All Things Women
Find your focus and strengths in times of crisis.
View Rights PortalThe traditional narrative of the mid-century (1930s-60s) is that of a wave of expansion and constriction, with the swelling of economic and political freedoms for women in the 1930s, the cresting of women in the public sphere during the Second World War, and the resulting break as employment and political opportunities for women dwindled in the 1950s when men returned home from the front. But as the burgeoning field of interwar and mid-century women's writing has demonstrated, this narrative is in desperate need of re-examination. Mid-century women's writing: Disrupting the public/private divide aims to revivify studies of female writers, journalists, broadcasters, and public intellectuals living or working in Britain, or under British rule, during the mid-century while also complicating extant narratives about the divisions between domesticity and politics.
This volume explores a range of premodern rulers and their depictions in historiography, literature, art and material culture to gain a broader understanding of their sexualities. It considers the methodologies and motivations of premodern writers and rulers when fashioning royal and elite sexualities and offers new analyses of an array of texts and artwork from across Europe and the wider Mediterranean.
This is the first in-depth study of post-war female religious life. It draws on archival materials and a remarkable set of eighty interviews to place Catholic sisters and nuns at the heart of the turbulent 1960s, integrating their story of social change into a larger British and international one. Shedding new light on how religious bodies engaged in modernisation, it addresses themes such as the Modern Girl and youth culture, '1968', generational discourse, post-war modernity, the voluntary sector and the women's movement. Women religious were at the forefront of the Roman Catholic Church's movement of adaptation and renewal towards the world. This volume tells their stories in their own words.
This book follows the lives of female Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution and became nurses. Nursing was nominally a profession but with its poor pay and harsh discipline, it was unpopular with British women. In the years preceding the Second World War, hospitals in Britain suffered chronic nurse staffing crises. As the country faced inevitable war, the Government and the profession's elite courted refugees as an antidote to the shortages, but many hospitals refused to employ Continental Jews. The book explores the changes in the refugees' status and lives from the war years to the foundation of the National Health Service and to the latter decades of the twentieth century. It places the refugees at the forefront of manoeuvres in nursing practice, education and research at a time of social upheaval and alterations in the position of women.
How do feminist movements develop and organise in ethno-nationally divided societies? How does this challenge our understandings of contemporary fourth wave feminism? Women's Troubles sets out to answer these questions using rich empirical data and analysis in an examination of feminist activism after the Northern Irish peace agreement. Utilising feminist frameworks and debates on movement building, policymaking, abortion rights, gender-based violence and the UN women, peace and security agenda, Claire Pierson interrogates the opportunities and challenges in articulating a feminist voice and creating feminist spaces in the conflict transformational politics and society. Capturing the complexities of contemporary feminist movement building in a divided society, Women's Troubles contributes to ongoing analysis of contemporary global feminisms.
This is the first book-length account of the women's liberation movement in Scotland, which, using documentary evidence and oral testimony, charts the origins and development of this important social movement of the post-1945 period. In doing so, it reveals the inventiveness and fearlessness of feminist activism, while also pointing towards the importance of considering the movement from the local and grassroots perspectives, presenting a more optimistic account of the enduring legacy of women's liberation. Not only does this book uncover the reach of the WLM but it also considers what case studies of women's liberation can tell us about the ways in which the development of the movement has been portrayed. Previous accounts have tended to equate the fragmentation of the movement with weakness and decline. This book challenges this conclusion, arguing that fragmentation led to a diffusion of feminist ideas into wider society. In the Scottish context, it led to a lively and flourishing feminist culture where activists highlighted important issues such as abortion and violence against women. ;
Many would agree that we are living in one of humanity’s most permissive times. Sex seems to be available anywhere, anytime. These developments can lead to the conclusion that we are all having all the sex we want today. In fact, though, a number of international studies have shown in recent years that our mobile phone and pornography consumption in particular, as well as women’s empowerment, have led to a decrease rather than an increase in sexuality. In her entertaining book, Juliane Burghardt analyses and evaluates the situation in our bedrooms.
