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This chapter argues that the plots and characters of eighteenth-century English fiction can be illuminated by an awareness of property law and the customary disposition of property within families. That material greed as well as rivalries and competitions springing from even more primitive sources should be represented as occurring within families in the fiction of the day should surprise no one who has ever lived in a family. What is noteworthy are the excesses of innocence on the one hand and of rapaciousness on the other. One finds good characters who seek nothing for themselves and are generous to a fault, and bad characters whom nothing can touch but their ruthless desire for material wealth. Ultimately, in the fiction from 1750 to 1820, one can still read the human responses to material inequities that tore families apart and made them accomplices of an economic system that put property before family loyalty.

The ballad of "Chevy Chase" is a very old ballad, probably dating back to the fifteenth century and referring to events that transpired in the middle of that century or even back to the fourteenth century. The border ballads, of which "Chevy Chase" is such a venerable example, are thus an expression of life on a frontier not only in medieval times but also in feudal-Renaissance times. The ballad of "Chevy Chase" is about a battle fought in the borderlands between the forces of Northumberland's Earl Percy and Scotland's Earl Douglas. Sir Walter Scott includes a ballad called "The Battle of Otterbourne" in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in which the brave Scots rout the English. If the ballad of "Otterburn" was constructed and sung from the Scots point of view, so the Anglophilia of the ballad of "Chevy Chase" is evident in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. "Chevy Chase" is also about the tragic absurdity of war.

Surfaces of novel block copolymers with amphiphilic side chains were studied for their ability to influence the adhesion of marine organisms. The surface-active polymer, obtained by grafting fluorinated molecules with hydrophobic and hydrophilic blocks to a block copolymer precursor, showed interesting bioadhesion properties. Two different algal species, one of which adhered strongly to hydrophobic surfaces, and the other, to hydrophilic surfaces, showed notably weak adhesion to the amphiphilic surfaces. Both organisms are known to secrete adhesive macromolecules, with apparently different wetting characteristics, to attach to underwater surfaces. The ability of the amphiphilic surface to undergo an environment-dependent transformation in surface chemistry when in contact with the extracellular polymeric substances is a possible reason for its antifouling nature. Near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy (NEXAFS) was used, in a new approach based on angle-resolved X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), to determine the variation in chemical composition within the top few nanometers of the surface and also to study the surface segregation of the amphiphilic block. A mathematical model to extract depth-profile information from the normalized NEXAFS partial electron yield is developed.

