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In this paper, my objective is to delve into the history of women accused of practicing witchcraft in Sicily during the early modern period. This investigation draws upon documented evidence from the Spanish Inquisition spanning from 1516 to 1782, along with archival records and the ethnographic works of nineteenth-century scholars. The focal point of my research is the enigmatic figure known as donna de fora (the ladies from outside) in the Italian context. To illuminate this subject, I employ an analysis of seventeenth-century Inquisition trial records and oral traditions documented by anthropologist Giuseppe Pitrè in the late nineteenth century. The donne de fora represent a distinctive and intriguing group as this term appears exclusively within the Inquisitorial records of Sicily. They were perceived as supernatural entities, characterized as "part witches, part fairies". According to beliefs of the time, these women's spirits would depart from their bodies during sleep to convene with higher-ranking fairies. Notably, the trials and the Edict of the Diocese of Girgenti (Agrigento) in 1656 document that the most significant gatherings of these figures occurred during the night of Saint John, between the 23rd and 24th of June. Through an examination of trial records, we gain insights into how these women were perceived by their contemporaries, as well as an understanding of their societal roles and the ritual practices they engaged in. Moving forward to the late nineteenth century, ethnologist Giuseppe Pitrè conducted a comprehensive study of local rituals and popular folklore, and he collected various objects and documents related to supernatural beliefs, including those associated with the donne de fora in the regions around Palermo. My research is centered on archival records containing Pitrè's notes, unpublished drafts, and correspondence with scholars in Italy and Europe discussing this phenomenon. Based on my findings, I aim to establish a connection between Pitrè's material discoveries and contemporary beliefs regarding donne de fora and witchcraft in Sicily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Encounters in Theory & History of Education / Rencontres en Theorie et Histoire de l'Educacion is the property of Queen's University, Faculty of Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There is a rich cache of letters detailing the production of climate knowledge at Tasmania's Hobart Observatory in the early nineteenth century. By contrast, a mere handful of sentences survive in the written record to describe the production of climate knowledge outside the Hobart Observatory, in Tasmania's north-east. In this paper, I confront the question of what to do with these unbalanced archival remains. I draw on the work of social and cultural historians as well as historians of colonialism and science to advocate a three-pronged methodology for approaching the problem of the unbalanced atmospheric archives. The application of this methodology, I show, reveals the way gender relations shaped the way atmospheric knowledge was both produced and used by historical actors in colonial Tasmania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences & Arts / Glasnik Etnografskog Instituta SANU is the property of Institute of Ethnography, SASA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Arenal.Revista de Historia de las Mujeres is the property of Arenal. Revista de Historia de las Mujeres and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Secuencia: Revista de Historia y Ciencias Sociales is the property of Instituto de Investigaciones - Dr. Jose M. Luis Mora and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The title of this paper refers to both the personality and work of the Spaniards who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had to abandon their homeland fleeing from the absolutism of King Ferdinand VII (1784–1833), and the inhabitants of the Spanish colonies in the New World, the forerunners of the struggles for independence in their respective countries. Both ended up settling in London, a city that served not only as a refuge but also as a place from which to disseminate their slogans in favour of freedom. Three areas are discussed: the publications of liberal Spanish exiles in London in the early nineteenth century, the interaction between Spanish and (Latin) American exiles and the role of women in this endeavour and in the cause of liberalism in general. The London press shaped this exile journalism and the subsequent liberal journalism in Spain when the extreme censorship from which these exiled journalists had fled was finally lifted. We believe that this global approach offers an original perspective from which to highlight the role of women, with a view to filling the traditional historiographical lacuna in this regard. To this end, we have employed recent relevant literature and primary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bourgeois women in nineteenth-century France were timekeepers for their families. They marked time off in their diaries and spent time with family and friends; working; directing servants and running the home. In each of these activities they showed awareness of time as a precious commodity, in keeping with the values of efficiency and economy of their social class. Yet most research on time and timekeeping assumes that time in the nineteenth century was uniform and mechanical and does so by largely ignoring women and the domestic environment. This paper looks at women’s diaries, clock and watch ownership and cookery and domestic advice manuals to argue that women operated on a range of timescales, both