Why do certain women become icons of evil? This book offers the first comparative, non-sensationalist account of five of the most reviled women in the modern Anglophone world: Myra Hindley, Rosemary West, Aileen Wuornos, Karla Homolka and Karla Faye Tucker. It examines their lives, crimes and cultural reception in the UK, USA and Canada, asking how violence committed by women is understood, judged and remembered. Going beyond moral outrage or tabloid headlines, the book explores how concep...

Disgrace is the first truly global history of sexual violence. The book explores how sexual violence varies widely across time and place, from nineteenth-century peasant women in Ireland who were abducted as a way of forcing marriage, to date-raped high-school students in twentieth-century America, and from girls and women violated by Russian soldiers in 1945 to Dalit women raped by men of higher castes today. It delves into the factors that facilitate violence – including institu...

Birkbeck traces the 200-year history of Birkbeck, University of London from its founding at a time when social elites deplored the notion of educated working people to the present day. Joanna Bourke writes a lively history of the institution, and how it contributed to the shaping of modern British higher education. Two hundred years ago, Birkbeck was founded as the London Mechanics' Institution (LMI). When it was established in 1823, one third of all men and half of all women were...

This book explores the concept of ‘resilience’ in the context of militaries and militarization. Focusing on the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, and continental Europe, it argues that, post-9/11, there has been a shift away from ‘trauma’ and towards ‘resilience’ in framing and understanding human responses to calamitous events. The contributors to this volume show how resilience-speech has been militarized, and deeply entrenched in imagined communities. As the concept travels, it is appli...

This volume explores agricultural commercialization from a gender equality and right to food perspective.Agricultural commercialization, involving not only the shift to selling crops and buying inputs but also the commodification of land and labour, has always been controversial. Strategies for commercialization have often reinforced and exacerbated inequalities, been blind to gender differences and given rise to violations of the human rights to food, land, work and social securit...

Sex with animals is one of the last taboos but, for a practice that is generally regarded as abhorrent, it is remarkable how many books, films, plays, paintings and photographs depict the subject. So what does loving animals mean? In this book the renowned historian Joanna Bourke explores the modern history of sex between humans and animals.Bourke looks at the changing meanings of ‘bestiality’ and ‘zoophilia’, assesses the psychiatric and sexual aspects, and concludes by delineating...

Everyone knows what is feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what they describe as 'painful' has changed considerably over time. In the...

In 1872, a woman known only as "An Earnest Englishwoman" published a letter titled "Are Women Animals?" in which she protested against the fact that women were not treated as fully human. In fact, their status was worse than that of animals: regulations prohibiting cruelty against dogs, horses, and cattle were significantly more punitive than laws against cruelty to women. The Earnest Englishwoman's heartfelt cry was for women to "become–animal" in order to gain the status that they were d...

Integrating a variety of historical approaches and methods, Joanna Bourke looks at the construction of class within the intimate contexts of the body, the home, the marketplace, the locality and the nation to assess how the subjective identity of the 'working class' in Britain has been maintained through seventy years of radical social, cultural and economic change. She argues that class identity is essentially a social and cultural rather than an institutional or political phenomenon and ...

Eyewitness accounts from the BBC Archive are at the heart of this unique history of the first half of the 20th Century, narrated by Tim Pigott-Smith.The events of 1900-1949 are described by the people who saw them happen, from the death of Queen Victoria and accession of Edward VII through the First World War, the sinking of the Titanic, the General Strike and the Great Depression, to the Second World War and its aftermath. Events both joyful and sorrowful are illustrated with fasc...

Looking across time and the globe, a critical history of sexual violence—what causes it and how we overcome it.Disgrace is the first truly global history of sexual violence. The book explores how sexual violence varies widely across time and place, from nineteenth-century peasant women in Ireland who were abducted as a way of forcing marriage, to date-raped high-school students in twentieth-century America, and from girls and women violated by Russian sold...

Eyewitness accounts from the BBC Archive are at the heart of this unique history of the latter half of the 20th Century, narrated by Tim Pigott-Smith.The events of 1950-1999 are described by the people who saw them happen, from the Festival of Britain in 1951 through to dawn of a new millennium at the end of 1999.Inbetween are the eras of the Angry Young Men, the Teddy Boys and the Punk Rockers; the arrival of rock and roll and the permissive society; the advent of industri...