商品簡介
In the Georgian era, female landowners controlled significant amounts of property as heiresses, widows and even occasionally wives. Yet we know almost nothing about how they managed those parts of their estates which lay beyond the park pale. The existing literature on elite women focuses almost exclusively on their role in household management, country house design and gardening, while histories of agricultural improvement and enclosure have largely ignored women as a category of landowners and improvers. This book investigates the role played by elite women in managing large agricultural estates, paying particular attention to their involvement in estate management, enclosure, landscaping and agricultural improvement. Drawing on archival materials from across Britain, the book demonstrates that landowning women were actively involved in a bundle of related practices - including parliamentary enclosure, estate rationalisation, agricultural experimentation and major landscaping projects - which together transformed the rural landscape in the century and a half after 1700. In revealing these women's hidden histories, it offers a carefully nuanced critique of recent thinking on women's lives and spaces. It argues that rather than universally retiring into domesticity in the eighteenth century, elite women played a key part in shaping agricultural landscapes, at the same time as investigating how gender roles and identities nevertheless impacted upon the opportunities available to them. In doing so, the book explores important questions about propertied women's role in Georgian society, as well as contributes to wider cultural debates about women's place in the environmental, social and economic history of Britain. It relates to the growing body of literature on aristocratic, gentle and middle class women's participation in the economy, politics and the anti-slavery movement during this period, all arenas until recently seen largely as the preserve of men.
作者簡介
Briony McDonagh is a historical and cultural geographer at the University of Hull. She has published widely on the British rural landscape, on women’s histories and historical geographies, and on the geographies of protest, property and the commons. She is Chair of the Historical Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and co-PI of the University of Hull’s Gender, Place and Memory research cluster.
