Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-1895

Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-1895 PDF Author: Mary Lyndon Shanley
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691215987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Bridging the fields of political theory and history, this comprehensive study of Victorian reforms in marriage law reshapes our understanding of the feminist movement of that period. As Mary Shanley shows, Victorian feminists argued that justice for women would not follow from public rights alone, but required a fundamental transformation of the marriage relationship.

Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-1895

Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-1895 PDF Author: Mary Lyndon Shanley
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691215987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Bridging the fields of political theory and history, this comprehensive study of Victorian reforms in marriage law reshapes our understanding of the feminist movement of that period. As Mary Shanley shows, Victorian feminists argued that justice for women would not follow from public rights alone, but required a fundamental transformation of the marriage relationship.

Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-95

Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-95 PDF Author: Mary Lyndon Shanley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9781350189072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
“Important both for political theorists and for women's studies. She explores with great care and thoroughness the connections between nineteenth century feminist argument and activism on the one hand, and familiar liberal principles of justice and equality on the other” - Nannerl 0. Keohane, Wellesley College Traditional studies of the women's movement in Victorian England focused on the battle for suffrage and other public rights. In this new study, however, Mary Lyndon Shanlev explores how Victorian women campaigned to reform the laws which related to marriage and the married state. Arguing that without a fundamental transformation of the marriage relationship there would be no justice for women, they fought a series of campaigns to change laws governing divorce, married women's property, infanticide, protective labour legislation, child custody, wife abuse, marital rape and the “restitution of conjugal rights”. Women involved in these campaigns exposed the connection between the privileged position of men in both public and private life and the reluctance of Parliament to enact the reforms women sought. In a series of case studies Shanley explores the demands of the reformers, and the response of Parliament. In an Epilogue, Shanley warns of the dangers to liberal feminism in relying exclusively on equal rights in the law as a formula for change.

Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England

Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England PDF Author: Joseph Ambrose Banks
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Having demonstrated that their economic aspirations and circumstances were a necessary but not a sufficient cause for the onset of family limitation by the English upper and middle classes, another suggested explanation, the emancipation of women, is examined in this study. This shows how the feminists were little involved in the family limitation campaigns, and concludes that such emancipation was less important than the rising standard of living.

Between Women

Between Women PDF Author: Sharon Marcus
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830850
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law. Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.

Wives & Property

Wives & Property PDF Author: Lee Holcombe
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487590180
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
In the 1870s Millicent Garrett Fawcett had her purse snatched by a young thief in London. When he appeared in court to testify, she heard the young man charged with 'stealing from the person of Millicent Fawcett a purse containing £1 18s 6d the property of Henry Fawcett.' Long after the episode she recalled: 'I felt as if I had been charged with theft myself.' The English common law which deprived married women of the right to own and control property had far-reaching consequences for the status of women not only in other areas of law and in family life but also in education, and employment, and public life. To win reform of the married women's property law, feminism as an organized movement appeared in the 1850s, and the final success of the campaigns for reform in 1882 was one of the greatest achievements of the Victorian women's movement. Dr Holcombe explores the story of the reform campaign in the context of its time, giving particular attention to the many important men and women who worked for reform and to the debates on the subject which contributed greatly to the formulation of a philosophy of feminism.

Marriage, Wife-beating, and the Law in Victorian England

Marriage, Wife-beating, and the Law in Victorian England PDF Author: Maeve E. Doggett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780872499676
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description


Marriage, Wife-beating and the Law in Victorian England

Marriage, Wife-beating and the Law in Victorian England PDF Author: Maeve E. Doggett
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9780297820987
Category : Abused wives
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This text examines the evolution of wifehood, the strength and enduring popluarity of the fiction of marital unity, and the attitudes of Victorian England which led to a growing concern about wife-beating.

The Late-Victorian Marriage Question

The Late-Victorian Marriage Question PDF Author: Ann Heilmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000560260
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 816

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Book Description
First published in 2004. This five volume set collects together a series of writings on the role of women in the late-Victorian Era. Volume 2 places the controversy on marriage and motherhood in the context of the New Woman debate. While the three debates were linked, each had its own dynamic and saw shifting alliances and antagonisms. The marriage debate pitted the three different groups and their opposing interests against each other: the Old (traditionalist) Woman defended the ideals of marriage, while the progressive man advocated 'free Iove', and the New Woman emphasized female independence within and outside marriage.

Cohabitation in Europe

Cohabitation in Europe PDF Author: Dalia Leinarte
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351741977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Originating from discussions about the reasons for, and regional variations behind, the remarkable rise in cohabitation that started in the 1970s – a rise that continues to this day – this book explores the main stimuli behind cohabitation. The variation in levels of cohabitation cannot be explained solely by regional differences, religious affiliation, nationality, levels of education, or by the varying rate in which contraceptive measures spread across Europe. The book also focuses on the ways in which cohabitants are legitimized or rejected by certain communities. Did communities develop specific terms to define cohabitation and because of which underlying reasons were these different terms created? Illegitimacy is another phenomenon inseparably tied to cohabitation, based on the hypothesis that the understanding of marriage differs between societies and regions. In 1971, Shorter, Knodel and Van de Walle found that children born in rural Slavic communities in unlawful but stable, consensual unions were not recognised by civil law and the Church, and were registered as illegitimates, but in a cultural perspective were considered as legitimate. They also found more or less the same pattern in Scandinavian countries. This book explores the correlations that exist between illegitimacy and cohabitation across space and time in Europe? This book was originally published as a special issue of The History of the Family.

Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-century England

Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-century England PDF Author: Joan Perkin
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415007712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
The 'bonds of matrimony' describes with cruel precision the social and political status of married women in the nineteenth century. Women of all classes had only the most limited rights of possession in their own bodies and property yet, as this remarkable book shows, women of all classes found room to manoeuvre within the narrow limits imposed on them. Upper-class women frequently circumvented the onerous limitations of the law, while middle-class women sought through reform to change their legal status. For working-class women, such legal changes were irrelevant, but they too found ways to ameliorate their position. Joan Perkin demonstrates clearly in this outstanding book, full of human insights, that women were not content to remain inferior or subservient to men.