This book explores the relationship between middle-class fathers and sons in England between c. 1870 and 1920. We now know that the conventional image of the middle-class paterfamilias of this period as cold and authoritarian is too simplistic, but there is still much to be discovered about relationships in middle-class families. Paying especial attention to gender and masculinities, this book focuses on the interactions between fathers and sons, exploring how relationships developed and masculine identities were negotiated from infancy and childhood to adulthood and old age. Drawing on sources as diverse as autobiographies, oral history interviews, First World War conscription records and press reports of violent incidents, this book questions how fathers and sons negotiated relationships marked by shifting relations of power, as well as by different combinations of emotional entanglements, obligations and ties. It explores changes as fathers and sons grew older and assesses fathers’ role in trying to mould sons’ masculine identities, characters and lives. It reveals negotiation and compromise, as well as rebellion and conflict, underlining that fathers and sons were important to each other, their relationships a significant – if often overlooked – aspect of middle-class men’s lives and identities.

Respectability, Bankruptcy and Bigamy in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Britain explores the vexed question of middle-class respectability in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It focuses upon the life of London solicitor Hamilton Pawley (1860–1936), who was barred from working by the Law Society, twice declared bankrupt, and in 1919 was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment with hard labour for bigamously marrying a woman practically forty years his junior. If Pawley did not suffer the revenge of respectable society, it is difficult to think who would. Drawing upon the fact that the disgraced and the disreputable have always tended to attract a disproportionate amount of attention, the book ranges widely, exploring such important issues as middle-class education, career choices, the dynamics of family life, and the workings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century legal system. It shows that Pawley was able to hold on to his professional – and even gentlemanly – status for far longer than seemed likely. This all suggests, the book concludes, that although respectability was as important to the middle class as we have always been told, it was both easier to acquire and easier to retain than we have generally been led to believe. This book will appeal to all those interested in British society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The purpose of this edited volume is to explore the contributions of women to European, Mexican, American and Indian film industries during the years 1900 to 1950, an important period that signified the rise and consolidation of media technologies. Their pioneering work as film stars, writers, directors, designers and producers as well as their endeavors to bridge the gap between the avant-garde and mass culture are significant aspects of this collection. This intersection will be carefully nuanced through their cinematographic production, performances and artistic creations. Other distinctive features pertain to the interconnection of gender roles and moral values with ways of looking, which paves the way for realigning social and aesthetic conventions of femininity. Based on this thematic and diverse sociocultural context, this study has an international scope, their main audiences being scholars and graduate students that pursue to advance interdisciplinary research in the field of feminist theory, film, gender, media and avant-garde studies. Likewise, historians, art and literature specialists will find the content appealing to the degree that intermedial and cross-cultural approaches are presented.

This book explores women’s editorial and salon activities in Southern Europe and provides a comparative view of their practices. It argues that women in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece used their double role as editors and salonnières to engage with foreign cultures, launch the careers of promising young authors and advocate for modernization and social change. By examining a neglected body of periodicals edited between 1860 and 1920, this book sets out to explore women’s editorial agendas and their interest in creating a connection between salon life and the print press. What purpose did this connection serve? How did women editors use their periodicals and their salons to create opportunities for cross-cultural exchange? In what ways did women use their double role as editors and salonnières to promote modernization and social progress in Southern Europe? By addressing these questions, this monograph contributes to the recent expansion of scholarship on nineteenth and twentieth-century periodicals and opens new avenues for theoretical reflection on European modernity. It also invites scholars and non-specialist readers to question the center vs. periphery model and to consider Southern European counties as cultural hubs in their own right.

This book attempts to cover all the important aspects of a woman’s life in Scotland, examining how and why it changed over the last 300 years. It walks us through the day-to-day existence of Scottish women and in doing so covers areas such as family and household, education, work and politics, religion and sexuality, crime and punishment. While sensitive to the differences among women, regarding colour, class and sexuality, the book seeks to establish a close and reciprocal relationship between women’s history and gender history; the first delineating the struggles of women for parity with men in economic, legal and political spheres; the second, as means of unravelling the continuing ways in which power is unequally distributed within the home, the workplace and in institutions, and in contesting the male-centred narratives of the past.

