Product Description: Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills offers a comparative history of European girlhood from 1750 to 1960, with a focus on Britain, France, and Germany. It covers diverse issues in the lives of girls, from sexuality and leisure to social roles in the family and the economy...read more

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Product Description: Through twenty engaging essays exploring cultures ranging from ancient Judaic civilization to contemporary Brazil, Gender, Kinship and Power places important contemporary issues related to kinship--such as parental responsibility and female-headed households--in their proper comparative and historical framework...read more

Product Description: Taking the Hard Road is an engaging history of growing up in working-class families in France and Germany during the Industrial Revolution. Based on a reading of ninety autobiographical accounts of childhood and adolescence, the book explores the far-reaching historical transformations associated with the emergence of modern industrial capitalism...read more

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance of early ideas about schooling for understanding contemporary society. She presents the competing perspectives on issues such as the identity and motivations of school reformers, the broad societal changes that made educational reform seem imperative toward the end of the eighteenth century all over the West, the connections between educational change and economic development, the role of schools in the evolution of class relations, the impact of reform on family strategies in the context of early industrialization. The work concludes by assessing historical data on the social impact of school reform and addressing the social meaning of schooling in the past and in the present.