This anthology makes available to students and general readers the rich variety of Victorian magazines for women. The extracts range from fashion magazines to feminist journals, from serious works for Christian mothers to tales of romance and passion for 'sweethearts'. Focusing on the historical development of the British women's magazine, this extensively illustrated work gives access to texts which few readers ever see. The first main section describes and illustrates eight kinds of magazine for women. Though they have common features, the differences between the drawing room journal of the 1830s and 1840s and the cheap domestic magazines of the 1890s are clearly demonstrated. The second section focuses on those elements which made up the magazine's typical mix of ingredients, including fiction, the fashion plate, poetry, political journalism, advice columns and reader's letters. The last section is the most comprehensive listing of British Victorian women's magazines which currently exists. This is a work of scholarship but one which will appeal to students of Cultural, Historical, Literary and Women's Studies, as well as to the general interested reader. Like the magazines it represents, it offers its readers both entertainment and instruction. ;
Make or break? Advertisements repeatedly praise „plant-based“ products or promise new mobility through ointments and dietary supplements. The tools of evidence-based pharmacy help to answer the question „Does this really help?“ This practical guide offers tips and explanations on how to be confident of finding the relevant scientific literature, critically evaluate clinical studies, and interpret therapeutic results. The book provides guidance on how to classify the quality of reviews and meta-analyses and assess the reliability of guidelines in everyday healthcare practice. Practical examples help to avoid pitfalls in evaluation and to understand the statistical details. An extensive appendix with technical terms, checklists, important institutions of evidence-based medicine and further sources completes the book.
In this fascinating study, Samantha George explores the cultivation of the female mind and the feminised discourse of botanical literature in eighteenth-century Britain. In particular, she discusses British women's engagement with the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and his unsettling discovery of plant sexuality. Previously ignored primary texts of an extraordinary nature are rescued from obscurity and assigned a proper place in the histories of science, eighteenth-century literature, and women's writing. The result is groundbreaking: the author explores nationality and sexuality debates in relation to botany and charts the appearance of a new literary stereotype, the sexually precocious female botanist. She uncovers an anonymous poem on Linnaean botany, handwritten in the eighteenth century, and subsequently traces the development of a new genre of women's writing - the botanical poem with scientific notes. The book is indispensable reading for all scholars of the eighteenth century, especially those interested in Romantic women's writing, or the relationship between literature and science.
'Early modern women's manuscript poetry' is an anthology of texts by fourteen women poets writing between 1589 and 1706. It is the only currently available anthology of early modern women's writing which focuses exclusively on manuscript material. Authors include Mary Sidney, Lucy Hutchinson and Katherine Philips; central figures in the emerging canon of early modern women writers, but whose work appears in a fresh and very different light in the manuscript context emphasised by this anthology. The volume also includes substantial excerpts from a recently discovered verse paraphrase of Genesis, thought to be by the previously unknown seventeenth-century writer Mary Roper, as well as selections from the unjustly neglected poet, Hester Pulter. The mix of canonical and non-canonical writers makes this book ideal for use on undergraduate and early postgraduate courses, while specialists will be particularly interested in the sophisticated and varied material taken from less familiar sources. ;
This book offers the first comprehensive history of white workers from the end of the First World War to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. It reveals how white worker identity was constituted, examines the white labouring class as an ethnically and nationally heterogeneous formation comprised of both men and women, and emphasises the active participation of white workers in the ongoing and contested production of race. White wage labourers' experiences, both as exploited workers and as part of the privileged white minority, offer insight into how race and class co-produced one another and how boundaries fundamental to settler colonialism were regulated and policed. Based on original research conducted in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, this book offers a unique theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, labour histories, settler colonialism, Marxism, emotions and the New African Economic History.
Through the Fiction of Phebe Gibbes places this prolific, newly recovered English writer at the centre of the revolutionary period. Gibbes's novels mark the struggles of women for agency in an expanding British empire, from the Seven Years' War to revolutions in American, Haiti and France. With Gibbes as a nexus in a lineage of women writers from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Kathryn S. Freeman offers a valuable perspective on the 'long eighteenth century', with Gibbes' own evolution mirroring that of the larger period. The study traces the development of Gibbes' authorial voice from satire to irony through a range of female characters subverting patriarchal oppression. Freeman guides the reader through patterns of narrative voice, concerns with gender and sexuality, and elements of wordplay through detailed discussion of five novels representing Gibbes' evolving representation of a subversive female subjectivity.
In the decades following the Second World War, mothers' experiences of loneliness, boredom and unhappiness were increasingly widely acknowledged. The language of postnatal depression came to be attached to this, but mothers organised around their own discontent in ways that challenged the medical model. Unhappy mothers draws attention to the social, political, and professional contexts within which knowledge about unhappy mothering developed. Drawing upon an extensive range of archival material, the book addresses themes around expertise, feminism, and the value given to lived experience.