This book analyzes how poor eighteenth-century London women coped when they found themselves pregnant, their survival networks and the consequences of bearing an illegitimate child. It does so by exploring the encounters between poor women and the parish as well as London's lying-in hospitals and the Foundling Hospital. It suggests that unmarried mothers did not constitute a deviant minority within London's plebeian community. In fact, many could expect to find compassion rather than ostracism a response to their plight. All poor mothers, left without the support of their child's father, shared similar strategies of survival and economies of makeshift.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "A Man Could Stand Up" by Ford Madox Ford. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
This monograph explores the role of culture in modern societies and the side effects that result when that role is distorted. The basic premise of this book is that many of the dominant cultural characteristics of modern life, like the ideologies and values associated with materialism and consumer capitalism, are cultural phenomena with influences that are in many ways problematic and in some ways downright detrimental to our sustained societal well-being. I argue in this book that the globalized capitalist economic system has become increasingly efficient in terms of scale and scope, but has also become less humane in many regards; less connected to human needs and concerns. Of particular concern is the encroachment of economic interests into areas of human society that traditionally have been free from profit motives, or at least only minimally influenced by them; areas such as scientific research, the justice system, and even family relationships. I suggest that there is a slow but steady intrusion into these areas of human life that were once considered off-limits to naked economic incentives and calculations. This intrusion puts the idea of America as a free and democratic society increasingly at risk when private economic stakeholders meddle in the political and cultural areas of society in ever more insidious ways to further their own enrichment at the expense of the public. Furthermore, the vast capitalist economic system is in many ways increasingly disconnected or disembedded from the contexts and regulations of traditional social relations as in the past.
