The Victorian Woman by Duncan Crow (1971).
Book is in acceptable condition with original dust jacket. The binding is a little soft and the pages are aged in color. The inside front cover has the name "Estelle" written lightly in pencil and the inside back cover has a price and some abbreviations also written in pencil.
The book gives an extremely detailed look inside the lives of women of the Victorian era (1837 - 1901), providing valuable information for historical researchers.
From the dust jacket:
"This extremely readable book sets out to describe the conditions - psychological, physical, emotional, legal, social, economic - under which more than half the population of the United Kingdom (and also the United States) lived during the sixty four-years of social adventure which was the Victorian era.
Who was the Victorian woman? Duncan Crow shows that she was not the doll-faced, swooning miss of the social myth, nor the straight-laced prude of popular imagination. She was, in fact, something much more exciting and adventurous.
He gives a startling picture of life in Victorian Britain and the United States, revealing the poverty, prostitution, incest and degradation that coexisted with the thrusting, affluent Top Nation. He incorporates, on the other hand, the life stories of many women, famous and not so famous, who lived in that ambivalent age, with its antithesis of violence and cosy euphemism, including some who helped to change those conditions. He covers, in fact, the whole Woman Scene in its private and public aspects, showing how it changed with the changing conditions. It is an enormous canvas, but the author has covered it thoroughly.
Aldous Huxley said that 'generalizing about Women is like indicting a nation - an amusing pastime, but very unlikely to be productive either of truth or of utility'. This book avoids that censure: it steers a fascinating course between the overly synoptic and the blinkers of detail."