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.

Examining how nineteenth-century Black women writers engaged radical reform, sentiment and their various readerships

This highly original synthesis is a clear and stimulating assessment of nineteenth-century British women. It aims to provide students with an in-depth understanding of the key historiographical debates and issues, placing particular emphasis upon recent, revisionist research. The book highlights not merely the ideologies and economic circumstances which shaped women's lives, but highlights the sheer diversity of women's own experiences and identities. In so doing, it presents a positive but nuanced interpretation of women's roles within their own families and communities, as well as stressing women's enormous contribution to the making of contemporary British culture and society.

Contains 1000 oral interviews with American black women who lived between 1800 and the 1880s.

Although scholars have emphasized the importance of women’s networks for civil society in twentieth-century Japan, Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan is the first book to tackle the subject for the contentious and consequential nineteenth century. The essays traverse the divide when Japan started transforming itself from a decentralized to a centralized government, from legally imposed restrictions on movement to the breakdown of travel barriers, and from ad hoc schooling to compulsory elementary school education. As these essays suggest, such changes had a profound impact on women and their roles in networks. Rather than pursue a common methodology, the authors take diverse approaches to this topic that open up fruitful avenues for further exploration. Most of the essays in this volume are by Japanese scholars; their inclusion here provides either an introduction to their work or the opportunity to explore their scholarship further. Because women are often invisible in historical documentation, the authors use a range of sources (such as diaries, letters, and legal documents) to reconstruct the familial, neighborhood, religious, political, work, and travel networks that women maintained, constructed, or found themselves in, sometimes against their will. In so doing, most but not all of the authors try to decenter historical narratives built on men’s activities and men’s occupational and status-based networks, and instead recover women’s activities in more localized groupings and personal associations.