Female Alliances

Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain

Amanda E. Herbert

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780300199253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, cultural, economic, and political changes, as well as increased geographic mobility, placed strains upon British society. But by cultivating friendships and alliances, women worked to socially cohere Britain and its colonies. In the first book-length historical study of female friendship and alliance for the early modern period, Amanda Herbert draws on a series of interlocking microhistorical studies to demonstrate the vitality and importance of bonds formed between British women in the long eighteenth century. She shows that while these alliances were central to women’s lives, they were also instrumental in building the British Atlantic world.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Small Expressions of My Passionate Love and Friendship to Thee”: The Idioms and Languages of Female Alliances
• 2. Noble Presents: Gender, Gift Exchange, and the Reappropriation of Luxury
• 3. Cooperative Labor: Making Alliances Through Women’s Recipes and Domestic Production
• 4. Hot Spring Sociability: Women’s Alliances at British Spas
• 5. Yokemates: Female Quaker Companionship in the British Atlantic World
• 6. Reconciling Friendship and Dissent: Female Alliances in the Diaries of Sarah Savage
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index