Author : Clarice Swisher
Publisher : Lucent Books
Page : 116 pages
File Size : 29,77 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 9781590185711
This book discusses the role of women in Victorian England.
Author : Sharon Marcus
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 41,92 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 : Joan Perkin
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 41,76 MB
Release : 1995
Category : History
ISBN : 9780814766255
A reprint of a book first published in 1993 by John Murray, UK. Perkins (women's history, Northwestern U.) uses letters, memoirs, and other revealing, first-hand sources to describe the social conditions of women of all classes during the Victorian era. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author : Arlene Young
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : pages
File Size : 27,61 MB
Release : 2019-05-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0773558489
The late Victorian period brought a radical change in cultural attitudes toward middle-class women and work. Anxiety over the growing disproportion between women and men in the population, combined with an awakening desire among young women for personal and financial freedom, led progressive thinkers to advocate for increased employment opportunities. The major stumbling block was the persistent conviction that middle-class women - "ladies" - could not work without relinquishing their social status. Through media reports, public lectures, and fictional portrayals of working women, From Spinster to Career Woman traces advocates' efforts to alter cultural perceptions of women, work, class, and the ideals of womanhood. Focusing on the archetypal figures of the hospital nurse and the typewriter, Arlene Young analyzes the strategies used to transform a job perceived as menial into a respected profession and to represent office work as progressive employment for educated women. This book goes beyond a standard examination of historical, social, and political realities, delving into the intense human elements of a cultural shift and the hopes and fears of young women seeking independence. Providing new insights into the Victorian period, From Spinster to Career Woman captures the voices of ordinary women caught up in the frustrations and excitements of a new era.
Author : Erna Olafson Hellerstein
Publisher : Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press
Page : 560 pages
File Size : 22,27 MB
Release : 1981
Category : Women
ISBN :
A vivid sense of what it meant to be a woman during the nineteenth century emerges from this collection of more than 200 documents.
Author : Jo Devereux
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 22,94 MB
Release : 2016-08-02
Category : Art
ISBN : 1476626049
When women were admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1860, female art students gained a foothold in the most conservative art institution in England. The Royal Female College of Art, the South Kensington Schools and the Slade School of Fine Art also produced increasing numbers of women artists. Their entry into a male-dominated art world altered the perspective of other artists and the public. They came from disparate levels of society--Princess Louise, the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria, studied sculpture at the National Art Training School--yet they all shared ambition, talent and courage. Analyzing their education and careers, this book argues that the women who attended the art schools during the 1860s and 1870s--including Kate Greenaway, Elizabeth Butler, Helen Allingham, Evelyn De Morgan and Henrietta Rae--produced work that would accommodate yet subtly challenge the orthodoxies of the fine art establishment. Without their contributions, Victorian art would be not simply the poorer but hardly recognizable to us today.
Author : Pamela K. Stone
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 109 pages
File Size : 23,3 MB
Release : 2020-10-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0429676999
This volume offers an overview of what it was like to be female and to live and die in Victorian England (c. 1837-1901), by situating this experience within the scientific and social contexts of the times. With a temporal focus on women’s life experience, the book moves from childhood and youth, through puberty and adolescence, to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, into senescence. Drawing on osteological sources, medical discourses, and examples from the literature and cultural history of the period, alongside social and environmental data derived from ethnographic and archival investigations, the authors explore the experience of being female in the Victorian era for women across classes. In synthesizing current research on demographic statistics, maternal morbidity and mortality, and bioarchaeological evidence on patterns of aging and death, they analyze how changing social ideals, cultural and environmental variability, shifting economies, and evolving medical and scientific understanding about the body combined to shape female health and identity in the nineteenth century. Victorian women faced a variety of challenges, including changing attitudes regarding appropriate behavior, social roles, and beauty standards, while grappling with new understandings of the role played by gender and sexuality in shaping women’s lives from youth to old age. The book concludes by considering the relevance of how Victorian narratives of womanhood and the experience of being female have influenced perceptions of female health and cultural constructions of identity today.
Author : Alex Owen
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 38,52 MB
Release : 2004-04-15
Category : History
ISBN : 0226642054
A highly original study that examines the central role played by women as mediums, healers, and believers during the golden age of spiritualism in the late Victorian era, The Darkened Room is more than a meditation on women mediums—it's an exploration of the era's gender relations. The hugely popular spiritualist movement, which maintained that women were uniquely qualified to commune with spirits of the dead, offered female mediums a new independence, authority, and potential to undermine conventional class and gender relations in the home and in society. Using previously unexamined sources and an innovative approach, Alex Owen invokes the Victorian world of darkened séance rooms, theatrical apparitions, and moving episodes of happiness lost and regained. She charts the struggles between spiritualists and the medical and legal establishments over the issue of female mediumship, and provides new insights into the gendered dynamics of Victorian society.
Author : Martha Vicinus
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 32,81 MB
Release : 1972
Category : Great Britain
ISBN : 9780416743401
The ideal woman of the Victorian era was a combination of sexual innocence, conspicuous consumption, and worship of the family hearth -- with marriage and procreation being a woman's only function. Suffer and Be Still is a collection of ten lively essays which document the feminine stereotypes that Victorian women fought against, but only partially defeated.
Author : K. D. Reynolds
Publisher : Oxford Historical Monographs
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 21,68 MB
Release : 1998
Category : History
ISBN : 9780198207276
This study of gender and power in Victorian Britain is the first book to examine the contribution made by women to the public culture of the British aristocracy in the 19th century. Based on a wide range of archival sources, it explores the roles of aristocratic women in public life, from their country estates to the salons of Westminster and the royal court. Reynolds also shows that a partnership of authority between men and women was integral to aristocratic life, thus making an important contribution to the "separate spheres" debate. Moreover, she reveals in full the crucial role that these women played at all levels of political activity--from local communities to the national electoral process. The book is both a lively portrait of women's experiences in modern Britain and a corrective to the view of the upper-class Victorian woman as a passive social butterfly.
