The Educated Woman

The Educated Woman
Author: Katharina Rowold
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2011-02-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1134625839

The Educated Woman is a comparative study of the ideas on female nature that informed debates on women’s higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in three western European countries. Exploring the multi-layered roles of science and medicine in constructions of sexual difference in these debates, the book also pays attention to the variety of ways in which contemporary feminists negotiated and reconstituted conceptions of the female mind and its relationship to the body. While recognising similarities, Rowold shows how in each country the higher education debates and the underlying conceptions of women’s nature were shaped by distinct historical contexts.

Mary Sumner

Mary Sumner
Author: Sue Anderson-Faithful
Publisher: Lutterworth Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2018-02-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0718845870

The founder and president of the Mothers' Union, one of the first and largest women's organisations, Mary Sumner (1828-1921) was an influential educator and a force to be reckoned with in the Church of England of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the analytical tools of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Sue Anderson-Faithful locates Mary Sumner's life and thought against social and religious networks in which she was restricted by gender yet privileged by class and proximity to distinguished individuals. This dichotomy is key to understanding the achievements of a woman who both replicated and shaped Victorian attitudes to women's roles in society. To Mary Sumner mission and education meant the propagation of religious knowledge through progressive pedagogy. Her activism was intended to promote social reform at home and nurture the growth of the British Empire with mothers wielding their political power as educators of future citizens. The symbiotic relationship between Church and State concentrated power in the hands of a ruling class with which Mary Sumner identified and which she supported. In her view the legitimacy of national and imperial rule was intertwined with the moral force of Anglicanism. SueAnderson-Faithful interprets Mary Sumner's lifelong work in the light of these relationships, contrasting her assertion of personal agency and an empowering discourse of motherhood with her simultaneous reinforcement of patriarchy and class privilege.

Gender, Property, and Law in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Communities in the Wider Mediterranean 1300–1800

Gender, Property, and Law in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Communities in the Wider Mediterranean 1300–1800
Author: Jutta Sperling
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2009-10-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135235015

This volume introduces a unique comparative perspective to the complexities of gender relations in Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities by examining women's property rights in different societies across the entire medieval and early modern Mediterranean.

Understanding the Roots of Voluntary Action

Understanding the Roots of Voluntary Action
Author: Colin Rochester
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1837642028

Draws on a range of empirical studies of aspects of the history of voluntary action. This title includes chapters that range across two centuries and a variety of fields of activity, geographical areas and organisational forms.

Female Agency in the Urban Economy

Female Agency in the Urban Economy
Author: Deborah Simonton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2013-04-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136275029

This innovative new book is overtly and explicitly about female agency in eighteenth-century European towns. However, it positions female activity and decisions unequivocally in an urban world of institutions, laws, regulations, customs and ideologies. Gender politics complicated and shaped the day-to-day experiences of working women. Town rules and customs, as well as police and guilds’ regulations, affected women’s participation in the urban economy: most of the time, the formally recognized and legally accepted power of women – which is an essential component of female agency – was very limited. Yet these chapters draw attention to how women navigated these gendered terrains. As the book demonstrates, "exclusion" is too strong a word for the realities and pragmatism of women’s everyday lives. Frequently guild and corporate regulations were more about situating women and regulating their activities, rather than preventing them from operating in the urban economy. Similarly corporate structures, which were under stress, found flexible strategies to incorporate women who through their own initiative and activities put pressure on the systems. Women could benefit from the contradictions between moral and social unwritten norms and economic regulations, and could take advantage of the tolerance or complicity of urban authorities towards illicit practices. Women with a grasp of their rights and privileges could defend themselves and exploit legal systems with its loopholes and contradictions to achieve economic independence and power.

Gender, Migration, and the Public Sphere, 1850-2005

Gender, Migration, and the Public Sphere, 1850-2005
Author: Marlou Schrover
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2011-01-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135235503

Exploring theories of difference in labor market participation, network formation and the immigrant organising process, on belonging and diaspora, and a theory of ‘vulnerability,’ A Global History of Gender and Migration looks critically at two centuries of the migration experience from the perspectives of women and men separately and together.

Anna Maria van Schurman, 'The Star of Utrecht'

Anna Maria van Schurman, 'The Star of Utrecht'
Author: Anne R. Larsen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2016-04-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317180690

Dutch Golden Age scholar Anna Maria van Schurman was widely regarded throughout the seventeenth century as the most learned woman of her age. She was 'The Star of Utrecht','The Dutch Minerva','The Tenth Muse', 'a miracle of her sex', 'the incomparable Virgin', and 'the oracle of Utrecht'. As the first woman ever to attend a university, she was also the first to advocate, boldly, that women should be admitted into universities. A brilliant linguist, she mastered some fifteen languages. She was the first Dutch woman to seek publication of her correspondence. Her letters in several languages Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French – to the intellectual men and women of her time reveal the breadth of her interests in theology, philosophy, medicine, literature, numismatics, painting, sculpture, embroidery, and instrumental music. This study addresses Van Schurman's transformative contribution to the seventeenth-century debate on women's education. It analyses, first, her educational philosophy; and, second, the transnational reception of her writings on women's education, particularly in France. Anne Larsen explores how, in advocating advanced learning for women, Van Schurman challenged the educational establishment of her day to allow women to study all the arts and the sciences. Her letters offer fascinating insights into the challenges that scholarly women faced in the early modern period when they sought to define themselves as intellectuals, writers, and thoughtful contributors to the social good.

New Perspectives on European Women's Legal History

New Perspectives on European Women's Legal History
Author: Sara L. Kimble
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2016-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317577159

This book integrates women’s history and legal studies within the broader context of modern European history in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sixteen contributions from fourteen countries explore the ways in which the law contributes to the social construction of gender. They analyze questions of family law and international law and highlight the politics of gender in the legal professions in a variety of historical, social and national settings, including Eastern, Southern, Western, Northern and Central Europe. Focusing on different legal cultures, they show us the similarities and differences in the ways the law has shaped the contours of women and men’s lives in powerful ways. They also show how women have used legal knowledge to struggle for their equal rights on the national and transnational level. The chapters address the interconnectedness of the history of feminism, legislative reforms, and women’s citizenship, and build a foundation for a comparative vision of women’s legal history in modern Europe.

Higher Education in the Next Decade

Higher Education in the Next Decade
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2021-05-25
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9004462716

This 50th volume examines current global trends in higher education, which include the situation of academic faculty, the demand for access, the role of the university in society and its governance, funding trends, and higher education’s international dimensions.