Explores the complexities of the lived experiences of Victorian women in the home, the workplace, and the empire as well as the ideals of womanhood and femininity that developed during the 19th century. Contrary to popular misconception, many Victorian women performed manual labor for wages directly alongside men, had political voice before women's suffrage, and otherwise contributed significantly to society outside of the domestic sphere. Daily Life of Victorian Women documents the varied realities of the lives of Victorian women; provides in-depth comparative analysis of the experiences of women from all classes, especially the working class; and addresses changes in their lives and society over time. The book covers key social, intellectual, and geographical aspects of women's lives, with main chapters on gender and ideals of womanhood, the state, religion, home and family, the body, childhood and youth, paid labor and professional work, urban life, and imperialism.

While Victorian tourism and Victorian sexuality have been the subject of much critical interest, there has been little research on a characteristically nineteenth-century phenomenon relating to both sex and travel: the honeymoon, or wedding journey. Although the term 'honeymoon' was coined in the eighteenth century, the ritual increased in popularity throughout the Victorian period, until by the end of the century it became a familiar accompaniment to the wedding for all but the poorest classes. Using letters and diaries of 61 real-life honeymooning couples, as well as novels from Frankenstein to Middlemarch that feature honeymoon scenarios, Michie explores the cultural meanings of the honeymoon, arguing that, with its emphasis on privacy and displacement, the honeymoon was central to emerging ideals of conjugality and to ideas of the couple as a primary social unit.

Personal diaries provide rare glimpses into those aspects of the past that are usually hidden from view, and the diary of Elizabeth Lee (1868–?) is no exception to this rule. Elizabeth’s father was a draper and outfitter in Birkenhead and during the twenty-five year span of Lee’s diary which began in 1884, she lived at home with her family while simultaneously traveling to both sides of the Mersey without supervision, making the diary an unusually revealing portrait of middle-class female life in Victorian society. Accompanied by a detailed introduction and an analysis of the diary itself, as well as a glossary relating to key people mentioned in its pages, The Diary of Elizabeth Lee is a rare firsthand account of adolescent life in Victorian Britain.

Indispensable for the student or researcher studying women's history, this book draws upon a wide array of cultural settings and time periods in which women displayed agency by carrying out their daily economic, familial, artistic, and religious obligations. Since record keeping began, history has been written by a relatively few elite men. Insights into women's history are left to be gleaned by scholars who undertake careful readings of ancient literature, examine archaeological artifacts, and study popular culture, such as folktales, musical traditions, and art. For some historical periods and geographic regions, this is the only way to develop some sense of what daily life might have been like for women in a particular time and place. This reference explores the daily life of women across civilizations. The work is organized in sections on different civilizations from around the world, arranged chronologically. Within each society, the encyclopedia highlights the roles of women within five broad thematic categories: the arts, economics and work, family and community life, recreation and social customs, and religious life. Included are numerous sidebars containing additional information, document excerpts, images, and suggestions for further reading.

“As dangerous as if she stood on the corner of the street exploding gunpowder.” This was the view of ‘Miles’, a correspondent in the Bedfordshire Mercury, writing about the dangerousness of prostitutes in 1874. They were considered a scourge by the Victorians; a menace to society and a threat to the moral and physical wellbeing of a nation. Carrying disease, committing crime, corrupting others; prostitutes were the most feared ‘social evil’. These women were the focus of controlling and invasive legislation, designed to clear the streets. They were imprisoned and removed from their friends and family. They were scorned and shamed and deemed worthless by much of society. The contemporary view of prostitution in the nineteenth century is colored by years of Ripperology, a grim fascination with the lives of a few mutilated women living in London. However, prostitutes were far more than caricatures of sinners or inevitable victims and lived in every other part of England too. Searching through the plethora of newspaper, census, police, and local history records it is now possible to uncover the lives of prostitutes in greater detail than ever before and discover the real women behind the stereotypes. Piecing together these women’s movements from cradle to grave and from one side of the country to another builds a rich picture of what it meant to be a prostitute, including the lives of prostitutes living in small towns, villages, and islands that have all been previously over-looked. This book explores the lives of the women who were omitted from the genteel history books of the past, aiming to identify what they looked like, what life was like for them, and who the important people in their lives were. It also looks in depth at the lives of a select few prostitutes, examining what drew them into prostitution and what happened to them afterwards. From Whitehaven to North Shields, from Peterborough to Bloomsbury (via Paris), these women led extraordinary, richly textured lives that are still relevant today, and that we can continue to learn so much from. The perfect introduction to Victorian prostitutes for family and local historians, genealogists, and students of the Victorian era.

