History of Women in the West

This five-volume series sets before us a panoramic chronicle that extends from antiquity to the present day. Volume I offers insight into more than twenty centuries of Greek and Roman history and encompasses a landscape that stretches from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and from the Pillars of Hercules to the banks of the Indus.

Drawing on myriad sources, this second volume in the celebrated series offers new perspectives on women. Twelve historians examine the image of women in the masculine mind, their social condition, and their daily experience from the end of the Roman Empire to the genesis of the Italian Renaissance.

This book draws a richly detailed picture of women in early modern Europe, considering them in a context of work, marriage, and family. At the heart of this volume is “woman” as she appears in a wealth of representations, from simple woodcuts and popular literature to master paintings; and as the focal point of a debate—sometimes humorous, sometimes acrimonious—conducted in every field: letters, arts, philosophy, the sciences, and medicine. Women from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries emerge from these pages in remarkable diversity.

This volume of the world-acclaimed series covers the period between the French Revolution and World War I. It gives us a vibrant picture of a bourgeois century, dynamic and expansive, in which the role of woman in the home was stressed, even as the economic pressures and opportunities of the industrial revolution drew her out of the house.

This fifth volume in the world-acclaimed series brings the history of women up to the present, placing it in the context of momentous events and profound social changes that have marked our time.