Women in European Culture and Society: Gender, Skill and Identity from 1700

A new and major contribution to the field, Women in European Culture and Societyis a transnational history of women in Europe from the beginning of the eighteenth century that pushes women's history beyond national studies to create an integrated view of three hundred years of women in Europe. Using a longue durée, the book disentangles the accounts of industrialisation and bourgeois femininity which tend to dominate women's studies, and questions the dominant narratives of history. Drawing on women's own writing and cultural production, it presents women as agents of change as well as exploring cultural perceptions of women and the ways in which women have been have been represented by these discourses. It explicitly engages with how women contributed as practitioners to shaping the culture and society of western Europe. The geographical range and generational breadth of this study provides a cohesive vision of women's lives up to the present day. Women in European Culture and Societyis an invaluable and essential guide to the conditions, circumstances and understandings of how women lived throughout Europe.

Deborah Simonton is Associate Professor of British History at the University of Southern Denmark and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her publications include The Routiedge History of Women in Modem Europe (Routiedge, 2006] and A History of European Women's Work (Routiedge, 1998) and she is the co-editor of Gender in Scottish History (2006).