Explores the reasons why women do not have the same influence, power, and wealth as men do. Meditates on the writer-temperament and explores the need for a woman to have a room of her own and five hundred pounds a year being symbols of the power to think for oneself and contemplate.

"A history of England from the Norman Conquest through the twentieth century, told through the stories of ordinary women"--

Pencils, a sketchbook, cake, yards of stolen ribbon, thimbles, snuff boxes, a picture of a lover, two live ducks: these are just some of the fascinating things carried by women and girls in their tie-on pockets, an essential accessory throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This first book-length study of the tie-on pocket combines materiality and gender to provide new insight into the social history of women's everyday lives-from duchesses and country...

Bitter rivals fight for control of the Women's Institute in a rural English town as it struggles with the onset of World War II. Separated from husbands, fathers, sons and brothers for years at a time, some permanently, they find themselves under extraordinary pressures in a rapidly fragmenting world.

Almost three-quarters of a million British soldiers lost their lives during World War I, and many more were incapacitated by their wounds, leaving behind a generation of women who, raised to see marriage as "the crown and joy of woman's life," suddenly discovered that they were left without an escort. Drawing upon a wealth of memoirs, this book tells the inspiring stories of these women: the student weeping for a lost world as the Armistice bells...