Rentiers,teachers and workers: Greek women in late nineteenth-century Odessa

Abstract

This article sheds light on a neglected aspect of the Greek paroikia of Odessa, its female component, in the late imperial period. By revisiting the 1897 All-Russian Census, it offers an insight into the demographic and social features of Greek women, and depicts their occupational position. It shows that middle-class and working women formed the majority of the Greek female workforce and suggests that their participation or non-participation in the labour market depended on the ability of the male breadwinner to support his household financially.     

Contesting Patriarchies: Nlha7pamux and Stl'atl'imx women and colonialism in nineteenth-century British Columbia

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a number of First Nations (Native) women in the southern interior of British Columbia began to live with and marry white settlers and gold miners. Demographic shifts in both white and Native populations, paired with the precedent of liaisons between fur traders and Native women, contributed to the mobility of Native women. Their departure from indigenous communities was, however, bitterly contested by Native men as well as by white politicians who sought to protect 'racial purity' in the province. Despite opposition, Native women pursued this historically constituted possibility of living within an alternative patriarchy. By the late 1890s, waves of British immigration brought young, single, white women to the province and, in a political climate increasingly hostile to 'miscegenation', male settlers began to marry white wives instead. Thus, ironically, discursive and demographic pressures again closed the window through which Native women had travelled into a different culture. Drawing on colonial records and inferences, this article analyses historical components of agency over several generations of Native women. In the process, it examines ways in which relations of power shifted along the axes of race and gender over 30 years of colonialism in British Columbia.     

Pestalozzi, Fellenberg and British nineteenth-century geographical education

The impact that Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) and Philipp Emanuel Fellenberg (1771–1844) had upon nineteenth-century European geographical education and ideas has long been recognised. Their influence upon British geography teaching has, however, been little explored, despite the work already done on the general impact of Pestalozzianism and Fellenbergianism on British education. Using the arguments of nineteenth-century educational theorists such as Compayre and Spencer, this study argues that Pestalozzian educationists such as Phillip Pullen and Charles Mayo in England helped to change the way that geography was taught to middle-class children. A case study of teaching practices at a Pestalozzian institution in Worksop, Nottinghamshire shows how changes in geographical education were encouraged by Pestalozzian ideas on the teaching of geography and the relationship of the subject to other disciplines including topography, natural history and geology.     

Performing the Lodge: Masonry, masculinity, and nineteenth-century North American moral geography

Geographies reinforce gender and facilitate gender performativity. In this study of nineteenth-century Masonry, we demonstrate the influence of Masonic Temples in the promotion and performance of ‘Masonic masculinity.’ Masonry, through its design and construction of interior space, its embedded material symbolism and especially the geography of Masonic ritual itself, inculcated morality in prospective and raised Master Masons. Masonic Temple architecture and décor typify Victorian moral environmentalism vis-à-vis the parlor, the Masonic Lodge a domesticated male space where significant numbers of bourgeois men (and women) acted out a particular and peculiar masculine moral geography.     

French businessmen in the nineteenth-century Mezzogiorno: technical innovation,sociability, networks and negotiation of identities

Abstract

This research examines a group of French entrepreneurs who settled in Naples during the sixty years before the Unification of Italy. It compares the marriage strategies, the professional behaviour, and the relations with the public authorities (the Bourbon government, their own consulate, the local courts, etc.) of these French businessmen with the experience and the life-style of other ethnic-national élites also present in the same period in the Mezzogiorno (Swiss, English, etc.). It highlights the considerable capacity for adaptation shown by the French, their integration in the host society, their collaboration with the indigenous population on a professional level, and their particular capacity to negotiate with the locals even their own status as foreigners. These are the elements that not only make the French case unique in the panorama of entrepreneurial minorities active in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, but also enabled many French entrepreneurs to make an important contribution to the business world in pre-Unification Southern Italy.     

Convict bastards, common-law unions, and shotgun weddings: premarital conceptions and ex-nuptial births in nineteenth-century Tasmania

This article uses reconstituted family data from birth, death, and marriage registers to measure ex-nuptial fertility and premarital pregnancies in nineteenth-century Tasmania. It also examines the extent to which convict origins of European society on the island caused a departure from English norms of family formation behavior, during a period when men greatly outnumbered women. Illegitimacy was high during the convict period. From the mid-1850s, after the convict system collapsed, levels of ex-nupital births were relatively constant until the end of the century, as indicated both by the illegitimacy rate and by the proportion of marriages associated with prenuptial births. By the end of the nineteenth-century, rates of illegitimacy and prenuptial conceptions in Tasmania were well within the range of those of contemporary English-speaking populations.     

Faith,philanthropy and the aged poor in nineteenth-century England and Wales

In the last half of the nineteenth century, Victorians grappled with welfare issues regarding the aged poor as social investigators sought to explain their dependency and poverty. Elderly men and women who were unable to care for themselves, and without a family or community to attend to their needs, had few alternatives outside the workhouse in nineteenth-century England and Wales. Catholic homes for the elderly managed by communities of women religious such as the Sisters of Nazareth provided an important option to the aged poor who often needed both accommodation and medical care. These homes provided a unique form of social welfare which attracted the attention of Protestants as well as Catholics as benefactors. Protestant reformers, looking for different approaches to maintaining the aged poor, inspected these Catholic homes in order to develop their own institutional solutions. Perhaps more pointedly, this interaction between Protestants and Catholics offers a counter narrative to the usual histories that emphasise anti-Catholicism, sectarianism and conflict. Despite the anti-Catholic tenor of the times, the homes for the aged of the Sisters of Nazareth were recognized and funded by both Catholics and Protestants as they were seen as providing a much needed form of charitable aid for the aged poor. As an alternative to poor law workhouses, the institutions created and managed by Catholic women religious formed an integral part of the mixed economy of welfare in the nineteenth century.