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
Chapter 3 shifts attention away from the male design consultant, to look at the production of professional identity on other sites and spaces in industrial design. The chapter begins by examining the identity of the ‘woman designer’, a term that makes little sense when taken out of the hyper-masculine context of industrial design. Through a focused study of the representation of designers Gaby Schreiber, Freda Diamond and Florence Knoll Bassett, three designers working successfully in the post-war period, it finds that the term was a useful media construction that enabled these women to find a balance between femininity and professionalism, using the former as a tool through which to claim expertise in the realm of consumer goods and interior design. Moving to look more closely at the mechanisms of professionalization, the second section addresses the parallel emergence of the publicity profession in the US, as a principal tool through which the visibility and identity of the design consultant was managed and performed. The chapter draws on new research in the archive of Betty Reese, to reveal the gendered dynamics of publicity work and its situation in the office of Raymond Loewy Associates. The final two sections of this chapter examine practices of administration and organization as professional roles in design. Drawing on the freshly transcribed oral history testimony of Dorothy Goslett, Business Manager at the Design Research Unit (DRU), London and a report on ‘Student Behaviour’ by Cycill Tomrley, manager of the Record of Designers at the Council of Industrial Design (CoID), the chapter shows how these women formulated their views of professionalism and professional conduct in relation to their impressions of male privilege, which they observed and interacted with at work.
Given the participation in printed medical debates of not only guild-regulated medical practitioners but also of the general public, increasingly over the sixteenth century physicians themselves did begin to record their medical knowledge and practices in print. If women did not publish medical texts themselves, it was more likely to result from their lack of opportunities than from any institutional bar from the book trades on their publication. There were popular handbooks produced with female medical practice in mind, and that indeed where women held medical works, they were generally of this variety. This chapter seeks to determine how women's domestic medical work was perceived by contemporaries, both the university medical and lay communities. Where histories of medicine acknowledge the role of women in primary and domestic medicine, it is commonplace to conclude that we cannot understand women's specific medical practices in the home because they were passed on orally.
This chapter assesses what elite women understood about their bodies, how they obtained this knowledge and how, confronted with other medical epistemologies, women justified their knowledge of their own bodies as valid. Although elite women probably attended births less frequently than women of more modest social origins, certainly the Nassau sisters made efforts to attend their sisters in childbed. The Nassau sisters' system of knowledge was not entirely exterior to their bodies, but linked to what they could feel through their bodies. They did absorb and accept certain aspects of obstetrical and gynaecological knowledge from the faculties, but also rejected other aspects, so as to create their own understandings based on their personal experiences and notions of their bodies. However, female knowledge of pregnancy was by no means innate, even if it relied on sensory perceptions of the body.
In March 1567, Jeanne Lescallier was prohibited by the lieutenant criminal in the Senechalscy of Anjou from practising medicine, from making medical diagnosis and from administering any potions and brews to the sick. The case was heard in 1578 before the Parlement of Paris which was the appeal court for decisions made at the presidial court at Angers. This chapter examines the existing documentation surrounding the presentation of the case before the Parlement of Paris. It analyses the opposing narratives put forward by jurists for the legal community, so as to understand how female healing was perceived by sixteenth-century law. Lescallier's case is unusually rich in demonstrating the complexities of contemporary opinions, within the medical, ecclesiastical, legal and local communities, about the authority and criminality of female healing, and how far they were prepared to recognise it publicly.
This chapter examines the intersections between university medicine and the reproductive knowledge of court women across sixteenth-century France and Spain. It explores their discussions of menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth in the correspondence surrounding the reign of Elisabeth de Valois as Queen of Spain between 1559 and 1568. The chapter demonstrates how the pubescent and parturient body of Elisabeth de Valois became a region of cultural confrontation and compromise, and a place of entry for female authority in French medicine. Elite women not only developed their own knowledge and practices about reproductive health that they shared with friends or family, but they could also participate in a wider arena, alongside physicians, midwives and other medical practitioners. The chapter examines the areas to which elite and royal women at court could contribute and the strategies they employed to justify their knowledge.
This chapter focuses on the nursing work of women in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century hospitals. The sixteenth century was a period of great change where the organisation of hospitals shifted from ecclesiastical control to one of the many poor relief services managed by municipal councils. The chapter examines religious women's work as nursing staff in the Hotel-Dieu in Paris during the early sixteenth century, a period that allows us to understand how the change from ecclesiastical to lay governors affected provision of their medical services. The documents with which the chapter is concerned encompass a time period from 1480 until 1539 to demonstrate that the difficulties and conflicts that women faced in pursuing their nursing work were not issues related to a single 'regime' or a particular prioress. Furthermore, the period from 1480 to 1539 marks a significant phase in the history of the Hotel-Dieu.
For a majority of the French population during the period known as the Renaissance, most medical care would come at the hands of women. Historians of medicine in France have traditionally emphasised the progression towards professionalisation that occurred as one of the defining characteristics of the period known as the Renaissance. The medical care contributed by women will include such domains as child health, primary emergency treatment, palliative care, culinary therapy, and hospital nursing to name a few. This book is structured in such a way as to demonstrate how different contexts and communities responded to women's medical work in varied and sometimes contrasting ways. It demonstrates that medicine in sixteenth-century France was not perceived as an exclusively male activity by any means, by either men or women at the time, nor even by those who formed the university and guild medical communities.
This chapter investigates the roles, responsibilities and perceptions of women who were paid for their work as care-givers and medical service providers in municipal child-care arrangements. The focus is on child-care arrangements in the later sixteenth century, a time when management of hospitals, foundling and orphaned children's welfare and poor relief services was becoming centralised under a bureau of lay administrators. Nursing a child was not without its dangers for women and their families. Hospital accounts recorded compensation given to wetnursing women who contracted illnesses from an infected child. Whatever the impact at the municipal level of increased supervision and organisation of child-care services, and of distinct establishments to cater for children, the day-to-day contact with the young recipients of care continued to be provided by women throughout the sixteenth century. Municipal health-care policies employed women as child carers in response to a number of contemporary notions.
Alongside guild regulation, female practice in Paris and other medical centres also faced regulation by their respective medical faculties. This chapter explores how medical faculties perceived women's medical knowledge and practices, and how women responded to these perceptions and practised medicine as a result. It first concentrates on a study of prosecutions for illegal practice brought before medical faculties. The chapter then examines what opportunities women had to access university medical knowledge and practice. In conclusion, it is evident that 'the university' as an institution certainly restricted women both consciously and unconsciously, as students, daughters, wives and widows, from most of the means by which they might gain some understanding of university medicine. The evidence presented in the chapter demonstrates that the Faculty of Medicine, at least in Paris, had any particular motivation to exclude female practitioners per se, and most women continued to practise medical services unhindered.
In the sixteenth century, guild organisations ordered practice and knowledge in a number of medical fields. Understanding the participation of women in medical guilds necessitates an examination of the medieval medical world in which many of these corporations were formed, and from which those instituted in the sixteenth century developed. This chapter focuses on women's interaction with the guild organisation of the barbers, surgeons and apothecaries in the medieval and early modern eras. It examines how these structures influenced the creation of a new licensed group in the sixteenth century and women's participation within it. The evidence of guild regulations seems to suggest that women as wives and widows could practise surgery in some measure through a kind of unofficial apprenticeship to their husbands and fathers. Guild regulation of certain medical work had a profound effect on female practice even before the sixteenth century.