Victorian Women - Softcover

Perkin, Joan

3.8

60 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0719556511 ISBN 13: 9780719556517

Publisher: Trafalgar Square Publishing, 1994

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This text explores what life was actually like for women in the turbulent period between the French Revolution and the First World War. In their own words they describe their childhood and education; courtship, marriage and homemaking; sex and motherhood; work; marital breakdown; and widowhood. Their voices speak to us with clarity and poignancy, revealing their strength of feeling, their courage, and their humour. The picture that emerges is an immensely varied one, set against a background of stark inequity, both between the sexes and between women of different social classes. And it is far from static. The dramatic events that altered women's lives over this restless century are recorded in the letters home of working girls, the songs of mill workers, the speeches of women campaigning for their rights, the quiet voices of numerous "angels in the house". It is to all these women that the modern feminist movement can trace its roots, in the Victorian kitchens, factories and parlours from which it sprang.

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About the Author:

Joan Perkin teaches women's history at Northwestern University. She is the author of It's Never Too late: A Practical Guide to Continuing Education for Women of all Ages, and Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England.

Review:

"A useful and engaging book, one in which real voices are allowed to speak and to describe experience as being as squalid, muddled, painful and interesting as it generally is."

-Sunday Times

"On individual examples Perkin is superb, not just on the great reformers but on the individual free-wheelers like Isabella Bird-Bishop, who set off at 40 to see the whole world and managed it."

-The Independent

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