Synopses & Reviews
This illustrated study tells the tale of a middle-class English family's fortunes. The experiences of two women--Anne Jemima Clough and her niece, Blanche Athena Clough--reveal the particular vulnerability of middle-class women to economic changes. As first and fourth principals of Newnham College, Cambridge, their lives and work enact the revolution in women's education which allowed women to finally enter professional occupations and construct their own economic lifelines. Anne Jemima's brother and Blanche Athena's father was the poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who lost his Christian faith painfully and publicly at the end of the 1840s.
Review
"This book is at its best when it deals with the peculiarities of a family that rarely seemed to work as a family but functioned, through its women, as integral to an institution, adapting to the times as its men never did." - Valerie Sanders, University of Hull
Review
"This book is engagingly written...[it] will be of great interest to historians of women's education, Victorian feminism, and to those who enjoy engaging biographies"
Pamela J. Walker, Carleton University, Canadian Journal of History
Review
"In 'Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind', Gillian Sutherland offers a multigenerational portrait of a well-connected family that is also illustrative of the broader importance of family and other ties within the history of the English middle class." -Marynel Ryan, H-Women
Synopsis
This is the story of an English middle-class family and their fortunes. Centre-stage are the women members, Anne Jemima Clough and her niece, Blanche Athena Clough, who helped replace a model of education for girls which kept them in the home with one which gave them access to systematic study and eventually to professional employment. Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind shows what it might mean to lose Christian faith in nineteenth and early twentieth century England, and is an unusually attractive and distinctive contribution to modern British history.
Synopsis
This 2006 book tells the story of an English middle-class family and their fortunes.
Table of Contents
List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Family trees; Introduction; 1. Childhood and Charleston; 2. 'A land...with strong foes beset'; 3. Confirming a vocation; 4. Family duty; 5. The beginnings of Newnham; 6. Enter Blanche Athena Clough; 7. 'An ought which has to be reckoned with'; 8. Re-grouping; 9. War and its consequences; 10. Salvage operations; 11. Retirement; Conclusion; Abbreviations; Notes; Index.