Forgotten Wives examines the ways in which the institution and status of marriage has contributed to the active ‘disremembering’ of women’s achievements. Drawing on archives, biographies, autobiographies and historical accounts, the book interrogates conventions of history and biography writing to show how assumptions about marriage and women help to write women out of history. The book uses the case-studies of four women who were active in social and educational reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and were married to well-known men: Charlotte Shaw (née Payne-Townshend), ... More

Forgotten Wives examines the ways in which the institution and status of marriage has contributed to the active ‘disremembering’ of women’s achievements. Drawing on archives, biographies, autobiographies and historical accounts, the book interrogates conventions of history and biography writing to show how assumptions about marriage and women help to write women out of history. The book uses the case-studies of four women who were active in social and educational reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and were married to well-known men: Charlotte Shaw (née Payne-Townshend), Mary Booth (née Macaulay), Jeannette Tawney (née Beveridge) and Janet Beveridge (known previously as Jessy Mair). The case-studies demonstrate how independently-performing women disappear as supporters of their husbands’ work, as secretaries and research assistants, and as managers of men’s domestic lives. Even intellectual collaboration tends to be portrayed as normative wifely behaviour rather than as joint work. Forgotten Wives asks critical questions about the mechanisms that maintain gender inequality, and it contributes a fresh vision of how the welfare state developed in the early twentieth century.