Ballads are a great unsung body of texts that hover on the margins of eighteenth-century literary history without quite being acknowledged by modern scholars of the period. But ballads were a crucial cultural phenomenon in eighteenth-century society, a common experience of rich and poor, so embedded in the soundscape as not to be remarked, any more than the air people breathed. Joseph Addison famously wrote about ballads in three Spectator papers of 1711 (nos. 70, 74, 85), praising the beauties of "The Ballad of Chevy Chase" and "Babes in the Wood." He said: "an ordinary Song or Ballad that is the Delight of the common People, cannot fail to please all such Readers as are not unqualified for the Entertainment by their Affectation or Ignorance" (no. 70). Addison cautioned his audience not to let the ballad's simplicity of style prejudice them against its "true poetical Spirit" or its passionate and beautiful sentiments. He cites the example of the "late Lord Dorset," a man with "the greatest Wit tempered with the greatest Candour ... one of the finest Criticks as well as the best Poets of his Age" who "had a numerous Collection of old English Ballads, and took a particular Pleasure in Reading of them" (no. 74). Ballads were many people's first literary experience in eighteenth-century England and Scotland, whether simple broadsides from which they learned to read or the earliest sung stories that moved them to tears or ignited their imaginations. Oliver Goldsmith loved ballads, and several find their way into The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He wrote in his essay "Happiness" (1759), "The music of Mattei" (the Neopolitan singer La Colonna (1)) "is dissonance to what I felt when our old dairymaid sung me into tears with 'Johnny Armstrong's Last Good Night,' or the cruelty of 'Barbara Allen.'" (2) When Clara Reeve wrote her radical history of the novel, The Progress of Romance (1785), tracing the novel's sources and influences, she insists that the romances--the closest proximate prior prose narrative form--came from earlier ballads. Her intellectual heroine, Euphrasia, quotes Thomas Percy's essay "On the Ancient Metrical Romances," prefixed to the third volume of his Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765), to the effect that romances "may be derived in a lineal descent from the ancient Historical songs of the Gothic bards and scalds" (33). (3) Percy's Reliques was the first literary collection of ballads in England and deeply influenced a generation of poets, including Coleridge and Wordsworth, who, significantly, named their first collection Lyrical Ballads. Thus the rediscovery of ballads as a powerful literary form can be said to have changed the course of literary history. Ballads were more present in eighteenth-century England than literary critics and historians tend to remember. We are so used to making our way in the world with our eyes that we forget what Waiter Ong calls the "lifeworld of the oral/aural past'4--an environment, in the city at least, of street cries and rhymes, bells ringing and chants, work songs and lullabies--an environment in which rags were sought and strawberries sold to the accompaniment of words and musical phrases so familiar that the hearer did not have to understand the words to recognize which peddler was abroad exercising his or her lungs. Ballads were sung in taverns and camps, in dimly lit laborers' cottages, as well as in the blazing halls of the wealthy; they were memorized and transmitted orally by ordinary people as well as by professional singers and actors. They were printed on broadsides and in chapbooks and garlands, and often circulated from print to oral transmission and back again. A ballad might be learned by ear and then written down to save or to remember; or it might be learned from a broadside, remembered, and then passed along orally. From the earliest dawn of printing, broadsides were the comic books and the poster art of the poor: single sheets decorated with woodcuts on which were printed the texts of ballads with the title of the familiar tune to which those words could be sung. …

Inventing a Feminist Institution in Boston: An Informal History of the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies at Radcliffe College RUTH PERRY Massachusetts Institute of Technology JOYCE ANTLER Brandeis University RENEE FALL Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies at Radcliffe College LAURA LEVINE FRADER Northeastern University and Center for European Studies, Harvard University CAROL HURD GREEN Boston College BARBARA HABER Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College ALICE JARDINE Harvard University CHRISTIANE ZEHL ROMERO Tufts University The Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies at Radcliffe College began as a conversation among friends in 1988. Everything followed from this beginning: as feminist scholars we dreamed up the Consortium because we wanted to work together in an institution of our own. That the

Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle‐class woman began to write. (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own)

Sometimes technological change seems the only constant in our lives; in our darker moments, the Frankenstein specter of technology, embodied by the atomic bomb, haunts our collective dreams. The rapidity of technological innovation, and our urgent need to describe and adapt to its effects, may overwhelm the examination of more fundamental questions concerning its nature and its relation to human need. Popular consciousness as well as formal scholarship too often share an overriding concern with the effects of technological change while neglecting to look for the forces driving these changes. The exceptions, welcome and provocative, have been all too rare.' The relation of gender to technology-the effects of technology on women's and men's lives, the ways in which women and men construct and use technology, the theoretical implications of gender socialization for future needs and developments in technology-these connections have yet to be made, this story has yet to be written. Yet it is imperative that as feminists we try to sort out these forces and habits of thought if we want best to influence the directions and uses of rapidly changing technologies.

All the contradictions of the period we call the ‘enlightenment’ were embodied in the life and writings of Mary Astell, a feminist intellectual who lived from 1666 to 1731. She argued for women’s right to an independent intellectual life yet she upheld absolute monarchy in the state. She believed in Reason but distrusted the materialism of the new way of ideas. An extremely devout Anglican, she rigorously observed all the vigils, fasts, and feasts of the established church. Yet her notion of heaven was a rationalist’s notion: a place where all knowledge was complete, all mysteries made clear. ‘Poor we that toil in life’s hard drudgerie,’ she poeticized as a young woman, ‘Pick scraps of Knowledge here and there,/While the blest Souls above do all things know;/All things worthy to be known ….’1 To be in heaven must include being as learned as one wished to be, she thought, dwelling in a society that increasingly valued knowledge as an instrumental means to power, but which steadfastly refused to educate its women.

