Insolvent Women

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asiya Siddiqi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Social Standing ◽  
Indian Women

Our study of insolvency records affords a rare glimpse into the lives of women from different social classes and milieus in Bombay during the mid-nineteenth century. Contrary to colonial stereotypes of Indian women as trapped in oppressive patriarchal relationships, and as weak and helpless, we find that many had independent incomes, owned property, and enjoyed power in the domain of the home and family life. Women from wealthy merchant families actually owned and controlled much of the borrowed capital. We infer from the insolvency records that women who were not wealthy and worked for their livelihood also had considerable agency. In our study, about 38% of the women who petitioned the insolvency courts for protections were dancing girls, courtesans, and prostitutes who had independent incomes and were directly affected by the crash. The incomes of dancing girls and courtesans were low as a whole but varied greatly, as did their social standing and levels of literacy.

Childbearing and Childrearing

2019 ◽  
pp. 18-43
Author(s):  
Brianna Theobald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Older Women ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Government Employees ◽  
Pregnancy And Childbirth ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter lays the groundwork for the book’s use of the Crow Reservation in Montana as an extended case study. After providing an overview of Crow history to the late nineteenth century, the chapter sketches the parameters of a Crow birthing culture that prevailed in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Crow women navigated pregnancy and childbirth within female generational networks; viewed childbirth as a sex-segregated social process; and placed their trust in the midwifery services of older women. The chapter further explores government employees’ attitudes toward and interventions in Indigenous pregnancy, childbirth, and especially family life in these years, as these ostensibly private domains emerged as touchstones in the federal government’s ongoing assimilation efforts.

Property, Privilege and Politics: The Coroner in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1801–1846

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Michelle McCann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Work Experience ◽  
Social Standing ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Alliances ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the function, status and qualifications of the men that served in the role of county coroner in Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century. This remains an under-researched area when compared to other local government figures of authority. The history of the office exposes tensions within a politically polarised society and the need for changes in legislation. A combination of factors initially undermined the social standing and reputation of coroners. An examination of the legislation on coroners that the administration subsequently introduced suggests that the authority of the office in early-nineteenth-century Ireland was not strictly jurisprudential, but political and confessional by nature. By analysing the personal background, work experience, social standing, political alliances and religious patronage of coroner William Charles Waddell (1798-1878), the paper charts the wider social and political narrative that allowed this eminently respectable Presbyterian figure to secure the role of coroner of County Monaghan.

scholarly journals Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make “Lady Doctors for India,” 1874–1885

1996 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoinette Burton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
London School ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Imperial Culture ◽  
Women's Medicine ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Scholarly Production

Recent work in British studies suggests that the project of historicizing the institutions and cultural practices of British imperialism is crucial to understanding metropolitan society in the nineteenth century. Monographs by Catherine Hall, Thomas C. Holt, and Jenny Sharpe, together with the impressive nineteen-volume series on Studies in Imperial Culture, edited by John Mackenzie—to name just a few examples of scholarly production in this field—have effectively relocated the operations of imperial culture at the heart of the empire itself. By scrutinizing arenas as diverse as the English novel, governmental policy making at the highest levels, and the ephemera of consumer culture, scholars of the Victorian period are in the process of giving historical weight and evidentiary depth to Edward Said's claim that “we are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies.”The origins of the London School of Medicine for Women (LSMW), its concern for Indian women in the zenana (sex-segregated spaces), and the embeddedness of its institutional development in Victorian imperial mentalities is one discrete example of how ostensibly “domestic” institutions were bound up with the empire and its projects in nineteenth-century Britain. As this essay will demonstrate, the conviction that Indian women were trapped in the “sunless, airless,” and allegedly unhygienic Oriental zenana motivated the institutionalization of women's medicine and was crucial to the professionalization of women doctors in Victorian Britain. One need only scratch the surface of the archive of British women's entry into the medical profession to find traces of the colonial concerns that motivated some of its leading lights.

The Spa: Emotional Economy and Social Classes in Nineteenth-Century Pyrmont

2002 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heikki Lempa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Mineral Springs ◽  
Mineral Spring ◽  
German Speaking

In 1835, Ferdinand Gustav Kühne, a Saxon writer and teacher, estimated that the Germanic realm was inundated with spas and that nowhere else were there as many as in Central Europe. In France there were “only ten springs, in Italy eight, Hungary had twelve, Sweden three, Spain two, England two, in Denmark and in vast Russia there was only one mineral spring of note in each, whereas in German-speaking countries, that is, including Bohemia and Switzerland, 149 facilities claimed to possess healing springs.” Although Kühne's estimate of foreign spas was too low—according to recent studies, the number of spas in England and France was significantly higher—contemporary accounts and recent local studies support his finding that Germans had the most bathing facilities in Europe. Fred Kaspar has isolated ninety-nine spas and mineral springs in Westphalia alone. Beginning in the last third of the eighteenth century, the number of spas and spa goers in particular increased rapidly in the Germanic realm. Only 200 guests came to the Kissingen spa in the summer of 1800, whereas fifty years later there were close to 4,000 and by the turn of the century 15,000 guests proper and more than 20,000 day visitors. Pyrmont, one of the most popular spas in the eighteenth century, started with 1,424 guests proper (not including peasants who were not considered guests proper) reaching 2,800 guests by the middle of the century, and around 19,000 by 1900.

The End of Love

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Horowitz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Public Life ◽  
July Monarchy ◽  
Nineteenth Century France

When the duc de Choiseul-Praslin, a politician and prominent member of the French aristocracy, killed his wife and then poisoned himself in August 1847, the case shook the foundations of the July Monarchy. In the wake of the affair, conservatives used the murder/suicide to argue that love was a respect for hierarchy, while those on the left saw violence and anomie as stemming from inequality. However, both sides saw women’s affections as crucial to public life and social cohesion. This article thus situates the Choiseul-Praslin affair within the politics of affection and family life in mid-nineteenth-century France.

scholarly journals To Love, Honour and Obey

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-140
Author(s):  
Kathryn Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Wife Battering

This paper aims to reconstruct some of the causes and the context of wife-battering in Montreal between the years 1869-1879. It seeks to determine what the immediate causes were as well as the underlying factors that shaped these conflicts. It also describes how the individuals involved responded, what the role of neighbours was and how this problem was viewed by the society at large. At a broader level, this research seeks to insert one largely ignored aspect of women's lived experience into the historical record while furthering our knowledge of relationships between men and women and working-class family life in general in the mid nineteenth century.

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Richard Owen and monotreme oviparity.

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart Nicol
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Egg Laying ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Richard Owen ◽  
Initial Description ◽  
Social Conservatives

Most biologists, particularly Australian biologists, are aware that the initial description and attempts to classify the echidna and platypus were surrounded by controversy. Fewer are aware of the important roles played by two eminent scientists, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in Paris and Richard Owen in London, in the debate as to whether the platypus and echidna were really mammals, and whether they laid eggs. Geoffroy argued that they were egg-laying but could not possibly lactate; Owen argued that they lactated but could not possibly lay eggs. Because of these and many other aspects of their biology, monotremes featured prominently in debates about classification of animals and the transmutation of species, and involved many important scientists of the time. These arguments can only be understood in the context of the development of science in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, and how that was influenced by the social context. Early ideas of evolution, or transformism, were attractive to radical thinkers, whereas social conservatives were anxious to show that the boundaries between types of animals, just like the boundaries between social classes, were erected by God and could not be crossed.

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