Routledge Library Editions: Women's History – serie

Reissuing seminal works originally published between 1928 and 1992, Routledge Library Editions: Women's History offers a selection of scholarship covering women's roles, gender battles, feminism and other issues through the ages. Topics include women in the World Wars, prostitution in Victorian times, the history of abortion, women's roles in the Stuart era and women's place in the household and in work.

The Second World War is often seen as a period of emancipation, because of the influx of women into paid work, and because the state took steps to relieve women of domestic work. This study challenges such a picture. The state approached the removal of women from the domestic sphere with extreme caution, in spite of the desperate need for women’s labour in war work. Women’s own preferences were frequently neglected or distorted in the search for a compromise between production and patriarchy. However, the enduring practices of paying women less and treating them as an inferior category of workers led to growth in the numbers and proportions of women employed after the war in many areas of work.Penny Summerfield concludes that the war accelerated the segregation of women in 'inferior' sectors of work, and inflated the expectation that working women would bear the double burden without a redistribution of responsibility for the domestic sphere between men, women and the state.First published in 1984, this is an important book for students of history, sociology and women’s studies at all levels.

Originally published in 1987, Out of the Cage brings vividly to life the experiences of working women from all social groups in the two World Wars.Telling a fascinating story, the authors emphasise what the women themselves have had to say, in diaries, memoirs, letters and recorded interviews about the call up, their personal reactions to war, their feelings about pay and the company at work, the effects of war on their health, their relations with men and their home lives; they speak too about how demobilisation affected them, and how they spent the years between two World Wars.

Commentators writing soon after the outbreak of the First World War about the classic problems of women’s employment (low pay, lack of career structure, exclusion from "men’s jobs") frequently went on to say that the war had "changed all this", and that women’s position would never be the same again.This book looks at how and why women were employed, and in what ways society’s attitudes towards women workers did or did not change during the war. Contrary to the mythology of the war, which portrayed women as popular workers, rewarded with the vote for their splendid work, the author shows that most employers were extremely reluctant to take on women workers, and remained cynical about their performance. The book considers attitudes towards women’s work as held throughout society. It examines the prejudices of government, trade unions and employers, and considers society’s views about the kinds of work women should be doing, and their "wider role" as the "mothers of the race". First published in 1981, this is an important book for anyone interested in women’s history, or the social history of the twentieth century.Companion volumes, Women Workers in the Second World War by Penny Summerfield, and Out of the Cage: Women's Experiences in Two World Wars by Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, are also published by Routledge.

This fascinating book examines the position of women under the Nazis. The National Socialist movement was essentially male-dominated, with a fixed conception of the role women should play in society; while man was the warrior and breadwinner, woman was to be the homemaker and childbearer. The Nazi obsession with questions of race led to their insisting that women should be encouraged by every means to bear children for Germany, since Germany’s declining birth rate in the 1920s was in stark contrast with the prolific rates among the 'inferior' peoples of eastern Europe, who were seen by the Nazis as Germany’s foes. Thus, women were to be relieved of the need to enter paid employment after marriage, while higher education, which could lead to ambitions for a professional career, was to be closed to girls, or, at best, available to an exceptional few. All Nazi policies concerning women ultimately stemmed from the Party’s view that the German birth rate must be dramatically raised.

The Nazi’s were implacably opposed to feminism and women’s independence. Rosa Luxemburg became a symbol of all that most horrified them in German society, in particular because of her involvement in active politics. Nazi ideology saw women in the activist role of 'wives, mothers and home-makers', and their task was to support their fighting menfolk by providing food and making and mending uniforms and flags.The miscellany of women’s organisations was dissolved and reunified by Gregor Strasser in 1931, and in 1934 Gertrud Scholtz-Klink became an overall leader of the Nazi Women’s Group, after which it functioned primarily as a propaganda channel. Part of the policy of Gleichschaltung (co-ordination) meant that even to join a sewing group, women had to choose the party group or nothing. This book provides a detailed and fascinating picture of the origins, development and functions of the specifically women’s organisations associated with the NSDAP from their beginnings in the early 1920s, until their demise in 1945. It traces the history of the Nazi Women’s Group, the sources of its members and analyses their ambitions and hopes from the Frauenwerk. Its purpose is above all to make an important contribution to the study of National Socialism as a movement which attracted and held the enthusiasm of a small minority of Germans who, given the chance from 1933, attempted to impose their will on the majority.

