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"Middle class women Great Britain Social conditions 19th century."
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In search of the new woman : middle-class women and work in Britain, 1870-1914
\"The 'New Women' of late nineteenth-century Britain were seen as defying society's conventions. Studying this phenomenon from its origins in the 1870s to the outbreak of the Great War, Gillian Sutherland examines whether women really had the economic freedom to challenge norms relating to work, political action, love and marriage, and surveys literary and pictorial representations of the New Woman. She considers the proportion of middle-class women who were in employment and the work they did, and compares the different experiences of women who went to Oxbridge and those who went to other universities. Juxtaposing them against the period's rapidly expanding but seldom studied groups of women white-collar workers, the book pays particular attention to clerks and teachers and their political engagement. It also explores the dividing lines between ladies and women, the significance of respectability and the interactions of class, status and gender lying behind such distinctions\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Silent Sisterhood
This perceptive book studies the Victorian woman in the home and in the family. One of the central purposes is to rescue Victorian woman from the realm of myth where her life was spent in frivolous trifles and instead to show how she had a major part to play in the practical management of the home.
The author makes judicious use of domestic manuals and other material written specifically for middle-class women. With statistical data to quantify the image as well, this book presents a better understanding of what it was like to be a middle-class woman in nineteenth-century England. Looking at the middle-class woman's problems as mistress of the house, her problems with domestics, her problems as mother and her problems as woman we can begin not merely to characterise the middle-class woman but to define her as an element of British social history and as a silent but significant agent of change.
The book was first published in 1975.
eBook
Love and Romance in Britain, 1918 - 1970
The new histories of love and romance offered within this edited collection illustrate the many changes, but also the surprising continuities in understandings of love, romance, affection, intimacy and sex from the First World War until the beginning of the Women's Liberation movement.
eBook
Feminine public sphere
At a time when women were barred from clerical roles, middle-class women made use of the informal power structures of Victorian and Edwardian associationalism in order to actively participate as citizens. This investigation of women's part in civic life provides a fresh approach to the 'public sphere', illuminates women as agents of a middle-class identity and develops the notion of a 'feminine public sphere', or the web of associations, institutions and discourses used by disenfranchised middle-class women to express their citizenship. The extent of middle-class women's contribution to civic life is examined through their involvement in reforming and philanthropic associations as well as local government. Making use of a range of previously untapped sources, this fascinating book will appeal in particular to those with an interest in Gender History and Scottish History.
eBook
When ladies go a-thieving : middle-class shoplifters in the Victorian department store
This book focuses on middle-class urban women as participants in new forms of consumer culture. Within the special world of the department store, women found themselves challenged to resist the enticements of consumption. Many succumbed, buying both what they needed and what they desired, but also stealing what seemed so readily available. Pitted against these middle-class women were the management, detectives, and clerks of the department stores. Abelson argues that in the interest of concealing this darker side of consumerism, women of the middle class, but not those of the working class, were allowed to shoplift and plead incapacitating illness—kleptomania. The invention of kleptomania by psychiatrists and the adoption of this ideology of feminine weakness by retailers, newspapers, the general public, the accused women themselves, and even the courts reveals the way in which a gender analysis allowed proponents of consumer capitalism to mask its contradictions.
eBook
The feminine public sphere
At a time when women were barred from clerical roles, middle-class women made use of the informal power structures of Victorian and Edwardian associationalism in order to actively participate as citizens. This investigation of women's part in civic life provides a fresh approach to the 'public sphere', illuminates women as agents of a middle-class identity and develops the notion of a 'feminine public sphere', or the web of associations, institutions and discourses used by disenfranchised middle-class women to express their citizenship. The extent of middle-class women's contribution to civic life is examined through their involvement in reforming and philanthropic associations as well as local government. Making use of a range of previously untapped sources, this fascinating book will appeal in particular to those with an interest in Gender History and Scottish History.
eBook
Victorian London's Middle-Class Housewife: What She Did All Day
Through a detailed description of the life and activities of the middle-class married woman of London between 1875 and 1900, this study reveals how housewives unwittingly became engines for change as the new century neared. In marked contrast to the stereotypical depictions of Victorian women in literature and on television, Draznin reveals a woman seldom seen: the stay-at-home housewife whose activities were not much different than those of her counterparts today. By exploring her daily activities, how she cleaned her home, disciplined her children, managed her servants, stretched a limited budget, and began to indulge herself, one discovers the human dimension of women who lived more than a century ago. While most studies of this period consider values, aspirations, and attitudes, this book concentrates on actions, what these women did all day, to provide readers with a new perspective on Victorian life. Late-Victorian London was a surprisingly modern city with a public face of well-lit streets, an excellent underground railway system, and extended municipal services. In the home, gas stoves were replacing coal ranges and household appliances were becoming more common. Having both money to spend and a strong incentive to buy the new laborsaving devices, ready-to-wear clothing, and other manufactured products, the middle-class matron's resistance to change gave way to a rising consumer culture. Despite her nearly exclusive preoccupation with home and family, these urban women became agents for the modernization of Britain.
eBook
Patriarchal Constraints on Women Workers' Mobilization: The Lancashire Female Cotton Operatives 1842-1919
The Lancashire women cotton workers were the best paid, most highly unionized female manual workers in Britain whose non-domestic way of life contravened Victorian domesticity. The paper examines the conditions that made possible their mobilization. It analyses how during early industrialism these women breached men's job monopolies, participated in communal protests and established unconventional family arrangements; how late nineteenth-century material and cultural ameliorations amplified their resources; and how interaction with middle-class women organizers then helped spark their own confrontation with gender inequities. Their experience illustrates a paradox in employed women's activism: the least dependent female workers were the ones to claim women's right to work and vote; those with the lowest fertility sought reproductive self-determination; and the sector with de facto equivalent wages to men's were the staunch advocates of 'equal pay'. The conjunction of partial emancipation from Victorian domesticity and patriarchal subjugation as working-class women determined this group's course of action.
Journal Article