This book attempts to cover all the important aspects of a woman’s life in Scotland, examining how and why it changed over the last 300 years. It walks us through the day-to-day existence of Scottish women and in doing so covers areas such as family and household, education, work and politics, religion and sexuality, crime and punishment. While sensitive to the differences among women, regarding colour, class and sexuality, the book seeks to establish a close and reciprocal relationship between women’s history and gender history; the first delineating the struggles of women for parity with men in economic, legal and political spheres; the second, as means of unravelling the continuing ways in which power is unequally distributed within the home, the workplace and in institutions, and in contesting the male-centred narratives of the past.
This book attempts to cover all the important aspects of a woman's life in Scotland, examining how and why it changed over the last 300 years. It walks us through the day-to-day existence of Scottish women and in doing so covers areas such as family and household, education, work and politics, religion and sexuality, crime and punishment. While sensitive to the differences among women, regarding colour, class and sexuality, the book seeks to establish a close and reciprocal relationship between women's history and gender history; the first delineating the struggles of women for parity with men in economic, legal and political spheres; the second, as means of unravelling the continuing ways in which power is unequally distributed within the home, the workplace and in institutions, and in contesting the male-centred narratives of the past.
Scottish history is undergoing a renaissance. Everyone agrees that an understanding of our nation’s history is integral to our experience of its present and the shaping of the future. But the story of Scotland’s past is being told with little reference to gendered identities. Not only are women largely missing from these grand narratives, but men’s experience has tended to be sublimated in intellectual, political and economic agendas. Neither femininities nor masculinities have been given much of a place in Scotland’s past or in the process of nation-making. Gender in Scottish Historyoffers a new perspective on Scotland’s past since around 1700, viewing some of the main themes with a gendered perspective. It starts from the assumption that gender is integral to our understanding of the ways in which societies in the past were organised and that national histories have a tendency to be gender blind.Each chapter engages with one key theme from Scottish historiography, asking what happens when women are added to the story and how the story changes when the meanings of gendered understandings and assumptions are probed. Addressing politics, culture, religion, science, education, work, the family and identity, Gender in Scottish Historyproposes an alternative reading of the Scottish past which is both inclusive and recognisable.
A wide-ranging, thematic survey of women's history in Britain in the 18th and early 19th centuries, with chapters written by both well-established writers and new and dynamic scholars in a thorough and well-balanced selection.
This is the first critical study of Clara Dorothea Rackham née Tabor (1875–1966), a towering figure in the suffrage, labour, co-operative, peace, and adult education movements but virtually forgotten today. This clearly written and engaging study is based on unpublished primary sources including Rackham’s unpublished speeches, letters, diaries, and contemporary media coverage of her work in local and national archives. It reassesses this remarkable woman not only as a politician who changed the face of Cambridge, the university city in which she lived and worked, but also as a public intellectual whose feminist advocacy of a fair, just, and equal society helped pave the way to Britain’s postwar settlement and Welfare State. Rackham came to prominence as Chairman of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, as a government factory inspector, and championing the rights of unemployed women in the 1930s. An early broadcaster on BBC radio, and among the first women appointed magistrates and councillors, her name became synonymous with enlightened local government. The transformation of women’s lives in Victorian and twentieth-century Britain is crucial to understanding Rackham’s ideals, intellectual formation, and priorities as a Labour Party politician. This book will be of interest to historians and students of gender, history, and women’s lives.
Ever since there have been factories women and children have, more often than not, worked in those factories. What is perhaps less well known is that women also worked underground in coal mines and overground scaling the inside of chimneys. Young children were also put to work in factories and coalmines; they were deployed inside chimneys, often half-starved so that they could shin up ever narrower flues. This book charts the unhappy but aspirational story of women and children at work through the Industrial Revolution to the beginning of the 20th century. Without women there would have been no pre-industrial cottage industries, without women the Industrial Revolution would not have been nearly as industrial and nowhere near as revolutionary. Many women, and children, were obliged to take up work in the mills and factories – long hours, dangerous, often toxic conditions, monotony, bullying, abuse and miserly pay were the usual hallmarks of a day’s work - before they headed homeward to their other job: keeping home and family together. This long overdue and much needed book also covers the social reformers, the role of feminism and activism and the various Factory Acts and trade unionism. We examine how women and children suffered chronic occupational diseases and disabling industrial injuries - life changing and life shortening – and often a one way ticket to the workhouse. The book concludes with a survey of the art, literature and the music which formed the soundtrack for the factory girl and the climbing boys.
The eighteenth century looms large in the Scottish imagination. It is a century that saw the doubling of the population, rapid urbanisation, industrial growth, the political Union of 1707, the Jacobite Rebellions and the Enlightenment - events that were intrinsic to the creation of the modern nation and to putting Scotland on the international map. The impact of the era on modern Scotland can be seen in the numerous buildings named after the luminaries of the period - Adam Smith, David Hume, William Robertson - the endorsement of Robert Burns as the national poet/hero, the preservation of the Culloden battlefield as a tourist attraction, and the physical geographies of its major towns. Yet, while it is a century that remains central to modern constructions of national identity, it is a period associated with men. Until recently, the history of women in eighteenth-century Scotland, with perhaps the honourable exception of Flora McDonald, remained unwritten. Over the last decade however, research on women and gender in Scotland has flourished and we have an increasingly full picture of women's lives at all social levels across the century. As a result, this is an appropriate moment to reflect on what we know about Scottish women during the eighteenth century, to ask how their history affects the traditional narratives of the period, and to reflect on the implications for a national history of Scotland and Scottish identity. Divided into three sections, covering women's intimate, intellectual and public lives, this interdisciplinary volume offers articles on women's work, criminal activity, clothing, family, education, writing, travel and more. Applying tools from history, art anthropology, cultural studies, and English literature, it draws on a wide-range of sources, from the written to the visual, to highlight the diversity of women's experiences and to challenge current male-centric historiographies.
Ida Greaves, who was born in Barbados in 1907, is one of the "missing female voices" of early development economics. This biography, the first for Ida Greaves, attempts to construct her career and era before the past wholly disappears. The biography covers her early years in Barbados, her time at boarding school in England, at McGill University in Canada where she focused on human behaviour under the influence of changing social and political histories and also published an early path-breaking study of black migrants into Canada, and her later research at Harvard and Columbia in the United States and at the London School of Economics. Individual chapters follow her career acting as economic adviser to the Colonial Office in London, where she worked alongside Arthur Lewis, and at the fledgling United Nations in New York. She published in top journals and produced an outstanding study of the influence of colonial monetary systems on poor countries. This accessible biography provides unexpected insights into personalities and institutions during a critical period in late colonial history. The issues it raises of class and race, gender and inequality, poverty and unemployment, are of no less relevance today than they were in her lifetime.
This account examines some of the areas of women's political activity in Britain from the Glorious Revolution to the election of the first female Prime Minister in 1979. It shows how women had worked in a variety of arenas and organizations before the suffrage campaign and explores the directions their political activity took afterwards.
