This book explores the relationship between middle-class fathers and sons in England between c. 1870 and 1920. We now know that the conventional image of the middle-class paterfamilias of this period as cold and authoritarian is too simplistic, but there is still much to be discovered about relationships in middle-class families. Paying especial attention to gender and masculinities, this book focuses on the interactions between fathers and sons, exploring how relationships developed and masculine identities were negotiated from infancy and childhood to adulthood and old age. Drawing on sources as diverse as autobiographies, oral history interviews, First World War conscription records and press reports of violent incidents, this book questions how fathers and sons negotiated relationships marked by shifting relations of power, as well as by different combinations of emotional entanglements, obligations and ties. It explores changes as fathers and sons grew older and assesses fathers’ role in trying to mould sons’ masculine identities, characters and lives. It reveals negotiation and compromise, as well as rebellion and conflict, underlining that fathers and sons were important to each other, their relationships a significant – if often overlooked – aspect of middle-class men’s lives and identities.

Respectability, Bankruptcy and Bigamy in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Britain explores the vexed question of middle-class respectability in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It focuses upon the life of London solicitor Hamilton Pawley (1860–1936), who was barred from working by the Law Society, twice declared bankrupt, and in 1919 was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment with hard labour for bigamously marrying a woman practically forty years his junior. If Pawley did not suffer the revenge of respectable society, it is difficult to think who would. Drawing upon the fact that the disgraced and the disreputable have always tended to attract a disproportionate amount of attention, the book ranges widely, exploring such important issues as middle-class education, career choices, the dynamics of family life, and the workings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century legal system. It shows that Pawley was able to hold on to his professional – and even gentlemanly – status for far longer than seemed likely. This all suggests, the book concludes, that although respectability was as important to the middle class as we have always been told, it was both easier to acquire and easier to retain than we have generally been led to believe. This book will appeal to all those interested in British society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Men and masculinities provides an engaging, accessible and provocative introduction to histories of masculinity for all readers interested in contemporary gender politics. The book offers a critical overview of ongoing historiographical debates and the historical making of men’s lives and identities and ideas of masculinity between the 1890s and the present day. In setting out a new agenda for the field, it makes an ambitious argument for the importance of writing histories which are present-centred and politically engaged. This means that the book engages head-on with ferocious debates about men’s social position and the status of masculinity in contemporary public life. In establishing a critical genealogy for the proliferation of this crisis talk, it sets out new ways of understanding how men’s lives and ideas of masculinity have changed over time while patriarchy and male power have persisted.

The purpose of this edited volume is to explore the contributions of women to European, Mexican, American and Indian film industries during the years 1900 to 1950, an important period that signified the rise and consolidation of media technologies. Their pioneering work as film stars, writers, directors, designers and producers as well as their endeavors to bridge the gap between the avant-garde and mass culture are significant aspects of this collection. This intersection will be carefully nuanced through their cinematographic production, performances and artistic creations. Other distinctive features pertain to the interconnection of gender roles and moral values with ways of looking, which paves the way for realigning social and aesthetic conventions of femininity. Based on this thematic and diverse sociocultural context, this study has an international scope, their main audiences being scholars and graduate students that pursue to advance interdisciplinary research in the field of feminist theory, film, gender, media and avant-garde studies. Likewise, historians, art and literature specialists will find the content appealing to the degree that intermedial and cross-cultural approaches are presented.

This book attempts to cover all the important aspects of a woman’s life in Scotland, examining how and why it changed over the last 300 years. It walks us through the day-to-day existence of Scottish women and in doing so covers areas such as family and household, education, work and politics, religion and sexuality, crime and punishment. While sensitive to the differences among women, regarding colour, class and sexuality, the book seeks to establish a close and reciprocal relationship between women’s history and gender history; the first delineating the struggles of women for parity with men in economic, legal and political spheres; the second, as means of unravelling the continuing ways in which power is unequally distributed within the home, the workplace and in institutions, and in contesting the male-centred narratives of the past.

