Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality

Front Cover
Carol Smart
Routledge, 1992 - Law - 233 pages
Sexuality, motherhood and marriage were matters of public policy throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were prominent areas in the regulation of women, but the idea that the law merely reflected what was normal and natural obscured the extent of this regulation. Regulating Womanhood poses historically and culturally specific questions about the mechanisms that have controlled and restricted women. It shows not merely how laws and policies have set boundaries to the lives of women but also how the category of 'woman' has been constructed as a specific object for legal and social policy, and how women came to be seen as needing 'special' regulation. In addition, Regulating Womanhood explores how children and the organisation of reproduction and sexuality operated to normalise and make acceptable the degree of regulation to which women were subjected. Yet this is not a catalogue of the unmitigated subjection of women in history. The contributors focus on women's resistance and activity, and on the shift in modes of regulation, to challenge the idea of an unchanging history of the legal oppression of women.

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About the author (1992)

Carol is Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds. She is also Director of the Centre for Research on Family, Kinship and Childhood. Her current research is on changing family life, childhood and cohabitation and her latest book, Family Fragments?, written with fellow CAVA member Bren Neale, was published by Polity Press in 1999. She is also co-author of Cohabitation Breakdown published by the Family Policy Studies Centre in April 2000, and co-editor of The New Family? (Sage, 1999). In relation to the original CAVA programme, Carol is the leader of Strand 3, working predominantly on the Divorce and Separation Study and the Transnational Kinship Study. She is also researching aspects of Strands 1 & 2. In addition, Carol is working with Shelley Budgeon on the Marrying In/Marrying Out project.

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