linear and cyclical. In arguing that women moved between public and private roles and thought about the seasons while also watching the clock, this paper seeks to widen the definition of modern temporality by arguing that women’s experience needs to be taken into account in order to understand how complex people’s experience of time continued to be in nineteenth-century France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates how the nineteenth-century writer Margaret Oliphant drew upon her domestic identity to write in radical ways which could educate and inform her young female readership. Through the exploration of two female characters, Catherine Vernon in Hester (1883) and Kirsteen Douglas in Kirsteen (1890), the paper demonstrates how Oliphant represented the importance of opportunities available for young women within "extended domesticity", a version of the domestic space which extended beyond conventional boundaries to include all women. Through representations of female characters like Catherine and Kirsteen, who had careers and even businesses, of their own, Oliphant showed the possibilities available for women whose lives did not fit into the conventional mould of marriage and maternity. Hester and Kirsteen allow Oliphant to represent two very different versions of domesticity, and to reinforce the necessity for an extended version of it, which allows women the space to find personal growth and fulfilment. The paper engages with the scholarship of critics such as George Levine and Katherine Mullin to explore Oliphant's radical voice and to reinforce her place as an important writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of William Graham Brooke as advocate of women’s higher education and access to university. His work as advocate is considered against the religious, political, social and economic backdrop of late nineteenth century Ireland. A barrister, as Clerk in the Lord Chancellor’s office, he was centrally involved in the organisation of Anglican schooling as part of a broader Irish-Church re-structuring in the wake of its Disestablishment (1869). For Brooke, education, including the education of women, constituted a single project; it was also a public project. He was ideally positioned to execute his role as advocate: descending from a family with a long tradition of involvement in Church education, Brooke had a thorough knowledge of the problems confronting women in education and in the workplace. The paper traces how Brooke, in a largely male-dominated society, exploited the relationships between the various bodies with which he had close connections to enable women to fruitfully engage with these same bodies in order to facilitate their access to university. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The modern sport of athletics emphasizes its 'Olympian' ideals and its origins in the public schools, universities and amateur clubs of the late Victorian era. Ironically for a sport that has so successfully commercialized itself and boasts many highly paid professionals, its debt to its predecessor, pedestrianism, the name for running for money, has been relatively neglected. Pedestrianism was a major sporting interest and an abiding part of popular culture in the nineteenth century. This paper, using the example of the West Midlands, traces how the sport adapted itself to urbanization and the leisure industry, encompassed disciplines as varied as sprints and walks of a thousand miles, how it was involved in the growth of the specialist sporting press, pioneered sports arenas and, not least, provided opportunities for female athletes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coverage of John Briggs's The English Baptists of the Nineteenth Century (1994) allows us to examine many of the aspects of Baptist life as they had come to be understood nearly thirty years ago. Since then culture has come to the fore as a subject for historical study. At the summer conference of the Baptist Historical Society held at Woodbrooke, Birmingham, in July 2022 the theme was 'Baptists in British Culture in the Nineteenth Century'. The papers delivered there point to fresh developments in Baptist studies and in particular the role of women, the place of slavery and the influence of the Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Letrônica is the property of EDIPUCRS - Editora Universitaria da PUCRS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos is the property of Asociacion Canadiense de Hispanistas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There is a tremendous amount of room within nineteenth-century Scottish literature to discover how women occupied space and what the implications of space and place are in terms of how women defined and identified with place. This paper navigates space and place in Margaret Oliphant's Kirsteen. My textual exploration begins by defining space, place, outsideness, and insideness with the intention of understanding how we perceive the world and our place within it. Kirsteen enters and moves fluidly in different spaces; she thus successfully adapts when situations change or when elements of space contain dangerous or threatening people or circumstances. Consequently, she is able to move back and forth through the space that links her old life to her new life with ease. First, I analyse the role played by space in Kirsteen's personal journey towards independence by first considering how women function as a form of space themselves. Second, I examine how Kirsteen lives within the space of 'elsewhere' because she chooses to exclude herself from orthodox social systems of economy and power. I conclude by theorising that 'elsewhere' is an unfixed space that Kirsteen