All Things Women
Find your focus and strengths in times of crisis.
View Rights PortalWomen before the court offers an innovative, comparative approach to the study of women's legal rights during a formative period of Anglo-American history. It traces how colonists transplanted English legal institutions to America, examines the remarkable depth of women's legal knowledge and shows how the law increasingly undermined patriarchal relationships between parents and children, masters and servants, husbands and wives. The book will be of interest to scholars of Britain and colonial America, and to laypeople interested in how women in the past navigated and negotiated the structures of authority that governed them. It is packed with fascinating stories that women related to the courts in cases ranging from murder and abuse to debt and estate litigation. Ultimately, it makes a remarkable contribution to our understandings of law, power and gender in the early modern world.
Exile, its pain and possibility, is the starting point of this book. Women's experience of exile was often different from that of men, yet it has not received the important attention it deserves. Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas addresses that lacuna through a wide-ranging geographical, chronological, social and cultural approach. Whether powerful, well-to-do or impoverished, exiled by force or choice, every woman faced the question of how to reconstruct her life in a new place. These essays focus on women's agency despite the pressures created by political, economic and social dislocation. Collectively, they demonstrate how these women from different countries, continents and status groups not only survived but also in many cases thrived. This analysis of early modern women's experiences not only provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile but also contributes important new scholarship to the history of women.
Little Women "has been read as a romance or as a quest, or both. It has been read as a family drama that validates virtue over wealth", but also "as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well".[6]:34 According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott created a new form of literature, one that took elements from Romantic children's fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels, resulting in a totally new format. Elbert argued that within Little Women can be found the first vision of the "All-American girl" and that her multiple aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters.
Women, the arts and globalization: Eccentric experience is the first anthology to bring transnational feminist theory and criticism together with women's art practices to discuss the connections between aesthetics, gender and identity in a global world. The essays in Women, the Arts and Globalization demonstrate that women in the arts are rarely positioned at the centre of the art market, and the movement of women globally (as travelers or migrants, empowered artists/scholars or exiled practitioners), rarely corresponds with the dominant models of global exchange. Rather, contemporary women's art practices provide a fascinating instance of women's eccentric experiences of the myriad effects of globalization. Bringing scholarly essays on gender, art and globalization together with interviews and autobiographical accounts of personal experiences, the diversity of the book is relevant to artists, art historians, feminist theorists and humanities scholars interested in the impact of globalization on culture in the broadest sense. ;
In "30 Women" öffnet die Autorin Lina Mallon persönlich und authentisch ihre Gedanken- und Gefühlswelt und teilt die Geschichten von dreißig Frauen, die in verschiedenster Weise ihr Leben beeinflusst und geprägt haben. Diese Frauen – von engen Freundinnen über familiäre Bezugspersonen bis hin zu beruflichen Vorbildern und inspirierenden öffentlichen Persönlichkeiten – repräsentieren eine Bandbreite an Erfahrungen, Lehren und Perspektiven, die Mallon auf ihrem eigenen Lebensweg begleitet haben. Indem sie ihre eigenen Erlebnisse, Auseinandersetzungen und Entwicklungen im Kontext dieser Begegnungen reflektiert, bietet sie Einblicke in die vielschichtigen Facetten weiblicher Beziehungen, gegenseitiger Unterstützung und persönlicher Wachstumsprozesse. Mallon betont die Bedeutung von authentischer Verbindung, offener Kommunikation und der Fähigkeit, sowohl Unterstützung zu geben als auch anzunehmen. Sie thematisiert die Herausforderungen und Widersprüche, mit denen Frauen in einer von gesellschaftlichen Erwartungen und individuellen Träumen geprägten Welt konfrontiert sind. "30 Women" ist nicht nur eine Hommage an die Kraft und Diversität weiblicher Beziehungen, sondern auch ein Plädoyer für mehr Solidarität, Empathie und Selbstbestimmung unter Frauen. Es ist eine Ermutigung, sich gegenseitig zu fördern, ehrlich miteinander umzugehen und gemeinsam sowohl die Freuden als auch die Herausforderungen des Lebens zu meistern. Inspirierende Geschichten von 30 Frauen, die das Leben von Bestsellerautorin Lina Mallon geprägt haben. Authentische Einblicke in Freundschaften, gesellschaftliche Erwartungen und die persönliche Entwicklung einer Frau. Faszinierende Auseinandersetzung mit der Kraft der weiblichen Solidarität und der Bedeutung von echtem Support. Persönliche und offene Reflexionen über Enttäuschungen in Freundschaften und den Umgang mit Kritik. Ermutigung für Frauen, sich gegenseitig zu unterstützen und gemeinsam zu wachsen, statt sich als Konkurrentinnen zu sehen. Lebensnaher Ratgeber, der die Leserinnen dazu anregt, über ihre eigenen Beziehungen und Erfahrungen nachzudenken. Abwechslungsreiche Porträts von Frauen aus unterschiedlichen Lebensbereichen, die alle auf ihre Weise inspirieren. Ein Buch von der bekannten Bloggerin, Fotografin und Podcasterin Lina Mallon, die ihre persönlichen Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse teilt. Ein Aufruf zu mehr Ehrlichkeit, Selbstreflexion und Mut in der Gestaltung weiblicher Beziehungen. Perfekt für Leserinnen, die sich für Themen rund um Freundschaft, Frauenpower und persönliches Wachstum interessieren.
