Free summaries
Gender & Sexuality Studies — page 4
185 public-domain gender & sexuality studies books, summarised. Page 4 of 4.
The Needed Change in the Age of Consent: An Appeal For the Better Protection of Our Girls
Richard Arthur
This urgent appeal argues that existing laws fail to protect young women from exploitation, calling for a legislative reform to raise the age of consent to eighteen.
The unwelcome child
Henry Clarke Wright
The unwelcome child is a fervent, bracing appeal for sexual autonomy and mutual reverence within marriage, positioning the well-being of the unborn as the ultimate consequence of how parents treat one another.
The Making of a Trade School
Mary Schenck Woolman
Fourteen-year-old girls in early twentieth-century New York enter high-speed factories unprepared, earning micro-wages without any path toward advance. A pioneering trade school steps into that breach to reshape industrial education for young women.
Woman in Political Evolution
Joseph McCabe
A grand historical survey tracing how human civilizations have restricted or elevated women, proving that modern demands for the vote are not a sudden social disruption, but the inevitable final phase of political evolution.
Tractus de Hermaphrodites
Giles Jacob
Early eighteenth-century medical inquiry meets sensational gossip in this curious treatise, which maps the outer boundaries of human anatomy, legal personhood, and sexual transgression with equal parts earnestness and intrigue.
A mechanical and critical enquiry into the nature of hermaphrodites
James Parsons
This investigation challenges the ancient and enduring myth of the hermaphrodite, arguing that what has historically been labeled as a "double sex" is always a biological misunderstanding. By dissecting both the medical literature and the societal superstitions of the past, the text systematically reclassifies…
Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment
Unknown
The fight for the vote is not merely a matter of winning hearts and minds, but a strategic campaign to bypass the systemic obstacles of state-by-state reform.
Men, Women, and God: A Discussion of Sex Questions from the Christian Point of View
A. Herbert (Arthur Herbert) Gray
The path to a fulfilled, moral life is paved not by fear or repression, but by a courageous, honest embrace of human love and the divine intention behind our sexual nature.
The causes of prostitution
James Peter Warbasse
Society often blames individual women for their circumstances, yet the true origins of systemic exploitation lie in economic disparity, inadequate education, and the pervasive indifference of a culture that profits from human misery.
Behind the scenes in a restaurant: A study of 1017 women restaurant employees
Consumers' League of New York City
Women toil in dark, unventilated kitchens for twelve to fifteen hours a day, carrying heavy trays for wages so low they must rely on tips or stolen moments of sleep to survive.
Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 684: February 3, 1877
Various
An eclectic slice of Victorian popular print, this issue balances serious debates on women's employment with moral fiction, travel reporting, and natural history.
Social devices for impelling women to bear and rear children
Leta Stetter Hollingworth
Society relies on a web of invisible pressures to ensure the continuation of the human race, often masking the profound physical and social costs of motherhood through cultural myth-making.
Adolescence
Stephen Paget
Adolescence offers a plea for parents to trade Victorian silence for honest, prepared guidance regarding the physical and spiritual development of children. It frames the maturation of the young as a shared responsibility requiring both physiological truth and moral grounding.
Legal Status of Women in Iowa
Jennie L. (Jennie Lansley) Wilson
This work serves as a foundational guide for Iowa women seeking to understand their legal rights, responsibilities, and protections within the state’s statutes and historical common law framework.
The Curtezan unmasked
Anonymous
This seventeenth-century moral tract serves as a stern, unyielding warning against the perils of lust, framing the pursuit of illicit pleasure as a path toward physical ruin and spiritual damnation. It offers a window into the intense religious anxieties and rigid social attitudes of its time, providing a stark,…
Early Double Monasteries: A Paper read before the Heretics' Society on December 6th, 1914
Constance Stoney
This academic inquiry illuminates the historically overlooked, collaborative structures of early Christian monasticism, where men and women maintained separate but interdependent communities under unified leadership.
Female affection
Basil Montagu
The essence of human connection is found in the heart of woman, where devotion serves as the primary and most enduring force of nature.
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447: Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852
Various
A single mid-nineteenth-century issue of a popular Victorian periodical provides a sharp, varied, and entertaining window into the social debates, colonial ambitions, financial scandals, and cultural pleasures of its day.
Education of Women
M. Carey (Martha Carey) Thomas
The higher education of women in America is a grand experiment that has, within only thirty years, proven its worth through the success of its students and the rapid expansion of opportunity.
The education and employment of women
Josephine Elizabeth Grey Butler
The industrial and social evolution of 19th-century Britain left millions of women stranded without the means of self-support, forcing a reckoning with an outdated system that ignored their economic reality.
Songs of Womanhood
Laurence Alma-Tadema
In this evocative collection of verse, the quiet rhythms of domestic life, the wonder of the natural world, and the ache of human longing find a gentle, lyrical voice.
