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From family to factory: women's lives during the Industrial Revolution

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From family to factory: women's lives during the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution saw thousands of women enter the workplace alongside men – but it was far from emancipatory, writes Elinor Evans The Industrial Revolution caused a dramatic shift in women’s roles in society. Before industrialisation, the household would have been the centre of production, and women’s work largely confined to the domestic sphere, but no less physical for it. Tasks such as fetching water, and tending livestock would have kept women as busy as clothing and feeding a family, while many also took other work into their home such as hand-spinning or weaving. Cottage industry, as it was called, didn’t entirely end with the arrival of large- scale manufacturing, but the advent of machinery had an irreversible impact on women’s lives. As machines replaced individual labour and burgeoning industries needed coal, women became part of the growing working classes that laboured in mines and mills. In
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From 1971: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

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From 1971: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? A version of this story originally appeared in the January 1971 issue of ARTnews. While the recent upsurge of feminist activity in this country has indeed been a liberating one, its force has been chiefly emotional—personal, psychological and subjective—centered, like the other radical movements to which it is related, on the present and its immediate needs, rather than on historical analysis of the basic intellectual issues which the feminist attack on the status quo automatically raises.1 Like any revolution, however, the feminist one ultimately must come to grips with the intellectual and ideological basis of the various intellectual or scholarly disciplines—history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, etc.—in the same way that it questions the ideologies of present social institutions. If, as John Stuart Mill suggested, we tend to accept whatever is as natural, this is just as true in the realm of academic investigation as it is
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The Power of a Smaller Breast Breast reduction is all the rage in cosmetic surgery

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The Power of a Smaller Breast Breast reduction is all the rage in cosmetic surgery. Are women asserting their independence or capitulating to yet another impossible standard of beauty? The women walk into the surgeons’ offices with photos cued up on their phones. Miley Cyrus. Keira Knightley. Bella Hadid. I want my breasts to look like this, they say. They’ve already spent hours on YouTube watching plastic surgeons’ infomercials, on Instagram poring over before-and-afters, and on TikTok, where an army of ordinary women post about their breast reductions. “Ask me,” they say. Whether their nipple sensation has changed. What their boyfriends said. Whether they cared.Sometimes a woman walks into her initial consultation with the bralette she hopes to wear. Or she’ll say, “I can’t wait for my braless summer.” Or that she looks forward to shopping for a $15 bikini top at Target, something cute and bright or floral, signaling a life so carefree its wearer might never need fat straps or eye ho
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Naked punishment: woman jailed for 8 months in China for stripping husband’s

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Naked punishment: woman jailed for 8 months in China for stripping husband’s  mistress and parading her through streets nude as friends beat her up Wife and 3 friends beat woman, tear off her clothes, sprinkle pepper on her body and force her through crowds Incident viewed 120 million times on Weibo alone as some ask why husband was not punished insteadA woman who took revenge on her husband’s lover by stripping her naked and parading her through the streets, has been sentenced to eight months in prison. A court in Jiang county in southwestern Guizhou province found the wife, surnamed Xu, guilty after she humiliated the woman said to be the mistress of her cheating husband. Xu told how, last year, neighbours had alerted her to the alleged infidelity, so she began following her spouse. In November, Xu saw her husband enter a flat and stay there for some time. Assuming there was a woman in there, she called three female friends for backup.The four women barged into the home, where they f
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