Secret Gardens Satanic Mills

Essays on the history of girlhood in modern Europe.

In the public imagination, Silicon Valley embodies the newest of the new—the cutting edge, the forefront of our social networks and our globally interconnected lives. But the pressures exerted on many of today’s communications tech workers mirror those of a much earlier generation of laborers in a very different space: the London workforce that helped launch and shape the massive telecommunications systems operating at the turn of the twentieth century. As the Victorian age ended, affluent Britons came to rely on information exchanged along telegraph and telephone wires for seamless communication: an efficient and impersonal mode of sharing thoughts, demands, and desires. This embrace of seemingly unmediated communication obscured the labor involved in the smooth operation of the network, much as our reliance on social media and app interfaces does today. Serving a Wired World is a history of information service work embedded in the daily maintenance of liberal Britain and the status quo in the early years of the twentieth century. As Katie Hindmarch-Watson shows, the administrators and engineers who crafted these telecommunications systems created networks according to conventional gender perceptions and social hierarchies, modeling the operation of the networks on the dynamic between master and servant. Despite attempts to render telegraphists and telephone operators invisible, these workers were quite aware of their crucial role in modern life, and they posed creative challenges to their marginalized status—from organizing labor strikes to participating in deviant sexual exchanges. In unexpected ways, these workers turned a flatly neutral telecommunications network into a revolutionary one, challenging the status quo in ways familiar today.

The Global History of Childhood Reader provides an essential collection of chapters and articles on the global history of childhood. The Reader is structured thematically so as to provide both a representative sampling of the historiography as well as an overview of the key issues of the field, such as childhood as a social construct, commonalities and differences globally, and why the twentieth century was not the "century of the child" for most of the world’s children. The Reader is divided into four parts: Theories and methodologies of the history of childhood Constructions of childhood in different times and places Children’s experiences in different times and places Usage of the past to articulate solutions to problems facing children today. Topics covered include theories and methodologies in the global history of childhood, sources for writing a global history of childhood, education, gender, disability, race, class and religion, the individual in history and emotions, violence, labour and illiteracy. With introductions that contextualize each of the four parts and the articles, further reading sections and questions; this is the perfect guide for all students of the history of childhood.

This Handbook brings together leading interdisciplinary scholarship on the gendered nature of the international political economy. Spanning a wide range of theoretical traditions and empirical foci, it explores the multifaceted ways in which gender relations constitute and are shaped by global politico-economic processes. It further interrogates the gendered ideologies and discourses that underpin everyday practices from the local to the global. The chapters in this collection identify, analyse, critique and challenge gender-based inequalities, whilst also highlighting the intersectional nature of gendered oppressions in the contemporary world order.

Girlhood, interdisciplinary and global in source, scope, and methodology, examines the centrality of girlhood in shaping women's lives. Scholars study how age and gender, along with a multitude of other identities, work together to influence the historical experience. Spanning a broad time frame from 1750 to the present, essays illuminate the various continuities and differences in girls' lives across culture and region--girls on all continents except Antarctica are represented. Case studies and essays are arranged thematically to encourage comparisons between girls' experiences in diverse locales, and to assess how girls were affected by historical developments such as colonialism, political repression, war, modernization, shifts in labor markets, migrations, and the rise of consumer culture.

In France’s Third Republic, secularism was, for its adherents, a new faith, a civic religion founded on a rabid belief in progress and the Enlightenment conviction that men (and women) could remake their world. And yet with all of its pragmatic smoothing over of the supernatural edges of Catholicism, the Third Republic engendered its own fantastical ways of seeing by embracing observation, corporeal dynamism, and imaginative introspection. How these republican ideals and the new national education system of the 1870s and 80s - the structure meant to impart these ideals - shaped belle époque popular culture is the focus of this book. The author reassesses the meaning of secularization and offers a cultural history of this period by way of an interrogation of several fraught episodes which, although seemingly disconnected, shared an attachment to the potent moral and aesthetic directives of French republicanism: a village’s battle to secularize its schools, a scandalous novel, a vaudeville hit featuring a nude celebrity, and a craze for female boxing. Beginning with the writer and performer Colette (1873–1954) as a point of entry, this re-evaluation of belle époque popular culture probes the startling connections between republican values of labor and physical health on the one hand, and the cultural innovations of the decades preceding World War I on the other.

This new study explores how British youth was made, and how it made itself, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Urbanisation and industrialisation brought challenges that altered how young people were both perceived and understood. As adults found it difficult to comprehend the rapidity of societal change, focus on the young intensified, and they became a symbol of uncertainty about the future. Highlighting both change and striking continuity, Melanie Tebbutt traces the origins and development of key themes and debates in the history of modern British youth. Current issues such as the ageing of western societies, high levels of youth unemployment and the potential for social and political unrest make this a timely study.

Urban parks are a much-loved feature of the city environment. However, our knowledge of the true scale of their impact remains uneven. Much work has been done on their origins and design features, but this book aims to extend this beyond the nineteenth century, examining the fuller flowering of these valuable spaces in the early decades of the twentieth century. Encompassing themes such as social and political usage, parks as employers and the dangers posed by such freely accessible spaces, the book examines a range of parks in cities such as Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Leeds, Preston, Hull and Cardiff and challenges the prevailing myths about their meaning for their users. This study's timeframe spans almost 100 years of unprecedented social, cultural, political and economic changes and allows for the consideration of the expansion and commercialisation of leisure opportunities for the public. Urban parks played a significant role in this — the book places parks firmly in the context of the evolving city and examines the importance of green space to the urban citizen during this most fascinating of historical periods.