This dramatic social history follows the struggle for women’s rights in England from the Industrial Revolution to the Suffragist victory after WWI. The 100 years from 1819-1919 saw remarkable change for women in England. From the early nineteenth century, when women were not even considered ‘persons' under the law, they achieved full legal rights and status. The doors of education and employment were thrown open to them, and by 1919, they won universal suffrage. As workers organized in the North-West to demand better conditions in the textile industries, women formed their own groups to support the cause—and fight for their own rights. Blowback came in August of 1819, in the form of the Peterloo Massacre. The brutality of that day brought attention to the women’s cause and encouraged them to continue the fight. Women became involved in reform groups, Chartism, trade unions, politics, education, career opportunities and the right to vote. Though they faced hostility from both men and women, their perseverance paid off for generations of women to come.

Spanning the century from the Taiping Rebellion through the establishment of the People's Republic of China, this is the first comprehensive history of women in modern China. Its scope is broad, encompassing political, economic, military, and cultural history, and drawing upon Chinese and Japanese sources untapped by Western scholars. The book presents new information on a wide range of topics: the impact of Western ideas on women, especially in education; the importance of women in the labor force; the relative independence enjoyed by some women textile workers; the struggle against footbinding; the influence of anarchism; the participation of a women's brigade in the Revolution of 1911; the role of women in the May Fourth Movement; the differences between the more assertive women of South China and the 'traditional' women of the North in organizing for political action; the involvement of peasant women in insurgency and anti-Japanese struggles in the countryside; and the effects of the Marriage Law of 1950. The author has contributed a new preface to this English edition, and Joshua A. Fogel and Susan Mann have written an introduction that places the book in the context of studies of Chinese women, Japanese sinology, and women's history in general. The book has extensive notes, a bibliography, and, as an appendix, a chronology of the history of women in modern China.

Here for the first time is a book devoted exclusively to the topic of women’s autobiography in nineteenth-century France. Tracing the rise of autobiography in relation to women’s domestic confinement, Kathleen Hart demonstrates how Flora Tristan, George Sand, and Louise Michel transformed the genre. Inspired by Romantic socialism, each of these remarkable autobiographers links the story of her personal development to socio-historic change. In the wake of the 1830 Revolution, Tristan chronicles social unrest as she relates her progressive transformation into humanity’s “Woman Guide” in Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838). Writing in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution, Sand consolidates her role as a mediator between the rich and the poor in Story of My Life (1854). A legend of the 1871 Paris Commune, Michel establishes herself as the poet and prophet of a mythical Revolution yet to come in her Memoirs (1886). Exploring the dynamic interplay between revolution and feminist acts of self-affirmation, Revolution and Women’s Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century France will appeal to scholars of history, French culture, literature, and women’s studies.

This book explores shifting representations and receptions of the arms-bearing woman on the British stage during a period in which she comes to stand in Britain as a striking symbol of revolutionary chaos. The book makes a case for viewing the British Romantic theatre as an arena in which the significance of the armed woman is constantly remodelled and reappropriated to fulfil diverse ideological functions. Used to challenge as well as to enforce established notions of sex and gender difference, she is fashioned also as an allegorical tool, serving both to condemn and to champion political and social rebellion at home and abroad. Magnifying heroines who appear on stage wielding pistols, brandishing daggers, thrusting swords, and even firing explosives, the study spotlights the intricate and often surprising ways in which the stage amazon interacts with Anglo-French, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-German, and Anglo-Spanish debates at varying moments across the French revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. At the same time, it foregrounds the extent to which new dramatic genres imported from Europe –notably, the German Sturm und Drang and the French-derived melodrama– facilitate possibilities at the turn of the nineteenth century for a refashioned female warrior, whose degree of agency, destructiveness, and heroism surpasses that of her tragic and sentimental predecessors.

Revolution was the common theme as the world changed between the years 1770 and 1870. This book goes from the Battle of Golden Hill, where the first American blood was spilled fighting against the British, to the Meiji Restoration in Japan and Unification of Germany. Topics include the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, Napoleon, Latin American Independence, Industrial Revolution, turmoil in the Muslim world, Shaka Zulu, Liberalism and Nationalism, the founding of Australia, Western-Asian conflicts, Napoleon III, and nation-state building in Italy, Japan, Germany, Canada, and the U.S. Everyone interested in the origins of revolutions and their consequences should read this book.

A theoretical account of moral revolutions, illustrated by historical cases that include the criminalization and decriminalization of abortion and the patient rebellion against medical paternalism. We live in an age of moral revolutions in which the once morally outrageous has become morally acceptable, and the formerly acceptable is now regarded as reprehensible. Attitudes toward same-sex love, for example, and the proper role of women, have undergone paradigm shifts over the last several decades. In this book, Robert Baker argues that these inversions are the product of moral revolutions that follow a pattern similar to that of the scientific revolutions analyzed by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. After laying out the theoretical terrain, Baker develops his argument with examples of moral reversals from the recent and distant past. He describes the revolution, led by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, that transformed the postmortem dissection of human bodies from punitive desecration to civic virtue; the criminalization of abortion in the nineteenth century and its decriminalization in the twentieth century; and the invention of a new bioethics paradigm in the 1970s and 1980s, supporting a patient-led rebellion against medical paternalism. Finally, Baker reflects on moral relativism, arguing that the acceptance of “absolute” moral truths denies us the diversity of moral perspectives that permit us to alter our morality in response to changing environments.

Annotation A sophisticated and groundbreaking book on what women actually did and what actually happened to them during the French Revolution.

The Science Education of American Girls provides a comparative analysis of the science education of adolescent boys and girls, and analyzes the evolution of girls' scientific interests from the antebellum era through the twentieth century. Kim Tolley expands the understanding of the structural and cultural obstacles that emerged to transform what, in the early nineteenth century, was regarded as a "girl's subject." As the form and content of pre-college science education developed, Tolley argues, direct competition between the sexes increased. Subsequently, the cultural construction of science as a male subject limited access and opportunity for girls.

A study of the role of pawnshops in the lives and culture of working and middle-class families in Mexico City from the eighteenth century to the present.

This innovative study of vision, gender and poetry traces Milton's mark on Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne to show how the lyric male poet achieves vision at the cost of symbolic blindness and feminisation. Drawing together a wide range of concerns including the use of myth, the gender of the sublime, the lyric fragment, and the relation of pain to creativity, this book is a major re-evaluation of the male poet and the making of the English poetic tradition.The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne examines the feminisation of the post-Miltonic male poet, not through cultural history, but through a series of mythic or classical figures which include Philomela, Orpheus and Sappho. It recovers a disfiguring sublime imagined as an aggressive female force which feminises the male poet in an act that simultaneously deprives and energises him. This book will be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the English poetic tradition and Victorian poetry.