This absorbing account of the life and work of Clara Collet, a leading economist, statistician and champion of women's employment, is the first biography of this remarkable woman and reveals through Collet's diaries her fascinating personal life. An early female university graduate (1880), then teacher, she campaigned for the secondary education provision of girls at a time when it was negligible. Her other major contribution was in raising the status of working-class women, becoming a Commissioner for the Royal Commission on Labour (1892). She was close to the family of Karl Marx, particularly with Eleanor Marx, and with Beatrice Webb. Her enduring friendship with the cult Victorian author George Gissing deeply influenced his writing. Her working relationships with Charles Booth, Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald and Winston Churchill are also celebrated

Published papers whose appeal lies in their subject-matter rather than their technical statistical contents. Medical, social, educational, legal,demographic and governmental issues are of particular concern.

The Lancashire cotton industry doubtless counts among the most thoroughly researched industries in Britain. Cotton processing has attracted attention both as the pioneer of industrialization and the harbinger of industrial decline, in many ways typifying the development of the British economy from unchallenged global leader to the demise of large sectors of its manufacturing industry. Yet among the spate of book and articles published about the industry, there is a conspicuous lacuna. Gender, though rarely addressed specifically, permeates the industry's historiography nonetheless. This study tackles head-on the notion of gender within the cotton industry during the period 1880-1914, not so much to trace its effects on the industry itself, but instead concentrating on the ways gender radicalized particularly the female workers in the Lancashire mills. In so doing, it promotes the view that it was women weavers' experience of the way in which gender inequality in the labour process clashed with varying degrees of inequality in the other spheres of their lives that caused many of them to organize for the franchise. Their experience of equality in the labour process both sensitized them to inequality elsewhere and empowered them to fight against it by showing it to be a product of society rather than nature. 'Drawing on the examples provided by disenfranchized working-class men and middle-class women alike, they accounted for inequality in terms of their exclusion from the polity. In the process of holding their own against male co-workers, supervisory staff, employers, labour activists, politicians, and even many middle-class women, they evolved their own version of working-class femininity, which differed in important ways from the female domesticity that had a vibrant existence in labour rhetoric, but rarely beyond.

Includes section "Reviews".

Contributions to female economic thought have come from prolific scholars, leading social reformers, economic journalists and government officials along with many other women who contributed only one or two works to the field. It is perhaps for this reason that a comprehensive bibliographic collection has failed to appear, until now. This innovative book brings together the most comprehensive collection to date of references to women’s economic writing from the 1770s to 1940. It includes thousands of contributions from more than 1,700 women from the UK, the US and many other countries. This bibliography is an important reference work for systematic inquiry into questions of gender and the history of economic thought. This volume is a valuable resource and will interest researchers on women's contributions to economic thought, the sociology of economics, and the lives of female social scientists and activist-authors. With a comprehensive editorial introduction, it fills a long-standing gap and will be greeted warmly by scholars of the history of economic thought and those involved in feminist economics.