Over the decades from 1900 to 1967 abortion was transformed from an important female-centred form of fertility control into a medical event, closely monitored by the State. This transition, the author argues here, took place against a background of debate over fertility control and its implications for women’s maternal role.The book, originally published in 1988, suggests that the inter-war years saw a crucial mapping of boundaries in the debates over abortion. The distinction between methods of fertility control used before and after conception was more sharply drawn. The abortion law was difficult to enforce and in 1936 the Abortion Law Reform Association was founded by feminists to call for safe legal abortion as a woman’s right. Resort to criminal abortion continued in the post-war years and the number of therapeutic abortions also began to increase. The medical profession’s attempt to create a distinction between worthy medical and spurious social reasons for fertility control gave way in the face of women’s demands for safe and effective means to plan when and if they would have children. After a hard-fought battle, the abortion law was reformed in 1967. The abortion decision, however, remained firmly in the hands of the medical profession.

This book surveys women and work in English society before its transition to industrial capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The time span of the book from 1300 to 1800 allows comparison of women’s work patterns across various phases of economic and social organisation. It was originally published in 1985.Several important themes are highlighted throughout the individual contributions in the book. The most significant is the association between home and work. Not only was trade and manufacture in the pre-industrial period carried out in close proximity to domestic life, many household activities also overlapped with commercial ones. The second key theme is the importance of the local social and economic environment in shaping the nature and extent of women’s work. The book also demonstrates the similarity between certain aspects of women’s work before and after industrialisation. The industrial revolution may have made sexual divisions of labour more apparent but their origins lie firmly in the pre-industrial period.

Why were the Victorians so passionate about "History"?How did this passion relate to another Victorian obsession – the "woman question"? In a brilliant and provocative study, Christina Crosby investigates the links between the Victorians’ fascination with "history" and with the nature of "women."Discussing both key novels and non-literary texts – Daniel Deronda and Hegel’s Philosophy of History; Henry Esmond and Macaulay’s History of England; Little Dorrit, Wilkie Collins’ The Frozen Deep, and Mayhew’s survey of "labour and the poor"; Villette, Patrick Fairburn’s The Typology of Scripture and Ruskin’s Modern Painters – she argues that the construction of middle-class Victorian "man" as the universal subject of history entailed the identification of "women" as those who are before, beyond, above, or below history. Crosby’s analysis raises a crucial question for today’s feminists – how can one read historically without replicating the problem of nineteenth century "history"?The book was first published in 1991.

This collection of papers draws on insights from social anthropology to illuminate historical material, and presents a set of closely integrated studies on the inter-connections between feminism and medical, social and educational ideas in the nineteenth century.Throughout the book evidence from both the USA and UK shows that feminists had to operate in a restricting and complex social environment in which the concept of "the lady" and the ideal of the saintly mother defined the nineteenth-century woman’s cultural and physical world.

Girls learn about "femininity" from childhood onwards, first through their relationships in the family, and later from their teachers and peers. Using sources which vary from diaries to Inspector’s reports, this book studies the socialization of middle- and working-class girls in late Victorian and early-Edwardian England. It traces the ways in which schooling at all social levels at this time tended to reinforce lessons in the sexual division of labour and patterns of authority between men and women, which girls had already learned at home. Considering the social anxieties that helped to shape the curriculum offered to working-class girls through the period 1870-1920, the book goes on to focus on the emergence of a social psychology of adolescent girlhood in the early-twentieth century and finally, examines the relationship between feminism and girls’ education.

