Women in Public, 1850-1900

Assembling a full and comprehensive collection of material which illustrates all aspects of the emergent womens movement during the years 1850-1900, this fascinating book will prove invaluable to students of nineteenth century social history and women's studies, to those studying the Victorian novel and to sociologists. Womens pamphlets and speeches, parliamentary debates and popular journalism, letters and memoirs, royal commissions and the leading reviews, are all used to document the conflicting images of women: surplus women and the issue of emigration; womens work and male hostility to it; the opening of education by Emily Davies; the claim to equity at law; the attack on the sexual double standard, led by Josephine Butler; womens public service from philanthropy exemplified in a Mary Carpenter or Louisa Twining or Octavia Hill to local government; and finally womens entry into politics led by Lydia Becker. The contents range from Caroline Norton on her battle for child custody in the 1830s to Annie Besants inspiration of the match-girls strike in 1888, and from W. T. Stead on child prostitution to Mrs Humphrey Wars Appeal against female suffrage in 1889. The book was originally published in 1979.