While there is increasing interest in the lives of medieval women, the documentary evidence for their activities remains little known. This book provides a collection of sources for an important and influential group of women in medieval England, and examines changes in their role and activities between 1066 and 1500. For most noble and gentry-women, early marriage led to responsibilities for family and household, and, in the absence of their husbands, for the family estates and retainers. Widowhood enabled them to take control of their affairs and to play an independent part in the local community and sometimes further afield. Although many women's lives followed a conventional pattern, great variety existed within family relationships, and individuality can also be seen in religious practices and patronage. Piety could take a number of different forms, whether a woman became a nun, a vowess or a noted philanthropist and benefactor to religious institutions. This volume provides a broad-ranging and accessible coverage of the role of noble women in medieval society. It highlights the significant role played by these women within their families, households, estates and communities.
The first in a new annual series, Women, Theatre and Performance that will consist of themed volumes on diverse aspects of women's engagement with theatre and performance. Ranging across three hundred years the essays in this volume address key questions in women's theatre history and retrieve a number of hitherto 'hidden' histories of women performers. Resituates women's, largely neglected, creative contribution within theatre and cultural history and seeks to challenge orthodox readings of both history and text. Topics include: Susanna Centlivre and the notion of intertheatricality; gender and theatrical space; the repositioning of women performers such as Wagner's Muse, Willhelmina Schröder-Devrient, the Comédie Français' 'Mademoiselle Mars', Mme Arnould-Plessey, and the actresses of the Russian serf theatre. ;
Anthony Burgess draws upon an autobiographical episode to create Beard's Roman Women, the story of a man haunted by his first wife, presumed dead. But is she? A marvellously economical book, full-flavoured, funny, and heartfelt, showing its author at the height of his powers. This new edition is the first to be published with David Robinson's photographs for over 40 years. The text of the novel has been restored using the original typescripts, and Graham Foster's new introduction provides valuable insight into the fictional and biographical contexts of the novel. The text is fully annotated with a detailed set of notes and this edition includes the previously unpublished script for Burgess's television film By the Waters of Leman: Byron and Shelley at Geneva, and a rare piece of Burgess's writing about Rome.
Women of war is an examination of gender modernity using the world's longest established women's military organisation, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. These New Women's adoption of martial uniform and military-style training, their inhabiting of public space, their deployment of innovative new technologies such as the motor car, the illustrated press, advertisements and cinematic film and their proactive involvement in the First World War illustrate why the Corps and its socially elite members are a particularly revealing case study of gender modernity. Bringing into dialogue both public and personal representations, it makes a major contribution to the social and cultural history of Britain in the early twentieth century and will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars working in the fields of military history, animal studies, trans studies, dress history, sociology of the professions, nursing history and transport history.