History and Legacy of the Suffragette Fellowship provides a biographical account of the scope and depth of the memory work of the now-forgotten commemorative group the Suffragette Fellowship, active from the 1920s to the 1970s. The Suffragette Fellowship comprised members from the militant suffrage groups known as the Women’s Social and Political Union, the Women’s Freedom League, and the Actress Franchise League. This research provides a comprehensive analysis of the Fellowship’s attempts to form and sustain a collective Suffragette identity across four decades of activity. It considers the legacy of contested histories attached to militant campaigning that pressured Fellowship leaders to take control of the public memory of suffrage history. With close attention given to a neglected piece of feminist history, this book highlights the cultural and political impacts that the Fellowship enacted in their memory of the women’s suffrage movement. Richly illustrated with images of members, artefacts, and publications, this extensive study of the Suffragette Fellowship adds to transnational suffrage histories in the United Kingdom and Australia and will be of interest to scholars in memory studies and women’s history.

Ida Greaves, who was born in Barbados in 1907, is one of the "missing female voices" of early development economics. This biography, the first for Ida Greaves, attempts to construct her career and era before the past wholly disappears. The biography covers her early years in Barbados, her time at boarding school in England, at McGill University in Canada where she focused on human behaviour under the influence of changing social and political histories and also published an early path-breaking study of black migrants into Canada, and her later research at Harvard and Columbia in the United States and at the London School of Economics. Individual chapters follow her career acting as economic adviser to the Colonial Office in London, where she worked alongside Arthur Lewis, and at the fledgling United Nations in New York. She published in top journals and produced an outstanding study of the influence of colonial monetary systems on poor countries. This accessible biography provides unexpected insights into personalities and institutions during a critical period in late colonial history. The issues it raises of class and race, gender and inequality, poverty and unemployment, are of no less relevance today than they were in her lifetime.

Male Professionals in Nineteenth-Century Britain is the first statistically-based social, cultural and familial history of a fast-growing and socially prominent section of the Victorian propertied classes. It is built around a representative cohort of 750 men who were recorded in the 1851 census as practising a profession in eight British provincial towns with distinctive economic and social profiles: Brighton, Bristol, Dundee, Greenock, Leeds, Merthyr Tydfil, Winchester, and the twin county town of Northumberland, Alnwick/Morpeth. The book provides a collective account of the cohort's lives and the lives of their families across four generations, starting with their parents and ending with their grandchildren. It touches on the history of 16,000 individuals. The book aims to throw light on the extent to which nineteenth-century professionals had a distinctive socio-cultural profile, as sociologists and some historians have claimed, or were largely indistinguishable from other members of propertied society, as most historians today assume without further investigation. In exploring this question, particular attention is paid to the cohort families' wealth, household size, education, occupational history, geographical mobility, and broader involvement in society measured by their members' choice of marriage partner, their kinship and friendship circles, their political allegiance and their leisure activities. The book demonstrates that male professionals in the Victorian era were far from being a homogenous group, but were divided in many ways. The most important was wealth which played a key role in the social and occupational fortunes of their descendants. These divisions largely explain why some professionals and some individual professions were much more likely to display endogenous characteristics than others. The book also demonstrates that even the most successful professional families got poorer over time, and reveals how easily in the age of industrialisation branches of families and sometimes complete families could drop out of the elite.

Family Experiments explores the forms and undertakings of ‘family’ that prevailed among British professionals who migrated to Australia and New Zealand in the late nineteenth century. Their attempts to establish and define ‘family’ in Australasian, suburban environments reveal how the Victorian theory of ‘separate spheres’ could take a variety of forms in the new world setting. The attitudes and assumptions that shaped these family experiments may be placed on a continuum that extends from John Ruskin’s concept of evangelical motherhood to John Stuart Mill’s rational secularism. Central to their thinking was a belief in the power of education to produce civilised and humane individuals who, as useful citizens, would individually and in concert nurture a better society. Such ideas pushed them to the forefront of colonial liberalism. The pursuit of higher education for their daughters merged with and, in some respects, influenced first-wave colonial feminism. They became the first generation of colonial, middle-class parents to grapple not only with the problem of shaping careers for their sons but also, and more frustratingly, what graduate daughters might do next.

The Royal Historical Society's Annual Bibliography of British and Irish History provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of books and articles published in a single calendar year. It covers all periods of British anbd Irish history from Roman Britain to the end of the twentieth century, and also includes a section on imperial and commonweatlh history. It is the most complete and up-to-date bibliography of its type, and an indispensable tool for historians.