THE BOOK'S STRUCTURE
The book is organised in three Parts. Part I, ‘Imagining woman', discusses how woman was conceived of and represented in cultural terms: how she was constructed as an ideal woman (and also her opposite, an anti-ideal woman) in the discourses of the philosophical, medical, scientific and religious worlds.
In this, the Enlightenment was paramount in this period, for though it may not have had an immediate impact on women (in terms of conferring new rights, for instance), its ideas did shape attitudes towards women and women's conception of themselves until the twentieth century. These representations or discourses on women are vital territory for the women's historian, for they lay the basis for all manner of political and legislative enactments concerning women, for how men regarded women, and for how women themselves constructed, negotiated and changed their own identities.Part II of the book focuses on women's experience and status within the family and the community. For the vast majority of European women in this period, their lives revolved around their immediate family and around social and economic relations within the community. Though this may be seen as the characteristic issue defining women's subordination from which feminists, for example, sought liberation, it is within these interconnected spheres that women, paradoxically, possessed greatest autonomy. The domestic sphere was a context of both subordination and the springboard for ideas about liberation, and this part of the book looks at these contradictory issues as they were experienced in respect of marriage and motherhood, community networks, sexuality, and paid and unpaid work.
Part III discusses women's explicit engagement with what has been called the public sphere. Here, in the world of domestic and imperial politics, the labour movement, and in organised feminism, women participated in the public face of the nineteenth century. They participated in various guises — as revolutionaries, nationalists, missionaries, strikers and feminists. It is here in the public sphere that, with hindsight, we have come to judge the freedoms of women. In the final chapter, I reconsider the event traditionally identified as marking both the end of the nineteenth century and the watershed in European women's long march to freedom — the Great War. I ask whether total war really was such a turning point, when the constraining gender ideology of the nineteenth century transformed into the liberation of the twentieth. The answer, like the story that precedes it, is complex, but it is at heart a story of optimism.
More on the topic THE BOOK'S STRUCTURE:
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- Adams Max. Unquiet Women: From the Dusk of the Roman Empire to the Dawn of the Enlightenment. Head of Zeus,2018. — 299 p., 2018
- Agnew Vanessa, Tomann Juliane, Stach Sabine (eds.). Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History. Routledge,2022. — 366 p., 2022
- Trading partners across the Indian Ocean: the making of maritime communities
- Wiesner-Hanks Merry E., Yoffee Norman. (eds). The Cambridge World History. Volume 3. Early Cities in Comparative Perspective, 4000 bce-1200 ce. Cambridge University Press,2015. — 595 p., 2015
- Kiple Kenneth F. (Editor). The Cambridge World History of Human Disease. Cambridge University Press,1993. — 1200 p., 1993
- Amin S.. Theory is History. Springer, 2014— 154 p., 2014
- Upper Palaeolithic: the coming of modern humans
- Contents
- Courtly cultures: western Europe, Byzantium, the Islamic world, India, China, and Japan