I’m a professor of modern Britain with a specialty in nineteenth-century social history. I’m drawn to sources and topics that tell us about how everyday people lived and thought about their lives. One favorite part of my job is the challenge of discovering more about those groups, like working-class women or children, who weren’t the main focus of earlier histories. Since 2000, I’ve taught classes at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, on Victorian Britain, the British Empire, the First World War, and the history of childhood.
It explores the lived experiences of Victorian women in the home, the workplace, and the empire, as well as the ideals of womanhood and femininity during the 19th century. Contrary to popular misconception, many Victorian women performed manual labor for wages directly alongside men, had a political voice before women's suffrage, and otherwise contributed significantly to society outside of the domestic sphere.
The book covers key social, intellectual, and geographical aspects of women's lives, with main chapters on gender and ideals of womanhood, the state, religion, home and family, the body, childhood and youth, paid labor and professional work, urban life, and imperialism.
I love this book for what it teaches us about the global nineteenth century and the complexities of identity.
Seacole traveled widely as a medical practitioner—from Kingston to London, Cruces to the Crimea, and eventually settled in England. Identifying herself as a “doctress,” an “unprotected female,” and “Mother Seacole,” she underscored the plasticity of Victorian gender ideals of separate spheres as she claimed her role on the battlefront.
She condemned the racism she faced as a Black Creole woman, yet also supported the British empire. Most of all, as my students often point out, she had the bravery to tell her own story.
Written in 1857, this is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale's during the Crimean War. Seacole's offer to volunteer as a nurse in the war met with racism and refusal. Undaunted, Seacole set out independently to the Crimea where she acted as doctor and 'mother' to wounded soldiers while running her business, the 'British Hotel'. A witness to key battles, she gives vivid accounts of how she coped with disease, bombardment and other hardships at the Crimean battlefront. "In her introduction to the very welcome Penguin edition, Sara Salih expertly analyses the rhetorical complexities of…
I’m captivated by Caroline Norton’s spirit and contradictions. She fought against inequality in English laws regarding child custody, marriage, divorce, contracts, property, and wages. But she continually maintained that she was against the idea of women’s suffrage or equality with men, writing instead that she claimed only one right: the right of women’s protection under the law.
I appreciate how she makes us think about the law in new ways, and also admire her candid writing about domestic violence. When her brutal husband destroyed her letters, attacked her, and took away her children and her income, she promised that as long as he held her copyrights, all her future writings would address only the issue of women and the law.
This account of the author's experience at the hands of an "imperfect state of law" in early 19th-century England makes a passionate plea for equal justice for women. Largely as a result of this book the passage of the Married Women's Property Act and reform of the English Marriage and Divorce Laws occurred some years later.
This is one of the first books that I remember buying for myself in graduate school. Cullwick’s descriptions of her relationship with upper-class Arthur Munby (whom she eventually married) and the photographs of her dressed as a maid-of-all-work, a lady, a “slave,” an agricultural worker, and a valet highlight Victorian power negotiations and performativity.
Cullwick started working as a servant at the age of eight. From her diaries, I learned much about the daily lives of domestic servants: their relationships with employers, the different levels of service and employment networks, and the sheer amount of hard, physical labor that it took to run a Victorian household.
"Hannah Cullwick (1833-1909) worked all her life as a maidservant, scullion, and pot-girl. In 1854 she met Arthur Munby, 'man of two worlds,' upper-class author and poet, with a lifelong obsession for lower-class women. And so began their strange and secret romance of eighteen years and marriage of thiry-six, lived largely apart. Hannah's diaries, written on Munby's suggestion, offer an obsorbing account of life 'below stairs' in Victorian England. But they reveal, too, a woman of extraordinary independence of will, whose chosen life of drudgery gave her the freedom not to 'play the Lady,' as Munby demanded. Rescued from obscurity.…
Yes, this is a domestic guide on how to create the ideal household, but it’s so much more than that!
I love that Beeton opens her book by comparing the mistress of the house to an army commander. The book includes hundreds of recipes, along with all kinds of domestic advice: how to hire servants, how to purchase a house, how to revive a child from a coma, how to set a broken bone, and how to treat opium overdose.
Best of all is the irony that the author of this middle-class domestic ideal worked outside the home alongside her publisher husband not only on The Book of Household Management but also as journalist and co-editor of The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.
I had read about the protest that Ellen and William Craft staged along with other abolitionists at the Crystal Palace Great Exhibition of 1851 and wanted to know more, which is what led me to this book.
Woo expertly brings attention to the international networks of abolitionist activism and to the intersections of gender, race, and class, starting with Ellen Craft’s escape from slavery dressed as an elite white man.
I also appreciate that Woo models how to write about complex theoretical ideas and histories with clarity and precision while telling a powerful story. The book is a page-turner!
The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as "his" slave.
In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the…
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping seven years earlier—an arrest she’d never bothered to tell Russ about.
Miranda tries to explain that she was only helping her best friend, in the midst of a nasty custody battle, take her daughter to visit her parents in Israel. As Miranda struggles to prove that she’s not a criminal, she stumbles into other secrets that will challenge what she thought she knew about her own family, her friend, Russ—and herself.
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping seven years earlier—an arrest she’d never bothered to tell Russ about.
Miranda tries to explain that she was only helping her best friend, in the midst of a nasty custody battle, take her daughter to visit her parents in Israel. As Miranda struggles to prove that she’s not…
Interested in
Victorian,
slaves,
and
presidential biography?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
Victorian,
slaves,
and
presidential biography.
