During the night of 24 May 1524 a fire broke out in the city of Troyes in the French province of Champagne, a fire which was to rage for two days and nights, destroying up to a quarter of the town (including at least 300 houses) and seriously damaging three of the city's churches. A number of fatalities was also reported. In the aftermath of the fire, as an assessment of the damage was made, the city council undertook a review of municipal security and ordered the expulsion of non-natives of Troyes, the safe storage of inflammable materials and the provision of water outside each house. Emergency grain supplies were also organized, as many stores had been destroyed in what had already been a poor yield that year. The extent of the fire reveals the vulnerability of urban communities at a time when fire-fighting methods were still extremely primitive and fire insurance non-existent, but the sources also demonstrate the capacity of these communities to recover from such a setback. For fire was a common enough occurrence in cities in this period, an everyday hazard in narrow streets where houses were huddled together and the primary building material and source of fuel, for both domestic use and manufacturing, was wood. Indeed, there is now a substantial literature on urban fires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which concentrates largely on the physical damage inflicted, the sources of relief available to the victims and the precautions to be taken to prevent a recurrence of such misfortune.

There has recently been a tremendous new awareness of male violence against women, an awareness which spans the academic world, the services that come in contact with it, and popular initiatives. Edinburgh District Council's Zero Tolerance campaign (which arose out of a report on adolescents' knowledge about, and attitude to, domestic violence) began in 1992 and was a landmark in bringing this issue out into the open in Britain. Hundreds of articles have appeared in American medical journals in the last four or five years, and March 1995 saw the launch of a new interdisciplinary journal, entitled simply Violence Against Women. And of all the women who suffer violence, the greatest number are wives whose husbands abuse them.

As controversy concerning the future of Britain's railways continues to be voiced, their influence in shaping social structures in the past perhaps remains unexplained. Yet the nineteenth-century revolution in transport had a most profound effect on the physical conditions and mentalities of contemporaries. Landscapes were altered, old towns irrevocably changed and new ones created; topographical spellings and pronunciation were standardized and time itself was robbed of local variation; a new vocabulary was devised and new occupations were invented. In the construction of the railways a vast labour force, around 200,000 labourers at mid century, drew workmen from their traditional employment and often very far from their original homes. In the operation of the railways, new possibilities of travel, for business and pleasure, changed fundamentally the patterns and perceptions of mobility. Given such revolutionary developments, it is highly improbable that patterns of crime and criminality and the measures taken to counteract them would be unaffected. This article attempts to assess and to illustrate the extent and nature of the changes in these areas caused by the coming of the railway.

The present ageing of the population in western countries, and the related problems this development poses for contemporary social policy, provide especially compelling reasons for historians to think about old age in the past. A fundamental question is whether solitariness, or residential isolation, in this phase of the life-cycle is an inherent product of industrialization and urbanization or whether past societies confronted similar problems.

Despite the growth in studies of the history of the family over recent years – studies which have considered family structure, family demography, household strategies, kinship networks, and the like – a great gap in the literature remains regarding the role and status of family members in different phases of the life-cycle in Spain, particularly with respect to age and sex. Therefore, it is not surprising that there is an absence of information on old age and our elders' life-styles in the past, or on the extent to which the aged led lives of poverty and marginalization.

This article attempts to tackle some of the issues relating to the elderly in a particular place, Bilbao, and in a historical period, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The progress of industrialization throughout the nineteenth century had profound effects on health and mortality. One relationship that contemporaries found particularly alarming was the potentially damaging effect that the employment of women in industry outside the home could have on their families' health. The fear expressed by public health officials was that women's employment would lead to neglect of their family duties and subsequently put their children's health at risk. Women were also regarded as more susceptible to industrial hazards, particularly to lead. Hence, women's work was seen to have important consequences for maternal and infant health and was considered incompatible with their traditional duties within the home. The introduction of legislation to restrict women's employment opportunities during the latter half of the nineteenth century was partly in recognition of this conflict between work and home. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the importance of good mothering was increasingly cited by public health reformers, mainly male and middle-class, alarmed at the persistent high level of infant mortality in urban areas. In industrial areas where there were opportunities for women's employment, the extent to which it contributed to high levels of mortality became a prominent public health issue associated with growing concern over standards of motherhood. In response to increasing agitation over the employment of mothers, the 1891 Factory Act prohibited employers from knowingly hiring women within a month of childbirth.

Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel and Christine D. Worobec eds., Russia's women: accommodation, resistance, transformation. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and Oxford, England: University of California Press, 1991.) Pages xi+300. £35.00 (hardback); £13.50 (paperback). (hereafter RW)

Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola eds., Russian peasant women. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.) Pages 304. £13.50. (hereafter RPW)

Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the fields and the city: women, work and family in Russia 1861–1914 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.) Pages xi+254. £35.00. (hereafter Between)

In 1995 a Russian scholar lamented that ‘Women's history as an autonomous sub-discipline of historical science does not yet exist in Russia’, and that it had been suppressed in the Soviet Union. In contrast, western historians have produced a great deal of work on Russian women over the last 20–30 years. Much of the early work concentrated on women radicals and the feminist movement. More recently, historians have turned their attention to the mass of the female population who lived in rural Russia. The books under review here are very good examples of both the range and the quality of the work on Russian women and of the new focus on peasant women.