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 daughters during the Victorian period. To illustrate the effect and evolution of feminine ideals over the Victorian period, the book’s final section presents the actual experiences of several middle-class Victorian women who represent three generations and range, socioeconomically, from lower-middle class through upper-middle class.

The British feminist movement has often been studied, but so far nobody has written about its opponents. Dr Harrison argues that British feminism cannot be understood without appreciating the strength and even the contemporary plausibility of ‘the Antis’, as the opponents of women’s suffrage were called.In a fully documented approach which combines political with social history, he unravels the complex politics, medical, diplomatic and social components of the anti-suffrage mind, and clarifies the Antis’ central commitment to the idea of separate but complementary spheres for the two sexes.Dr Harrison then analyses the history of organised anti-suffragism between 1908 and 1918, and argues that anti-suffragism is important for shedding light on the Edwardian feminists. The Antis also introduce us to important Victorian and Edwardian attitudes which are often forgotten and which differ markedly from the attitudes to women which are now familiar; on the other hand, his concluding chapter – which surveys the period from 1918 to 1978 – claims that many of these attitudes, though less frequently voiced in public, still influence present-day conduct. His book, published originally in 1978, therefore makes an important contribution towards the history of the British women’s movement and towards understanding Britain in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries.

Assembling a full and comprehensive collection of material which illustrates all aspects of the emergent women’s movement during the years 1850-1900, this fascinating book will prove invaluable to students of nineteenth century social history and women's studies, to those studying the Victorian novel and to sociologists.Women’s pamphlets and speeches, parliamentary debates and popular journalism, letters and memoirs, royal commissions and the leading reviews, are all used to document the conflicting images of women: ‘surplus women’ and the issue of emigration; women’s work and male hostility to it; the opening of education by Emily Davies; the claim to equity at law; the attack on the sexual double standard, led by Josephine Butler; women’s public service from philanthropy – exemplified in a Mary Carpenter or Louisa Twining or Octavia Hill – to local government; and finally women’s entry into politics led by Lydia Becker.The contents range from Caroline Norton on her battle for child custody in the 1830s to Annie Besant’s inspiration of the match-girl’s strike in 1888, and from W. T. Stead on child prostitution to Mrs Humphrey War’s Appeal against female suffrage in 1889.The book was originally published in 1979.

The nineteenth century witnessed a discursive explosion around the subject of sex. Historical evidence indicates that the sexual behaviour which had always been punishable began to be spoken of, regulated, and policed in new ways. Prostitutes were no longer dragged through the town, dunked in lakes, whipped and branded. Medieval forms of punishment shifted from the emphasis on punishing the body to punishing the mind.Building on the work of Foucault, Walkowitz, and Mort, Linda Mahood traces and examines new approached emerging throughout the nineteenth century towards prostitution and looks at the apparatus and institutions created for its regulation and control. In particular, throughout the century, the bourgeoisie contributed regularly to the discourse on the prostitution problem, the debate focusing on the sexual and vocational behaviour of working class women. The thrust of the discourse, however, was not just repression or control but the moral reform – through religious training, moral education, and training in domestic service – of working class women.With her emphasis on Scottish 'magdalene' homes and a case study of the system of police repression used in Glasgow, Linda Mahood has written the first book of its kind dealing with these issues in Scotland. At the same time the book sets nineteenth-century treatment of prostitutes in Scotland into the longer run of British attempts to control 'drabs and harlots', and contributes to the wider discussion of 'dangerous female sexuality' in a male-dominated society.

In the mid-nineteenth century many parts of England and Wales were still subjected to a system of regulated prostitution which, by identifying and detaining for treatment infected prostitutes, aimed to protect members of the armed forces (94 per cent of whom were forbidden to marry) from venereal diseases.The coercive nature of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the double standard which allowed the continuance of prostitution on the ground that the prostitute 'herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue', aroused the ire of many reformers, not only women’s rights campaigners.Paul McHugh analyses the social composition of the different repeal and reform movements – the liberal reformists, the passionate struggle of the charismatic Josephine Butler, the Tory reformers whose achievement was in the improvement of preventative medicine, and finally the Social Purity movement of the 1880s which favoured a coercive approach. This is a fascinating study of ideals and principles in action, of pressure-group strategy, and of individual leaders in the repeal movement’s sixteen year progress to victory.The book was originally publised in 1980.