This volume uncovers the ideas concerning everyday life circulating in the burgeoning feminist periodical culture of Britain in the early twentieth century. Barbara Green explores the ways in which the feminist press used its correspondence columns, women’s pages, fashion columns and short fictions to display the quiet hum of everyday life that provided the backdrop to the more dramatic events of feminist activism such as street marches or protests. Positioning itself at the interface of periodical studies and everyday life studies, Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life illuminates the more elusive aspects of the periodical archive through a study of those periodical forms that are particularly well-suited to conveying the mundane. Feminist journalists such as Rebecca West, Teresa Billington-Greig, E. M. Delafield and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence provided new ways of conceptualizing the significance of domestic life and imagining new possibilities for daily routines. /p>

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

This volume offers an overview of what it was like to be female and to live and die in Victorian England (c. 1837-1901), by situating this experience within the scientific and social contexts of the times. With a temporal focus on women’s life experience, the book moves from childhood and youth, through puberty and adolescence, to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, into senescence. Drawing on osteological sources, medical discourses, and examples from the literature and cultural history of the period, alongside social and environmental data derived from ethnographic and archival investigations, the authors explore the experience of being female in the Victorian era for women across classes. In synthesizing current research on demographic statistics, maternal morbidity and mortality, and bioarchaeological evidence on patterns of aging and death, they analyze how changing social ideals, cultural and environmental variability, shifting economies, and evolving medical and scientific understanding about the body combined to shape female health and identity in the nineteenth century. Victorian women faced a variety of challenges, including changing attitudes regarding appropriate behavior, social roles, and beauty standards, while grappling with new understandings of the role played by gender and sexuality in shaping women’s lives from youth to old age. The book concludes by considering the relevance of how Victorian narratives of womanhood and the experience of being female have influenced perceptions of female health and cultural constructions of identity today.

From the Thirteenth century through the Nineteenth, the waterways of the world provided the major means of transportation for exploration, trade, the military, and even criminals. Find out what life was like for those who chose to sail the high seas, as well as for those who didn't choose to be on board, like wives brought to sea by husbands and slaves en route to the auction block. What were their quarters like? What did they eat? How did they pass their long days at sea? These and other questions are answered in animated prose that brings the lives of ordinary people who oftentimes engaged in extraordinary activities, into sharp focus. First-hand accounts from such sources as personal journals and magazine articles are provided to help bring the time period alive. Students will also learn what life was like in the seaport towns and what the sailors did when they visited these towns, as well as the physical parts of the ships and the different roles different members of the crew played. This engaging history helps to separate fact from fiction while exploring the reasons the sea and sea life have held such prominent roles in popular fiction, and will help students understand what life was truly like for these people.

Nicole C. Dittmer offers a reimagining of the popular Gothic female “monster” figure in early-to-mid-Victorian literature. Regardless of the extensive scholarship concerning monstrosities, these pre-fin-de-siècle figurations have often been neglected by critical studies or interpreted as fragments of mind and body which create a division between culture and nature. In Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism, Dittmer deploys monism to delineate from and contest such dualism, unifies the material-immaterial aspects of fictional women, and blurs the distinction between nature-culture. Blending intertextual disciplines of medical sciences, ecofeminism, and fiction, she exposes female monstrosities as material and semiotic figurations. This book, then, identifies how women in the Victorian Gothic are informed by the entanglement of both immaterial discourses and material conditions. When repressed by social customs, the monistic mind-body of the material-semiotic figure reacts to and disrupts processes of ontology, transforming women into “wild” and “monstrous” (re)presentations.