During the early modern period, men and women in England lived their lives within a social and gender framework inherited from biblical times. Patriarchy - the social and cultural dominance of the male - has long been a feature of western civilization, and this work attempts to provide a portrait of the origins and operation of the system over a long stretch of the English past.

Drawing on testimony from contemporary letters and diaries, this book revises previous understandings of parenting and what it was like to grow up in England in the period between 1600 and 1914. One of the facets explored by the author is different experiences of men and boys, women and girls.

The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737-1832 provides a comprehensive guide to theatre of the Georgian era across the range of dramatic forms.

A facing-page edition of a seventeenth-century mother's advice book, giving insights both into female Protestant religious devotion, authorship and spirituality, and into how women's words were altered in the transmission by male editors.

"The queer man's mode of embodiment--his gestural and vocal style, his posture and gait, his occupation of space--remembers a political history. To gesture with the elbow held close to the body, to affect a courtly lisp, or to set an arm akimbo with the hand turned back on the hip is to cite a history in which the sovereign body became the effeminate and sodomitical and, finally, the homosexual body. In Queer Articulations, Thomas A. King argues that the Anglo-American queer body publicizes a history of resistance to the gendered terms whereby liberal subjectivities were secured in early modern England. Arguing that queer agency preceded and enabled the formulation of queer subjectivities, Queer Articulations investigates theatricality and sodomy as performance practices foreclosed in the formation of gendered privacy and consequently available for resistant uses by male-bodied persons who have been positioned, or who have located themselves, outside the universalized public sphere of citizen-subjects. By defining queerness as the lack or failure of private pleasures, rather than an alternative pleasure or substance in its own right, eighteenth-century discourses reconfigured publicness as the mark of difference from the naturalized, private bodies of liberal subjects. Inviting a performance-centered, interdisciplinary approach to queer/male identities, King develops a model of queerness as processual activity, situated in time and place but irreducible to the individual subject's identifications, desires, and motivations."--Pub. desc. (v.2).

What does American history look like with women at the center of the story? From Pocahantas to military women serving in the Iraqi war, this Very Short Introduction chronicles the contributions that women have made to the American experience from a multicultural perspective that emphasizes how gender shapes women's--and men's--lives.

A new collection of essays which challenges many existing assumptions, particularly the conventional models of separate spheres and economic change. All the essays are specifically written for a student market, making detailed research accessible to a wide readership and the opening chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the subject describing the development of gender history as a whole and the study of eighteenth-century England. This is an exciting collection which is a major revision of the subject.

History of women in western Europe during the years 1500 to 1800, discussing what females of various stations could expect at every stage of life from the time of their birth.

In this Very Short Introduction Chris Shilling considers the social significance of the human body, and the importance of the body to individual and collective identities. He examines how bodies not only shape but are shaped by the social, cultural, and material contexts in which humans live.

This concise and accessible book explores the history of gender in England between 1500 and 1700. Amidst the political and religious disruptions of the Reformation and the Civil War, sexual difference and gender were matters of public debate and private contention. Laura Gowing provides unique insight into gender relations in a time of flux, through sources ranging from the women who tried to vote in Ipswich in 1640, to the dreams of Archbishop Laud and a grandmother describing the first time her grandson wore breeches. Examining gender relations in the contexts of the body, the house, the neighbourhood and the political world, this comprehensive study analyses the tides of change and the power of custom in a pre-modern world. This book offers: Previously unpublished documents by women and men from all levels of society, ranging from private letters to court cases A critical examination of a new field, reflecting original research and the most recent scholarship In-depth analysis of historical evidence, allowing the reader to reconstruct the hidden histories of women Also including a chronology, who’s who of key figures, guide to further reading and a full-colour plate section, Gender Relations in Early Modern England is ideal for students and interested readers at all levels, providing a diverse range of primary sources and the tools to unlock them.