A biography of the leading woman of science in Great Britain during the nineteenth century.

The first comprehensive guide to women activists from every part of the world, illuminating the broad range of women's struggles to reform society from the 18th century to the present. Despite being marginalized, disenfranchised, impoverished, and oppressed, women have always stepped forward in disproportionate numbers to lead movements for social change. This two-volume encyclopedia documents the visions, struggles, and lives of women who have changed the world. This encyclopedia celebrates the lives and achievements of nearly 300 women from around the globe—women who have bravely insisted that the way things are is not the way they have to be. Nadeshda Krupskaya, the wife of Lenin, spearheaded the drive against illiteracy in post-revolutionary Russia. American Dorothy Day founded the Catholic worker movement. Begum Rokeya Hossain organized a girls' school in Calcutta in 1911. Rachel Carson launched the modern environmental movement with her book Silent Spring. The stories of these women and the hundreds of others collected here will restore missing pages to our history and inspire a new generation of women to change the world.

Romance's Rival argues that the central plot of the most important genre of the nineteenth century, the marriage plot novel, means something quite different from what we thought. In Victorian novels, women may marry for erotic desire--but they might, instead, insist on "familiar marriage," marrying trustworthy companions who can offer them socially rich lives and futures of meaningful work. Romance's Rival shows how familiar marriage expresses ideas of female subjectivity dating back through the seventeenth century, while romantic marriage felt like a new, risky idea. Undertaking a major rereading of the rise-of-the-novel tradition, from Richardson through the twentieth century, Talia Schaffer rethinks what the novel meant if one tracks familiar-marriage virtues. This alternative perspective offers new readings of major texts (Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, Trollope) but it also foregrounds women's popular fiction (Yonge, Oliphant, Craik, Broughton). Offering a feminist perspective that reads the marriage plot from the woman's point of view, Schaffer inquires why a female character might legitimately wish to marry for something other than passion. For the past half-century, scholars have valorized desire, individuality, and autonomy in the way we read novels; Romance's Rival asks us to look at the other side, to validate the yearning for work, family, company, or social power as legitimate reasons for women's marital choices in Victorian fiction. Comprehensive in its knowledge of several generations of scholarship on the novel, Romance's Rival convinces us to re-examine assumptions about the nature and function of marriage and the role of the novel in helping us not simply imagine marriage but also process changing ideas about what it might look like and how it might serve people.

This book argues that the definition of femininity as propounded by gynaecological science is a cultural product of a wider, more political context.

Focusing on six popular British girls' periodicals, Kristine Moruzi explores the debate about the shifting nature of Victorian girlhood between 1850 and 1915. During an era of significant political, social, and economic change, girls' periodicals demonstrate the difficulties of fashioning a coherent, consistent model of girlhood. The mixed-genre format of these magazines, Moruzi suggests, allowed inconsistencies and tensions between competing feminine ideals to exist within the same publication. Adopting a case study approach, Moruzi shows that the Monthly Packet, the Girl of the Period Miscellany, the Girl's Own Paper, Atalanta, the Young Woman, and the Girl's Realm each attempted to define and refine a unique type of girl, particularly the religious girl, the 'Girl of the Period,' the healthy girl, the educated girl, the marrying girl, and the modern girl. These periodicals reflected the challenges of embracing the changing conditions of girls' lives while also attempting to maintain traditional feminine ideals of purity and morality. By analyzing the competing discourses within girls' periodicals, Moruzi's book demonstrates how they were able to frame feminine behaviour in ways that both reinforced and redefined the changing role of girls in nineteenth-century society while also allowing girl readers the opportunity to respond to these definitions.

Making Girls into Women offers an account of the historical emergence of "the lesbian" by looking at late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women's writing. Kathryn R. Kent proposes that modern lesbian identity in the United States has its roots not just, or even primarily, in sexology and medical literature, but in white, middle-class women’s culture. Kent demonstrates how, as white women's culture shifted more and more from the home to the school, workplace, and boarding house, the boundaries between the public and private spheres began to dissolve. She shows how, within such spaces, women's culture, in attempting to mold girls into proper female citizens, ended up inciting in them other, less normative, desires and identifications, including ones Kent calls "protolesbian" or queer. Kent not only analyzes how texts represent queer erotics, but also theorizes how texts might produce them in readers. She describes the ways postbellum sentimental literature such as that written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Emma D. Kelley eroticizes, reacts against, and even, in its own efforts to shape girls’ selves, contributes to the production of queer female identifications and identities. Tracing how these identifications are engaged and critiqued in the early twentieth century, she considers works by Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop, as well as in the queer subject-forming effects of another modern invention, the Girl Scouts. Making Girls into Women ultimately reveals that modern lesbian identity marks an extension of, rather than a break from, nineteenth-century women’s culture.

This intriguing book examines the ways contagion - or disease - inform and shape a wide variety of nineteenth century texts and contexts. Christiensen dissects the cultural assumptions concerning disease, health, impurity and so on before exploring different perspectives on key themes such as plague, nursing and the hospital environment and focusing on certain key texts including Dicken's Bleak House, Gaskell's Ruth, and Zola's Le Docteur Pascal.

Bats, beetles, wolves, butterflies, bulls, panthers, apes, leopards and spiders are among the countless creatures that crowd the pages of literature of the late nineteenth century. Whether in Gothic novels, science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, journalism, political discourse, realism or naturalism, the line between the human and the animal becomes blurred. Beastly Journeys examines these bestial transformations across a range of well-known and less familiar texts and shows how they are provoked not only by the mutations of Darwinism but by social and economic shifts that have been lost in retellings and readings of them. The physical alterations described by George Gissing, George MacDonald, Arthur Machen, Arthur Morrison, W.T. Stead, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, and many of their contemporaries, are responses to changes in the social body as Britain underwent a series of social and economic crises. Metaphors of travel DS social, spatial, temporal, mythical and psychological DS keep these stories on the move, confusing literary genres along with the indeterminacy of physical shape that they relate. Beastly Journeys will appeal to anyone interested in the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and its contexts and especially to those interested in the fin de siècle and in metaphors of travel, animals and shape-changing.