Product Description

Eighteenth-century women have long been presented as the heroines of traditional biographies, or as the faceless victims of vast historical processes, but rarely have they been deemed worthy of rigorous historical enquiry. Based on a close examination of letters, diaries and account books, this study offers an insight into the intimate and everyday lives of genteel women and transforms our understanding of the position of women in this period.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93288 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-11
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 436 pages

From Amazon.com
Winner of the Longman History Today Prize in 1998, Amanda Vickery's The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England is an outstanding study of a crucial period in modern women's history. Roy Porter described this book as "the most important thing in English feminist history in the last ten years." Readers familiar with the feminist analysis of women's lives in the late 18th to mid-19th century will find some of the commonplaces of that viewpoint called into question: the rise of "separate spheres" of male and female experience, for example, or the social construction of motherhood in the 18th century. At once scholarly and readable, The Gentleman's Daughter takes its readers on a vivid and well-illustrated tour of "genteel" Georgian society, bringing that world to life through what Vickery identifies as the "terms set out in their own letters by genteel women." Those terms structure the seven sections of the book: "Gentility", "Love and Duty', "Fortitude and Resignation" (which includes a notable discussion of the experience of pregnancy), "Prudent Economy", "Elegance", "Civility and Vulgarity", and "Propriety". "Our battles were not necessarily theirs," Vickery reminds us, striking her convincing balance between a feminist interest in the restriction and rebellion of women's lives and their own ways of finding meaning and pleasure in the gender distinctions of Georgian culture. --Vicky Lebeau, Amazon.co.uk

From Library Journal
This meticulously researched social history should be welcomed by specialists in British and European women's history. Vickery (British women's history, Univ. of London) challenges the standard argument that once the industrial revolution took production out of the home, women's lives were marginalized in the domestic sphere. Using the letters, diaries, and account books of more than 100 women from the "genteel" classes, she theorizes that women's activities actually expanded as they involved themselves in new areas of community life. Indeed, she concludes that the struggles of the Victorian suffragettes may have stemmed not from a sense of oppression but from a desire to expand the gains of their Georgian predecessors. Unfortunately, Vickery's insistence on proving her provocative thesis overwhelms the richness of the descriptive material she presents: there is good information here on household management, servants, material culture, shopping and consumption, and female attitudes on courtship, pregnancy, motherhood, and child rearing. Recommended for academic libraries.?Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., Livingston, NJ
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"The most important thing in English feminist history in the last ten years." Roy Porter; "The Gentleman's Daughter is the most important work of social history since Lawrence Stone's Family, Sex and Marriage. From now on, any historian writing about 18th-century women will have to address the arguments in Vickery's book... It is the first book to bring out into the open the debate about separate spheres. It succeeds on two levels, first as an academic argument of the highest order, and second as a fascinating and enjoyable read. Serious history is rarely this fun." Amanda Foreman, The Times; "Innovative, expertly researched and luminous in style." Linda Colley, London Review of Books; "Amanda Vickery's new history of women in Georgian England offers a revolutionary reinterpretation of the accepted script, both an academic triumph and a spell-binding read" Julie Wheelwright, The Independent