Help! My wish list #19

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One more title from my ever-expanding reading wish list.

** The cover image is for illustrative purposes only. If you are a publisher and would kindly like to offer me a copy of this book for review, I will change the cover so as to reflect the edition received. **

Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England
By Sharon Marcus

Amazon's product description: Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law. Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality -- not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.

Why I want to read this book: A supporter of relationships between women, I am deeply interested in accounts of past lives.

Comments

  1. Irene Palfy7 April 2011 at 20:03

    This sounds great!! Now I want to read it too. Thank you for sharing!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. CharmedLassie8 April 2011 at 10:43

    I've got this. Half-read it but other things got in the way. It's very detailed, I would recommend it.

    ReplyDelete

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