is able to harness and from which she can construct place. In harnessing 'elsewhere', Kirsteen's journey from metaphysical outsideness at home in Scotland becomes a fixed reality of insideness in London. Her life experience can be viewed as a journey through different intervals in space that culminate in a lived experience that finally includes insideness. This insideness allows her to forge a new identity as a woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Sara Levy's World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin" is a collection of essays that examines the life and contributions of Sara Levy, a wealthy Jewish woman in 18th and 19th century Berlin. The book explores Levy's involvement in the salon culture of Berlin and her role in preserving and performing music by the Bach family. It also delves into the tension between Levy's Jewish faith and her participation in Christian sacred music. The book offers a comprehensive assessment of the role of Jewish salonnières in Berlin's cultural landscape, providing a valuable perspective on the contributions of women, particularly Jewish women, in music and culture during this time period. The review suggests that the book is suitable for graduate seminars, but may also be of interest to advanced undergraduate music majors or students in disciplines like Women's Studies or Jewish Studies. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines the representation of indigenous bodies, namely those of women and young men, in observations made by the Russian imperial elite in Central Asia during the late nineteenth century. Civilising agenda, a central framework used by these observers, relied on interweaving empire-building efforts with colonised bodies. While indigenous women were fundamental in these narratives, they remained largely invisible to the male colonial enterprise, which, in turn, sought to make them visible through medicine and commercial sex. The latter combined the elite's anxieties over native sexualities with the desire to control and gain a glimpse of women's bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address both the neglect of non-Anglo-centric accounting gendered practices beyond the predominant professional setting and the controversial roles of women and accounting in power relationships inside the household. Analyzing a Spanish upper-middle class Catholic family in the early nineteenth century, the research focuses on the reciprocal interaction of accounting with practices and processes of daily life in a rigid patriarchal socio-cultural and juridical context.Design/methodology/approach This microhistory draws upon several archives, including in Spain the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Cádiz. In England, the Bath Record Office has preserved documents and correspondence, both personal and business related, and the Worcester Record Office preserved notarial documents concerning the family. The large number of letters which have survived has facilitated an in-depth study of the people who were affected by accounting calculations.Findings In a juridical context where women were conceived as merely the means for the circulation of property between two families, the evidence shows that accounting provided the proof of women’s patrimony value and the means to facilitate their recovery in this cosification process. Although women had a little involvement in the household’s accounting and management, they demonstrated confidence in accounting, fulfilling a stewardship function for the resources received. Also, evidence shows that by using accounting practices to shield supposedly defenseless women, this reinforced male domination over women and promoted the view that the role of women was as an ornament and in need of a good husband.Originality/value Contrasting with the Anglo-Saxon contemporary context, the Spanish law preserved a woman’s property rights, guaranteeing recovery of properties owned by her before marriage should the marriage be legally annulled or be dissolved because one of the spouses’ death. This required a detailed accounting of the wife’s properties brought to her marriage, most especially regarding the dowry provided by her family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional studies of elites, both sociological and historical, have focused on male elite schooling to the exclusion or elision of female elite schooling. This leaves us with subtly different literatures on female and male lines of both contemporary elites and their forebears, and this represents a challenge for those working on elite education. Judith Okely noted back in 1978 that even if the education of boys and girls can be separate and asymmetrical, they are nevertheless ‘ideologically interdependent’. Likewise, Claire Maxwell and Peter Agglestone advocate the study of reproduction and privilege in contemporary British elite education for girls within a holistic framework that seeks to understand the complex relations between each student’s home, social milieu and school. Taking the idea of ideological interdependence as a starting point, this paper seeks to explore the history of nineteenth-century Catholic female education in Ireland, drawing on feminist critiques of power theory, to move beyond current narrowly defined debates on the utility and purpose of elite female education. An exclusive focus on the disempowering effects of official curricula obscures other socialising aspects of the schooling experience, especially those that enabled or empowered. This article takes the concept of cosmopolitanism as a way of understanding the benefits accompanying an education at a Catholic convent boarding school in Ireland. The graduates of these