The feminine script of early nineteenth century centered on women's role as patient, long-suffering mothers. By mid-century, however, their daughters faced a world very different in social and economic options and in the physical experiences surrounding their bodies. In this groundbreaking study, Nancy Theriot turns to social and medical history, developmental psychology, and feminist theory to explain the fundamental shift in women's concepts of femininity and gender identity during the course of the century—from an ideal suffering womanhood to emphasis on female control of physical self. Theriot's first chapter proposes a methodological shift that expands the interdisciplinary horizons of women's history. She argues that social psychological theories, recent work in literary criticism, and new philosophical work on subjectivities can provide helpful lenses for viewing mothers and children and for connecting socioeconomic change and ideological change. She recommends that women's historians take bolder steps to historicize the female body by making use of the theoretical insights of feminist philosophers, literary critics, and anthropologists. Within this methodological perspective, Theriot reads medical texts and woman- authored advice literature and autobiographies. She relates the early nineteenth-century notion of "true womanhood" to the socioeconomic and somatic realities of middle-class women's lives, particularly to their experience of the new male obstetrics. The generation of women born early in the century, in a close mother/daughter world, taught their daughters the feminine script by word and action. Their daughters, however, the first generation to benefit greatly from professional medicine, had less reason than their mothers to associate womanhood with pain and suffering. The new concept of femininity they created incorporated maternal teaching but altered it to make meaningful their own very different experience. This provocative study applies interdisciplinary methodology to new and long-standing questions in women's history and invites women's historians to explore alternative explanatory frameworks.

This first systematic study of mother-daughter relationships as represented in Western European fiction during the second half of the 20th century provides a comparative study of works from England, France, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Italy, and Spain. For each individual body of texts, the authors identify characteristics arising from specific national literary traditions and from internal cultural diversities. The text suggests avenues for future investigation both within and across national boundaries. The featured writers include Steedman, Diski, Winterson, Tennant, de Beauvoir, Leduc, Djura, Wolf, Jelinek, Mitgutsch, Novak, Lavin, O'Brien, O'Faolin, Morante, Sanvitale, Ramondino, Chacel, Rodoreda, and Martin Gaite. The six contributing authors are scholars from New Zealand, England, Ireland, Italy and Wales. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Stanley traces women's inventions in five vital areas of technology worldwide--agriculture, medicine, reproduction, machines, and computers.

Excerpt: "Presently the evenness of his breathing told her he was asleep. For a long time she lay on her back just as he had left her, mulling over her situation. In those brief minutes everything had supposedly righted itself. She had officially left her girlhood behind forever and become a woman. The days of wearing her hair down her back in a long braid were gone, although she was not yet entitled to wear a married woman's kerchief. Nor did she any longer belong to the group of young housemaids who had been her friends, nor to a group of married women whom she hardly knew. All at once she felt very alone, not knowing what was expected of her. The only thing she knew for sure was that her life had taken a false turn, and she didn't know how to set it right again." ========================= Nineteenth century Swedish peasant life was not always the dance around the Midsummer pole portrayed by the artists of the time. Those same peasants lived daily lives in the shadow of the all-powerful village church, controlled by the countless rules, customs, and traditions that governed every aspect of their existence, leaving no room for individual deviations. When it became known that Augusta Torsdotter's daughter Elsa-Carolina was illegitimate, the course of both of their lives irrevokably changed. As an adult, Elsa-Carolina immigrated to America, turning her back on the past. It wasn't until three-quarters of a century later, at the age of 94, that she returned to Sweden, to come to terms with her girlhood. "The harshness of Swedish peasant life and landscape is beautifully chronicled in Judit Martin's novel. Her knowledge of the culture, customs, work, superstitions, and attitudes of the day opens up that world for those of us seeking to know our Swedish ancestors." -Joan Morrison Granddaughter of Swedish immigrants Charleston, Maine ===================== "Wonderful and evocative! A captivating and enlightening read!" -Mr. Jan Smedh Bookseller The English Bookshop Upsala & Stockholm, Sweden This book is intended for mature audiences.

Provocative assessment of how new ideas about motherhood and domesticity in pre-Revolutionary France helped women demand social and political equality later on

In 1976, Adrienne Rich wrote in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution that Othe cathexis between mother and daughter_essential, distorted, misused_is the great unwritten story.O In the quarter century since Rich wrote those words, the topic of mothers and daughters has emerged as a salient issue in feminist scholarship. Using womenOs writing, film, feminist theory, and personal experience, contributors to Mothers and Daughters explore how the mother/daughter relationship is represented and experienced as a site of empowerment. This volume will offer readers an important and welcome chapter in the story of the complex relationship that is a part of nearly every womanOs life.

Over the next fourteen years she wrote home to her mother, Julia Stone Towne; these letters and Julia's letters back to her - the only published collection of sustained correspondence between a nineteenth-century American mother and daughter - create a deep and rich world filled with the ideas, affection, advice, and comfort that each woman gave to the other.

The decades between 1880 and 1920 could represent a watershed in the history of the mother-daughter relationship--a subject ripe for extensive investigation. This study investigates conflict and harmony between the generations before, during, and after this period, drawing on a variety of sources: letters, diaries, autobiographies, prescriptive advice or "self-help" literature, and fiction. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

At her death she was hailed as the conscience of Rhode Island: Elizabeth Buffum Chace's life (1806-1899) of public activism spanned sixty years. Having fought to abolish slavery in the years before the Civil War, Chace spearheaded the drive for women's suffrage in Rhode Island in the last decades of the 19th century. She was an associate of radical activists William Lloyd Garrison and Lucy Stone and she advocated for the rights of women and children toiling in her husband's factories. Her daughter--one of ten children--Lillie Chace Wyman (1847-1929), was an activist-writer and published short stories on social issues in Atlantic Monthly and other periodicals. An outspoken advocate of racial equality, Wyman kept the legacy of the radical antislavery movement of her mother's generation alive into the twentieth century. Since neither Chace nor Wyman left behind a collection of personal papers, this mother-daughter biography is the product of Stevens' extensive research into public and private archives to locate documents that illuminate the lives of these two remarkable women. By looking at 19th century American women's history through the lens of this activist pair, Stevens reveals some of the connections between the public and private lives of activists and examines a relationship that was at once nurturing, confining, stifling and enriching.