Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England

Focusing on the participation of middling women in urban life, Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England focuses on the relationship between urban change and shifts in the pattern of gender relations in the 18th century - a period of rapid transformations in English history. It explores to what extent urban change accelerated a redefinition of gender relations; the connections between urban growth, changing definitions of citizenship, and the emergence of the male gendered political subject; the role of women in a literate, consumer and industrializing society; women's contribution to its development, and how that in turn inflected contemporary conceptualizations of gender.