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

Author: Ellen Ross Professor of Women's Studies Ramapo College
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195365003
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
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.

Author: Ellen Ross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190281340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
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.

Author: Ellen Ross
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520249059
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
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.

Author: Peter G. Bietenholz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004100633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
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.

Author: Linda Blum
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807021415
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
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.

Author: Andrew August
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317877977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
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.

Author: Sarah Knott
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
ISBN: 0374213585
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
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.

Author: Jill Rappoport
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199772606
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
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.

Author: Sandra Trudgen Dawson
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 179360827X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
"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"--

Author: Pat Thane
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199578508
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Covers the stories of unwed mothers and one of the voluntary organization that supported them throughout the century: The National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (which renamed itself), The National Council for One Parent Families, (and is now, after a merger, called Gingerbread).