Women's history: Britain, 1700-1850 - an introduction

This output is entered both as co-edited collection of essays and a co-authored individual output. The volume provides a comprehensive introduction to British women's history 1700-1850 for students and scholars alike. A collaboration envisioned, compiled and edited by Dr Elaine Chalus and Dr Hannah Barker (University of Manchester), the volume extended the range and chronology of their earlier co-edited volume, Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, Longman, 1997). Women's History: Britain, 1700-1850 features recent and established leading British and international scholars including, among others, Professor Jane Rendall (York), Dr Debbi Simonton (then Aberdeen; now University of Southern Denmark), Dr Anne-Marie Kilday (Oxford Brookes), Dr Karen Harvey (Sheffield) and Professor Kathleen Wilson (New York, Stony Brook). As an experienced professional editor, Dr Chalus liaised with the contributors to ensure quality and complementarity, co-ordinated submissions and copy-edited all contributions. The introduction to the volume was co-authored with Dr Barker. Dr Chalus's own submission is a double-length essay of 15,000 words, titled 'Women and Politics', co-authored with Professor Fiona Montgomery (Bath Spa). The decision to publish one double-length, co-authored essay on women and politics for the period, instead of two separate essays, was a strategic decision made by Drs Chalus and Barker as a way of countering the historiographical tendency to divide women's political involvement between 1700 and 1850 into halves — often pre- and post-French Revolution. One extended, co-authored essay enabled the authors, specialists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to combine their knowledge and foreground continuity in women's political experience across the period of 150 years.