Subjects

Browse by subject to discover a wide variety of primary and critical materials on various topics, from Education to Empire, and from Politics to Literature. Click on a subject tile to read an overview of the category and view the relevant primary source documents, secondary source book chapters, journal articles and thematic essays.
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Education
Educational reform for the Victorian women’s movement chiefly concerned the provision of secondary and higher education for middle-class girls and young women. Elementary education for…
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Empire
The women of the British Empire have until recently had a bad press. Where they have not been ignored as merely a special case within…
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Literature and Writings
A key premise of feminist literary criticism is that gender and sexuality play a significant part in determining how texts were and are written, distributed,…
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Movements and Ideologies
Feminism’s longstanding concern with achieving rights and equalities for large numbers of women has encouraged women who self-identify as feminist to work collectively to achieve…
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Politics and Law
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the one acknowledged right of every woman was to be passed safely from the care and control of…
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Religion and Belief
Religion has always occupied a difficult and contested place within the history of feminism. Religious belief was largely dismissed from pioneering accounts of women’s history,…
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Society and Culture
This section covers material on women’s changing roles in culture and society. This includes women’s work and leisure and female organisations and activism, as well…
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Women at Home
Thinking about women at home in this period calls to mind the iconic image of the ‘angel in the house’. Taken from Coventry Patmore’s poem…