History and Legacy of the Suffragette Fellowship provides a biographical account of the scope and depth of the memory work of the now-forgotten commemorative group the Suffragette Fellowship, active from the 1920s to the 1970s. The Suffragette Fellowship comprised members from the militant suffrage groups known as the Women’s Social and Political Union, the Women’s Freedom League, and the Actress Franchise League. This research provides a comprehensive analysis of the Fellowship’s attempts to form and sustain a collective Suffragette identity across four decades of activity. It considers the legacy of contested histories attached to militant campaigning that pressured Fellowship leaders to take control of the public memory of suffrage history. With close attention given to a neglected piece of feminist history, this book highlights the cultural and political impacts that the Fellowship enacted in their memory of the women’s suffrage movement. Richly illustrated with images of members, artefacts, and publications, this extensive study of the Suffragette Fellowship adds to transnational suffrage histories in the United Kingdom and Australia and will be of interest to scholars in memory studies and women’s history.

Ida Greaves, who was born in Barbados in 1907, is one of the "missing female voices" of early development economics. This biography, the first for Ida Greaves, attempts to construct her career and era before the past wholly disappears. The biography covers her early years in Barbados, her time at boarding school in England, at McGill University in Canada where she focused on human behaviour under the influence of changing social and political histories and also published an early path-breaking study of black migrants into Canada, and her later research at Harvard and Columbia in the United States and at the London School of Economics. Individual chapters follow her career acting as economic adviser to the Colonial Office in London, where she worked alongside Arthur Lewis, and at the fledgling United Nations in New York. She published in top journals and produced an outstanding study of the influence of colonial monetary systems on poor countries. This accessible biography provides unexpected insights into personalities and institutions during a critical period in late colonial history. The issues it raises of class and race, gender and inequality, poverty and unemployment, are of no less relevance today than they were in her lifetime.

Through the translated stories of twenty Tibetan women of various backgrounds, ages and occupations who were alive in the twentieth century, this book presents broad, under-explored and engaging perspectives on Tibetan culture and politics, ethnicity or mixed ethnicity, art, marriage, religion, education and values. Offering a unique spectrum of primary sources, this book showcases interviews which were recorded in the 1990s and early 2000s which faithfully document Tibetan women telling their stories in their own words and situate these stories in their historical and socio-cultural contexts. These women were historically and religiously significant, such as a tulku (an incarnate), and tribal and local leaders, as well as ordinary women, such as poor peasants, the urban poor and women in polyandrous marriages. An important and unique contribution to the understanding of Tibetan women, this book is a valuable resource for those in the fields of anthropology, women and gender studies, applied history, contemporary China studies and Indigenous studies.

This volume deals with philosophical, scientific, and ideological images of women during the French Enlightenment, examining their emergence in the reflections of the philosophes, in Catholic morality, in biological and medical knowledge, in novels, in periodicals, and in the law. Alongside the appeals for social and intellectual emancipation advanced by the femmes savantes, typical of the eighteenth-century salons, a new conception pertaining to women’s social role related to the affirmation of the bourgeoisie and of its model of the family took place. Codified in a more complex and organized way within the Rousseauian philosophy, this new conception spread in various cultural debates, gaining a real hegemony: women were meant to be excluded from any "public" space, devoid of cultural aspirations, and only devoted to satisfying the needs of the family. The book adopts a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and synthetic approach and at the same time highlights the "roots" of some fundamental ways of considering women that are still active in present-day society. It also addresses researchers in the history of philosophy, sociology, literature, and gender studies, and readers with an interest in women’s issues.

This is the first critical study of Clara Dorothea Rackham née Tabor (1875–1966), a towering figure in the suffrage, labour, co-operative, peace, and adult education movements but virtually forgotten today. This clearly written and engaging study is based on unpublished primary sources including Rackham’s unpublished speeches, letters, diaries, and contemporary media coverage of her work in local and national archives. It reassesses this remarkable woman not only as a politician who changed the face of Cambridge, the university city in which she lived and worked, but also as a public intellectual whose feminist advocacy of a fair, just, and equal society helped pave the way to Britain’s postwar settlement and Welfare State. Rackham came to prominence as Chairman of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, as a government factory inspector, and championing the rights of unemployed women in the 1930s. An early broadcaster on BBC radio, and among the first women appointed magistrates and councillors, her name became synonymous with enlightened local government. The transformation of women’s lives in Victorian and twentieth-century Britain is crucial to understanding Rackham’s ideals, intellectual formation, and priorities as a Labour Party politician. This book will be of interest to historians and students of gender, history, and women’s lives.