Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life

by Alison Mackinnon

Overview

Can the educated women of the 1990s have both a career and a fulfilling personal life? This book traces the history of women's responses to changes in education, employment, reproductive science and law since the 1890s. Increased work and education opportunities and knowledge of contraception meant choice about when, and indeed whether, to marry and have children. The author utilizes social and government history, autobiography and statistical analysis. This incisive interdisciplinary book will find broad appeal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521497619
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/28/1997
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; Acknowledgements; Epigraph; 1. Gender crisis and social anxiety; 2. The selfishness of women: moral panic and the declining birthrate; 3. Sexuality and reproduction: narratives of demography and discourse; 4. The curse of Eve? Family formation and the university woman; 5. 'This dependence of the woman in marriage unspeakably distasteful': from wife to woman; 6. Two antagonistic worlds? Love and the life of the mind; 7. The internationalization of the human heart; 8. Conclusions: both gifts in one hand?

Editorial Reviews

"Alison Mackinnon deftly weaves together three crucial changes in the lives of women during the past hundred years: feminism, education and birth control. This is a wonderfully lucid and convincing study." Martha Vicinus, University of Michigan

"In her excellent study, Alison Mackinnon extends to Australia a literature that examines the lives of early women college graduates and their entrance into professional life. Mackinnon has made an excellent contribution to women's history and to the history of work and family. her book is significant for all who are interested in the lives of women in the Anglophone world. The questions she shares about marriage, motherhood, and autonomy remain as relevant today as they were a century ago." Penina Migdal Glazer, American Historical Review

From the Publisher