In her nineteenth-century essay, Florence Nightingale speaks out against the imposed restrictions, idleness, and triviality that characterized the life of Victorian women (view table of contents)

Florence Nightingale (1820-1920) is famous as the heroine of the Crimean War and later as a campaigner for health care founded on a clean environment and good nursing. Though best known for her pioneering demonstration that disease rather than wounds killed most soldiers, she was also heavily allied to social reform movements and to feminist protest against the enforced idleness of middle-class women. This original edition provides bold new insights into Nightingale's beliefs and a new picture of the relationship between feminism and religion. Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truth Among the Artisans of England (1860), which contains the novel Cassandra, is a central text in 19th-century history of feminist thought and is published here for the first time. Nightingale argues that work was the means by which every individual sought self-fulfillment and served God. She wrote influentially about the group most Victorians declared to be above work: unmarried, middle-class women.

Product Description: Did medieval women have the power to choose? This is a question at the heart of this book that explores three court cases from Yorkshire in the decades after the Black Death.

(view table of contents)

Product Description: Barbara Caine offers the first complete overview of the history of "modern" English feminism, from the French Revolution through to the advent of Women's Liberation. Her analysis of feminist organizations, debates, and campaigns shows a keen sense of the relationship between feminist thought and actions, and wider social and cultural change...read more

Product Description: This vivid and pioneering study illuminates the different roles played in late medieval society by noblewomen - the most substantial group of women to survive as individuals in medieval documents. They emerge (despite limited political opportunities) as figures of consequence themselves in a landowning society through estate management in their husbands' frequent absences, and through hospitality, patronage and affinity...read more

This series provides the student, scholar and general reader with short studies of key aspects and personalities of the medieval world. The careers explored in the biographical volumes are studied not only for their intrinsic importance, but also for the light they shed on the wider themes and processes of the time. Any serious attempts to explain the contribution made by women to past societies have been hampered by the shortage of surviving evidence. This is particularly true for women of the Middle Ages, who, unless they were nuns, saints or queens, living in a world governed and controlled by men made little impact on historical records. In the later Middle Ages, however, English noblewomen fared a little better. It becomes possible to identify some of them as individual personalities with individual careers. In this study Dr Ward examines the lives of women in the upper strata of lay society. By using Lady Elizabeth de Burgh (1295-1360), younger sister of the last Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, as a continuing case study throughout the book, Dr Ward places the various life-roles of English noblewomen in context. The book fills gaps in medieval and social history, and in the rapidly expanding field of women's history. It views the noble lady in the terms of her respective "life roles"; as a marriageable asset, wife, widow, mother, administrator of a major household and as a religious and cultural patron. It is aimed at sixth form students and 1st/2nd year undergraduates and general readership. It is designed for courses - Medieval British history, social and economic history, religious and cultural history and women's studies.

Product Description: Book by Amrit Wilson

An invaluable work not only for historians and students but anyone interested in the lives of women in the past. (view table of contents)

Shakespeare and The Nature of Women , first published in 1975, inaugurated a new wave of feminist scholarship. It claimed that Shakespeare's plays offered a sustained critique of inherited male thinking about women, theological, literary and social. The book argued that the presence of the boy actor in Shakespeare's theatre created an awareness of gender as performance. Almost thirty years on, it continues to be the corner-stone of writing about women in this period and the spring-board for new research.

The gifted English writer submits a strong plea for intellectual freedom, women's rights, and the cessation of war, in an annotated series of letters. Reprint. 12,000 first printing.

Product Description: Women of the Tudor period (1485-1603)- they were urged to be silent, but by virtue of education, many served as office holders, business people, gild members etc.

Product Description: 1984, hardcover edition, Ohio University press, Athens, OH, 250 pages. Vintage illustrations. Details the life and times of 6 Victorian ladies and their marriages and some customs dictated by the times themselves.

The economic condition of women is enormously important to our understanding of any society. Historians have made many assumptions about women's property in the early modern period in an attempt to generalize about legal development, about family relations, and about women's status in the past. Using original research into probate documents and court records, Amy Erickson argues that many of these assumptions are wrong. By explaining how multiple and overlapping legal systems affected women as daughters, wives and widows, and comparing this legal structure with the actual distribution of property among ordinary people, she shows that early modern Englishwomen owned and managed far more money, goods and property than has ever been recognized by historians. Erickson uses virtually unknown sources to combine legal, social and women's history in an imaginative way. In testing out the extent, the limits and the contradictions of women as property owners, fascinating material about their daily lives and their relationship emerges.

(view table of contents)

(view table of contents)