Mary Spongberg – författare

The complaint of Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, that history has 'hardly any women at all' is not an uncommon one. Yet there is evidence to suggest that women have engaged in historical writing since ancient times.This study traces the history of women's historical writing, reclaiming the lives of individual women historians, recovering women's historical writings from the past and focusing on how gender has shaped the genre of history. Mary Spongberg brings together for the first time an extensive survey of the progress of women's historical writing from the Renaissance to the present, demonstrating the continuities between women's historical writings in the past and the development of a distinctly woman-centred historiography.Writing Women's History since the Renaissance also examines the relationship between women's history and the development of feminist consciousness, suggesting that the study of history has alerted women to their unequal status and enabled them to use history to achieve women's rights. Whether feminist or anti-feminist, women who have had their historical writings published have served as role models for women seeking a voice in the public sphere and have been instrumental in encouraging the growth of a feminist discourse.

The complaint of Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, that history has 'hardly any women at all' is not an uncommon one. Yet there is evidence to suggest that women have engaged in historical writing since ancient times.This study traces the history of women's historical writing, reclaiming the lives of individual women historians, recovering women's historical writings from the past and focusing on how gender has shaped the genre of history. Mary Spongberg brings together for the first time an extensive survey of the progress of women's historical writing from the Renaissance to the present, demonstrating the continuities between women's historical writings in the past and the development of a distinctly woman-centred historiography.Writing Women's History since the Renaissance also examines the relationship between women's history and the development of feminist consciousness, suggesting that the study of history has alerted women to their unequal status and enabled them to use history to achieve women's rights. Whether feminist or anti-feminist, women who have had their historical writings published have served as role models for women seeking a voice in the public sphere and have been instrumental in encouraging the growth of a feminist discourse.

Addressing current trends in feminist historical and literary scholarship in relation to digital media, this book looks at how the field has developed since the first feminist archival research projects were initiated over twenty years ago. The contributions to the book explore three key concerns: projects which document the history of women’s political activism; the digitising of primary document archives by women; and the impact of digitisation on historical research about women. In addition, the book sheds light on the way in which historians and literary scholars fuse digital sources with traditional forms such as books and journal articles to imagine different and ground-breaking histories of women’s experience.With the field of feminist history and its relationship to the digital world in a dynamic position, the contributions to this volume can be read as signposts for future research in the field, posing questions for scholars and readers to explore in more detail. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s History Review.

The essays included in Mary Hays’s ‘Female Biography’: Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism emerge from the authors’ collaboration in producing the first modern edition of Hays’s work in the Chawton House Library Edition (2013, 2014). This book explores Hays’s larger ambitions to lay the foundation for an encyclopaedic work by, for, and about women. The scholars’ contributions to this volume engage with some of the multiple problems and possibilities that Female Biography presented. Drawing on this effort, individual scholars examine Hays’s attempts to correct existing masculinist constructs which framed the ‘universe of knowledge’ then and persist in our time. Hays perceived that these had the cumulative effect of rendering women invisible. She responded to such absence by providing examples of the extent of female worth across Western society. Other contributions focus specifically on the subjects of Hays’s entries, looking at how she used source material and laid the groundwork for future biographical studies of women’s lives.Both Female Biography and Hays herself have continually presented difficulties in categorization: not quite Enlightenment, not quite Victorian either. This book recontextualizes her work, demonstrating the radicalism and originality of her feminism, even in its post-Wollstonecraftian phase, as well as the longevity of her influence. As such, it will be of interest to those conducting research into Hays, her subjects, and the evolution of life-writing by women.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

The essays included in Mary Hays’s ‘Female Biography’: Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism emerge from the authors’ collaboration in producing the first modern edition of Hays’s work in the Chawton House Library Edition (2013, 2014). This book explores Hays’s larger ambitions to lay the foundation for an encyclopaedic work by, for, and about women. The scholars’ contributions to this volume engage with some of the multiple problems and possibilities that Female Biography presented. Drawing on this effort, individual scholars examine Hays’s attempts to correct existing masculinist constructs which framed the ‘universe of knowledge’ then and persist in our time. Hays perceived that these had the cumulative effect of rendering women invisible. She responded to such absence by providing examples of the extent of female worth across Western society. Other contributions focus specifically on the subjects of Hays’s entries, looking at how she used source material and laid the groundwork for future biographical studies of women’s lives.Both Female Biography and Hays herself have continually presented difficulties in categorization: not quite Enlightenment, not quite Victorian either. This book recontextualizes her work, demonstrating the radicalism and originality of her feminism, even in its post-Wollstonecraftian phase, as well as the longevity of her influence. As such, it will be of interest to those conducting research into Hays, her subjects, and the evolution of life-writing by women.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

