The Gender and Sexuality Collection is a valuable resource for university librarians, researchers, and teaching staff. This collection delves into themes such as domesticity, education, work, sexuality, representation, religion, mental health, activism and motherhood. By surveying gender identity and sexuality from diverse perspectives, it raises critical questions about gender roles, feminist theory and heteronormativity. Covering a broad historical range from the medieval period to the present day, this collection is indispensable for those engaged in gender and sexuality studies.
| Key series |
| Gender in History |
| Rethinking Art’s Histories |
| Studies in Imperialism |
| Theory for a Global Age |
| Women, Theatre and Performance |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 7 |
| 2023/4 titles | 12 |
| 2004-2022 titles | 89 |
| Total collection | 128 |
| Keywords |
| Domesticity |
| Education |
| Work |
| Nature |
| Sexuality |
| Heteronormativity |
| Representation |
| Religion |
| Global South |
| Mental health |
| Motherhood |
| Gender roles |
| Activism |
| Feminism |
| Beauty |
| Thema subject categories |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| History |
| Economics |
| Politics and government |
| The Arts |
| Feminism and feminist theory |
| Film history, theory or criticism |
| Gender studies, gender groups |
| History of religion |
| LGBTQ+ Studies / topics |
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Gender and sexuality collection
Why is it that in myth, and reality, women’s presence in wild nature has been controlled, limited and, in some cultures, forbidden by men? Since the very first story ever written down, the Epic of Gilgamesh, inscribed on tablets thousands of years ago, stories imagine the wild as a site of men’s heroic myth making whereas women are kept behind the city’s thick walls. Only monstrous, transgressive or supernatural women are found in the wild, to be feared, or consulted, or punished. In reality, practices such as Purdah, and foot-binding, chaperoning and religious banishment of women from sacred places, as well as practical constraints such as restrictive clothing, have all conspired to limit women’s presence in the wild and keep them bound to the hearth and home. Nineteenth-century western science only reinforced ideas of women’s helplessness and intellectual inadequacy. When women, like Mary Kingsley, did travel and explore, their narratives were very different from the masculine ideal of man-versus-nature, the hero that must conquer often feminine landscapes in order to reach his true self. The five women subjects of this book represent five different phases of our modern encounters with the wild, from exploration, to scientific research, to sport and leisure, and latterly, to conservation and rewilding, as we begin to understand the damage we have done to this fragile planet.
Mina Hubbard successfully completed her expedition from North West River to Ungava Bay in the early autumn of 1905. On her return, she wrote a book of her travels, A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador, and embarked on a book tour to London. She still faced criticism and questioning, particularly in New York. Her map of northern Labrador tells the story of both her and her husband’s journeys into the wilderness. It also shows evidence of First Nation American portage routes and settlements. After her book was published in 1908, she remarried and became Mrs Harold Ellis.
When Mina Hubbard’s husband Leonidas died while attempting to map the route of the Naskaupi River in northern Labrador in 1903, his widow, Mina, decided to try to finish his work. In the summer of 1905 she set off, with four Native American and mixed-race guides, in two canoes, starting at the North West River trading post. As a woman her presence in the Labrador ‘wild’ was highly contested and the New York ‘outdoors’ magazines criticised her and questioned her motives. Her private diary of her journey reveals the peaceful delight she found in the wilderness, removed from the expectations and restrictions of so-called ‘civilised’ society.
Dorothy Pilley and Evelyn Cheesman were exploring and climbing well into old age. Mina Hubbard instead chose to live a life in exile in England and rarely went back into the ‘wild’. Her map is her lasting legacy, although parts of the route she took are now submerged beneath a massive reservoir. Evelyn Cheesman carried on collecting in the late 1950s, when she was in her 70s. Her discoveries contributed to the science of biogeography. Dorothy Pilley broke her hip in a car accident in 1958 but her love for the mountains persisted. She saw in her last New Year on the Isle of Skye. Her ashes are scattered on Tryfan, Snowdonia. Her memoir, Climbing Days has just gone into its fourth edition and is viewed as a classic.
Wangari Maathai grew up in rural Kenya, in the foothills of the Aberdare Mountains. As a schoolgirl in the 1950s she lived through the Mau Mau emergency. Clever and hardworking, in 1960 she joined other young Kenyans in the ‘Kennedy Air Lifts’, and went to study for her degree at Mount Saint Scholastica, in Atchison, Kansas. On her return to an independent Kenya under Jomo Kenyatta, she experienced sexism at the University of Nairobi, where she worked as a lecturer. She became the first woman from East Africa to gain a PhD. After hearing concerns of women from rural Kenya during preparations for the United Nations Women’s Conference (1975), she began a tree-planting movement.