schools could lay claim to an associational culture maintained in adulthood through intermarriage, alumna clubs and charitable associations. The evidence of cosmopolitanism, real or imagined, within conventual schools manifested itself in curricular choices, public exhibitions and the cultivation of refined dress, accent and manners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Anthropology Magazine is the property of University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Puerperal insanity has been described as a nineteenth-century diagnosis, entrenched in contemporary expectations of proper womanly behaviour. Drawing on detailed study of establishment registers and patient case notes, this paper examines the puerperal insanity diagnosis at Dundee Lunatic Asylum between 1820 and 1860. In particular, the study aims to consider whether the class or social status of the patients had a bearing on how their conditions were perceived and rationalized, and how far the puerperal insanity diagnosis, coloured by the values assigned to it by the medical officers, may have been reserved for some women and not for others. This examination of the diagnosis in a Scottish community, suggesting a contrast in the way that middle-class and working-class women were diagnosed at Dundee, engages with and expands on work on puerperal insanity elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that a collection of English play-texts gathered by Princess Augusta Sophia of the United Kingdom (1768–1840), daughter of King George III (1738–1820) and Queen Charlotte (1744–1818), represents the royal family's intergenerational tradition of women's book collecting. Located today at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the collection comprises nearly eight hundred full texts of comedies, farces, and musical dramas, mostly from the long eighteenth century. Significantly, it reflects the royal family's theatrical and book-collecting interests, particularly those of Queen Charlotte, who supervised the princess's education and whose own books Augusta adopted after the monarch's death. Tracing the library's reorganization and movements toward a city named after the queen—Charlotte, North Carolina—this article additionally demonstrates how Augusta Sophia's book-collecting legacy, and her mother's, have been obscured by patrilineal libraries and academic research priorities, and also what steps might "reconstruct" her library for further inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women have been seen, understood, and defined through men writing about them since centuries. Texts authored by men not only defined women's roles to fit the frame designed by men but they also shaped women's dreams and aspirations according to men's perspectives about women. Also, these male writings muted women by usurping their right to speak for themselves. Thus, the attempt to know the women of the past as independent individuals with their own visions and identities is a challenging task. This paper aims at exploring how women viewed and defined themselves. Such an exercise allows us to form a comprehensive picture. To paint this picture of women's self-perception and reflection, inevitably we need to rely on women's writings, although they may be fewer in number compared to those of men. Some critics might even raise doubts about the quality or the originality of their works. This paper examines writings of women who wrote in the Urdu language at a time when reading and writing by women was highly dichotomic issue among the Muslim male elite, the majority of whom looked at women's education as a threat to their cultural norms and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English painter Barbara Bodichon received a dynamic home education, consisting of engaging lessons, reading sessions, family discussions, sketching excursions, and trips at home and abroad. As an adult, Bodichon led a nomadic life, living between Algeria and England and travelling across Europe and America. Seeking to unpack travelling and travel letters as sources of learning, this paper studies Bodichon’s correspondence as epistolary articulations of herBildung(self-cultivation). It argues that, conforming toBildung’s idea of forging one’s individuality in interaction with the world, her travelling provided her with a variety of settings through which she extended towards the unknown and incorporated it into her sense of being. In turn, letters functioned as forums where she made sense of encountering the difference through which she individualised her subjectivity. Notwithstanding, a revised reading ofBildungpermits teasing out to what extent Bodichon’s self-cultivation was developed at the expense of certain social categories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT The built fabric of institutions plays a fundamental role in both the process and the experience of institutionalisation. This crucial role of the physical fabric makes the buildings and landscape of institutions a rich source of evidence for historical archaeologists, with the potential to provide important insights into the development of institutions and their complex role in society. This paper examines aspects of the built fabric of the largest and longest-operating Magdalen asylum in Australia, at Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne, to investigate the evolution of this complex site in the second half of the nineteenth century. Magdalen asylums were institutions that attempted to reform 'wayward' and vulnerable women and girls. Although they accommodated thousands of women and girls in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their role and significance in Australia has not been extensively investigated. In this study, the extant buildings and grounds of Abbotsford Convent, as well as historical maps, photographs and written descriptions, provide evidence of the evolution of this institution over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ra Ximhai is the property of Universidad Autonoma Indigena de Mexico and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The singing profession in the nineteenth century allowed women to opt for a social reality that differed from the household model. Those who stood out for their vocal styling or those who wanted to develop their artistic sensitivity could have access to official or private singing education. