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 |
SDG coverage
Gender and sexuality collection
This chapter argues that through writing a novel featuring two mad characters—a man and a woman—Fenwick revises the narrative of love-madness to identify the nexus of male guardianship, libertinism, and gendered Rousseauvian educational ideas, rather than women’s inherent weakness, as the cause of female mental affliction. In a clear rejection of medical models of female frailty, Fenwick casts Sibella Valmont as inherently both mentally and physically strong as she battles her guardian’s attempt to inflict Rousseauvian ideas about women’s natural passivity and docility upon her through an isolated education. She succumbs, however, to a romantic imagination, the product of social isolation and limited intellectual opportunities that make her idealize her libertine lover. Fenwick contrasts Sibella’s madness with that of the young Arthur Murden, who falls more quickly and more easily into love-madness than does Sibella, which further undermines sentimental and medical models of inherent female frailty. Fenwick’s novel is more pessimistic than Wollstonecraft’s in that there is no ambiguity about her character’s fate: she dies from melancholia and the physical effects of hysteria. Moreover, Fenwick actively destroys female friendship as a way for women to maintain their mental health, showing that women’s relationships are battered by the web of male power. In the place of female friendship, Fenwick presents an option that Wollstonecraft never considered in Wrongs of Woman—that men might be persuaded through moral instruction and tragic fiction to change their libertine ways.
Injured minds returns madness to a central role in feminist literary criticism by offering a close look at the novels of five early Romantic-period women authors. In an updated exploration of hysteria, melancholia, and love-madness, Weiss maintains that Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, and Mary Hays created novels that exposed how medical models for mental disease and the popular sentimental figure of the love-mad maid allowed men to hide their culpability for injuring women. Weiss demonstrates that in these novels, patriarchal structures of control, acts of abuse, and the educational and sentimental legacy of Rousseau, rather than inherent female weakness and the supposedly aberrant female body, are responsible for the protagonists’ dangerous hysteric and melancholic illnesses. Making careful distinctions among authors, Weiss shows how Maria Edgeworth and Amelia Opie shared their radical contemporaries’ critiques of misogynistic medical and sentimental models of female madness, but resisted blaming men and patriarchal social systems entirely for women’s mental afflictions. Instead, these more mainstream authors explored less strongly gendered and less victim-based models of causality, such as trauma, misplaced passions, erroneous associations, and remorse. Weiss shows that these novels presented ways of understanding madness that were more modern than those available through contemporary medical or sentimental texts. Taken as a whole, Injured minds suggests that this presentation of female madness furthered the development of the psychologically complex heroine of the nineteenth-century novel. In so doing, the book makes a powerful case for focusing on women’s mental health in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century literary criticism.
Chapter 5 explores the rejection and failure of the professional ideal in design, which originated both from within the profession and outside it. This was predicated through the opening of new spaces for professional dissent, including the International Congress of Design at Aspen (ICDA), which helped to generate and facilitate dissenting discourse that had hitherto been absent from the US industrial design profession. The chapter looks in particular at the 1960 conference, which attempted to bridge a perceived divide between American and British cultures of professionalism, putting the two into dialogue under the title, ‘The Corporation and the Designer’. The next sections look at internal responses to this growing international critique, as both the SIAD and the newly formed IDSA set out to revise their Codes of Conduct in response to increased criticism. As the chapter shows, these organizations proved to be poorly equipped to deal with the scale of this new design culture as a new generation, favouring cultures of creativity over professionalism, undermining the authority of the professional organization as a controlling authority. Alternative models of behaviour, including Ken Garland’s First Things First (1963), articulated a cultural change in the professional identity of the designer as it sought to reconcile commercial imperatives with ethical and social concerns.
The Epilogue reflects on the central themes of the book and brings these into dialogue with contemporary problems, struggles and issues in the design profession internationally. It identifies the structural and social issues that continue to put the profession in crisis, including issues of economic precarity and environmental concerns, alongside the glamorization of creative work and its performative visibility in contemporary society. The chapter ends by offering concluding remarks on the unresolved status of industrial design as an endlessly new profession.
If the history of a profession starts with the invention of a ‘pioneer’ through which to sell the professional ideal to the public and business, then the identity of the industrial design consultant represents the apotheosis of this ideal. Chapter 2 focuses on the history of the Consultant Designer role, examining its claim to professional status in both Britain and the US. As a central protagonist of the industrial design profession, a title that was celebrated in the US and subsequently in Britain, design historians have previously argued that the ‘importation’ of this role marked the ‘arrival’ of professional identity. This chapter reconsiders this assessment, looking more closely at its adaptation and performance, which it finds to be relatively shallow and short-lived in comparison with the movement towards design integration, which represented a constitutive shift in the structure and identity of the industrial design profession in both places. Overall, the chapter argues that the greatest legacy of the Consultant Designer has been the enduring strength of the romanticized ideal of the individual industrial designer.