From the beginning to end, then, landowner's legal history is much to be seen as the effort to overcome the common law rights of daughters. Eileen Spring, Law, Land, and Family , p. 35. The basic kinship structure both in England and in Kandyan Ceylon is unquestionably bilateral but, in both cases, in the property owning sections of society, devices were introduced which greatly restricted the possibility of a female heir who had male siblings from inheriting property in land. These devices were of various kinds and patterned in different ways: they included primogeniture, entailment, and dowry payments in cash and jewellery (rather than land). Edmund Leach, “Complementary Filiation and Bilateral Kinship,” p. 54. Kinship societies are the only truly democratic societies on this planet; for women to share social power again, we must learn from them. Christine Gailey, “Evolutionary Perspectives on Gender Hierarchy,” p. 62. The disinheritance in the title of this chapter refers to the psychological not to say legal disinheritance of daughters that I believe occurred in the eighteenth century as a result of the kinship shift I have been describing. Fictional treatments of the phenomenon vary widely. Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron (1777), like Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), is the wish-fulfillment story of initial disinheritance followed by legitimation and adoption. Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747–8), on the other hand, is more purely tragic about the psychological meaning of disinheritance.

Marriage is a sort of Lottery; nor can all the Precautions in the World insure its certain Happiness. Philogamus, The Present State of Matrimony: or, The Real Causes of Conjugal Infidelity and Unhappy Marriages (1739), p. 33. Jointures and Settlements … are not only the greatest Impediments towards entring into that State [marriage], but also the frequent Causes of Distrust and Animosity in it after it is consummated … I have [long] thought the Coldness of Wives to their Husbands, as well as Disrespect from Children to Parents, to arise from this one Sourse [sic]. This Trade for Minds and Bodies in the Lump, without Regard to either, but as they are accompanied with such Sums of Money, and such Parcels of Land, cannot but produce a Commerce between the Parties concerned suitable to the mean Motives upon which they at first came together. The Tatler , September 12, 1710, from notes by Edward Wortley. Marriage was, for all ranks, the main means of transferring property, occupational status, personal contacts, money, tools, livestock, and women across generations and kin groups. Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 , p. 151. From a 21st-century vantage point looking back three centuries, marriage would seem to be foundational to the meaning of family. But it is by no means clear that marriage was the most significant kin connection in earlier historical periods, even for women, when compared, for example, to daughterhood or sisterhood.

Ruth Perry describes the transformation of the English family as a function of several major social changes taking place in the eighteenth century including the development of a market economy and waged labor, enclosure and the redistribution of land, urbanization, the 'rise' of the middle class, and the development of print culture. In particular, Perry traces the shift from a kinship orientation based on blood relations to a kinship axis constituted by conjugal ties as it is revealed in popular literature of the second half of the eighteenth century. Perry focuses particularly on the effect these changes had on women's position in families. She uses social history, literary analysis and anthropological kinship theory to examine texts by Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Henry MacKenzie, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and many others. This important study by a leading eighteenth-century scholar will be of interest to social and literary historians.

The sentimental ideal of motherhood is the product of the historical separation of public and private spheres that gave gender polarity its present form as an institutionalized opposition between male rationality and maternal nurturance. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination , p. 206. As late as the seventeenth century there were different words in German for aunt and uncle depending on whether one was referring to the mother's or the father's siblings … Not only does it show an awareness of a two-sided kinship, but when one pair of terms was dropped, it was the one for paternal kin ( Vetter and Base ). Oheim and Muhme were transferred to all aunts and uncles. The mother's kin must have been extremely important for those terms to have prevailed. Beatrice Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age , pp. 186–7. But the maternal office was supplied by my aunt, Mrs. Catherine Porten … the true mother of my mind as well as of my health. Edward Gibbon, The Memoirs of the Life of Edward Gibbon , pp. 30, 37. I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible. Jane Austen to Caroline Austen, October 30, 1815. Despite the emphasis on marriage and motherhood in late eighteenth-century society, mothers in novels of the period are notoriously absent – dead or otherwise missing.