Books in Brief: An Experience of Women

An Experience of Women: Pattern and Change in Nineteenth-Century Europe, by Priscilla Robertson (Temple University, 673 pp., $39.95, cloth; $14.95, paper). Perhaps because this book is not polemically feminist, it has not got the attention it deserves. It is excellent sociological history: Priscilla Robertson, the author of Revolutions of 1848: A Social History, has written a vivid and complex story about the role of women from different classes in England, France, Germany, and Italy in the nineteenth century. Mrs. Robertson begins by examining the mores that determined the role of women: fettering customs, habits, and beliefs; governmental pressure and social restrictions; contracts, class divisions, sexual roles, marriage customs, the authority of the husband, hygienic problems. Beneath the differences among women’s roles in the various countries examined, she discovers an underlying harsh uniformity. Then, in the second section of her book, Mrs. Robertson describes the achievements and failures of rebels who sought to ameliorate the lot of women and arrive at a measure of equality. Mrs. Robertson is a balanced and thoughtful historian who has written a long-needed study of the origins of the feminist movement.

HK

About the Author

Herbert A. Kenny

Featured Tags

An Experience of Women: Pattern and Change in Nineteenth-Century Europe, by Priscilla Robertson (Temple University, 673 pp., $39.95, cloth; $14.95, paper). Perhaps because this book is not polemically feminist, it has not got the attention it deserves. It is excellent sociological history: Priscilla Robertson, the author of Revolutions of 1848: A Social History, has written a vivid and complex story about the role of women from different classes in England, France, Germany, and Italy in the nineteenth century. Mrs. Robertson begins by examining the mores that determined the role of women: fettering customs, habits, and beliefs; governmental pressure and social restrictions; contracts, class divisions, sexual roles, marriage customs, the authority of the husband, hygienic problems. Beneath the differences among women’s roles in the various countries examined, she discovers an underlying harsh uniformity. Then, in the second section of her book, Mrs. Robertson describes the achievements and failures of rebels who sought to ameliorate the lot of women and arrive at a measure of equality. Mrs. Robertson is a balanced and thoughtful historian who has written a long-needed study of the origins of the feminist movement.