Many scholars suggest that credit networks were fundamental to the operation of early modern towns. Unfortunately, the majority of this scholarship ignores the role of women in the debt and credit system. The legal position of early modern women and the nature of the available sources mean that womens experiences are generally not documented in any significant numbers. Historians are therefore forced to speculate on how women might have been involved in borrowing and lending and often end up writing as though the female experience of credit was identical to mens experience of the system. The records of the Baillie Court of Aberdeen, Scotland offer a glimpse at women engaging in debt and credit transactions in large numbers and pursuing transactions that went awry. This study looks at 671 debt cases brought before Aberdeens court system in two years in the late seventeenth-century and reveals that women participated in 46% of these cases. Similar studies, focusing mainly on England, have found female participation in debt and credit to hover closer to the 15% range. While there are some unique characteristics that might explain how Aberdeen would see more women becoming involved in the court system, there is little evidence that Aberdonian women were unusually active in the debt and credit system as a whole, in comparison to the rest of early modern Europe. Instead, Aberdeens court records reveal what was likely a very common, but undocumented, experience in the rest of the pre-industrial world. As a result of this unprecedented level of documentation, we see women involved who would otherwise be invisible to us. The Baillie Court shows married women involved in far greater numbers than either single women or widows, a fact which goes against the traditional image of single and widowed women as the only ones involved in the credit system through their roles as moneylenders. Instead, we find another level of women using debt and credit to secure goods for their households and participating in the economy of the town. We find that, although women were heavily involved in borrowing and lending, their experience of that system was significantly different than that of early modern men. The causes of debt and the amounts for which people would both sue and be sued were substantially different depending on ones gender and marital status. While the statistics that come out of this study are impressive, the human stories are even more enlightening. By examining individual cases, we can see how women negotiated the debt and credit and how they shaped that system to their own needs.

Many scholars suggest that credit networks were fundamental to the operation of early modern towns. Unfortunately, the majority of this scholarship ignores the role of women in the debt and credit system. The legal position of early modern women and the nature of the available sources mean that womens experiences are generally not documented in any significant numbers. Historians are therefore forced to speculate on how women might have been involved in borrowing and lending and often end up writing as though the female experience of credit was identical to mens experience of the system. The records of the Baillie Court of Aberdeen, Scotland offer a glimpse at women engaging in debt and credit transactions in large numbers and pursuing transactions that went awry. This study looks at 671 debt cases brought before Aberdeens court system in two years in the late seventeenth-century and reveals that women participated in 46% of these cases. Similar studies, focusing mainly on England, have found female participation in debt and credit to hover closer to the 15% range. While there are some unique characteristics that might explain how Aberdeen would see more women becoming involved in the court system, there is little evidence that Aberdonian women were unusually active in the debt and credit system as a whole, in comparison to the rest of early modern Europe. Instead, Aberdeens court records reveal what was likely a very common, but undocumented, experience in the rest of the pre-industrial world. As a result of this unprecedented level of documentation, we see women involved who would otherwise be invisible to us. The Baillie Court shows married women involved in far greater numbers than either single women or widows, a fact which goes against the traditional image of single and widowed women as the only ones involved in the credit system through their roles as moneylenders. Instead, we find another level of women using debt and credit to secure goods for their households and participating in the economy of the town. We find that, although women were heavily involved in borrowing and lending, their experience of that system was significantly different than that of early modern men. The causes of debt and the amounts for which people would both sue and be sued were substantially different depending on ones gender and marital status. While the statistics that come out of this study are impressive, the human stories are even more enlightening. By examining individual cases, we can see how women negotiated the debt and credit and how they shaped that system to their own needs.

