ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is the culmination of a decade of my own teaching and research on the history of women in modern Europe, and the product of several decades of immensely rich and stimulating writing by other women's historians who have made the lives of European women more tangible, and a little better understood.
My debt to the work of others is enormous. The corpus of women's and gender history, especially for the nineteenth century, is now so great that the task of those who try to synthesise this body of material is likely to produce a partial and incomplete vision of the experiences, the roles and the struggles of those women who helped to make European history. I should like to pay tribute to the work of feminist scholars of European women who have contributed to the reshaping of the historical agenda. Hilary Wilkey, former editor at Longman, urged me to embark on this road. I would like to thank her for encouraging me to write this book. I hope the final product is what she envisaged.I have many debts of gratitude. I first starting teaching European women's history while at Lancaster University between 1990 and 1995. Penny Summerfield was at that time — and still is — my mentor, and her enthusiasm for, and practice of, women's history is motivating and inspiring. At Glasgow University, the students on my women's history courses have always been critically engaged and intellectually challenging. In particular, my special subject class of 1996—97 forced me to think hard about feminism and women, and many of them have gone on to emulate the ambition and drive of their heroines from the past.
A number of friends have carried out the unpaid work of commenting on various drafts of the text. My thanks are extended to Eleanor Gordon, Elizabeth Harvey, Deborah Simonton, Megan Smitley and Perry Willson. My neighbour Moira Lawson, sustained my writing by many acts of traditional female reciprocity — although my cucumbers never did seem like a fair exchange for her cream cakes. My deepest thanks are to Callum Brown. He read my words so many times and so immersed himself in European women's history, he deserves the equivalent of a ‘motherhood medal'.
Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to my paternal grandmother, Grace Abrams (1900—2000), and my maternal grandmother, May Jay (born 1911), both of whom, in their different ways, are the reason why women's history remains a history to be written.