As paid work becomes increasingly central in women’s lives, the history of their labor struggles assumes more and more importance. This volume represents the best of the new feminist scholarship in twentieth-century U.S. women’s labor history. Fourteen original essays illuminate the complex relationship between gender, consciousness and working-class activism, and deepen historical understanding of the contradictory legacy of trade unionism for women workers. The contributors take up a wide range of specific subjects, and write from diverse theoretical perspectives. Some of the essays are case studies of women’s participation in individual unions, organizing efforts, or strikes; others examine broader themes in women’s labor history, focusing on a specific time period; and still others explore the situation of particular categories of women workers over a longer time span.This collection extends the scope of current research and interpretation in women’s labor history, both conceptually and in terms of periodization – emphasis is placed on the post-World War I period where the literature is sparse. This book will be valuable for scholars, students and general readers alike.

In 1791, the French femme de lettres Olympe de Gouges wrote that 'as women have the right to take their places on the scaffold, they must also have the right to take their seats in government'. This book explores the issues of female emancipation through the history of female execution, from the burning of Joan of Arc in 1431 to the events of the French revolution.Concentrating on individual victims, the author addresses the sexual attitudes and prejudices encountered by women condemned to death. She examines the horrific treatment of those denounced as witches and reveals the gruesome reality of death by hanging, burning or the guillotine. In an attempt to uncover the historical truth behind such figures as Joan of Arc, Anne Boleyn, Manon Roland and Charlotte Corday, she goes beyond biography to consider their deaths in symbolic terms. She also considers writers such as Genet, Yourcenar and Brecht and their treatment of the tragic, sacrificial and erotic aspects of female execution.

The suffragette movement shattered the domestic tranquillity of Edwardian England. This book is an original and searching study of the formidable organization which led this campaign: the Women’s Social and Political Union.With the use of previously unpublished correspondence of Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, her colleagues and such political leaders as Asquith, Balfour and Lloyd George, the author views the development of ever more extreme and violent forms of militancy not as a series of amusing exploits and incidents but as the carefully calculated political strategy the suffragettes intended it to be. He examines the reasons for the remarkable effectiveness of militant tactics in making women’s enfranchisement a political issue of central importance, and shows why militancy failed to secure this right prior to the outbreak of war in August 1914. He assesses, too, the influence of the vast social and political changes wrought by the war on the ultimate success of the campaign in 1918.

This lively collection of essays, originally published in 1989, illustrated recent developments in the area, with chapters by contributors from many different countries and disciplines.Asking new questions and using sources in a challenging way, the contributors reflect 1980s debates about politics and academic research in women’s studies. They cover a wide range of topics, dealing for example with opportunities and obstacles for women within male-defined power-structures and institutions such as science, religious communities, and ancient Roman industry. They discuss feminists and feminist movements, analyse the utterances of women and men in medieval literature and in defamation cases, and give insights into the ways femaleness and femininity are given meaning. The essays on theory deal with such important issues as women’s historiography, and androcentrism and ethnocentrism in history.

When it was first published in 1984, this book filled an acknowledged gap in the social history of the period and made available hitherto inaccessible sources. The work draws on newspapers and journals, memoirs, diaries, courtesy books, county surveys and records, but also on the literature of the period, its novels, poetry and plays. It examines the role assigned to women in eighteenth-century society and the education thought fitting to perform it. It looks at attitudes to courtship and marriage, chastity and sexual passion. It explores the role of women as wives and mothers, as spinsters and widows, and focuses on the living and working experience of women whether in the home, agriculture, industry or domestic service. It contrasts the expectations of the rich and the poor, the leisured lady and the underpaid female agricultural labourer, the unmarried mother and the prostitute.