People´s access to safe health care is not as common as one might think. Today with new and different health insurances and improved health policies people should in theory have safe health care. Although numerous of health insurances exist, targeting large parts of populations, there are still many issues with them. The Behavioural Model of Health Services Use and Separate Spheres are the two theories that are used in this study. Where Separate Spheres describes men´s and women´s separate worlds, their responsibilities in them and how it effects them and the Behavioural Model of Health Services Use, which describes factors that either impede or enable people’s access to health care utilization. This study´s purpose is to see what different perceptions men and women have about the insurance and how these perceptions can affect families’ choice to enroll to the insurance. The study uses a qualitative approach and is based on semi-structured interviews. Results in this study showed that men and women have very different perceptions about the insurance. Men want the insurance because they want to save money and decrease health expenses. While women wants the insurance for their children to always have access to health care. The roles between men and women in households are significant and their different responsibilities affect their priorities and perceptions.

Thesis advisor: Peter Weiler / Between 1866 and 1918, suffragists in Britain campaigned to acquire the vote for women. Opposition to women's suffrage derived mainly from separate spheres ideology – the belief that the genders are inherently different and must fulfill different roles in society. Many scholars claim that the suffragists challenged separate spheres ideology. By comparing the writings of Millicent Fawcett and Frances Cobbe, two prominent suffragists, with the writings of Mary Ward and Violet Markham, two prominent anti-suffragists, this work demonstrates similar themes within the opposing campaigns. More importantly, the similarities indicate that suffragists argued within the context of separate spheres ideology and did not seek to significantly alter traditional gender roles. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2005. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

My dissertation, Understanding the Gray:Aging Women in Victorian Culture and Fiction, explores the cultural construction of aging for middle-class Victorian women and how aging was experienced and then depicted within novels. Chiefly, I work from midcentury to the end of the century in order to understand the experience of aging and ways women were ascribed age due to their position in society as spinsters, mothers, and progressive women. I explore how the age of fictional women reflects and contributes to critical debates concerning how Victorian women were expected to behave. Debates over separate spheres, how women were perceived in British society, and how women’s rights changed during the 19th century highlight how aging affected women and how they were treated throughout the century. Victorian fiction illustrates the ways women achieved different roles in society and how age and the perception of age affected their ability to do so. Understanding how aging was experienced, understood, and ascribed to Victorian women who fought in various ways for new terms of citizenship and mobility helps us begin to trace how we treat and respond to aging in women today. The first chapter outlines the social status of unmarried women and spinsters, considering how age affected women’s ability to lead professional lives in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). The second chapter, on George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, explores older motherhood through Mrs Transome and illustrates how the novel seeks to teach younger women of the pitfalls of unequal marriages. The third chapter builds a cultural understanding of how aging was linked to progressive, anti-domestic womanhood and racial impurity through the New Woman and in H.R. Haggard’s She.

This dissertation examines the relationship between women and economics in American Progressive Era through the discussion of selected works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton. The authors and texts included in the study together demonstrate how women responded to the economic development and the concept of the separate spheres at the-turn-into-the-twentieth-century America. Based on Thorstein Veblen¡¦s socio-psychological theory of the leisure class and the institutional economics and Gilman¡¦s analysis on the sexual-economic relationship in marriage, my discussion aims to investigate the interconnection between human relationships, women¡¦s economic values, and economic exchanges in business, focusing on the methods the three women writers employ to re/present how middle/upper-class women redefine womanhood and construct female subjectivity in an economic system that favors men. In my introductory chapter, I explain the historical background of the period, general concepts in Veblen¡¦s economic theory, and the motivation, methodology, and organization of the dissertation. Chapter Two, ¡§Veblenian Workmanship and Gilman¡¦s Woman-Made Land,¡¨ purports to cross-examine Gilman¡¦s Women and Economics and her utopian fiction Herland, aiming to show Gilman¡¦s optimistic view on women¡¦s emancipation from the private to the public. In Chapter Three, ¡§Barbarian Status of Women and Chopin¡¦s Feminism,¡¨ I discuss by Chopin¡¦s The Awakening the tension between women¡¦s growing sense of an autonomous self and men¡¦s adherence to the institutionalized habits of thought. My fourth chapter, ¡§Conspicuous Consumption and Society Women in Edith Wharton,¡¨ is a study on the relationship between the display culture in the consumer society and woman¡¦s role as the non-productive consumer in Edith Wharton¡¦s The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country. The concluding chapter, along with general comparisons of the heroines, outlines major arguments in the whole thesis.