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of the activity carried out by women in the process of teaching-learning of singing during the nineteenth century in Spain, despite de limitations of the time. For that purpose, the focus will be on two representative vocal training institutions: the Conservatory in the public system in Madrid and the Lyric-dramatic school in the private sphere. This research is based on the review and analysis of documentation, mostly historical, through which several aspects have been recreated: the type of vocal instruction that women had access to, their role within the education system and the professional careers of those studies. Even though there were few differences between both genders during the training period, the low presence of female singing teachers in teachers' staff meetings, the limited opportunities to teach male singers, and relative paucity of places in which to publish their didactic methods demonstrate the long way that still lied ahead in achieving gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study on the notion of female readers in various medical treatises published in Spain throughout the 19th century. This analysis sheds light on many of the aspects concerning the study of the figure of the female reader that was so common during this historical period. In this journey, we will discover science's attempt to pathologize the activity of reading when it is carried out by women, revealing the fear that underlies the possibilities of gender reconfiguration that may be provided through reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Irish migrants and their descendants who returned either permanently or temporarily to Ireland in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Data for return of Irish-born migrants is uneven, so one of the best sources for those born in Australia and living in Ireland is in the Irish censuses of 1901 and 1911. In this analysis, we use Australian-born people present on the census nights as an approximate measure of those migrants who had previously left Ireland and then returned with Australian-born children, recognising that this is also an imprecise measure. We match data points from the census returns with demographic data to fill in the background of selected returnees. Key findings are that Australian-born women were disproportionately represented in census data. In order to capture a broader sample of Irish migrants who returned to Ireland, we also analyse visiting and temporary return through a case study of one migrant group from Limerick who settled in rural colonial Victoria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have recognized the importance of enslaved African American healers, including conjure practitioners who drew on herbal and ritual remedies, in providing a "dual system of health care" for enslaved people in the American South. Planters' journals and narratives by formerly enslaved people alike include accounts of antebellum conjurers as health practitioners. After Emancipation, African American conjurers remained integral, particularly in rural Black communities where people had little contact with orthodox physicians. However, because these practitioners left few written accounts, African American conjurers in the post-Emancipation South have received less scholarly attention. Focusing on the 1887 trial of Sarah Evans, a freedwoman, for practicing medicine without a license, this essay demonstrates that court records shed light on health practitioners who are less visible in other archives and provide insight into how conjurers, particularly female conjurers, performed their unique roles as healers who also presented themselves as capable of inflicting harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In chapter 57 of Roughing It, Mark Twain extols his experience of the West in terms that are at once highly idealized and strangely skewed: "It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society! Only swarming hosts of stalwart men—nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible anywhere!" This description, however memorable, is also blatantly false. The 1860 federal census records 111 women in Virginia City and Gold Hill, "83 of whom were living with their husbands... and caring for more than 100 children." Clemens's cognizance of this fact is reflected in the circumstances of his own brother Orion, who, within a year of their 1861 arrival, was joined in Carson City by his wife and daughter, as well as in his reporting for the Virginia City Enterprise. This article explores the personal and cultural underpinnings of this omission, examining it in relation to conventional nineteenth-century gender hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The doctrine of coverture restricted married women's legal agency during the early modern period and into the nineteenth century. While the impact and ethos of judicial decisions at private law regarding the doctrine has received sustained attention from