Women in European Culture and Society: Gender, Skill and Identity from 1700

by Simonton; Deborah

• ISBN13: 9780415213073
• ISBN10: 041521307X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-02-02
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

A new and major contribution to the field, Women in European Culture and Societyis a transnational history of women in Europe from the beginning of the eighteenth century that pushes women#xE2;#xAC;"s history beyond national studies to create an integrated view of three hundred years of women in Europe. Using a longue dur#xC3;#xA9;e, the book disentangles the accounts of industrialisation and bourgeois femininity which tend to dominate women#xE2;#xAC;"s studies, and questions the dominant narratives of history. Drawing on women#xE2;#xAC;"s own writing and cultural production, it presents women as agents of change as well as exploring cultural perceptions of women and the ways in which women have been have been represented by these discourses. It explicitly engages with how women contributed as practitioners to shaping the culture and society of western Europe. The geographical range and generational breadth of this study provides a cohesive vision of women#xE2;#xAC;"s lives up to the present day. Women in European Culture and Societyis an invaluable and essential guide to the conditions, circumstances and understandings of how women lived throughout Europe.

Author Biography

Deborah Simonton is Associate Professor of British History at the University of Southern Denmark and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her publications include The Routiedge History of Women in Modem Europe (Routiedge, 2006] and A History of European Women's Work (Routiedge, 1998) and she is the co-editor of Gender in Scottish History (2006).

Table of Contents

List of figures, tables and illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. xi
A note about referencing	p. xv
Overture	p. 1
Rights of man and duties of woman	p. 7
Prelude: Women's identity in eighteenth-century culture	p. 9
Timeline: Rights of man and duties of women	p. 11
Intimate lives: self, sex and family	p. 20
Community spaces	p. 53
Wider worlds: gendering the Enlightenment	p. 85
Intermezzo: The revolutionary era	p. 116
Timeline: The revolutionary era	p. 121
Domesticity and industrialism	p. 129
Prelude: The legacy of the Enlightenment	p. 131
Timeline: Domesticity and industrialism	p. 138
Intimate worlds: our mothers' daughters	p. 141
Community spaces: labour, leisure and consumption	p. 179
Shaping wider worlds	p. 210
Intermezzo: La belle époque or fin de siècle?	p. 241
Timeline: La belle époque	p. 258
Modern times	p. 263
Prelude: 'Carrying Linda's Stones'	p. 265
Timeline: Modern times	p. 274
Intimacy and independence	p. 281
The transitional community	p. 320
Women go public	p. 352
Coda: Gender, skill and identity	p. 389
Further reading	p. 394
Index	p. 404
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