A study of the lives of the wives, mothers and sisters of more than 50 British political families between 1860 and 1914, ranging from the Cecils to the Ramsay MacDonalds and exploring their personal experiences with first-hand information taken from diaries and correspondence. The author examines the rituals of courtship, and the complex interactions of love, wealth, and class as important prerequisites for marriage and motherhood and contrasts the joys of childbirth with the ever present dangers of miscarriage and maternal mortality. The book analyzes the social and political roles and attitudes of politicians' wives, and the role of spinsters in their obligations to ageing parents and ambitious brothers. Individual case studies are used throughout to document the varieties of women's behaviour, and to illustrate how women's daily activities often differed radically from the prescribed ideals of womanhood. The study is aimed at all those interested in women's studies and social history and students of social and political history in the 19th and 20th centuries. This book was first published in 1986 by Oxford University Press. Pat Jalland has taught history and women's studies in universities in UK, Cnanada and Australia.