This collection of papers draws on insights from social anthropology to illuminate historical material, and presents a set of closely integrated studies on the inter-connections between feminism and medical, social and educational ideas in the nineteenth century.

Throughout the book evidence from both the USA and UK shows that feminists had to operate in a restricting and complex social environment in which the concept of "the lady" and the ideal of the saintly mother defined the nineteenth-century woman's cultural and physical world.