This course examines the lives and times of London women over the past three centuries from a social history perspective. It includes studies of: the notion of women being regarded as ‘the weaker vessel’;
‘domestic ideology’; marriage in aristocratic circles; the burgeoning feminist movement; a revisionist appraisal of Queen Victoria; the militant campaign for women’s suffrage and the changing role of women during two world wars and the political, and socio-economic impact on their lives.
Learning outcomes:
Students who complete the course will have developed a good understanding of how women in London existed, acted and thought during the past three hundred years. They will appreciate and reflect on the complexity and diversity of situations, events and past mentalities. Students will read texts and course materials paying attention to critical and conceptual frameworks, and the tasks required of them will enable them to build and write a research essay based on library, museum and archival sources. They will develop an ability to gather, organize and deploy information and gain familiarity with appropriate means of finding, retrieving, sorting and exchanging information. Sharing and discussing their experiences will improve their skills of communication and ability to present their findings in an engaging and cogent manner. Bibliographical skills will also be enhanced by the completion of this course.
Method of presentation:
Lectures, seminars, student presentations
Field study:
Visits to London museums, galleries and archives; and walking tours guided by the professor.
Required work and form of assessment:
Punctuality, preparation and class participation (20%); open-book mid-term exam (20%); Research paper (3,500-word minimum) using primary sources as much as possible (30%); and a Final open-book exam (30%).
content:
Week 1: ‘The Weaker Vessel’
Students will be presented with an outline of the course orientated to what will be required of them. A lecture will be given on the notion of women being regarded as ‘the weaker vessel’, an ideology which persisted throughout the early modern period and lasted until the outbreak of the First World War. Two introductory key texts will be analyzed for the tyranny of language which informed many attitudes – male and female – to women in the period under review.
Week 2: The Material Culture of Women’s Lives
Led by their professor, students will spend this session at the Museum of London where they will complete the task: Where are the women? This will involve them making an audit of the artefacts, displays and interpretational texts about women in London from the mid 17th to the early 20th century galleries.
Week 3: A Woman’s Place is in the Home
The origins and prevalence of ‘domestic ideology’, the notion of ‘the two spheres’ will be presented in an illustrated lecture. Drawing on material gathered at the Museum of London, students will be apprised of the importance of the late 18th century dogma which insisted that a woman’s place was in the home and nowhere else. With the exception of the poorest women who had to go out to work, this orthodoxy was a severe impediment to women who wanted or needed a life beyond the confines of their home. It was an ideology which was contested by the burgeoning 19th century feminist movement which would derive much of its vigour and intellectual discourse from Mary Wollstonecraft.
Week 4: Visit to the Women’s Library
The professor will lead the morning session at the Women’s Library, an important archive of the history of British women. Students will be required to analyse archival material and consult key texts on the subject of their research essay.
Week 5: Aristocratic Marriages in 18th Century London
This lecture will illuminate the reality of many marriages at the highest level of society in 18th century London. Marriages within the social elite were about land and money and trunks of cash and jewelry rather than
romantic love, and a young woman was often prized for her dowry or portion more than her looks and
personality. The practice of primogeniture will be discussed and the consequences it had on the lives of the women, percolating from aristocratic circles down to the middle class. There will be a screening of Persuasion, by Jane Austen.
Week 6: ‘Hyenas in Petticoats’ and ‘Vixens in Velvet’
These were terms of abuse hurled at feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft down to the doughty campaigners of the 19th century. This lecture provides the history of 19th century feminists’ challenges to the many socio- economic, political and legal inequalities which existed in all women’s lives. The widespread and ingrained belief in women as ‘weaker vessels’ and passive and meek ‘angels of the hearth’ would be the context of the
important feminist struggles of the 1800s.
Week 7: Different Lives: Queen Victoria and working women in 19th Century London
A revisionist study of Queen Victoria’s private life will be juxtaposed with the living and working conditions of thousands of working-class women in London during her reign. Feminist campaigners found her a powerful role model, probably due to the fact that she ruled over a quarter of the earth’s land mass and a quarter of the earth’s population, yet had no time for ‘the mad folly of women’s rights’
Week 8: Rise Up Women! The Suffragette Campaign for the Vote
An illustrated lecture will outline the narrative of the daring and dangerous militant campaign for women’s suffrage from the founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 to the granting of the first instalment of the vote in 1918.
