundamental transformation of the marriage relationship.
Author : Mary Lyndon Shanley
Publisher : Bloomsbury Academic
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 48,6 MB
Release : 2021-02-25
Category : History
ISBN : 9781350189072
“Important both for political theorists and for women's studies. She explores with great care and thoroughness the connections between nineteenth century feminist argument and activism on the one hand, and familiar liberal principles of justice and equality on the other” - Nannerl 0. Keohane, Wellesley College Traditional studies of the women's movement in Victorian England focused on the battle for suffrage and other public rights. In this new study, however, Mary Lyndon Shanlev explores how Victorian women campaigned to reform the laws which related to marriage and the married state. Arguing that without a fundamental transformation of the marriage relationship there would be no justice for women, they fought a series of campaigns to change laws governing divorce, married women's property, infanticide, protective labour legislation, child custody, wife abuse, marital rape and the “restitution of conjugal rights”. Women involved in these campaigns exposed the connection between the privileged position of men in both public and private life and the reluctance of Parliament to enact the reforms women sought. In a series of case studies Shanley explores the demands of the reformers, and the response of Parliament. In an Epilogue, Shanley warns of the dangers to liberal feminism in relying exclusively on equal rights in the law as a formula for change.
Author : June Purvis
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 631 pages
File Size : 43,1 MB
Release : 2008-01-28
Category : History
ISBN : 1135367094
Women's History: Britain 1850-1945 introduces the main themes and debates of feminist history during this period of change, and brings together the findings of new research. It examines the suffrage movement, race and empire, industrialisation, the impact of war and womens literature. Specialists in their own fields have each written a chapter on a key aspect of womens lives including health, the family, education, sexuality, work and politics. Each contribution provides an overview of the main issues and debates within each area and offers suggestions for further reading. It not only provides an invaluable introduction to every aspect of womens participation in the political, social and economic history of Britain, but also brings the reader up to date with current historical thinking on the study of womens history itself.
Author : K. J. Kesselring
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 18,4 MB
Release : 2022-02-17
Category : History
ISBN : 0192666959
England is well known as the only Protestant state not to introduce divorce in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Only at the end of the seventeenth century did divorce by private act of parliament become available for a select few men and only in 1857 did the Divorce Act and its creation of judicial divorces extend the possibility more broadly. Aspects of the history of divorce are well known from studies which typically privilege the records of the church courts that claimed a monopoly on marriage. But why did England alone of all Protestant jurisdictions not allow divorce with remarriage in the era of the Reformation, and how did people in failed marriages cope with this absence? One part of the answer to the first question, Kesselring and Stretton argue, and a factor that shaped people's responses to the second, lay in another distinctive aspect of English law: its common-law formulation of coverture, the umbrella term for married women's legal status and property rights. The bonds of marriage stayed tightly tied in post-Reformation England in part because marriage was as much about wealth as it was about salvation or sexuality, and English society had deeply invested in a system that subordinated a wife's identity and property to those of the man she married. To understand this dimension of divorce's history, this study looks beyond the church courts to the records of other judicial bodies, the secular courts of common law and equity, to bring fresh perspective to a history that remains relevant today.
Author : Diana Moore
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 49,42 MB
Release : 2021-07-14
Category : History
ISBN : 3030755452
"This book examines how a group of transnational British-Italian women affiliated with the exiled patriots of the Italian Left repurposed traditionally feminine activities, such as fundraising, gift-giving, maternity, and memory collection, to make a substantial contribution to Italian Unification and state-building. Through their actions, Mary Chambers, Sara Nathan, Giorgina Saffi, Julia Salis Schwabe, and Jessie White Mario transcended the boundaries of acceptable behavior for middle-class women and participated in the broader female emancipation movement. By drawing attention to their activities, this book reveals how nineteenth-century female activists achieved their most revolutionary goals by using conservative, domestic, or anti-Catholic language. Adding to the growing understanding of the Italian Risorgimento as a transnational phenomenon, it also shows how non-Catholic and non-Italian women participated in the creation and development of the Italian state. Finally, the book argues for the continuing importance of religion in both politics and philanthropy throughout the nineteenth century."
