Love and Toil : Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918

Love and Toil : Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages : 338
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780195365009
ISBN-13 : 0195365003
Rating : 4/5 (09 Downloads)

Synopsis Love and Toil : Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 by : Ellen Ross Professor of Women's Studies Ramapo College

The history of the British working class has until recently been written with a focus on the workplace or on such male organizations as clubs, unions or national political parties. This study of mothers in London before World War I stresses the distinctiveness of their experiences from those of other classes, and of the post World War I period, and demonstrates the ways in which mothers and their domestic choices were essential to the survival and cultural perpetuation of the working classes.

Love and Toil

Love and Toil
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Total Pages : 592
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780190281342
ISBN-13 : 0190281340
Rating : 4/5 (42 Downloads)

Synopsis Love and Toil by : Ellen Ross

The feisty warm-hearted "mum" has long figured as a symbol of the working class in Britain, yet working-class history has emphasized male organizations such as clubs, unions, or political parties. Investigating a different dimension of social history, Love and Toil focuses on motherhood among the London poor in the late Victorian and Edwardian years, and on the cultures, communities, and ties with husbands and children that women created. Mothers' skills in managing the family budget, earning income, and caring for their children were critical in protecting households from the worst hardships of industrial capitalism, yet poverty or the threat of it molded intimate relationships and left its imprint on personalities. This book is also a case study demonstrating the larger argument that the concept of "motherhood" is more socially and historically constructed than biologically determined. Shaky household economics, pressure toward respectability, the close proximity of neighbors, the precariousness of infant and child life, and little chance of better lives for their children shaped the work and emotions of motherhood much more than did the biological experiences of pregnancy, birth, and lactation. This beautifully written book, embellished with Cockney slang and music hall songs, addresses fascinating questions in the fields of women's studies, labor history, social policy, and family history.

Slum Travelers

Slum Travelers
Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Total Pages : 348
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0520249054
ISBN-13 : 9780520249059
Rating : 4/5 (54 Downloads)

Synopsis Slum Travelers by : Ellen Ross

Ellen Ross has collected impressions from some of the half a million women involved in philanthropy by the 1890s, most of them active in the London slums. The contributors include Sylvia Pankhurst and Beatrice Webb, as well as many more less well known figures.

Historia and Fabula

Historia and Fabula
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Total Pages : 472
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9004100636
ISBN-13 : 9789004100633
Rating : 4/5 (36 Downloads)

Synopsis Historia and Fabula by : Peter G. Bietenholz

Examining a variety of texts ranging from the Ancient Near East to the nineteenth century, this book deals with the inevitable presence of both fact and fiction in historical thought and investigates when, where and to what degree they were distinguished.

At the Breast

At the Breast
Author :
Publisher : Beacon Press
Total Pages : 300
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0807021415
ISBN-13 : 9780807021415
Rating : 4/5 (15 Downloads)

Synopsis At the Breast by : Linda Blum

In our ironic, "postfeminist" age few experiences inspire the kind of passions that breastfeeding does. For advocates, breastfeeding is both the only way to supply babies with proper nutrition and the "bond" that cements the mother/child relationship. Mother's milk remains "natural" in a world of genetically modified produce and corporate health care. But is it a realistic option for all women? And can a well-intentioned insistence on the necessity of breastfeeding become just another way to cast some women as bad mothers? Linda M. Blum is author of Between Feminism and Labor: The Significance of the Comparable Worth Movement. She teaches sociology and women's studies at the University of New Hampshire, and wrote this book while a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children

Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children
Author :
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages : 268
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780812201451
ISBN-13 : 0812201450
Rating : 4/5 (51 Downloads)

Synopsis Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children by : Sherri Broder