Women reading Shakespeare, 1660-1900 comprehensively rediscovers a lost tradition of women's writing on Shakespeare. Since Margaret Cavendish published the first critical essay on Shakespeare in 1664, women have written as scholars, critics, editors, performers and popularisers of Shakespeare. Many found in Shakespeare criticism the opportunity to raise a wide variety of issues, ranging from the use of women in society, family life, social relations and ethnic difference. In their different ways, women appropriated Shakespeare to their own ends - not always in step with their male contemporaries. Virtually none of this work is available today; it is unread and unknown. This fascinating anthology draws upon extensive new research to collect for the first time in one volume the Shakespeare criticism of some fifty British and American women writing before 1900. It includes the work of both familiar and unknown names and represents the diversity of literary genres used by women: the scholarly article, the periodical essay, book-length studies, personal memoirs, books for children, school editions. The volume also includes previously unknown Shakespeare illustrations by women, and a general introduction to the development of women's criticism of Shakespeare before 1900. ;
This book is the first investigation on how official organizers built and sustained the national militant campaign of the Women's Social and Political Union between 1903 and 1918. Whilst the overall policy of the Union was devised by an ever-decreasing circle of women, centred around the mother-daughter team of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, much of its actual activity, including its more extreme militant actions such as arson, was devised and implemented by these organizers who worked in the provinces and in London. Women of the right spirit reveals organizers to be a diverse bunch of women, whose class backgrounds ranged from the aristocratic to the extremely impoverished. It describes the ways in which they were recruited and deployed, and the work they undertook throughout Britain. The exhausting pace of their itinerant life is revealed as well as the occasions when organizers fell out with their employers or their own branches. Taking the story of the WSPU's workers up to the end of the First World War, it considers what directions they took when votes for women became a reality. The book will appeal to academics, postgraduates and undergraduates with an interest in women's history, as well as a more general readership wishing to understand the extent of support for the votes for women campaign and the mechanisms through which it organized. ;
Brings together the varied artistic, critical and cultural productions by women scholars, critics and artists between 1790-1900, many of whom are little known in the canonical histories of the period. Questions the concepts of 'scholarship', 'criticism' and 'artist' across the different disciplines. Women discussed include authors (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Sydney Morgan and Anna Jameson) actresses ( Elizabeth Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, and Mary Robinson) critics ( Margaret Oliphant and Mary Cowden Clarke) historians (Agnes Strickland, Lucy Aikin, Mary Anne Everett Green, Elizabeth Cooper and Lucy Toulmin Smith) as well as the writers and readers of Women's magazines, educationalists and translators. Makes a significant and original contribution to the development of gender studies by extending the frontiers of existing knowledge and research. ;
What attracts women to far-right movements that appear to denigrate their rights? This question has vexed feminist scholars for decades and has led to many lively debates in the academy. In this context, during the 1980s, the study of women, gender, and fascism in twentieth-century Europe took off, pioneered by historians such as Claudia Koonz and Victoria de Grazia. This volume makes an exciting contribution to the evolving body of work based upon these earlier studies, bringing emerging scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe alongside that of more established Western European historiography on the topic. Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919-45 features fourteen essays covering Serbia, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, and Poland in addition to Germany, Italy, France, Spain, and Britain, and a conclusion that pulls together a European-wide perspective. As a whole, the volume provides a compelling comparative examination of this important topic through current research, literature reviews, and dialogue with existing debates. The essays cast new light on questions such as women's responsibility for the collapse of democracy in interwar Europe, the interaction between the women's movement and the extreme right, and the relationships between conceptions of national identity and gender. ;
Women and madness in the early Romantic novel returns madness to a central role in feminist literary criticism through an updated exploration of hysteria, melancholia, and love-madness in novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie. This book argues that these early Romantic-period novelists revised medical and popular sentimental models for female madness that made inherent female weakness and the aberrant female body responsible for women's mental afflictions. The book explores how the more radical authors-Wollstonecraft, Fenwick and Hays-blamed men and patriarchal structures of control for their characters' hysteria and melancholia, while the more mainstream writers-Edgeworth and Opie-located causality in less gendered and less victimized accounts. Taken as a whole, the book makes a powerful case for focusing on women's mental health in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century literary criticism.
Starting with a critique of existing methodologies and histories of the period, this book examines the production of women artists, looking at different areas and aspects of their activities, and particularly contrasting the lives of different generations of women artists. Many of these women's names or their works are not familiar in art histories of the twentieth century. The book analyses how women artists' presence which was consistently one third of the artists in many major exhibiting groups became less than 10% of the museum purchases and in art historical texts for this period. Comparisons are made between the opportunities presented to women artists and those of their male peers in the light of considerable change and restructuring within the art world in Britain during this period, principally due to the growing influence of modernism in the art market. ;
This enlightening book aims to fill the gap in the literature on women's lives from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, a time in which Italian urban societies saw much debate on the nature of women and on their roles, education and behaviour. Indeed these were debates which would in subsequent years resonate throughout Europe as a whole. Using a broad range of contemporary source material, most of which has never been translated before, this book illuminates the ideals and realities informing the lives of women within the context of civic and courtly culture. The text is divided into three sections: contemporary views on the nature of women, and ethical and aesthetic ideals seen as suitable to them; life cycles from birth to death, punctuated by the rites of passage of betrothal, marriage and widowhood; women's roles in the convent, the court, the workplace, and in cultural life. Through their exploration of these themes, Rogers and Tinagli demonstrate that there was no single 'Renaissance woman'. The realities of women¹s experiences were rich and various, and their voices speak of diverse possibilities for emotionally rich and socially useful lives. This will be essential reading for students and teachers of society and culture during the Italian Renaissance, as well as gender historians working on early modern Europe. ;