During the nineteenth century, European women of all countries and social classes experienced many changes in their familial, working and political lives. In this study three themes are united: 1) the tension between tradition and modernity, 2) the changing relationship between the community and individual, 3) the shifting boundaries between public and private.
The essays in this book explore what the material culture - the objects that we own and which surround us in everyday culture -in Great Britain from 1600-1940 tells us about gendered identities and how gender reveals meaning of spaces and things. The essays are written by scholars in a range of history-related disciplines. The essays offers exposés of research methods and interests with the aim of demonstrating to students and other researchers how a relationship between material culture and gender is being addressed. .Contains: Introduction: gender and material culture : Gender and material culture in the early modern London guilds : Women's letters: eighteenth-century letter-writing and the life of the mind : Men's hair: managing appearances in the long eighteenth century : Craftsmen in common: objects, skills and masculinity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries : Stitching women: unpicking histories of Victorian clothes : Grooming men: the material world of the nineteenth-century barbershop : Queer things: men and make-up between the wars : Manly drinkers: masculinity and material culture in the interwar public house. .The list of resources contains online museum and gallery catalogues, projects and blogs.