In late Victorian America few issues held the public's attention more closely than the allegedly unnatural family life of the urban poor. In Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, Sherri Broder brings new insight to the powerful depictions of the urban poor that circulated in newspapers and novels, public debate and private correspondence, including the irresponsible tramp, the "fallen" single mother, and the neglected child. Broder considers how these representations contributed to debates over the nature of family life and focuses on the ways different historical actors—social reformers, labor activists, and ordinary laboring people—made use of the available cultural narratives about family, gender, and sexuality to comprehend changes in turn-of-the-century America. In the decades after the Civil War, Philadelphia was an important center of charity, child protection, and labor reform. Drawing on the rich records of the Pennsylvania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty, Broder assesses the intentions and consequences of reform efforts devoted to women and children at the turn of the century. Her research provides an eloquent study of how the terms used by social workers and their clients to discuss the condition of poverty continue to have a profound influence on social policies and develops a complex historical perspective on how social policy and representations of poor families have been and remain mutually influential.

The British Working Class 1832-1940

The British Working Class 1832-1940
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 297
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781317877974
ISBN-13 : 1317877977
Rating : 4/5 (74 Downloads)

Synopsis The British Working Class 1832-1940 by : Andrew August

In this insightful new study, Andrew August examines the British working class in the period when Britain became a mature industrial power, working men and women dominated massive new urban populations, and the extension of suffrage brought them into the political nation for the first time. Framing his subject chronologically, but treating it thematically, August gives a vivid account of working class life between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, examining the issues and concerns central to working-class identity. Identifying shared patterns of experience in the lives of workers, he avoids the limitations of both traditional historiography dominated by economic determinism and party politics, and the revisionism which too readily dismisses the importance of class in British society.

Mother Is a Verb

Mother Is a Verb
Author :
Publisher : Sarah Crichton Books
Total Pages : 321
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780374213589
ISBN-13 : 0374213585
Rating : 4/5 (89 Downloads)

Synopsis Mother Is a Verb by : Sarah Knott

Welcome to a work of history unlike any other. Mothering is as old as human existence. But how has this most essential experience changed over time and cultures? What is the history of maternity—the history of pregnancy, birth, the encounter with an infant? Can one capture the historical trail of mothers? How? In Mother Is a Verb, the historian Sarah Knott creates a genre all her own in order to craft a new kind of historical interpretation. Blending memoir and history and building from anecdote, her book brings the past and the present viscerally alive. It is at once intimate and expansive, lyrical and precise. As a history, Mother Is a Verb draws on the terrain of Britain and North America from the seventeenth century to the close of the twentieth. Knott searches among a range of past societies, from those of Cree and Ojibwe women to tenant farmers in Appalachia; from enslaved people on South Carolina rice plantations to tenement dwellers in New York City and London’s East End. She pores over diaries, letters, court records, medical manuals, items of clothing. And she explores and documents her own experiences. As a memoir, Mother Is a Verb becomes a method of asking new questions and probing lost pasts in order to historicize the smallest, even the most mundane of human experiences. Is there a history to interruption, to the sound of an infant’s cry, to sleeplessness? Knott finds answers not through the telling of grand narratives, but through the painstaking accumulation of a trellis of anecdotes. And all the while, we can feel the child on her hip.

Giving Women

Giving Women
Author :
Publisher : OUP USA
Total Pages : 269
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780199772605
ISBN-13 : 0199772606
Rating : 4/5 (05 Downloads)

Synopsis Giving Women by : Jill Rappoport

Drawing on novels, poetry, periodicals, and political pamphlets, Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of gift exchange among English women from the 1820s until the end of the First World War.

Mothers, Midwives, and Reproductive Labor in Interwar and Wartime Britain

Mothers, Midwives, and Reproductive Labor in Interwar and Wartime Britain
Author :
Publisher : Lexington Books
Total Pages : 251
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781793608277
ISBN-13 : 179360827X
Rating : 4/5 (77 Downloads)

Synopsis Mothers, Midwives, and Reproductive Labor in Interwar and Wartime Britain by : Sandra Trudgen Dawson

"Safe childbirth and midwifery occupied medical professional and government officials throughout the interwar and war years, but economic constraints and war preparation took precedence. Mothers and midwives made childbirth and professional decisions based on their desires and needs rather than at the direction of the local and central government"--