Addressing current trends in feminist historical and literary scholarship in relation to digital media, this book looks at how the field has developed since the first feminist archival research projects were initiated over twenty years ago. The contributions to the book explore three key concerns: projects which document the history of women’s political activism; the digitising of primary document archives by women; and the impact of digitisation on historical research about women. In addition, the book sheds light on the way in which historians and literary scholars fuse digital sources with traditional forms such as books and journal articles to imagine different and ground-breaking histories of women’s experience.With the field of feminist history and its relationship to the digital world in a dynamic position, the contributions to this volume can be read as signposts for future research in the field, posing questions for scholars and readers to explore in more detail. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s History Review.

In 1497 the local council of a small town in Scotland issued an order that all light women--women suspected of prostitution-- be branded with a hot iron on their face. In late eighteenth- century England, the body of the prostitute became almost synonymous with venereal disease as doctors drew up detailed descriptions of the abnormal and degenerate traits of fallen women. Throughout much of history, popular and medical knowledge has held women, especially promiscuous women, as the source of venereal disease. In Feminizing Venereal Disease, Mary Spongberg provides a critical examination of this practice by examining the construction of venereal disease in 19th century Britain. Spongberg argues that despite the efforts of doctors to treat medicine as a pure science, medical knowledge was greatly influenced by cultural assumptions and social and moral codes. By revealing the symbolic importance of the prostitute as the source of social disease in Victorian England, Spongberg presents a forceful argument about the gendering of nineteenth- century medicine.In a fascinating use of history to enlighten contemporary discourse, the book concludes with a compelling discussion of the impact of Victorian notions of the body on current discussions of HIV/AIDS, arguing that AIDS, like syphilis in the nineteenth century, has become a feminized disease.

In 1497 the local council of a small town in Scotland issued an order that all light women--women suspected of prostitution-- be branded with a hot iron on their face. In late eighteenth- century England, the body of the prostitute became almost synonymous with venereal disease as doctors drew up detailed descriptions of the abnormal and degenerate traits of fallen women. Throughout much of history, popular and medical knowledge has held women, especially promiscuous women, as the source of venereal disease. In Feminizing Venereal Disease, Mary Spongberg provides a critical examination of this practice by examining the construction of venereal disease in 19th century Britain. Spongberg argues that despite the efforts of doctors to treat medicine as a pure science, medical knowledge was greatly influenced by cultural assumptions and social and moral codes. By revealing the symbolic importance of the prostitute as the source of social disease in Victorian England, Spongberg presents a forceful argument about the gendering of nineteenth- century medicine.In a fascinating use of history to enlighten contemporary discourse, the book concludes with a compelling discussion of the impact of Victorian notions of the body on current discussions of HIV/AIDS, arguing that AIDS, like syphilis in the nineteenth century, has become a feminized disease.

1790 saw the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France -- the definitive tract of modern conservatism as a political philosophy. Though women of the period wrote texts that clearly responded to and reacted against Burke's conception of English history and to the contemporary political events that continued to shape it, this conversation was largely ignored or dismissed, and much of it remains to be reconsidered today.Examining the works of women writers from Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft to the Strickland sisters and Mary Anne Everett Green, this book begins to recuperate that conversation and in doing so uncovers a more complete and nuanced picture of women's participation in the writing of history. Professor Mary Spongberg puts forward an alternate, feminized historiography of Britain that demonstrates how women writers' recourse to history caused them to become generically innovative and allowed them to participate in the political debates that framed the emergence of modern British historiography, and to push back against the Whig interpretation of history that predominated from 1790-1860.