• The only guidebook focused on the women who have shaped London through the centuries. • Original self-guided walking tours take the reader to historic areas where important women lived, worked, and are commemorated. • Discover scientists and suffragettes, reformers and royals, military and medical pioneers, authors and artists, fashion and female firsts, and more • The author is a popular London tour guide and lecturer, specializing in women's history. • Illustrated with new full-color photography and specially commissioned maps.

Drawing on untapped archives, as well as aggregating a wide range of existing published sources, this book recalibrates the understanding of women artists’ roles, outputs and receptions in London during what was indubitably a vibrant and innovative period in the history of British art, and in which the work of their male contemporaries is so well understood. The book takes its starting point from Alicia Foster’s article “Gwen John’s Self-Portrait: Art, Identity and Women Students at the Slade School,” published in 2000, where the expression “a talented and decorative group” was coined to describe common attitudes towards women artists in the late 19th and early 20th century London. This pejorative attribution strongly implied a status less significant to that of their male counterparts. The author challenges this statement's basic tenet by casting a wide net in examining women’s art education from the Slade School of Fine Art, through to the role of its graduates within a selection of London’s exhibition groups, societies and publications. This book also reconstructs ‘from scratch’ the role of the Women’s International Art Club (WIAC), hitherto entirely overlooked in art historical studies of the era. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in art and cultural history, gender studies,and in sociological studies of pre-War World War Britain.

Dina Copelman's investigation of the public and private lives of women teachers reveals a strikingly different model of gender and class identity than the orthodox one constructed by historians of middle-class gender roles and middle-class feminism. Consequently, while the book focuses on women teachers from the beginning of state education in 1870 up to 1930, it is also an examination of how gender, class and professional identities were shaped and perceived. While offering a significant original contribution to the social history of teachers, this book is also driven by a consideration of broader historiographical questions.

The first book of its kind to study this period, Gerry Holloway's essential student resource works chronologically from the early 1840s to the end of the twentieth century and examines over 150 years of women’s employment history. With suggestions for research topics, an annotated bibliography to aid further research, and a chronology of important events which places the subject in a broader historical context, Gerry Holloway considers how factors such as class, age, marital status, race and locality, along with wider economic and political issues, have affected women’s job opportunities and status. Key themes and issues that run through the book include: continuity and change the sexual division of labour women as a cheap labour force women’s perceived primary role of motherhood women and trade unions equality and difference education and training. Students of women’s studies, gender studies and history will find this a fascinating and invaluable addition to their reading material.

Foregrounds the diversity of periodicals, fiction and other printed matter targeted at women in the postwar periodForegrounds the diversity and the significance of print cultures for women in the postwar period across periodicals, fiction and other printed matterExamines changes and continuities as women's magazines have moved into digital formatsHighlights the important cultural and political contexts of women's periodicals including the Women's Liberation Movement and SocialismExplores the significance of women as publishers, printers and editorsWomen's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s draws attention to the wide range of postwar print cultures for women. The collection spans domestic, cultural and feminist magazines and extends to ephemera, novels and other printed matter as well as digital magazine formats. The range of essays indicates both the history of publishing for women and the diversity of readers and audiences over the mid-late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century in Britain. The collection reflects in detail the important ways in magazines and printed matter contributed to, challenged, or informed British women's culture. A range of approaches, including interview, textual analysis and industry commentary are employed in order to demonstrate the variety of ways in which the impact of postwar print media may be understood.

This accessible and unusually wide-ranging book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonial and African American women's writing. It provides a valuable gender and culture inflected critical introduction to well established women writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Suniti Namjoshi, Bessie Head, and others from the U.S.A., India, Africa, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and introduces emergent writers from South East Asia, Cyprus and Oceania. Engaging with and clarifying contested critical areas of feminism and the postcolonial; exploring historical background and cultural context, economic, political, and psychoanalytic influences on gendered experience, it provides a cohesive discussion of key issues such as cultural and gendered identity, motherhood, mothertongue, language, relationships, women's economic constraints and sexual politics.

Now in its second edition and with new chapters covering such texts as Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love and 'yummy mummy' novels such as Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It, this is a wide-ranging survey of popular women's fiction from 1945 to the present. Examining key trends in popular writing for women in each decade, Women's Fiction offers case study readings of major British and American writers. Through these readings, the book explores how popular texts often neglected by feminist literary criticism have charted the shifting demands, aspirations and expectations of women in the 20th and 21st centuries.