You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In 1965, at the age of twenty-nine, the young sociologist Hannah Gavron took her own life. A year later, the book based on the research she carried out for her thesis was published as The Captive Wife. Based on first-hand accounts of the lives of working-class and middle-class women in Kentish Town in London, it was one of the earliest works of British, sociological feminism and has since become a feminist classic. Arguing that motherhood stripped women of independence as it often brought an end to paid work, Gavron explores how their values and aspirations as women came into conflict with the traditional role they had to play as mothers. Written in simple prose and fair-minded in its approach, it became an inspirational book for many mothers, feminists and activists seeking equality for women and remains a vital book today. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Ann Oakley.
Hannah Gavron's classic study of housebound mothers will be of interest to students of the family and methodology alike.
Whose stories deserve to be told? And whose words should do the telling? In Felix Culpa, Jeremy Gavron conjures up a work of extraordinary literary alchemy: a novel made out of lines taken from a hundred great works of literature. It follows a writer on the trail of a boy recently released from prison, who has been discovered dead in the cold north, frozen and alone. But in searching for the boy’s story, will he lose his own? Magical and moving, Felix Culpa is a living demonstration of how storytelling works, by sound and by rhythm, by elision and by omission, as well as by reference and by allusion. It asks what happens when we lose the narrative of our own life, and fall into someone else’s.
Father and daughter provides an unique Ôinsider perspectiveÕ on two key figures in twentieth-century British social science. Ann Oakley, a highly respected sociologist and best-selling writer, draws on her own life and that of her father, Richard Titmuss, a well-known policy analyst and defender of the welfare state, to offer an absorbing view of the connections between private lives and public work. Using an innovative mix of biography, autobiography, intellectual history, archives, and personal interviews, some of which have not been previously available to the public, she provides a compelling narrative about gender, patriarchy, methodology, and the politics of memory and identity. This fascinating analysis defies the usual social science publications to offer a truly distinctive account which will be of wide interest.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 GORDON BURN PRIZE It's 1965, and in Primrose Hill, north London, a beautiful young woman has just gassed herself to death, leaving behind a suicide note, two small children, and an about-to-be-published manuscript: The Captive Wife. Like Sylvia Plath, who died in eerily similar circumstances two years earlier just two streets away, Hannah Gavron was a writer. But no-one had ever imagined that she might take her own life. Bright, sophisticated, and swept up in the progressive politics of the 1960s, Hannah was a promising academic and the wife of a rising entrepreneur. Surrounded by success, she seemed to live a gilded life. But there was another side to Hannah, as Jer...
Private life has altered beyond all recognition during the past one hundred years. Britain in 1900 was emerging from a Victorian era in which prudery, patriarchal authority, and pettifogging rules of etiquette were widely perceived to have circumscribed relations between men and women. The twentieth century witnessed a reaction against this system of separate spheres spearheaded by reformers eager that the sexes become each other's equals and intimates. Modern Love traces the trajectory of this new model of personal relationships over the course of the twentieth century, from its emergence out of the crucible of the suffrage campaign through its reshaping by the women's liberation movement. It explores its impact on smut merchants, warring couples, and teenagers, as well as its reception by such diverse figures as Bertrand Russell and Germaine Greer. It draws on sources as varied as suffragette propaganda, banned sex manuals, marriage counseling literature and pin-up magazines. Marcus Collins teaches modern British history at Emory University.
Focusing on the human story, journalist Daniel Gavron movingly portrays the fears, regrets and hopes of members of kibbutzim ranging from traditional to modern and agricultural to urban.
Spanning the century from the Taiping Rebellion through the establishment of the People's Republic of China, this is the first comprehensive history of women in modern China. Its scope is broad, encompassing political, economic, military, and cultural history, and drawing upon Chinese and Japanese sources untapped by Western scholars. The book presents new information on a wide range of topics: the impact of Western ideas on women, especially in education; the importance of women in the labor force; the relative independence enjoyed by some women textile workers; the struggle against footbinding; the influence of anarchism; the participation of a women's brigade in the Revolution of 1911; th...
"The short dirk in the hands of Muriel Spark has always been a deadly weapon," said The New York Times, and "never more so than in The Abbess of Crewe." An elegant little fable about intrigue, corruption, and electronic surveillance, The Abbess of Crewe is set in an English Benedictine convent. Steely and silky Abbess Alexandra (whose aristocratic tastes run to pâté, fine wine, English poetry, and carpets of "amorous green") has bugged the convent, and rigged her election. But the cat gets out of the bag, and--plunged into scandal--the serene Abbess faces a Vatican inquiry.
A New York Times bestseller From the author of the international bestseller Girl With A Pearl Earring and At the Edge of the Orchard, Tracy Chevalier once again paints a distant age with a rich and provocative palette of characters. Falling Angels follows the fortunes of two families in the emerging years of the twentieth century in England, while the Queen's death reverberates through a changing nation. Told through a variety of shifting perspectives—wives and husbands, friends and lovers, masters and their servants, and a gravedigger's son—Falling Angels is graced with the luminous imagery that distinguished Girl With a Pearl Earring, Falling Angels is another dazzling tour de force from this "master of voices" (The New York Times Book Review).