Maria S. Rye, a woman motivated by both feminist and philanthropic ideals, devoted her life to the migration of women and girls out of England. This biography gives an account of Rye's activities from her early engagement with liberal feminism through her association with the Langham Place group in the 1850s, her work as a journalist and with the Society for Promoting Women's Employment, through to her efforts in women's and children's emigration Between 1861 and 1896, Maria S. Rye sent many hundreds of single women out to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and more than four thousand children to Canada, all with the promise of a better life in the British colonies than they could expect at home in England. Like many nineteenth century advocates of emigration, she saw it as a panacea for many social ills, taking people from impoverishment in the old world to the hope of better prospects in the new. Unlike other advocates, she linked this enthusiasm for emigration with the ideals of liberal feminism, arguing that women and girls should share the opportunities for advancement that the colonies offered to men and boys Rye played a central role in developing organizations to facilitate the migration of women and girls, starting with the Female Middle Class Emigration Society in 1861. After 1869 she concentrated on the migration of so-called gutter-children to Canada, where her pioneering efforts were followed by numerous other philanthropic associates, such as Barnardo This biography analyzes how feminism and philanthropy intertwined in her activities, and how her early concerns with the rights of women to economic opportunity came to be over-ridden by an authoritarian streak that led to the tragic excesses of her work in juvenile migration.

This work explores Mary Wollstonecraft's 19th-century legacy in relation to three themes integral to her work: the nature of motherhood, religion and the empowerment of women, and women's contribution to the sciences of man. The introduction provides a comparative framework for French and English women and situates each essay within current historical debates.

Like the corset, the women's magazines which emerged in the nineteenth century produced a `natural' idea of femininity: the domestic wife; the fashionable woman; the romancing and desirable girl. Their legacy, from agony aunts to fashion plates, are easily traced in their modern counterparts. But do these magazines and their promises empower or disempower their readers? A Magazine of Her Own? is a lively and revealing exploration of this immensely popular form from its beginnings. In fascinating detail Margaret Beetham investigates the desires, images and interpretations of femininity posed by a medium whose readership was and still is almost exclusively female. A Magazine of Her Own is at once a chronological tracing of the history, a collection of intriguing case studies and an intervention into recent debates about gender and sexuality in popular reading. It is a book which anyone who is interested in the unique, influential world of the woman's magazine - students, scholars and general readers alike - will want to read

British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832-1877 examines the literature of Victorian settler emigration in America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, arguing that popular Victorian periodicals played a key and overlooked role in imagining and moderating this dramatic historical experience.