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Women are shown to have played an important and very visible role in society at the time. Fashionable "polite" society of this period emphasised mixed-gender sociability and encouraged the visible participation of elite women in a series of urban, often public settings. Using a variety of sources (both men's and women's correspondence, accounts, bills, memoirs and other family papers), this book investigates the ways in which polite social practices and expectations influenced the experience of elite femininity in Scotland in the eighteenth century. It explores women's education and upbringing; their reading practices; the meanings of the social spaces and activities in which they engaged and how this fed over into the realm of politics; and the fashion for tourism at home and abroad. It also asks how elite women used polite social spaces and practices to extend their mental horizons and to form a sense of belonging to a public at a time when Scotland was among the most intellectually vibrant societies in Europe.
The late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was a period of great social and political change within Ireland, as the Protestant Ascendancy gained control of the country, aided by the English government and aristocracy, with whom the ruling class in Ireland mixed through marriage and travel. The resulting Anglo-Irish elite, with its distinct transnational identity, differed markedly from the preceding Irish elite, but, at the same time, because of its Irish dimension, was very different also from the contemporary English and Scottish upper classes. Women played key roles in this Anglo-Irish elite, and the nature of the Protestant Ascendancy can only be completely understood by consideri...
A wide-ranging, thematic survey of women's history in Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with chapters written by both well-established writers and new and dynamic scholars in a thorough and well-balanced selection.
An examination of the interaction between ideology and experience in the lives of English women during a period of great social and intellectual change. Focusing on the complex relationship between discourse and experience, Women of Quality examines the role of gender in aristocratic women's daily lives during a period of significant cultural change. In the years followingthe Glorious Revolution, didactic writers and other social critics responded to a perceived crisis of gender relations by creating a new discourse of 'natural' feminine behavior in opposition to the luxury and decadence of fashionable women. Modern scholars have often portrayed this agenda as representing the rise of a midd...
Includes a variety of women's political writings from the Seventeenth Century. This collection highlights the principles inherent in female political action in its many and varied forms, from women's Civil War petitioning, to the efforts of Quaker women to reform prisons.
*Shortlisted for the 2022 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize* This book is the first, full-length scholarly examination of British women’s involvement in equestrianism from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, as well as the corresponding transformations of gender, class, sport, and national identity in Britain and its Empire. It argues that women’s participation in horse sports transcended limitations of class and gender in Britain and highlights the democratic ethos that allowed anyone skilled enough to ride and hunt – from chimney-sweep to courtesan. Furthermore, women’s involvement in equestrianism reshaped ideals of race and reinforced imperial ideology at the zenith of the...
Are sex scandals simply trivial distractions from serious issues or can they help democratize politics? In 1820, George IV's "royal gambols" with his mistresses endangered the Old Oak of the constitution. When he tried to divorce Queen Caroline for adultery, the resulting scandal enabled activists to overcome state censorship and revitalize reform. Looking at six major British scandals between 1763 and 1820, this book demonstrates that scandals brought people into politics because they evoked familiar stories of sex and betrayal. In vibrant prose woven with vivid character sketches and illustrations, Anna Clark explains that activists used these stories to illustrate constitutional issues co...
This title takes a fresh look at a familiar building type - the town house in 18th century London - and investigates the circumstances in which individuals made decisions about living in London, and particularly about their West End house.
This volume brings together ten distinguished scholars of history, literature, music, theatre, and art to explore the political and cultural implications of the court's transgressive new character.
During the Georgian period there was a remarkable proliferation of seductive visual imagery and written accounts of female performers. Focusing on the close relationship between the dramatic and visual arts at this time, this beautiful and stimulating book explores popular ideas of the actress as coquette, whore, celebrity, muse, and creative agent, charting her important symbolic role in contemporary attempts to professionalize both the theatre and the practice of fine art. Gill Perry shows how artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner or Lawrence produced complex images of female performers as fashion icons, coquettes, dignified queens or creative artists. The result is a rich interdisciplinary study of the Georgian actress. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art