Suchergebnisse

Friendly societies gave working people an element of security through mutual insurance against sickness, while also offering opportunities for regular, sometimes ritual-based, sociability. Their history has often been viewed as a part of labour history and dominated by the associational patterns of skilled men. More recently much has been done by social historians to explore friendly societies as fraternal associations through which different kinds of identities, including gender identities, might be developed. The regional diversity and the heterogeneity of male societies before 1830 have been emphasised. This paper examines the appearance of female friendly societies in Scotland between c. 1790 and 1830, set against the growth of male friendly societies: sixty-six female societies and over 1500 male societies have been identified. The previously unexplored development of female friendly societies in Scotland has also been compared to existing literature on such societies in England and Wales. Like them, Scottish women's societies were unlikely to be occupationally based, and much more likely to relate to neighbourhood and community ties and to be committed to values of respectability. Their regulations were likely to reflect women's dual identities as workers and carers for their families. Elite women found in them opportunities to extend their own local influence in a philanthropy directed towards mutual self-help. But the growth of Scottish female societies followed a different chronology from those of England and Wales, and had a different regional distribution, concentrated in south-west Scotland and largely absent from major cities.

Both Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Hamilton drew extensively on Scottish moral philosophy, and especially on the work of Dugald Stewart, in constructing educational programmes that rested on the assumption that women, and especially mothers, were intellectually capable of understanding the importance of the early association of ideas in the training of children's emotions and reasoning powers. As liberals they found in Stewart's work routes toward intellectual and social progress-both for women and for their society as a whole-that stopped short of radical politics and preserved moral certainties compatible with Christian faith. Both were assailed by Evangelical critics; Edgeworth acquired an undeserved reputation for infidelity, but Hamilton resolutely defended her committed but nonsectarian Christian faith, as she broadened her ambitions towards making her own contribution to the philosophy of mind, which she argued was relevant to the education of all classes in a modernising society. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Books reviewed in this article:Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928Peter Gordon and David Doughan, with a foreword by Sheila Rowbotham, Dictionary of British Women's Organisations 1825–1960Sybil Oldfield, Collective Biography of Women in Britain, 1550–1900: A Select Annotated Bibliography

In Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the contrast between 'public' and 'private' worlds drew not on one, but on multiple, contrasts. However, recognising such variations does not necessarily provide us with new analytical tools. This article examines some of the ways in which twentieth‐century commentators have attempted to categorise these contrasts. In particular the article critically engages with Habermas's definition of the public sphere and suggests the advantages and disadvantages of using his notion through a discussion of the relationship of the British women's suffrage movement to the debate over citizenship in the 1860s.