Women Workers and Gender Identities, 1835 - 1913 examines the experiences of women workers in the cotton and small metals industries and the discourses surrounding their labour. It demonstrates how ideas of womanhood often clashed with the harsh realities of working-class life that forced women into such unfeminine trades as chain-making and brass polishing. Thus discourses constructing women as wives and mothers, or associating women's work with distinctly feminine attributes, were often undercut and subverted.
Women Workers and Gender Identities, 1835 - 1913 examines the experiences of women workers in the cotton and small metals industries and the discourses surrounding their labour. It demonstrates how ideas of womanhood often clashed with the harsh realities of working-class life that forced women into such unfeminine trades as chain-making and brass polishing. Thus discourses constructing women as wives and mothers, or associating women's work with distinctly feminine attributes, were often undercut and subverted.
In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Crawford provides the first survey of women’s suffrage campaigns across the British Isles and Ireland, focusing on local campaigns and activists. Divided into thirteen sections covering the regions of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, this book gives a unique geographical dimension to debates on the suffrage campaign of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Through a study of the grass-roots activists involved in the movement, Crawford provides a counter to studies that have focused on the politics and personalities that dominated at a national level, and reveals that, far from providing merely passive backing to the cause, women in the regions were engaged in the movement as active participants Including a thorough inventory of archival sources and extensive bibliographical and biographical references for each region, including the addresses of campaigners, this guide is essential for researchers, scholars, local historians and students alike.
The first book of its kind to study this period, Gerry Holloway's essential student resource works chronologically from the early 1840s to the end of the twentieth century and examines over 150 years of women’s employment history. With suggestions for research topics, an annotated bibliography to aid further research, and a chronology of important events which places the subject in a broader historical context, Gerry Holloway considers how factors such as class, age, marital status, race and locality, along with wider economic and political issues, have affected women’s job opportunities and status. Key themes and issues that run through the book include: continuity and change the sexual division of labour women as a cheap labour force women’s perceived primary role of motherhood women and trade unions equality and difference education and training. Students of women’s studies, gender studies and history will find this a fascinating and invaluable addition to their reading material.
The Lancashire cotton industry doubtless counts among the most thoroughly researched industries in Britain. Cotton processing has attracted attention both as the pioneer of industrialization and the harbinger of industrial decline, in many ways typifying the development of the British economy from unchallenged global leader to the demise of large sectors of its manufacturing industry. Yet among the spate of book and articles published about the industry, there is a conspicuous lacuna. Gender, though rarely addressed specifically, permeates the industry's historiography nonetheless. This study tackles head-on the notion of gender within the cotton industry during the period 1880-1914, not so much to trace its effects on the industry itself, but instead concentrating on the ways gender radicalized particularly the female workers in the Lancashire mills. In so doing, it promotes the view that it was women weavers' experience of the way in which gender inequality in the labour process clashed with varying degrees of inequality in the other spheres of their lives that caused many of them to organize for the franchise. Their experience of equality in the labour process both sensitized them to inequality elsewhere and empowered them to fight against it by showing it to be a product of society rather than nature. 'Drawing on the examples provided by disenfranchized working-class men and middle-class women alike, they accounted for inequality in terms of their exclusion from the polity. In the process of holding their own against male co-workers, supervisory staff, employers, labour activists, politicians, and even many middle-class women, they evolved their own version of working-class femininity, which differed in important ways from the female domesticity that had a vibrant existence in labour rhetoric, but rarely beyond.
This compelling and stimulating book explores the gendered social history of students in modern Britain. From the privileged youth of Brideshead Revisited, to the scruffs at 'Scumbag University' in The Young Ones, representations of the university undergraduate have been decidedly male. But since the 1970s the proportion of women students in universities in the UK has continued to rise so that female undergraduates now outnumber their male counterparts. Drawing upon wide-ranging original research including documentary and archival sources, newsfilm, press coverage of student life and life histories of men and women who graduated before the Second World War, this text provides rich insights into changes in student identity and experience over the past century. The book examines : men's and women's differing expectations of higher education the sacrifices that families made to send young people to college the effect of equality legislation demography changing patterns of marriage and the impact of the 'sexual revolution' on female students the cultural life of students and the role that gender has played in shaping them. For students of gender studies, cultural studies and history, this book will have meaningful impact on their degree course studies.
This study argues that businesswomen were central to urban society and to the operation and development of commerce in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It presents a rich and complicated picture of lower-middling life and female enterprise in three northern English towns: Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield. The stories told by a wide range of sources - including trade directories, newspaper advertisements, court records, correspondence, and diaries - demonstrate the very differing fortunes and levels of independence that individual businesswomen enjoyed. Yet, as a group, their involvement in the economic life of towns and, in particular, the manner in which they exploited and facilitated commercial development, force us to reassess our understanding of both gender relations and urban culture in late Georgian England. In contrast to the traditional historical consensus that the independent woman of business during this period - particularly those engaged in occupations deemed 'unfeminine' - was insignificant and no more than an oddity, businesswomen are presented here not as footnotes to the main narrative, but as central characters in a story of unprecedented social and economic transformation. The book reveals a complex picture of female participation in business. It shows that factors traditionally thought to discriminate against women's commercial activity - particularly property laws and ideas about gender and respectability - did have significant impacts upon female enterprise. Yet it is also evident that women were not automatically economically or socially marginalized as a result. The woman of business might be subject to various constraints, but at the same time, she could be blessed with a number of freedoms, and a degree of independence that set her apart from most other women - and many men - in late Georgian society.
The industrial revolution stands out as a key event not simply in British history, but in world history, ushering in as it did a new era of sustained economic prosperity. But what exactly was the 'industrial revolution'? And why did it occur in Britain when it did? Ever since the expression was coined in the 19th century, historians have been debating these questions, and there now exists a large and complex historiography concerned with English industrialisation. This short history of the British Industrial Revolution, aimed at undergraduates, sets out to answer these questions. It will synthesise the latest research on British industrialisation into an exciting and interesting account of the industrial revolution. Deploying clear argument, lively language, and a fresh set of organising themes, this short history revisits one of the most central events in British history in a novel and accessible way. This is an ideal text for undergraduate students studying the Industrial Revolution or 19th Century Britain.
This book examines links between gender, race and national identity by analyzing a range of mass-mediated and pop-cultural ‘texts’ in four nations: Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom and the USA.
