• 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.

These late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts describe female servants' experiences of work in early modern London. This volume exposes the contractual underpinnings of domestic service, suggesting female servants were an important support of emergent capitalism in the early modern metropolis. The depositions in this volume show that service was a prototypical form of female wage labour rather than a pre-marital life phase. Voices of the non-literate in this volume are clear and distinct as they present their working and personal circumstances.

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 The flâneur is the quintessentially masculine figure of privilege and leisure who strides the capitals of the world with abandon. But it is the flâneuse who captures the imagination of the cultural critic Lauren Elkin. In her wonderfully gender-bending new book, the flâneuse is a “determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” Virginia Woolf called it “street haunting”; Holly Golightly epitomized it in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; and Patti Smith did it in her own inimitable style in 1970s New York. Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such flâneuses as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis. Called “deliciously spiky and seditious” by The Guardian, Flâneuse will inspire you to light out for the great cities yourself.

This is the first full-length study of prostitution in London during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is a compelling account, exposing the real lives of the capital's prostitutes, and also shedding light on London society as a whole, its policing systems and its attitudes towards the female urban poor. Drawing on the archives of London's parishes, jury records, reports from Southwark gaol as well as other sources which have been overlooked by historians, it provides a fascinating study for all those interested in Georgian society.

City Women is a major new study of the lives of ordinary women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London. Drawing on thousands of pages of Londoners' depositions for the consistory court, it focuses on the challenges that preoccupied London women as they strove for survival and preferment in the burgeoning metropolis. Balancing new demographic data with vivid case studies, Eleanor Hubbard explores the advantages and dangers that the city had to offer, from women's first arrival in London as migrant maidservants, through the vicissitudes of marriage, widowhood, and old age. In early modern London, women's opportunities were tightly restricted. Nonetheless, before 1640 the city's unique demographic circumstances provided unusual scope for marital advancement, and both maids and widows were quick to take advantage of this. Similarly, moments of opportunity emerged when the powerful sexual anxieties that associated women's speech and mobility with loose behaviour came into conflict with even more powerful anxieties about the economic stability of households and communities. As neighbours and magistrates sought to reconcile their competing priorities in cases of illegitimate pregnancy, marital disputes, working wives, remarrying widows, and more, women were able to exploit the resulting uncertainty to pursue their own ends. By paying close attention to the aspirations and preoccupations of London women themselves, their daily struggles, small triumphs, and domestic tragedies, City Women provides a valuable new perspective on the importance and complexity of women's roles in the growing capital, and on the pragmatic nature of early modern English society as a whole.

In Shopping for Pleasure, Erika Rappaport reconstructs London's Victorian and Edwardian West End as an entertainment and retail center. In this neighborhood of stately homes, royal palaces, and spacious parks and squares, a dramatic transformation unfolded that ultimately changed the meaning of femininity and the lives of women, shaping their experience of modernity. Rappaport illuminates the various forces of the period that encouraged and discouraged women's enjoyment of public life and particularly shows how shopping came to be seen as the quintessential leisure activity for middle- and upper-class women. Through extensive histories of department stores, women's magazines, clubs, teashops, restaurants, and the theater as interwoven sites of consumption, Shopping for Pleasure uncovers how a new female urban culture emerged before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Moving beyond the question of whether shopping promoted or limited women's freedom, the author draws on diverse sources to explore how business practices, legal decisions, and cultural changes affected women in the market. In particular, she focuses on how and why stores presented themselves as pleasurable, secure places for the urban woman, in some cases defining themselves as instrumental to civic improvement and women's emancipation. Rappaport also considers such influences as merchandizing strategies, credit policies, changes in public transportation, feminism, and the financial balance of power within the home. Shopping for Pleasure is thus both a social and cultural history of the West End, but on a broader scale it reveals the essential interplay between the rise of consumer society, the birth of modern femininity, and the making of contemporary London.