Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War (v. 4) (History of women in the west) - Tapa dura

The fourth volume in the ambitious project of the French historians Duby and Perrot to present the history of women from the antiquities till now proves that strong ambitions are worth pursuing. After antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period, this fourth volume deals with the nineteenth century. The final volume about the twentieth century is already published and with that a true masterpiece is done...This volume is fascinating, mainly because it gives such an extensive and comprehensive overview of the discourses of femininity and gender, and of all the arguments which have been used in relation to these themes in everyday knowledge, public debates, and social policies. -- Trudie Knijn Contemporary Sociology A History of Women in the West is a collection of thoughtful essays by leading European and American scholars...After so many centuries of confinement, drudgery, anonymity and speculation about whether or not women qualify as human, how fine to come to Volume IV and such bracing chapters as 'Daughters of Liberty and Revolutionary Citizens' and 'Stepping Out!' -- Elizabeth J. Sherman Washington Times A History of Women in the West is ambitious in conception and impressive in realization. -- Jessica Mann Literary Review

With its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the French Revolution opened a whole new stage in the history of women, despite their conspicuous absence from the playbill. The coming century would see women put in their place as never before, their subordination to men codified in all manner of new laws and rules; and yet the period would also witness the birth of feminism, the unprecedented emergence of women as a collective force in the political arena. The fourth volume in this series covers the distance between these two poles. It gives a vibrant picture of a bourgeois century, dynamic and expansive, in which woman's role in the home was stressed more and more, even as the economic pressures and opportunities of the industrial revolution drew her out of the house; in which woman's growing role in the family as the centre of all morals and virtues pressed her into public service fighting social ills. Here we see the world of women as it evolved between two cataclysmic events, the French Revolution and World War I. Once women's revolutionary usefulness had exhausted itself, this world came to revolve ever more narrowly around the home. The authors show us how woman was at once cast as the housewife, the - acquisitive consumer who acted as a counterpart to the bourgeois man, but also as a possession to be decorated and flaunted, and as well as the repository of all the values that had no place in business: tenderness, compassion, sentimentality, idealism, charity, and pity. Though focusing primarily on Europe, this volume also describes these "feminine" virtues affecting such public issues as abolition, temperance, and social work in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of sources in art, literature, and the new anthropology, the authors fashion an innovative history, one that documents the transformations in women's lives during this period, but also reveals the changes in perspectives on women.