Product Description: This book illustrates the social, cultural, legal and, political conditions that European women have faced from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Product Description: This collection sets out to analyze the influence of women's movements on the emergence of Europe's welfare state from the 1880s to the 1950s, and the limits of that influence. It compares the women's movements - and social policies concerning women - in the dictatorships of Italy, Germany and Spain with the democracies in Britain, France and Scandinavia...read more

This highly acclaimed volume brings together some of the world's foremost historians of ideas to consider Machiavelli's political thought in the larger context of the European republican tradition, and the image of Machiavelli held by other republicans. An international team of scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (notably law, philosophy, history and the history of political thought) explore both the immediate Florentine context in which Machiavelli wrote, and the republican legacy to which he contributed. (view table of contents)

Historically, as well as more recently, women's emancipation has been seen in two ways: sometimes as the "right to be equal" and sometimes as the "right to be different". These views have often overlapped and interacted in a variety of guises they have played an important role in both the development of ideas about women and feminism, and the works of political thinkers who are not primarily concerned with women's liberation. This book deals primarily with the meaning and use of these two concepts in the context of gender relations (past and present), but also draw attention to their place in the understanding and analysis of other human relationships.