The Introduction sets out the main aims of the book and its central research questions and introduces the reader to the key concepts and literature of the field. This includes sociology and social histories of the professions, gender history and its relationship to professionalization and professional identity. The chapter further provides a concise history of the emergence of a professional consciousness for industrial designers in Britain and the US, through a graphic timeline. The chapter summarizes the methodological approach of the book and provides a justification for the geographical and temporal borders of the study, as well as a general overview of the chapter structure and key arguments.
Chapter 1 puts pressure on the identity of the ‘new’, which provided the dominant framing for the introduction of the industrial design profession in Britain and the US. The chapter explores the invention of a set of myths, ideals and self-images that guided the profession in its formative years, looking at their circulation and promotion according to different logics of representation and mediation. It argues that while the US professional identity of the industrial designer was defined by visibility, buoyantly celebrated in the pages of newspapers and the public and trade press, in Britain, the identity of the designer was shaped by its absence, as before the Second World War the industrial artist was said to occupy an ‘anonymous status’. While, in the US, the corporation, individual design consultancies, public relations and the media conspired to produce a powerful and colourful image of the individualized designer, in Britain, professionalization was led by governmental agencies and individuals associated with the ‘design reform movement’, which advocated a more restrained and gentlemanly view of the designer in the image of the ‘older professions’, including architecture and engineering, resting on a model of teamwork. This tension between new and old status recurs throughout the book.
Continuing with the theme of professional behaviour, Chapter 4 examines the function of professional societies and organizations as controlling authorities through which ideas about professional identity, its boundaries and limitations, were steered and managed. The first section deals with the establishment of the professional journals as a ‘forum for self-definition’ through which members could reflect upon the limits and boundaries of professionalism in design. While the chapter finds evidence of this activity in Britain through the pages of the SIA Journal, it reflects on the absence of this space in the US, which resulted in a more limited space for self-critique. The chapter then turns to look at the operation of a formalized code of conduct, issued by the respective professional organizations. While each of these adhered to models of professionalism inherited from the ‘older professions’ of architecture and engineering, the extent to which they were applied in theory or in practice differed considerably in Britain and the US. The professional codes in both cultures were written with the client as their priority audience, while its relationship to the public remained ill-defined and obscure. The chapter focuses on the issue of advertising, which divided opinion almost immediately and became a matter of considerable controversy in both countries. Flagrant diversions from this regulation by some of the profession’s most visible protagonists, including Terence Conran and Raymond Loewy, undermined the authority of the professional organizations as controlling agents in the profession, and by the 1960s it was clear that the model of professional behaviour inherited from the older professions was incompatible in practice. The final section of this chapter briefly looks at the ‘exportation’ of the professional code of conduct on the international stage, through the establishment of the International Council for Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) in 1957, which, it is argued, provided a platform on which British and American designers attempted to project and impose their ‘universal’ models and codes of behaviour. Subtle acts of resistance to this within the ICSID ominously indicated the declining status of these ideals in the context of international politics and social concerns.
Chapter 6 turns to the ‘reinvention’ of the industrial designer in light of ‘social responsibility’. Drawing on reports and letters exchanged within the IDSA and SIAD relating to the application for licensing the industrial designer in New York State and the application for a Royal Charter in Britain, the chapter argues that the two organizations were severely inhibited by a poorly established relationship with the public. The chapter examines the public critique of the profession by Victor Papanek, an émigré designer from Austria based in the US, who delivered a damning and dramatic polemic on industrial design, ‘a dangerous profession’. The chapter further positions the emergence of ‘design for development’ paradigms within the context of the cold war and the politicized value of design as a tool of cultural diplomacy and exploitation in industrializing countries. It ends by reflecting on the inability of professional organizations to meaningfully respond to this shift or to sufficiently reinvent their professional identity for this new audience.
The design profession is frequently said to be in a state of crisis. Taking a fresh look at its past to connect with present-day features, this book revisits the history of the industrial design profession in new perspective. Exploring the design profession as a socially constructed practice, the book identifies points of transition, friction and flux that have steered representation and identity in this field since the early twentieth century. Its analysis focuses on the period between 1930 and 1980, starting from the moment British and American industrial artists and designers self-consciously chose to pursue the path to professionalization, to establish visible public status as professionals alongside the architect and engineer. From here, the book explores the internal dramas, hopes, aspirations, insecurities and failures of men and women working as industrial designers between 1930 and 1980, a period of immense cultural and social change. Bringing new perspectives to the gendered dynamics of professionalization and the history of design, it examines the representation of the industrial designer over time through the lens of the museum and gallery, television and film, magazines and the print press, in the studio, boardroom and home. Each chapter of the book captures moments of transition through these platforms, which give agency to the identity of design, a profession in a constant state of invention.