Week 9: In the Footsteps of the Suffragettes
Led by the professor, students will be taken on a walking tour of Westminster and Whitehall, up to Buckingham
Palace which was the suffragettes’ battleground with the police and the Liberal government.
Week 10: ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’
An illustrated lecture will be presented on women’s work during the First World War, 1914-1918. In a previously unthinkable development, women took over every aspect of men’s work (except underground coal mining) during these years. The huge loss of (male) life and the massive cultural shift of women doing men’s work would have profound implications for women’s lives – not least the granting of the first instalment of the vote in 1918 – during the 1920s and 1930s.
Week 11: Visit to the Imperial War Museum
Led by the professor students will visit the Imperial War Museum and make an audit of the artefacts and displays interpreting women’s work in the First and Second World Wars.
Week 12: Women of the London ‘Blitz’
Drawing on findings made at the Imperial Museum, an illustrated lecture will be given on the role of women during the Second World War, 1939-1945 and its impact on women’s lives in the 1950s and beyond.
Required readings:
Inwood, Stephen, A History of London, Macmillan, 2000
Recommended readings:
Key chapters from key books and a variety of primary sources will be presented in the reading pack for the course.
Brief Biography of Instructor:
Dr. Diane Atkinson holds a Ph.D. on the politics of women’s sweated labour, 1810-1910, from the University of London. She also has an M.A. in Life-Writing from the internationally renowned Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia. She has lectured on the social history of London at the Museum of London where in 1992 she curated the major groundbreaking exhibition Purple, White and Green: the Suffragettes in London 1906-1914. In 1996 she was commissioned by the Fawcett Society to curate and write the book for the exhibition Funny Girls Cartooning for Equality, the foreword of which was written by the Honourable Betty Boothroyd, the first women Speaker of the House of Commons. She has written several books on the suffragettes. Her most recent titles are Love and Dirt: the Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick published by Macmillan in 2003, and Elsie and Mairi Go To War: Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front, published by Preface/ Random House in 2009.
This course examines the lives and times of London women over the past three centuries from a social history perspective. It includes studies of: the notion of women being regarded as ‘the weaker vessel’;
‘domestic ideology’; marriage in aristocratic circles; the burgeoning feminist movement; a revisionist appraisal of Queen Victoria; the militant campaign for women’s suffrage and the changing role of women during two world wars and the political, and socio-economic impact on their lives.
Students who complete the course will have developed a good understanding of how women in London existed, acted and thought during the past three hundred years. They will appreciate and reflect on the complexity and diversity of situations, events and past mentalities. Students will read texts and course materials paying attention to critical and conceptual frameworks, and the tasks required of them will enable them to build and write a research essay based on library, museum and archival sources. They will develop an ability to gather, organize and deploy information and gain familiarity with appropriate means of finding, retrieving, sorting and exchanging information. Sharing and discussing their experiences will improve their skills of communication and ability to present their findings in an engaging and cogent manner. Bibliographical skills will also be enhanced by the completion of this course.
Lectures, seminars, student presentations
Visits to London museums, galleries and archives; and walking tours guided by the professor.
Punctuality, preparation and class participation (20%); open-book mid-term exam (20%); Research paper (3,500-word minimum) using primary sources as much as possible (30%); and a Final open-book exam (30%).
Week 1: ‘The Weaker Vessel’
Students will be presented with an outline of the course orientated to what will be required of them. A lecture will be given on the notion of women being regarded as ‘the weaker vessel’, an ideology which persisted throughout the early modern period and lasted until the outbreak of the First World War. Two introductory key texts will be analyzed for the tyranny of language which informed many attitudes – male and female – to women in the period under review.
Week 2: The Material Culture of Women’s Lives
Led by their professor, students will spend this session at the Museum of London where they will complete the task: Where are the women? This will involve them making an audit of the artefacts, displays and interpretational texts about women in London from the mid 17th to the early 20th century galleries.
