{"title":"Joan Perkin","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"victorian-women-book-joan-perkin-9780719556517","title":"Victorian Women","description":"While the aristocratic women of the Victorian age have long preoccupied the popular imagination, seldom have women of other classes been granted a voice. Victorian Women is the first book to allow women of all classes to render their own lives, in their own words, from birth to old age, in the long nineteenth century between the French Revolution and the First World War. In letters, memoirs, and other contemporary sources these women describe their childhood and education; courtship, marriage and homemaking; sex and motherhood; marital breakdown; widowhood; and their pastimes and entertainments. Their voices, heretofore drowned by the cacophony of louder, often male versions of history, speak to us with clarity and poignancy, revealing strength of feeling, courage, and humor. We find in this book the unmarried woman worker, the single mother, the prostitute, as well as those who fought for professional recognition against the regiments of the church, government, and law.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49504052314385,"sku":"GOR001348182","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49554561892625,"sku":"GOR001645395","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53547959058705,"sku":"CIN0719556511A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0719556511.jpg?v=1750978305"},{"product_id":"victorian-women-book-joan-perkin-9780719549557","title":"Victorian Women","description":"Nineteenth century? And what did women themselves have to say about their status? This revealing book explores what life was actually like for women in the turbulent period between the French Revolution and the First World War. In their own words they describe their childhood and education; courtship, marriage and homemaking; sex and motherhood; marital breakdown; and widowhood. Their voices speak to us with clarity and poignancy, revealing their strength of feeling, their courage, and their humour. We hear from women whose voices have been drowned by the cacophony of stronger; often male, versions of history: the unmarried woman worker; the single mother; the prostitute; as well as those who fought for professional recognition against the regiments of the Church, Parliament and the law. The picture Joan Perkin presents is an immensely varied one' set against a background of stark inequity, both between the sexes and between women of different social classes. And it is far from static.  The dramatic events which altered women's lives over this restless century are recorded in the letters home of working girls, the songs of mill workers, the speeches of women campaigning for their rights, the quiet voices of numerous 'angels in the house'. It is to these women that the modern feminist movement can trace its roots, in the Victorian kitchens, factories and parlours from which it sprang.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49515125866769,"sku":"GOR001313751","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52901250859281,"sku":"GOR003816624","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0719549558.jpg?v=1751199808"},{"product_id":"merry-duchess-book-joan-perkin-9781844010158","title":"The Merry Duchess","description":"The story of Harriot Mellon is a unique, individual and perceptive insight into a vanished world of deprivation and privilege. Joan Perkin's book is the amazing story of a remarkable woman: Harriot Mellon, the poor child of strolling players in the late eighteenth century, who rose to become a star at Drury Lane in the heyday of Sarah Siddons and Dorothy Jordan, and the protegee and second wife of Thomas Coutts the royal banker. Annoyed by his three daughters, all married into the aristocracy, who treated her badly, he left her the Bank, which she doubled in value in fifteen years. A famous society hostess, charitable to the poor yet familiar with Prinny, Prince Regent and later George IV, and pursued as the richest widow in Britain by his brothers the royal dukes and other suitors, she married, secondly, the young Duke of St. Albans, appropriately a descendant of Nell Gwyn and Charles II, and so became the Merry Duchess. Friend of Sir Walter Scott and satirised by Benjamin Disraeli as Mrs. Millions, she was savagely attacked by the yellow press and the scurrilous cartoonists of the day, but never ceased her charities to deserving dependents and members of the acting profession down on their luck. Finally, she left her huge fortune to her youngest step-granddaughter Angela, who became Baroness Burdett-Coutts, the greatest philanthropist of the nineteenth century. Thus the Merry Duchess became fairy godmother by proxy to the Victorian poor. Joan Perkin is a women's historian, with well-known books on Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England and on Victorian Women. A pioneer of the Welfare State, starting as an Inspector of National Insurance in 1948, she has had a varied career, in industrial relations in the rayon industry, as a magistrate, and a university teacher in a top-ten American university. As a latecomer to higher education, she used her experience to write an advice book for other mature students: It's Never Too Late: A practical guide to continuing education for women of all ages, which changed the lives of many women. She has been married for over fifty years to Harold Perkin, the pioneer social historian - see The Making of a Social Historian (Athena Press, 2002).","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49598704353553,"sku":"GOR005238695","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51299567960337,"sku":"NIN9781844010158","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1844010155.jpg?v=1751411696"},{"product_id":"women-and-marriage-in-nineteenth-century-england-book-joan-perkin-9780415007719","title":"Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England","description":"The 'bonds of matrimony' describes with cruel precision the social and political status of married women in  the nineteenth century. Women of all classes had only the most limited rights of possession in their own bodies and property yet, as this remarkable book shows, women of all classes found room to manoeuvre within the narrow limits imposed on them. Upper-class women frequently circumvented the onerous limitations of the law, while middle-class women sought through reform to change their legal status. For working-class women, such legal changes were irrelevant, but they too found ways to ameliorate their position. Joan Perkin demonstrates clearly in this outstanding book, full of human insights, that women were not content to remain inferior or subservient to men.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51690640245009,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51690640343313,"sku":"GOR007247778","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52119631102225,"sku":"GOR014493595","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52333146734865,"sku":"NLS9780415007719","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0415007712.jpg?v=1751422077"},{"product_id":"victorian-women-book-joan-perkin-9780814766248","title":"Victorian Women","description":"While the aristocratic women of the Victorian age have long preoccupied the popular imagination, seldom have women of other classes been granted a voice. 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We find in this book the unmarried woman worker, the single mother, the prostitute, as well as those who fought for professional recognition against the regiments of the church, government, and law.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52407330636049,"sku":"NLS9780814766248","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780814766248.jpg?v=1758771851"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-joan-perkin.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}