This book presents a collection of papers which discuss the origins of the domestic ideal and its effects on activities usually undertaken by women: not only on women’s wage work, but also on activities either not defined as work or accorded an ambiguous status. It discusses the formation of the ideology of domesticity, philanthropy and its effects on official policy and on women, landladies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, working-class radical suffragists, and Labour Party and trade union attitudes to feminists.Modern society of 1979, when the book was first published, is analysed in a discussion of militancy and acquiescence among women wage workers, a look at how and why the legal system reinforces activity specialisation according to gender, and an examination of why both pre-pre-war capitalism and the modern Welfare State have been unable to meet the needs of dependents. This collection reflects the increasing recognition that in order to understand women’s roles today, it is necessary to examine not only their current manifestations, but also their origins and early development.

This book offers a detailed examination of the interaction between socialism and feminism through the lens of one particular socialist organisation, the Communist Party of Great Britain, from its foundation in 1920 until the outbreak of the Second World War. The study of socialism and feminism in the CPGB can be divided into four major areas – the party’s concept of socialism and the role of women in a future society; the party’s relationship to the feminist movement; the work of the party in relation to specific women’s issues; and how the sexual division of labour operated within the party.The author here defines and explains the socialist and feminist traditions in Britain and describes the ways in which they interacted, both at the level of theory and of practice. Sources from party press and reports to interviews with party members and non-party written and oral evidence and accounts feed into this thorough chronological treatment which outlays the changes within the CPGB during the 1920s and 30s in relation to feminism.

Rooted in the printed sources of the period, this book reconstructs the attitudes of a pioneer generation of young women to the conflicts brought about by their new experience of employment outside their homes, and to changes in work and family relationships. In the 1890s and after the still prevalent Victorian conception of respectable womanhood excluded wage-earning women. Yet working-class women themselves did not acquiesce in this judgement, and Eisenstein’s exploration of Victorian ideas about women and work – using the contemporary middle-class literature of advice and prescription to this new workforce – makes a historical study which is a classic of its kind.The book was originally published in 1983.

In this fascinating book, originally published in 1989, Anne Smith records interviews with a group of octogenerian women, covering all social classes and a great variety of experience. She allows the women to speak for themselves, bringing to light the submerged history of ordinary women's lives. This book should be of interest to wide general readership, as well as students of British social history and women's studies.

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.

In dealing with the common experience of women in modern society, this book provides a deeper insight into European women at work, at home, at leisure and in their political and educational functions. Particular emphasis is placed upon the significant cultural differences between women of various classes and nationalities. The first chapters of the book trace the growing importance of women’s work in the economic sector and for modernisation in general. Data from a wide variety of sources, including census figures, government and labour reports and personal accounts, illustrate that women have integrated work roles into a complex life style. The new image of women in society is analysed in the light of the numerous educational, political and legal reforms which took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the impact of feminist ideology is discussed in relation to this. In its overall presentation this book, first published in 1978, illustrates the importance of the history of women not only for an understanding of the female experience but also the process of modernisation in Western Europe in general.

This unusual book traces the development of the feminist movement in America and, to a lesser extent, in England. The comparison between the movements is enlightening.Professor O’Neill starts with Mary Wollstonecraft and traces the development of the attack on Victorian institutions right up to the 1920s and on to the 'permissive' society in which we live. But the story covers all facets of the movement: the struggle for enfranchisement, for property rights, and education, for working women in industry, for temperance and social reform. These remarkable women leaders live in these pages, but even more in the Documents which form the second part of the book. Here their own voices come to us across the years with a sincerity which gives life to the language of a past age.

This translation of the French Femme au dix-huitiéme siécle from 1862, first published in English in 1928, traces the life of the Eighteenth Century woman in an historical account. Through discussion of evidence from paintings and memoirs, the book draws an intimate lifelike account of what lay behind these images for women in France of this time. The Goncourt brothers wrote several social histories but were also art critics and novelists. Here they offer portraits of upper, middle and working class women in France. This is one of the earliest accounts of life for women in this period.