Week 3: A Woman’s Place is in the Home
The origins and prevalence of ‘domestic ideology’, the notion of ‘the two spheres’ will be presented in an illustrated lecture. Drawing on material gathered at the Museum of London, students will be apprised of the importance of the late 18th century dogma which insisted that a woman’s place was in the home and nowhere else. With the exception of the poorest women who had to go out to work, this orthodoxy was a severe impediment to women who wanted or needed a life beyond the confines of their home. It was an ideology which was contested by the burgeoning 19th century feminist movement which would derive much of its vigour and intellectual discourse from Mary Wollstonecraft.
Week 4: Visit to the Women’s Library
The professor will lead the morning session at the Women’s Library, an important archive of the history of British women. Students will be required to analyse archival material and consult key texts on the subject of their research essay.
Week 5: Aristocratic Marriages in 18th Century London
This lecture will illuminate the reality of many marriages at the highest level of society in 18th century London. Marriages within the social elite were about land and money and trunks of cash and jewelry rather than
romantic love, and a young woman was often prized for her dowry or portion more than her looks and
personality. The practice of primogeniture will be discussed and the consequences it had on the lives of the women, percolating from aristocratic circles down to the middle class. There will be a screening of Persuasion, by Jane Austen.
Week 6: ‘Hyenas in Petticoats’ and ‘Vixens in Velvet’
These were terms of abuse hurled at feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft down to the doughty campaigners of the 19th century. This lecture provides the history of 19th century feminists’ challenges to the many socio- economic, political and legal inequalities which existed in all women’s lives. The widespread and ingrained belief in women as ‘weaker vessels’ and passive and meek ‘angels of the hearth’ would be the context of the
important feminist struggles of the 1800s.
Week 7: Different Lives: Queen Victoria and working women in 19th Century London
A revisionist study of Queen Victoria’s private life will be juxtaposed with the living and working conditions of thousands of working-class women in London during her reign. Feminist campaigners found her a powerful role model, probably due to the fact that she ruled over a quarter of the earth’s land mass and a quarter of the earth’s population, yet had no time for ‘the mad folly of women’s rights’
Week 8: Rise Up Women! The Suffragette Campaign for the Vote
An illustrated lecture will outline the narrative of the daring and dangerous militant campaign for women’s suffrage from the founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 to the granting of the first instalment of the vote in 1918.
Week 9: In the Footsteps of the Suffragettes
Led by the professor, students will be taken on a walking tour of Westminster and Whitehall, up to Buckingham
Palace which was the suffragettes’ battleground with the police and the Liberal government.
Week 10: ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’
An illustrated lecture will be presented on women’s work during the First World War, 1914-1918. In a previously unthinkable development, women took over every aspect of men’s work (except underground coal mining) during these years. The huge loss of (male) life and the massive cultural shift of women doing men’s work would have profound implications for women’s lives – not least the granting of the first instalment of the vote in 1918 – during the 1920s and 1930s.
Week 11: Visit to the Imperial War Museum
Led by the professor students will visit the Imperial War Museum and make an audit of the artefacts and displays interpreting women’s work in the First and Second World Wars.
Week 12: Women of the London ‘Blitz’
Drawing on findings made at the Imperial Museum, an illustrated lecture will be given on the role of women during the Second World War, 1939-1945 and its impact on women’s lives in the 1950s and beyond.
Inwood, Stephen, A History of London, Macmillan, 2000
Key chapters from key books and a variety of primary sources will be presented in the reading pack for the course.
Dr. Diane Atkinson holds a Ph.D. on the politics of women’s sweated labour, 1810-1910, from the University of London. She also has an M.A. in Life-Writing from the internationally renowned Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia. She has lectured on the social history of London at the Museum of London where in 1992 she curated the major groundbreaking exhibition Purple, White and Green: the Suffragettes in London 1906-1914. In 1996 she was commissioned by the Fawcett Society to curate and write the book for the exhibition Funny Girls Cartooning for Equality, the foreword of which was written by the Honourable Betty Boothroyd, the first women Speaker of the House of Commons. She has written several books on the suffragettes. Her most recent titles are Love and Dirt: the Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick published by Macmillan in 2003, and Elsie and Mairi Go To War: Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front, published by Preface/ Random House in 2009.