Women in England 1760-1914 by Susie Steinbach

I’m also a reviewing editor for the Journal of Victorian Culture, which is a multi- and interdisciplinary journal, so I get to work with people in literature, art history, and geography. Her perspective is grounded in the same time and place, but her strategies are totally different from mine, and her questions about what I’ve written-or about what I haven’t written, or haven’t addressed-always improve my work.

We’ve co-taught, and we always read and critique each other’s written work-I don’t remember the last time I submitted something without getting her comments on it first. Yes, in several ways! I have a friend and colleague who’s also a Victorianist, but of literature rather than history. Have you ever worked with someone in another field, and what was the nature of your collaboration together? Respectability was important, but not everyone was pursuing it all the time. The most popular entertainments were the most titillating-novels full of gruesome murders and scandalous bigamists, plays with onstage shipwrecks, music hall songs full of double entendres. But actually tons of Victorian Britons were openly pleasure-seeking people who enjoyed sex and food and drink and scandal, and who were perfectly comfortable with all of that. People think of Victorians as anti-fun and anti-sex-always going to church and fainting at the sight of a woman’s ankle-or as sanctimonious hypocrites who preached fidelity and abstinence in public and hired prostitutes when no one was looking. Susie Steinbach: I’m an historian of gender in nineteenth-century Britain-so, the Victorians. We caught up with her to talk about Victorian respectability, baking, and Nordic noir detective novels.Īlex Golub: What’s a factoid or tidbit about your field that most people don’t know? 1790–1900, Sacred to Female Patriotism: Gender, Class, and Politics in Late Georgian Britain, and Hard at Work in Factories and Mines: The Economics of Child Labor during the British Industrial Revolution. She has also reviewed many books including Women, Scholarship, and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge c.

Susie is the author of Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture, and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain as well as Women in England 1760-1914: A Social History.

This month we interviewed Susie Steinbach, a professor of history at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Welcome to Ask a Professor, our series that offers an insider’s view of life in academia.

Women in England 1760-1914 by Susie Steinbach