Behind the Scenes in a Hotel
Consumers' League of New York City
The modern hotel is a machine of luxury for the traveler, but for the women in the housekeeping and kitchen departments, it is a place of exhausting, low-wage labor and profound instability.
Women for votes
Elizabeth Hughes
In this 1912 farce, a New York household becomes the battleground for the suffrage movement, where political convictions clash with social ambitions and the absurd realities of daily life.
The Industrial Condition of Women and Girls in Honolulu: A Social Study
Frances Blascoer
Beneath the sunlit tranquility of the Hawaiian islands, a quiet industrial awakening is drawing women and young girls into canneries, laundries, and shops to test the limits of their endurance.
The Progress of the Women's Suffrage Movement: Presidential Address to the Cambridge Branch of the C. & U. W. F. A. at the Annual Meeting on May 23rd, 1913
Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick
This presidential address offers a measured, reflective look at the state of the women’s suffrage movement in early twentieth-century Britain. It traces the long, patient struggle for the vote, balancing hard-won optimism against the mounting tensions of the era.
Universal peace—from a woman's standpoint
Bertha von Suttner
Universal peace is not a distant, utopian dream for the naive, but a practical necessity for a modern, rational civilization. This urgent call to action argues that the time for organized, international arbitration has finally arrived.
The Girl and Her Religion
Margaret Slattery
Society often expects girlhood to be a golden path of absolute freedom, yet the reality reveals a crushing weight of social handicaps, empty materialism, and spiritual starvation.
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
Jean Turner-Zimmermann
A doctor's exposé of Chicago's white slave trade, where girls are lured, trapped, and sold into prostitution.
Confidential Chats with Girls
William Lee Howard
This guide serves as a candid, no-nonsense manual for adolescent girls, stripping away the era’s suffocating silence to explain the biological and behavioral requirements for lifelong health.
The constitutional iniquity involved in all forms of the regulation of prostitution
Josephine Elizabeth Grey Butler
The state-sanctioned regulation of prostitution constitutes an assault on fundamental legal rights, undermining the very constitutional framework that protects all citizens from arbitrary government power.
French morality, under the regulation system
Julie-Victoire Daubié
A scathing, meticulously researched indictment of the mid-nineteenth-century French "regulation system," this work exposes how state-sanctioned policies protected male vice while systematically dehumanizing women.
Shelley and the Marriage Question
John Todhunter
A Victorian physician examines the radical legacy of a poet, arguing that the modern struggle for gender equality and marriage reform finds its most prophetic, if imperfect, voice in the idealism of the past.
Women Students in the University of North Carolina: 1897-1922
Anonymous
Marking a quarter-century of pioneering coeducation at the University of North Carolina, this commemorative record chronicles the diverse paths and achievements of its early women students.
Woman under the ethnic religions
Smith, Moses, Mrs.
This paper, originally delivered at the 1893 World’s Congress of Missions, argues that the status of women serves as the definitive yardstick for evaluating the moral fruit of the world’s major religions.
The torch bearer
Agnes E. Ryan
A meticulous insider account reveals how a tiny, underfunded office in Boston runs the premier voice of the American suffrage movement through sheer conviction and administrative grit.
The Stilled Patter
James E. Gunn
The world ends not with a bang, but with the quiet, collective realization that parenthood is a trap. This grimly satirical tale explores how one man’s attempt to debunk baby-care myths inadvertently triggers the collapse of human civilization.
Josiah's Secret: A Play
Marietta Holley
A tired farm wife puts chivalry to the test, freezing dinner and churning butter to teach her husband that pedestal-placing requires actual labor.
Women compositors
H. G. B.
This guide serves as a practical, foundational manual for women entering the printing trade, offering both technical instruction and a spirited defense of their inclusion in a historically male-dominated industry.
Why and How
Addie Chisholm
The liquor traffic is a relentless tyrant, but organized, praying women possess the strength to break its hold on the nation’s homes.
The Sentence and Affidavit of John Church, the Obelisk Preacher: For an Attempt to Commit an Unnatural Crime on Adam Foreman, at Vauxhall. Together With Judge Bayley's Impressive Address to the Prisoner, at Full Length. At the Court of King's Bench, Nov. 24, 1817
Joseph Augustus Dowling
This transcript documents the final courtroom reckoning of John Church, a disgraced preacher whose public morality collapsed under the weight of his criminal behavior at Vauxhall.
The Heroic Women of Early Indiana Methodism: An Address Delivered Before the Indiana Methodist Historical Society
T. A. (Thomas Aiken) Goodwin
History has long celebrated the male pioneers of the pulpit, entirely overlooking the women whose backbreaking labor, quiet endurance, and steadfast faith sustained the early church.