In 1889, Annie Nathan Meyer, still in her early twenties, led the effort to start Barnard College after Columbia College refused to admit women. Named after a former Columbia president, Frederick Barnard, who had advocated for Columbia to become coeducational, Barnard, despite many ups and downs, became one of the leading women’s colleges in the United States. A College of Her Own offers a comprehensive and lively narrative of Barnard from its beginnings to the present day. Through the stories of presidents and leading figures as well as students and faculty, Robert McCaughey recounts Barnard’s history and how its development was shaped by its complicated relationship to Columbia University and its New York City location. McCaughey considers how the student composition of Barnard and its urban setting distinguished it from other Seven Sisters colleges, tracing debates around class, ethnicity, and admissions policies. Turning to the postwar era, A College of Her Own discusses how Barnard benefited from the boom in higher education after years of a precarious economic situation. Beyond the decisions made at the top, McCaughey examines the experience of Barnard students, including the tumult and aftereffects of 1968 and the impact of the feminist movement. The concluding section looks at present-day Barnard, the shifts in its student body, and its efforts to be a global institution. Informed by McCaughey’s five decades as a Barnard faculty member and administrator, A College of Her Own is a compelling history of a remarkable institution.

The essays collected in this volume reflect the upsurge of interest in the research and writing of feminist history in the 1970s/80s and illustrate the developments which have taken place – in the types of questions asked, the methodologies employed, and the scope and sophistication of the analytical approaches which have been adopted. Focusing on women in nineteenth-century Britain and America, this book includes work by scholars in both countries and takes its place in a long history of Anglo-American debate. The collection adopts 'the doubled vision of feminist theory', the view that it is the simultaneous operation of relations of class and of sex/gender that perpetuate both patriarchy and capitalism. This view informs a wide variety of contributions from 'Class and Gender in Victorian England', to 'Servants, Sexual Relations and the Risks of Illegitimacy', 'Free Black Women', 'The Power of Women’s Networks', and 'Socialism, Feminism and Sexual Antagonism in the London Tailoring Trade'. Both the vigour and the urgency of scholarship infused with social aims can be clearly felt in the essays collected here.

“In his most ambitious work to date, [Edney] questions the very concept of ‘cartography’ to argue that this flawed ideal has hobbled the study of maps.” —Susan Schulten, author of A History of America in 100 Maps Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include. In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same. “[An] intellectually bracing and marvellously provocative account of how the mythical ideal of cartography developed over time and, in the process, distorted our understanding of maps.” —Times Higher Education “Cartography: The Ideal and Its History offers both a sharp critique of current practice and a call to reorient the field of map studies. A landmark contribution.” —Kären Wigen, coeditor of Time in Maps

Matteo Battistini offers a critical deconstruction of the fetish of the middle class. Social sciences strive to transform an image of labour and capital as opposing forces into a consensual order wherein capitalism and democracy could coexist without tension.