historians, the impact upon criminal law has received less analysis. This article examines a series of cases, pertaining to offences ranging from recusancy in the sixteenth century to receiving stolen goods in the nineteenth century, to demonstrate the longstanding nature of arguments of 'legal impossibility' due to coverture in married women's criminal trials. While lawmakers sought to uphold patriarchy by ensuring coverture as well as justice was served, the way these two goals were met differed over time and across offences. Yet, the underlying ideology of patriarchy remained steadfast. Overall, a holistic approach is needed to understand the impact coverture had upon the legal agency of femes covert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late-nineteenth century saw private book collecting gain a renewed respectability and cultural cachet as a leisure pursuit for the upper- and middle classes. This paper examines representations of collectors in the literature belonging to a new genre of writing which emerged for the ‘book-hunter’: a late-Victorian variant of the book-collecting passion which could encompass aesthetes and antiquarians as well as aspiring amateurs of more moderate means. It will show how, during the 1880s and 1890s, this particular type of collecting practice was used rhetorically in a range of printed material to venerate ‘gentlemanly’ book-buying, in contrast to feminine forms of engagement with old books in particular. In spite of women's comparative lack of advantage in the market for antiquarian editions, however, I argue that such a critique would not have been articulated so forcefully had women not been taking a determined interest in rare books. Evidence from central London booksellers during this period suggests that a variety of women were making antiquarian collections of their own. Male bibliophiles who denigrated female book-buyers in the periodical press were attempting to partially invent a homosocial tradition of collecting in order to distance their own pursuit from what they saw as the more emasculating elements of modern consumerism. This was a response not just to developments in contemporary print culture, but also to the growing appreciation of second-hand goods of all kinds among affluent female consumers with aesthetic and literary tastes shaped independently of male judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent scholarship on the American Bible has explored its production, interpretation, rhetorical usage, and authority. Less studied are the images of the illustrated Bibles that proliferated in the early nineteenth century. One of the most innovative and successful of these, Harper & Brothers' artistic and highly ornamented Illuminated and New Pictorial Bible , serves as a locus point for understanding the significance of early nineteenth century Bibles' illustrations. The Illuminated Bible 's emphasis on beauty, mercy, compassion, emotion, and sympathy reflected a shift toward a maternal Protestantism, while the sheer number of images and their embedding within the text serves as commentary on the text itself. This is a gendered commentary, interpreting the Bible through the lens of a feminine sentimental ideal, and serving as the basis of the Illuminated Bible 's reliability, trustworthiness, and authority. Stylistically, the artists of the Illuminated Bible , led by John Gadsby Chapman, employed a mishmash of baroque, neoclassical, rococo, and romantic elements to communicate a refined feminine sentimentality. The Illuminated Bible 's gendered imagery not only marketed the text to women consumers seeking to sacralize their parlors, but also interpreted the text in a sentimentalized fashion, communicating a refined, middle-class theology. Such "Christian refinement" was a juxtaposition of contrasting styles—classical and modern, Christian and pagan—reflecting the contradictory nature of Victorianism itself. The images of the Illuminated Bible enshrined these contradictions. Women were pious, submissive, maternal guardians of a sentimentalized domestic world, but they were also active, public spiritual agents, chosen by their Creator for a starring role in his narrative. The images of Harper's Bible reflect the tensions inherent in America's Protestant communities as women were celebrated for their piety even as they threatened the paternal order by using their religious identities to carve out public roles in biblical education, writing, and leadership of moral-reform associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study I conduct an exploratory corpus-based study of nineteenth-century advice manuals for women with a view to investigating the ways in which these texts ideologically and discursively construct a model of socially acceptable female identity. The analysis is based on a corpus of twenty advice manuals published in Britain between 1810 and 1878. By combining a quantitative analysis of keywords with manual investigation of concordance lines containing the most frequent keywords, I examine the parameters within which the model of socially acceptable female identity is discursively constructed. My analysis shows that, by learning to control their bodies, voices and speech, nineteenth-century women readers internalised the model presented in advice literature in order to become desirable to men of a good social position (Armstrong 2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a re-reading of the Chilean Maipina de la Barra's travel memoir Mis impresiones y mis vicisitudes en mi viaje a Europa, which was published in Buenos Aires in 1878. Whereas previous interpretations have read it as personal testimony and feminine revindication, this article shows