ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book understands 'Europe' to be the land stretching from Ireland to the Ural Mountains in Russia, and from the Scandinavian countries down to the four main Mediterranean peninsulas, Iberia, Italy, the Balkans, and Anatolia, not excluding the Mediterranean Islands. It analyses a variety of eighteenth-century literary genres that were strongly associated with women, including letters and didactic literature, autobiography, poetry, novels and children's literature, particularly looking for the ways women used such forms to comment on women's role and status. The book shows how the changes affected women's subsistence and money-making activities, both for better and for worse, and it takes up several long-running debates about women's work, women and capitalism, and women and industrialization. It examines with the massive conservative reaction that the Revolutions inadvertently set in motion, one in which the status of women was a central concern.
