Gender and Power in Britain 1640-1990

Gender and Power in Britain is an original and exciting history of Britain from the early modern period to the present focusing on the interaction of gender and power in political, social, cultural and economic life. Using a chronological framework, the book examines: * the roles, responsibilities and identities of men and women * how power relationships were established within various gender systems * how women and men reacted to the institutions, laws, customs, beliefs and practices that constituted their various worlds * class, racial and ethnic considerations * the role of empire in the development of British institutions and identities * the civil war * twentieth century suffrage * the world wars * industrialisation * Victorian morality.

Kingsley Kent, Susan

List of figures, Acknowledgments, PART I: The seventeenth century: gender and the crises of authority, 1. Challenging authority at mid-century, 2. Restoring authority, 1660-1715, PART II: The eighteenth century: engendering virtue - politics and morality in the age of commercial capitalism, 3. Challenges to virtue: the economic revolutions, 1690-1780, 4. Manly dominions: war and empire, 1689-179, 5. Feminine encroachments: women, culture, and politics, 1740-89, 6. Domesticating revolution, 1789-1815, PART III: The nineteenth century: "the angel in the house" and her critics - virtue and politics in the age of bourgeois liberalism, 7. The virtues of liberalism: consolidating the domestic ideal, 1815-48, 8. "The Sex": women, work, and politics, 1825-80, 9. Imperial manliness, colonial effeminacy: the gender of empire, 1823-73, 10. Liberalism besieged, masculinity under fire, 1873-1911, PART IV: The twentieth century: crises of conflict, crises of gender, 11. Crises of masculinity: sex and war, 1908-18, 12. Searching for peace: the reconstruction of gender, 1919-39, 13. War, welfare, and postwar "consensus," 1939-63, 14. The end of consensus: "permissiveness" and Mrs Thatcher's reaction, 1963-90, Index