The experience of women in the nineteenth century has generated a lot of research in recent decades. This book presents recent scholarship available in a concise resource, providing thus an authoritative source of information and interpretation. The authors emphasize areas in which scholars have identified important changes (such as suffrage and reform), topics in which researchers are now making great strides (such as racial, ethnic, religious, and regional diversity), and innovative and relatively recent explorations (for example, work on female sexuality). Accessible overview articles and alphabetical encyclopedia-like entries are combined in a comprehensive volume. .Part 1 contains a historiographical essay followed by a ten-chapter narrative overview. These chapters include discussions of families and households, labor and the workforce, religion and morality, feminism and equal rights, reform and voluntarism, and more. Part 2 is an A-to-Z listing of concise entries on key terms, notable figures, political movements, social and religious organizations, and legislation.
This book with domestic topics for Victorian women, illustrates women's roles and represents the attempt of the authors to direct women's acquisition and use of a variety of new household consumer goods available in the post-Civil War economic book. It updates Catharine Beecher's influential 'Treatise on domestic economy' (1841) and incorporates domestic writings by Harriet Beecher Stowe first published in The Atlantic in the 1860.