This groundbreaking volume examines women's political involvement from a variety of innovative angles. In addition to exploring literary sources and women's contribution to electoral processes, pressure group politics are examined in depth (including Jewish civil rights and the campaigns against the Corn Laws and Indian widow-burning). The attention to neglected aspects of women's political activity, such as religion, domesticity, European nationalism, empire, and lifestyle enable this book to challenge not only the historiography of Georgian and Victorian women, but also the nature of political history itself.

This groundbreaking volume examines women's political involvement from a variety of innovative angles. In addition to exploring literary sources and women's contribution to electoral processes, pressure group politics are examined in depth (including Jewish civil rights and the campaigns against the Corn Laws and Indian widow-burning). The attention to neglected aspects of women's political activity, such as religion, domesticity, European nationalism, empire, and lifestyle enable this book to challenge not only the historiography of Georgian and Victorian women, but also the nature of political history itself.

This comparative study analyses the emergence of feminist movements and their differing characters in Britain, France and the United States. Jane Rendall examines the social, economic and cultural factors which affected women's status in society, and led some women to act, individually and collectively, to seek to change it. The Enlightenment emphasis on women's 'nature' and the evangelical stress on the moral potential of women contributed to a framework of ideas which could be used by conservatives and by feminists. Among the middle classes, discussion focused on the need to improve women's education and on the strengths and limitations of domesticity. Patterns of paid employment for women were shifting, and Jane Rendall suggests that the weak position of women in the labor market during the early stages of industrialisation restricted their ability to associate together. Yet involvement in religious, political and philanthropic movements could provide a means by which women might come together to identify their common concerns and learn the necessary political skills. Jane Rendall places the origins of feminism in the broader context of social and political change in the nineteenth century, looking both at the changing relationship between paid work and domestic life and at the links between feminism and class and political conflict in three different societies.

Although women are often seen as "hidden from history," this book unveils the personal experiences of the wives, mothers, and sisters of Victorian and Edwardian politicians. Drawing on rich new evidence from correspondence and diaries, Jalland examines the lives of women in more than fifty British political families, recounting their experiences of courtship, marriage, and childbirth and the vital domestic and political functions they performed. With its numerous case studies and intimate approach to women's lives, this book is a welcome complement to the better known public history of women and the women's movement.

Producing a second edition of Sex, Work and Politics has allowed me to extend its chronological limits back to the 1780s and forward to the end of the Second World War in 1945. The original structure of the book remains unaltered though each chapter has been remodelled to take account of this change and of research published since early 2012. In particular, I have made wider use of contemporary newspapers to position women more firmly within their varied milieus. I have also added two new chapters that consider the role played by women after they received the vote in 1918 and 1928 and the place of women in Britain's imperial project after 1780. The first chapter considers the relationship between different approaches that have evolved to explain the role of women in history. This is followed by a chapter that looks at the ways in which women were represented in the nineteenth century in terms of the female body, sexuality and the notion of 'separate spheres'. Chapter 3 explores the relationship between women and work and how that relationship developed. Although women's suffrage has had a symbolic importance for generations of feminists, the campaign for the vote has obscured the broader agitations for women's rights during the nineteenth century and was, in terms of its impact before 1914, far less significant. Before the 1880s, the focus was not on winning the vote and the demand for parliamentary suffrage was only one of a range of campaigns. Between 1850 and 1880, a number of significant battles were fought and won. This was particular evident in the successful campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts from the mid-1860s and in the growing significance of girls' schooling and the campaign for higher education, issues are examined in Chapter 4.The following two chapters look at the ways in which women actively sought access to the public sphere through political activity and demands for suffrage reform. It was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that the suffrage movement achieved widespread national recognition largely through the activities of the militant Suffragettes led by the controlling Pankhursts and the non-militant campaigning of the Suffragists. These wings of the suffrage movement agreed about ends but disagreed about some of the means used to achieve those ends: it was a question of deeds or words. The nature of the suffrage campaign is considered in Chapter 7 while reactions to this from anti-suffragists and political parties form the core of Chapter 8. The impact of the First World War on women generally and the suffrage campaign in particular is discussed in Chapter 9. The critical question is whether women gained the vote in 1918 as a reward for their services during the war or whether it was a political imperative that could no longer be reasonably resisted. Chapter 10 considers the role played by women after they gained the vote in 1918 through to the end of the Second World War. Many women emigrated, either on their own or as part of families, to Britain's growing colonial possessions after 1780. Chapter 11 examines the nature of their role in the development of these colonies. The book ends with an examination of the notion of 'borderlands' as a conceptual framework for discussing women in Britain between 1780 and 1945 and the ways in which their personal, ideological, economic, legal and political status developed and changed.

"British women writers were enormously influential in the creation of public opinion and political ideology during the years from 1780 to 1830. Anne Mellor demonstrates the many ways in which they attempted to shape British public policy and cultural behavior in the areas of religious and governmental reform, education, philanthropy, and patterns of consumption. She argues that the theoretical paradigm of the 'doctrine of the separate spheres' may no longer be valid. Surveying all the genres of literature - drama, poetry, fiction, non-fiction prose, and literary criticism - Mellor shows how women writers promoted a new concept of the ideal woman as rationally educated, sexually self-disciplined, and above all, virtuous. This New Woman, these writers said, was better suited to govern the nation than were its current fiscally irresponsible, lecherous, and corruptible male rulers. Beginning with Hannah More, Mellor argues that women writers, who were too often dismissed as conservative or retrogressive, instead promoted a revolution in cultural mores. She discusses writers as diverse as Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, and Joanna Baillie: Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, and Lucy Aikin; Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Reeve, and Anna Seward; and concludes with extended analyses of Charlotte Smith's Desmond and Jane Austen's Persuasion. She thus documents women writers' full participation in that very discursive public sphere which Habermas so famously restricted to men of property."--