Womens history: Britain, 18501945
Womens History
General Editor
June Purvis
Professor of Sociology, University of Portsmouth
Published
Carol Dyhouse
No distinction of sex? Women in British universities, 18701939
Bridget Hill
Women, work and sexual politics in eighteenth-century England
Linda Mahood
Policing gender, class & family: Britain, 18501940
June Purvis (editor)
Womens history: Britain, 18501945
Forthcoming
Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey (editors)
Gender relations in German history
Shani DCruze
Sex, violence and working women in Victorian and Edwardian England
jay Dixon
The romantic fiction of Mills & Boon, 190995
Ralph Gibson
Women, faith and liberation: female religious orders in
nineteenth-century France
Wendy Webster
Women in the 1950s
Barbara Winslow
Sylvia Pankhurst: a political biography
Womens History: Britain 18501945
An Introduction
Edited by
June Purvis
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1995 by UCL Press
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.
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1995 Edited by June Purvis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
ISBN 0-203-93015-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN13: 978-0-203-93015-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN13: 978-1-135-36709-1 ePub ISBN
ISBN 0-415-23889-7
Contents
June Purvis |
Pat Hudson |
Shani DCruze |
Jane Humphries |
Jane McDermid |
Penny Tinkler |
Barbara Harrison |
Sheila Jeffreys |
June Hannam |
Clare Midgley |
Sandra Stanley Holton |
Penny Summerfield |
Preface
In September 1973, Sheila Rowbothams Hidden from history: 300 years of womens oppression and the fight against it was published. Its influence has been enormous in that it acted as a catalyst for the taking off of womens history in Britain. In the 1990s, publications in womens history are booming and there are now three specialised journals in the field: Journal of Womens History, Gender and History, and Womens History Review. Yet despite the output of researchers, few general textbooks have been published that attempt to provide an overview of womens lives in Britain from 1850 to 1945. The pathbreaking analysis offered by Jane Lewis in Women in England, 18701950: sexual divisions and social change, first published in 1984, covered mainly the family, marriage, motherhood and employment. But since that date, no other general accounts of the period have been published.
The aim of this book is to fill this gap. Specialists in the field have each written a chapter about a key aspect of womens lives in Britain, 18501945, an analysis that is preceded by a discussion about the nature of womens history itself, from the nineteenth century to the present day. We hope that the book will be especially useful to undergraduate and postgraduate students on history, sociology, cultural studies and womens studies courses and, above all, that it will promote discussion and stimulate further research and reinterpretation. The fleld of womens history is exciting and challenging. If this book contributes in some small way to that debate, it will be more than sufficient justification for our efforts.
June Purvis
Notes on contributors
Shani DCruze is History Subject Leader at Crewe and Alsager Faculty, Manchester Metropolitan University. She has published articles on eighteenth-century urban history, women, gender and the household economy, and on the history of sexual violence. She is currently writing a full-length study of Victorian working-class women and sexual assault.
June Hannam teaches labour history and womens studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, where she is head of history. Her publications include Isabella Ford, 18551924, Women and the ILP, 18901914 in The centennial history of the Independent Labour Party (eds D.James et al.), and Women, history and protest in Introducing womens studies (eds D. Richardson and V.Robinson). She is currently working on a study of women in Bristol politics, 18301939 and researching into Dorothy Jewson and the politics of gender in the ILP in the 1920s.
Barbara Harrison is Reader in the Sociology of Health and Illness at NESCOT, Epsoms Higher and Further Education College, and has taught historical aspects of health and welfare, and the area of womens health, for a number of years. Her own research has been concerned with women and occupational ill-health in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain. She is the author of a forthcoming book Not only the dangerous trades: women and occupational ill-health, 18801914.
Sandra Stanley Holton is an Australian Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. She has recently completed a full-length history of the suffrage movement from the 1860s to the 1920s. She is currently working on a biography of Alice Clark, the pioneer woman industrialist and suffragist.
Pat Hudson is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Liverpool. Her research has concentrated on the process and impact of industrialization in Britain, with particular emphasis on proto-industrialization, capital accumulation, regional specialization and the family economy. Her publications include The genesis of industrial capital and The industrial revolution, and she was co-editor of Womens work and the family economy in historical perspective. Together with Dr Pamela Sharpe, she is currently preparing a volume on industrialization in Britain, which attempts to integrate womens history and challenges the sources, methods and terms of mainstream arguments and debates.