how her memoir can also be read as field note observation and scientific divulgation. The theoretical framework is based on the history of science and knowledge and therefore offers a unique angle for studying the writing of a nineteenth-century woman who resided in a peripheral area of the world, far removed from the major centres of scientific advancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a biography of Elise Luquin (1832-1898), pioneer of the professional training of girls and women in 19th Century France. She created an accounting class in Lyon in 1857 and then expanded it for several decades to cover the whole country, trained instructors, promoted this teaching via textbooks and public speeches. Then, this article wants to shed light on the way which E. Luquin gained status and authority in women's education: first through relating her own professional career and second, through highlighting her writings and actions to advocate for women's education and work. She endeavoured to intervene at all stages of education: defining the position of qualified women in this business sector, developing curricula, and training a pool of women specialised in business education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a new perspective on what it meant to be a business proprietor in Victorian Britain. Based on individual census records, it provides an overview of the full population of female business proprietors in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. These census data show that around 30% of the total business population was female, a considerably higher estimate than the current literature suggests. Female entrepreneurship was not a uniform experience. Certain demographics clustered in specific trades and within those sectors employers and own-account proprietors had strikingly different age, marital status and household profiles. A woman's life cycle event such as marriage, motherhood and widowhood played an important role in her decision whether to work, the work available to her and the entrepreneurial choices she could make. While marriage and motherhood removed women from the labour force, they had less of an effect on their levels of entrepreneurship. Women who had young children were more entrepreneurial than those who had none, and entrepreneurship rates rose with the arrival of one child and continued to rise the more children were added to the family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problematising the definition of a travel guidebook in the context of the nineteenth century, this study offers a framework for the improvement of guidebook identification and analysis. Through redefinition, it seeks to include works which have been either missed or miscategorised in the larger body of travel literature, paying particular attention to those written by women. The aim of this essay is twofold: first, it offers a new definition and set of parameters through which we can analyse the nineteenth-century guidebook; second, it seeks to establish women and gender into the historiography of the guidebook by showing that women were active in the production of different guidebook subgenres in the nineteenth century. This work better equips scholars in the study of guidebooks, and by examining female-authored guides, highlights the need for greater investigation into women's production and consumption of the nineteenth century's most important tool for travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how the children's books written by two nineteenth-century female writers, Eliza Tabor and Mary Martha Sherwood, when they accompanied their husbands to India, enabled them to navigate this new environment and their position as respectable middle-class women while revealing how India was deemed a place where British childhood was impossible. Just as many women took up botanical study to legitimise their 'otherwise transgressive presence in imperial spaces' (McEwan 219), writing for children enabled others to engage with the masculine world of travelling and earning money without compromising their femininity. Addressing their work to children also seems to have helped both writers to deal with the absence of their own children: the Indian climate made it impossibly challenging for most British infants and children. In this way their writing gives expression to what might be termed a crisis of imperial motherhood. Underlying the texts is an anxiety relating to British settlement and an attempt to comprehend and control a place that threatened their maternal roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long Victorian period has often been interpreted through the lens of 'separate spheres', a notion that compartmentalizes markers such as gender and class into discrete areas. However, the margins surrounding class and gender were full of fissures and scholars have argued for more nuanced research involving specific case studies at a micro-level to uncover the breadth and boundaries of female experience. Adopting this micro-approach by using archives and biographical methods to investigate the communities of women involved in swimming-related careers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries yields new insights into the complexities of 'separate spheres' ideologies. Serious swimming became acceptable for women of all social classes after facilities expanded following the Baths and Washhouses Acts of 1846 and 1878, and a moral imperative, which required women to be attended to only by women, meant that gender-specific career routes gradually emerged. The class origins and familial connections of female natationists, swimming teachers, and baths employees are explored, to place them