This is the first full-length study of prostitution in London during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is a compelling account, exposing the real lives of the capital's prostitutes, and also shedding light on London society as a whole, its policing systems and its attitudes towards the female urban poor. Drawing on the archives of London's parishes, jury records, reports from Southwark gaol as well as other sources which have been overlooked by historians, it provides a fascinating study for all those interested in Georgian society.
This is the first full-length study of prostitution in London during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is a compelling account, exposing the real lives of the capital's prostitutes, and also shedding light on London society as a whole, its policing systems and its attitudes towards the female urban poor. Drawing on the archives of London's parishes, jury records, reports from Southwark gaol as well as other sources which have been overlooked by historians, it provides a fascinating study for all those interested in Georgian society.
This is the first full-length study of prostitution in London during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Not only is it deeply revealing about the experience of prostitution in Georgian London but it also throws light on London society as a whole and its attitudes towards the female urban poor. The author has drawn on the archives of London's parishes, jury records, reports from Southwark gaol as well as other sources which have been overlooked by historians. The result is a study which opens up contemporary debate and offers new conclusions.
Eighteenth-century literature displays a fascination with the seduction of a virtuous young heroine, most famously illustrated by Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and repeated in 1790s radical women's novels, in the many memoirs by fictional or real penitent prostitutes, and in street print. Across fiction, ballads, essays and miscellanies, stories were told of women's mistaken belief in their lovers' vows. In this book Katherine Binhammer surveys seduction narratives from the late eighteenth century within the context of the new ideal of marriage-for-love and shows how these tales tell varying stories of women's emotional and sexual lives. Drawing on new historicism, feminism, and narrative theory, Binhammer argues that the seduction narrative allowed writers to explore different fates for the heroine than the domesticity that became the dominant form in later literature. This study will appeal to scholars of eighteenth-century literature, social and cultural history, and women's and gender studies.
In the last third of the eighteenth-century, Bristol and Nantes were two of the most active commercial ports of England and France, despite a slowdown of their economy. Their economies were based primarily on the maritime trade, but they developed alongside Atlantic industries that attracted many migrants, both male and female, from the surrounding countryside and from abroad. The busy urban environment, the high number of sailors and single men migrating to the port, and the decline of female house based proto-industries, were factors encouraging the development of prostitution. How prostitution is perceived in the context of social control and urban change is key to understanding the evolving attitudes to gender and sexuality in the eighteenth century. In this comparative study, Marion Pluskota offers an analysis of the lives of prostitutes that looks beyond a purely criminal perspective, and which encompasses their roles within their families, relationships and social networks. Using police and judicial records, she provides a valuable corrective to the narrow analysis of prostitutes in terms of immorality or deviance. The unique forms of development and problems faced by port cities in the early modern period make them particularly interesting subjects for comparative history. This book is well suited for those who study social history, gender and women’s history.
An examination of the interaction between ideology and experience in the lives of English women during a period of great social and intellectual change. Focusing on the complex relationship between discourse and experience, Women of Quality examines the role of gender in aristocratic women's daily lives during a period of significant cultural change. In the years followingthe Glorious Revolution, didactic writers and other social critics responded to a perceived crisis of gender relations by creating a new discourse of 'natural' feminine behavior in opposition to the luxury and decadence of fashionable women. Modern scholars have often portrayed this agenda as representing the rise of a middle-class ideology, but Ingrid Tague argues that the new rhetoric held enormous appeal for those women who would appear to be its greatest targets: wealthy, fashionable 'women of quality'. Using the correspondence and diaries of these women, Tague traces the ways in which they adopted, adapted, and exploited ideals of femininity. In their hands, feminine values could become powerful tools that enabled them to compete for status and reputation. Ironically, by identifying femininity with private, trivial concerns, these ideals created unique opportunities for elite women. Female participation in informal social and political activities placed women at the heart of aristocratic power in the early eighteenth century, even as they employed the language of wifely subordination and domesticity. Ingrid Tague is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Denver.
This book opens a window into the lives of British spinsters in the mid-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, assessing the opportunities open to them and the restrictions placed upon them within different social classes, occupations, and periods. Hill examines how often spinsters were able to earn enough money to live independently, She looks at the part single women played in religious organisations and the role of friendship and letter-writing in their daily lives. She describes the nature of close relationships between women, some lesbian but many others not. Exploring the spinsters' possibilities of escape from restrictive lives, particularly by emigration or crossdressing, she discusses how successful these were. She provides details about the degree of surveillance single women suffered from the authorities and how often they were seen as a threat to social order. Finally she addresses the question of whether all spinsters of this era were suffering victims or potential viragoes, or neither.
The resurgence of marriage as a transnational institution, same-sex or otherwise, draws upon as much as it departs from enlightenment ideologies of sex, gender, and sexuality which this collection aims to investigate, interrogate, and conceptualize anew. Coming to terms with heteronormativity is imperative for appreciating the literature and culture of the eighteenth century writ large, as well as the myriad imaginaries of sex and sexuality that the period bequeaths to the present. This collection foregrounds British, European, and, to a lesser extent, transatlantic heteronormativities in order to pose vital if vexing questions about the degree of continuity subsisting between heteronormativities of the past and present, questions compounded by the aura of transhistoricity lying at the heart of heteronormativity as an ideology. Contributors attend to the fissures and failures of heteronormativity even as they stress the resilience of its hegemony: reconfiguring our sense of how gender and sexuality came to be mapped onto space; how public and private spheres were carved up, or gendered and sexual bodies socially sanctioned; and finally how literary traditions, scholarly criticisms, and pedagogical practices have served to buttress or contest the legacy of heteronormativity.
The Single Homemaker and Material Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century represents a new synthesis of gender history and material culture studies. It seeks to analyse the lives and cultural expression of single men and women from 1650 to 1850 within the main focus of domestic activity, the home. Whilst there is much scholarly interest in singleness and a raft of literature on the construction and apprehension of the home, no other book has sought to bring these discrete studies together. Similarly, scholarly work has been limited in evaluating gendered consumption practices during the long eighteenth century because of an emphasis on the homes of families. Analysing the practices of single people emphasises the differences, but also amplifies the similarities, in their strategies of domestic life.