The history of women education has been structured by two powerful narratives. The first of these is the tale of the separation of the spheres and the second is the application of the cult of true womanhood to understand women place in the early 19th century. The purpose of this thesis is to examine and analyse the educational ideal for upperclass women in Sweden. By applying an unconventional source material, namely the Swedish lifestyle magazine Magasin för konst, nyheter och moder, a new narrative emerge. The previous research into the topic has mainly used the concepts of the separate spheres and the cult of true womanhood to explain the cultural paradigm that occurred to the hierarchy of genders during the early 19th century. This thesis aims to test if these concepts also can be applied on the previously mentioned source material, and still be viable. This thesis purpose that the previously named historical narratives can not be applied as strictly as it was previously believed. This paper critically reviews the level of education that Magasin för konst, nyheter och moder expected from its female readers, and hope that through this critical review a debate on the topic will emerge.

In this essay, an analysis of Lucy Montgomery's bildungsroman Anne of Green Gables has been conducted. The story of the protagonist Anne Shirley’s development into adulthood displays many aspects of the gender roles of the twentieth century in Canada as a result of her gendered upbringing. Anne's conformity to the private sphere stems from a need to solve her inherent crisis as an orphan but has the purpose of making domestic life seem desirable to the young reader. Anne of Green Gables was released in the twentieth century when women were considered to have universal traits that benefited the conservative gender roles. Therefore this essay analyses the didactic purpose of the novel, theorizing to find that the novel's purpose is to steer the reader's development toward conservative gender roles. Feminist theory provides this essay with explanations of the cause and effect of the notion of gender roles and is used as a guideline throughout the analysis. The results of this essay demonstrate that the bildungsroman Anne of Green Gables has a didactic purpose of steering the development of the reader toward the acceptance of conservative gender roles.

This study focuses on the role and contribution of women in the context of the social and economic development of two towns in Hertfordshire during the nineteenth century. Although the age saw an increase in urbanisation, Hertfordshire remained an agricultural county with long established land owners, a middle class with influence in the towns and its closeness to London attracting the newly wealthy in search of a country estate. The towns selected for this study, Hertford and Hitchin, changed little in their character and, compared with others which experienced industrial expansion, saw a modest population growth. This, however, brought the consequential pressures on housing and poverty. This research is unique in combining the study of the activities of women and the challenges faced by two market towns over a period of time of change and thus making a contribution to the debate on the concept of “separate spheres” by demonstrating that women had a place in the public arena. The daily life of a country town was reliant on a thriving economic environment. As this research demonstrates, many women had trades and businesses, contributed to good causes and were central to the education of children and adults. Their philanthropic efforts supported the building and maintenance of churches, schools, and hospitals. It charts the role of ordinary women, operating in a small town environment, before extension of the suffrage and Equal Opportunities legislation established their position as legitimate influencers of policy and practice. Little work has been done on how the English small town coped with its growth in population and the summons from central government on compliance with an increasing body of legislation on how the town should be run. It was men who undertook the necessary offices associated with this seed of local government but a micro-history of the people who inhabited these two towns demonstrates that women made a significant contribution to social and economic life of these towns.

By considering San Francisco’s legal, social, and cultural history during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in relation to American law, missionary women, and Chinese American prostitutes, this thesis argues that by aggressively trying to control Chinese sexuality through laws, “yellow slave” narratives, Christianizing, and the immigration process, the American government and missionaries created an atmosphere ripe for Chinese prostitutes in America with varying degrees of sexual freedoms.