within the contemporary social context and to draw some tentative conclusions about the influence of patriarchy on female occupational choices. Reflections on the potential for combining different biographical methods to produce a 'blended approach' are then offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as points of inspiration Peter Parish's 1989 book, Slavery: History and Historians, and Angela Davis's seminal 1971 article, "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves," this probes both historiographically and methodologically some of the challenges faced by historians writing about the lives of enslaved women through a case study of intimate partner violence among enslaved people in the antebellum South. Because rape and sexual assault have been defined in the past as non-consensual sexual acts supported by surviving legal evidence (generally testimony from court trials), it is hard for historians to research rape and sexual violence under slavery (especially marital rape) as there was no legal standing for the rape of enslaved women or the rape of any woman within marriage. This article suggests enslaved women recognized that black men could both be perpetrators of sexual violence and simultaneously be victims of the system of slavery. It also argues women stoically tolerated being forced into intimate relationships, sometimes even staying with "husbands" imposed upon them after emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which women authors were read at the ebb of the nineteenth century and around the start of the twentieth? Research on historical readership groups reveals a strikingly different picture from the one transmitted through literary histories and textbooks. Empirical data from the catalogues of Norwegian reading societies from this period form the basis of the proposed conclusions. From a feminist, scholarly point of view, it is doubly interesting to investigate the fate of female authors among female readers; hence, the main emphasis is on the book collection of the women’s reading society based in Oslo from 1874. The collections of other societies, whether male or open to both sexes, are consulted for comparison. Although the material is Norwegian, the results turn out to be comparable to those seen in other countries, not least Finland. The data presented here serve to modify the received canon of European literary history, and to invite future revisions in the reception of female authorship and of women’s place in world literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the strategies available to women journalists in the nineteenth century. It focuses in particular on the voice of Cassandra adopted by Marie d'Agoult at the time of the 1848 revolution. D'Agoult created a new journalistic model which included three specific features: the assumption of a poetic, prophetic, and apocalyptic voice in order to announce disaster; the explicit invocation of the figure of Cassandra; and a dramatic practice of 'coming out' which meant dropping the disguise of masculinity. For those rare women who, in the wake of d'Agoult, managed to write about politics in newspapers and periodicals at the end of the nineteenth century, the reference to Cassandra was almost inevitable, as illustrated by the careers of Juliette Adam, Claude Vignon and Séverine. This practice of women's journalism endures into the twentieth century, taken up in particular by Louise Weiss and Geneviève Tabouis when fascism was on the rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles Antoinette Emily Dyce, who was known as Mrs. Danford who discovered the Xiphion danfordiae also known as Iris danfordiae in 1876. Topics discussed include the traditional form of address for a married woman in Victorian times, Dyce's marriage to barrister-at-law Charles G. Danford who made significant contributions to the botanical and horticultural history and Dyce's making of herbarium specimens.

Like many art practitioners across cultures and over generations, I work in my room. A room serves the function of essential studio space, a space where I can paint, write, read, chant, meditate or do nothing. The notion of “a room of one’s own” brought forth by the writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) in the 1920s is a c­ommon goal among many practitioners in the arts, women in particular. This continues to the present day. In this article, I aim to illustr­ate how my practice is akin to that of women in the West, Paris in particular, at the turn of the twentieth century in the longing for one's private space. The article explores the notion of private space in other, less obvious ways. I also discuss how women in a remote part of China in their own rooms, through the exclusive practice ofnüshu, a set of near-extinct and “secret” writing script, echoed the significance of having their own platform, a creative space in which they could excel. I demonstrate how, through appropriating some characters from the Chinese language with a “female” ideograph andnüshuscript, my drawing acts as a strategy, suggesting that the “edge” of culture could speak. In addition, it attempts to “practice that difference” advocated by the philosopher Luce Irigaray (b. 1930). Working and exhibiting in various spaces, I realize that a room for executing and displaying is a transitional tool. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses lower, or working, class reading culture and readership in Victorian era Great Britain, including what are referred to as penny novel's emotional and sensational aspects. An overview of working class women's reading habits during the Victorian period, including female servants' addiction to novel reading, is provided.