This study to analyzes romantic fiction's depiction of women as part of the broader history of ideas about women.; Given the success of the Mills & Boon romance, their portrayal of subjects like sex, love, marriage, class, motherhood and femineity are important cultural barometers and make interesting study.; The author shows how all these themes have an historical trajectory and how these novels have come to reflect feminist concerns.; Based on a study of over 1000 Mills & Boon romances the book provides analysis of plot types and shows how these have changed in response to women's own changing position within society.

Despite pioneering studies, the term 'romance novel' itself has not been subjected to scrutiny. This book examines mass-market romance fiction in the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. through four categories: capitalism, war, heterosexuality, and white Protestantism and casts a fresh light on the genre.

Analyzes romantic fiction and its depiction of women within its historical context and as part of the history of ideas about women. This volume discusses such areas as: early years - class and wealth; and the twenties - sex and violence.

Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, two hundred fifty interviews, and over three hundred youth love letters, author Shanti Parikh uses lively vignettes to provide a rare window into young people's heterosexual desires and practices in Uganda. In chapters entitled "Unbreak my heart," "I miss you like a desert missing rain," and "You're just playing with my head," she invites readers into the world of secret longings, disappointments, and anxieties of young Ugandans as they grapple with everyday difficulties while creatively imagining romantic futures and possibilities. Parikh also examines the unintended consequences of Uganda's aggressive HIV campaigns that thrust sexuality and anxieties about it into the public sphere. In a context of economic precarity and generational tension that constantly complicates young people's notions of consumption-based romance, communities experience the dilemmas of protecting and policing young people from reputational and health dangers of sexual activity. "They arrested me for loving a school girl" is the title of a chapter on controlling delinquent daughters and punishing defiant boyfriends for attempting to undermine patriarchal authority by asserting their adolescent romantic agency. Sex education programs struggle between risk and pleasure amidst morally charged debates among international donors and community elders, transforming the youthful female body into a platform for public critique and concern. The many sides of this research constitute an eloquently executed critical anthropology of intervention.

The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel is an authoritative volume on the Australian novel by more than forty experts in the field of Australian literary studies, drawn from within Australia and abroad. Essays cover a wide range of types of novel writing and publishing from the earliest colonial period through to the present day. The international dimensions of publishing Australian fiction are also considered as are the changing contours of criticism of the novel in Australia. Chapters examine colonial fiction, women's writing, Indigenous novels, popular genre fiction, historical fiction, political novels, and challenging novels on identity and belonging from recent decades, not least the major rise of Indigenous novel writing. Essays focus on specific periods of major change in Australian history or range broadly across themes and issues that have influenced fiction across many years and in many parts of the country.

Starting after the Great War, this book charts the rise of the ritualistic engagement, the modern white wedding and the more widely available honeymoon holiday, to show changes and continuities in English masculinity by considering power relations between men and women. Through a close reading of a range of sources (including first-person testimonies, newspapers and etiquette manuals), power relations between bride and groom, and between different generations, are revealed in the context of social class and the rise of consumerism.

A unique intersection between periodical and literary scholarship, and class and gender history, this book showcases a brand-new approach to surveying a popular domestic magazine. Reading Woman’s Weekly alongside titles including Good Housekeeping, My Weekly, Peg’s Paper and Woman’s Own, and works by authors including Dot Allan, E.M. Delafield, George Orwell and J.B. Priestley, it positions the publication within both the contemporary magazine market and the field of literature more broadly, redrawing the parameters of that field as it approaches the domestic magazine as a literary genre in its own right. Between 1918 and 1958, Woman’s Weekly targeted a lower middle-class readership: broadly, housewives and unmarried clerical workers on low incomes, who viewed or aspired to view themselves as middle-class. Examining the magazine’s distinctively lower middle-class treatment of issues including the First World War’s impact on gender, the status of housewives and working women, women’s contribution to the Second World War effort, and Britain’s post-war economic and social recovery, this book supplies fresh and challenging insights into lower middle-class culture, during a period in which Britain’s lower middle classes were gaining prominence, and middle-class lifestyles were undergoing rapid and radical change.

Women in Transnational History offers a range of fresh perspectives on the field of women’s history, exploring how cross-border connections and global developments since the nineteenth century have shaped diverse women’s lives and the gendered social, cultural, political and economic histories of specific localities. The book is divided into three thematically-organised parts, covering gendered histories of transnational networks, women’s agency in the intersecting histories of imperialisms and nationalisms, and the concept of localizing the global and globalizing the local. Discussing a broad spectrum of topics from the politics of dress in Philippine mission stations in the early twentieth century to the shifting food practices of British women during the Second World War, the chapters bring women to the centre of the writing of new transnational histories. Illustrated with images and figures, this book throws new light on key global themes from the perspective of women’s and gender history. Written by an international team of editors and contributors, it is a valuable and timely resource for students and researchers of both women’s history and transnational and global history.

Together with her mother, Emmeline, Christabel Pankhurst co-led the single-sex Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded in 1903 and soon regarded as the most notorious of the groupings campaigning for the parliamentary vote for women. A First Class Honours Graduate in Law, the determined and charismatic Christabel, a captivating orator, revitalised the women’s suffrage campaign by rousing thousands of women to become suffragettes, as WSPU members were called, and to demand rather than ask politely for their democratic citizenship rights. A supreme tactician, her advocacy of ‘militant’, unladylike tactics shocked many people, and the political establishment. When an end to militancy was called on the outbreak of war in 1914, she encouraged women to engage in war work as a way to win their enfranchisement. Four years later, when enfranchisement was granted to certain categories of women aged thirty and over, she stood unsuccessfully for election to parliament, as a member of the Women’s Party. In 1940 she moved to the USA with her adopted daughter, and had a successful career there as a Second Adventist preacher and writer. However, she is mainly remembered for being the driving force behind the militant wing of the women’s suffrage movement. This full-length biography, the first for forty years, draws upon feminist approaches to biography writing to place her within a network of supportive female friendships. It is based upon an unrivalled range of previously untapped primary sources.

Women, Diplomacy and International Politics since 1500 explores the role of women as agents of diplomacy in the trans-Atlantic world since the early modern age. Despite increasing evidence of their involvement in political life across the centuries, the core historical narrative of international politics remains notably depleted of women. This collection challenges this perspective. Chapters cover a wide range of geographical contexts, including Europe, Russia, Britain and the United States, and trace the diversity of women’s activities and the significance of their contributions. Together these essays open up the field to include a broader interpretation of diplomatic work, such as the unofficial avenues of lobbying, negotiation and political representation that made women central diplomatic players in the salons, courts and boudoirs of Europe. Through a selection of case studies, the book throws into new perspective the operations of political power in local and national domains, bridging and at times reconceptualising the relationship of the private to the public. Women, Diplomacy and International Politics since 1500 is essential reading for all those interested in the history of diplomacy and the rise of international politics over the past five centuries.