Author : Andrew Dowling
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 44,60 MB
Release : 2017-03-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1351920146
The purpose of this book is to address two principal questions: 'Was the concept of masculinity a topic of debate for the Victorians?' and 'Why is Victorian literature full of images of male deviance when Victorian masculinity is defined by discipline?' In his introduction, Dowling defines Victorian masculinity in terms of discipline. He then addresses the central question of why an official ideal of manly discipline in the nineteenth century co-existed with a literature that is full of images of male deviance. In answering this question, he develops a notion of 'hegemonic deviance', whereby a dominant ideal of masculinity defines itself by what it is not. Dowling goes on to examine the fear of effeminacy facing Victorian literary men and the strategies used to combat these fears by the nineteenth-century male novelist. In later chapters, concentrating on Dickens and Thackeray, he examines how the male novelist is defined against multiple images of unmanliness. These chapters illustrate the investment made by men in constructing male 'others', those sources of difference that are constantly produced and then crushed from within gender divide. By analysing how Victorian literary texts both reveal and reconcile historical anxieties about the meaning of manliness, Dowling argues that masculinity is a complex construction rather than a natural given.
Author : Sharon Marcus
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 43,66 MB
Release : 2009-07-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1400830850
Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law. Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.
Author : K. Nash
Publisher : Springer
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 23,40 MB
Release : 1997-10-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0230372252
The author argues that rather than seeing liberalism as exclusionary of women's specificity, as many contemporary feminists do, we should look at variations in liberalism, and in particular at its democratisation in the nineteenth century, and at how feminists have used liberalism as a resource. Liberalism is analysed using a post-structuralist theory of hegemony: texts of liberal political philosophy are deconstructed to show how the term 'women' is used as an 'undecidable' in the Derridean sense to produce the opposition between feminine private and masculine public spheres; these texts are then linked to liberal-democratic social and political practices, including feminism as a social movement.
Author : Arthur Burns
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 365 pages
File Size : 34,8 MB
Release : 2003-11-13
Category : Art
ISBN : 0521823943
This book takes a look at the 'age of reform', from 1780 when reform became a common object of aspiration, to the 1830s - the era of the 'Reform Ministry' and of the Great Reform Act of 1832 - and beyond, when such aspirations were realized more frequently. It pays close attention to what contemporaries termed 'reform', identifying two strands, institutional and moral, which interacted in complex ways. Particular reforming initiatives singled out for attention include those targeting parliament, government, the law, the Church, medicine, slavery, regimens of self-care, opera, theatre, and art institutions, while later chapters situate British reform in its imperial and European contexts. An extended introduction provides a point of entry to the history and historiography of the period. The book will therefore stimulate fresh thinking about this formative period of British history.
Author : Sandra Stanley Holton
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 21,9 MB
Release : 2012-11-12
Category : History
ISBN : 1135141177
One nineteenth-century commentator noted the ‘public’ character of Quaker women as signalling a new era in female history. This study examines such claims through the story of middle-class women Friends from among the kinship circle created by the marriage in 1839 of Elizabeth Priestman and the future radical Quaker statesman, John Bright. The lives discussed here cover a period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and include several women Friends active in radical politics and the women’s movement, in the service of which they were able to mobilise extensive national and international networks. They also created and preserved a substantial archive of private papers, comprising letters and diaries full of humour and darkness, the spiritual and the mundane, family confidences and public debate, the daily round and affairs of state. The discovery of such a collection makes it possible to examine the relationship between the personal and public lives of these women Friends, explored through a number of topics including the nature of Quaker domestic and church cultures; the significance of kinship and church membership for the building of extensive Quaker networks; the relationship between Quaker religious values and women’s participation in civil society and radical politics and the women’s rights movement. There are also fresh perspectives on the political career of John Bright, provided by his fond but frank women kin. This new study is a must read for all those interested in the history of women, religion and politics.