The 1980s–2000s were difficult decades for Wangari Maathai. While her Green Belt Movement was planting millions of trees, Wangari was beaten and imprisoned for standing up to President Daniel arap Moi’s corruption. She took him on over a proposed development in Uhuru Park, Nairobi, and then again over the selling off of Karura Forest on the edge of the city, in 1999. Leaders such as Kofi Annan, Secretary of the United Nations, and Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the Soviet Union, interceded on her behalf. She attended the first UN climate summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
Humans came from the wild. But as soon as societies began to build permanent settlements, women’s presence amidst both the dangers, and beauties, of wild nature was controlled. For men the wild is a place for heroic questing, myth making and exploration. For women, both in storytelling and in reality, they are warned to stay indoors, within the city walls, imprisoned by patriarchy. Women, however, have always challenged for their place in the wild realm beyond human statute, and this book tells the stories of five of them, their lives spanning more than 100 years. Mina Hubbard took on her dead husband’s unfinished task, to find the source of the Naskaupi River in northern Labrador, witness the great caribou migration and make contact with First Nation Americans in their homeland. Evelyn Cheesman, the first woman Keeper of Insects at London Zoo, travelled across the Pacific searching for exhibits, and in doing so helped unlock the ancient secrets of the earth. Dorothy Pilley, the mountaineer, sought spiritual union with nature, as well as freedom from society’s strictures, on the high peaks of the Alps, Snowdonia and the Rockies. Ethel Haythornthwaite’s quiet and insistent campaigning helped make the Peak District the UK’s first National Park in the face of fierce resistance from the grouse-shooting aristocracy. The Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement helped plant 30 million trees in Kenya, to reverse the environmental destruction caused by both colonial settlers and the corrupt and extractive government of Daniel arap Moi.
This short chapter begins with a brief and largely speculative account of Peterloo from the perspective of carers. It then reflects on the application of social context to nurse reputations, and the recoverable evidence of nurses’ lives, for a revised appreciation of women and men who nursed. It argues that nurse reputations fluctuated at the same time that most nursing work was fulfilled adequately or well. Pre-professional nursing may have lacked formal training, but it did secure some forms of recognition and success. The book concludes by sketching out some avenues for future research in the history of pre-reform nursing.
Nurse employers from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries inhabited a culture which made dogmatic statements about nurse behaviour. This chapter considers the ideal nurse in practical and fictional literature, with a particular focus on the writings of Sarah Trimmer, and her diametric opposite, dubbed here the ‘anti-nurse’, subject to reproach and satire. These templates and assumptions around female nurses serve as a backdrop to the evidence of nursing care, written first in the diaries and letters of patients or their families and then from the perspective of the nurses. Domestic nurses might have been either paid or unpaid. This chapter recognises that it is difficult to retrieve material from the perspective of the paid nurse – women employed to nurse others in their homes left no discernible personal papers – but that we can still learn about the practical and affective aspects of nursing by looking at the letters, diaries, and memoirs of unpaid nurses. The chapter considers the accounts of unmarried women with literary aspirations who nursed their relations and others without direct material reward. Personal and biographical material for literary figures such as Mary Lamb are linked back to the social contexts raised in the chapter to characterise domestic nursing as physically challenging and emotionally harrowing. The chapter concludes with a survey of the risks to nurses which to date have formed little part of our understanding of the role.
The book begins with a vignette of plague nurses as they were depicted in 1660 and as they have been subsequently judged. This entrée is used as a springboard into a survey of the history of pre-professional nursing, placing particular emphasis on the contributions of Margaret Pelling and Ian Mortimer. Historiographical discussion incorporates research on Poor Law and naval nurses, and concludes that most histories with something to say about nurses before the 1850s have made little or no impression on the entrenched assumptions of nursing history. The Introduction goes on to argue that the social context for nurses – who were usually older, poor women with an undeniable proximity to human waste – has underlain nurses’ poor reputations in ways that are ripe for challenge. It offers a model for understanding the activities of pre-reform nursing as one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many respectively, and justifies the integration of paid and unpaid work for a proper appreciation of the history of care. The Introduction establishes the book as a social and cultural history, acknowledging the ways in which the sociology of nursing work researched from the 1970s onwards can expand our awareness of the challenges posed to nursing for women and men in the context of femininity and masculinity between 1660 and 1820. It draws on the ideas of Everett Hughes, Blake Ashforth, and Glen Kreiner to characterise the ‘dirty work’ inherent in different nurses’ occupational contexts, and on writing by Arlie Hochschild and Pam Smith for devising and applying concepts of ‘emotion work’.