Dress, Distress and Desire

Dress, Distress and Desire
Author: J. Batchelor
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2005-05-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230508200

Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature. Batchelor's study brings together for the first time canonical and non-canonical texts including novels, conduct books and women's magazines to investigate the pressures that the growth of the fashion market placed on conceptions of female virtue and propriety. It shows how dress dispelled the sentimental myth that the body acted as a moral index and enabled the women reader to resist some of sentimental literature's more prescriptive advice.

Silent Partners

Silent Partners
Author: Amy M. Froide
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2017
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0198767986

Silent Partners restores women to their place in the story of England's Financial Revolution. Women were active participants in London's first stock market beginning in the 1690s and continuing through the eighteenth century. Whether playing the state lottery, investing in government funds for retirement, or speculating in company stocks, women regularly comprised between a fifth and a third of public investors. These female investors ranged from London servants to middling tradeswomen, up to provincial gentlewomen and peeresses of the realm. Amy Froide finds that there was no single female investor type, rather some women ran risks and speculated in stocks while others sought out low-risk, low-return options for their retirement years. Not only did women invest for themselves, their financial knowledge and ability meant that family members often relied on wives, sisters, and aunts to act as their investing agents. Moreover, women's investing not only benefitted themselves and their families, it also aided the nation. Women's capital was a critical component of Britain's rise to economic, military, and colonial dominance in the eighteenth century. Focusing on the period between 1690 and 1750, and utilizing women's account books and financial correspondence, as well as the records of joint stock companies, the Bank of England, and the Exchequer, Silent Partners provides the first comprehensive overview of the significant role women played in the birth of financial capitalism in Britain.

Women and Learning in English Writing, 1600-1900

Women and Learning in English Writing, 1600-1900
Author: Deirdre Raftery
Publisher:
Total Pages: 336
Release: 1997
Genre: Education
ISBN:

This book documents and analyzes an aspect of social change in England -- the opening of higher education to women. Because college education for women developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, the opening of higher education to women has been viewed as an 'unexpected revolution'. This book challenges such all assumption, by indicating that the education of women had been the subject of debate and serious discussion at least since the Renaissance, and it illustrates how print culture brought the debate into the public domain and contributed to the eventual opening of higher education to women. The publications examined in this study indicate that formal higher education for women had been anticipated by a significant number of seventeenth-, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers whose works are here contextualised for the first time. While the focus of this study has been on printed sources, attention has also been paid to the personal papers of individuaLs who directly influenced the eventual opening of university education to women, and who illustrated that the success of the struggle for women's education was due to the ability of a few individuals to realise ambitions which had been held for generations.