Research Catalog

Regulating womanhood : historical essays on marriage, motherhood, and sexuality / edited by Carol Smart.

Title: Regulating womanhood : historical essays on marriage, motherhood, and sexuality / edited by Carol Smart.
Publication: London ; New York : Routledge, 1992.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	HQ 1236 .R43 1992	Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Smart, Carol

Description

ix, 233 p. : ill.; 23 cm.

Summary

Sexuality, motherhood and marriage were matters of public policy throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were prominent areas in the regulation of women, but the idea that the law merely reflected what was normal and natural obscured the extent of this regulation. Regulating Womanhood poses historically and culturally specific questions about the mechanisms that have controlled and restricted women. It shows not merely how laws and policies have set boundaries to the lives of women but also how the category of 'woman' has been constructed as a specific object for legal and social policy, and how women came to be seen as needing 'special' regulation. In addition, Regulating Womanhood explores how children and the organisation of reproduction and sexuality operated to normalise and make acceptable the degree of regulation to which women were subjected. Yet this is not a catalogue of the unmitigated subjection of women in history. The contributors focus on women's resistance and activity, and on the shift in modes of regulation, to challenge the idea of an unchanging history of the legal oppression of women.

Subject

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

committed to retain

Contents

Disruptive bodies and unruly sex : the regulation of reproduction and sexuality in the nineteenth century / Carol Smart -- Feminist vigilantes of late-victorian England / Lucy Bland -- Child sexual abuse and the regulation of women : variations on a theme / Carol-Ann Hooper -- Women and late-nineteenth-century social work / Jane Lewis -- Producers of legitimacy : homes for unmarried mothers in the 1950's / Martine Spensky -- Representing childhood : the multiple fathers of the Dionne quintuplets / Mariana Valverde -- Whose property? The double standard of adultery in nineteenth-century law / Ursula Vogel -- Mothers as citizens : feminism, evolutionary theory and the reform of Dutch family law 1870-1910 / Selma Sevenhuijsen -- Humanity or justice? Wifebeating and the law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / Anna Clark.

ISBN

041506080X

LCCN

^^^91020286^

OCLC

24011438
SCSB-9999587

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library