Best of
Feminism

1996

Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood


bell hooks - 1996
    A memoir of ideas and perceptions, Bone Black shows the unfolding of female creativity and one strong-spirited child's journey toward becoming a writer. She learns early on the roles women and men play in society, as well as the emotional vulnerability of children. She sheds new light on a society that beholds the joys of marriage for men and condemns anything more than silence for women. In this world, too, black is a woman's color—worn when earned—daughters and daddies are strangers under the same roof, and crying children are often given something to cry about. hooks finds good company in solitude, good company in books. She also discovers, in the motionless body of misunderstanding, that writing is her most vital breath.

The Descent of Alette


Alice Notley - 1996
    Alette, the narrator, finds herself underground, deep beneath the city, where spirits and people ride endlessly on subways, not allowed to live in the world above. Traveling deeper and deeper, she is on a journey of continual transformation, encountering a series of figures and undergoing fragmentations and metamorphoses as she seeks to confront the Tyrant and heal the world. Using a new measure, with rhythmic units indicated by quotation marks, Notley has created a "spoken" text, a rich and mesmerizing work of imagination, mystery, and power.

The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service


Laura Kaplan - 1996
    Wade decision, most women determined to get abortions had to subject themselves to the power of illegal, unregulated abortionists...But a Chicago woman who happened to stumble across a secret organization code-named 'Jane' had an alternative. Laura Kaplan, who joined Jane in 1971, has pieced together the histories of the anonymous (here identified only by pseudonyms), average-sounding women who transformed themselves into outlaws."—Cleveland Plain Dealer"The Story of Jane is a piece of women's history in step with feminist theory demanding that women tell their own stories. It serves to remind people of an important and often overlooked moment in the women's rights movement."—Seattle Weekly"Laura Kaplan's The Story of Jane is the first book to chronicle this controversial sliver of history, and it is a fascinating, if partisan, close-up of the group."—Newsday"[Kaplan] draws on her personal recollections and interviews with Jane members and clients and the doctors who performed the abortions to provide a well-written, detailed history of this radical group."—Publisher's Weekly"Weaving together the voices and memories of her former co-workers, Kaplan recounts how the group initially focused on counseling women and helping them find reliable, reasonably priced doctors....Kaplan's account of this remarkable story recaptures the political idealism of the early '70s...23 years after Roe vs. Wade, the issues and memories raised by the books are close and all too relevant."—K Kaufmann, San Francisco Chronicle"Laura Kaplan's The Story of Jane is the first book to chronicle this controversial sliver of history, and it is a fascinating, if partisan, close-up of the group....The Story of Jane succeeds on the steam of Kaplan's gripping subject and her moving belief in the power of small-scale change."—Cynthia Leive, New York Newsday"During the four years before the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion in 1973, the 100 members of Jane helped some 11,000 women end their pregnancies....There is more in this remarkable book that will further raise eyebrows....Kaplan's engrossing tales of the quiet courage of the women who risked their reputations and freedom to help others may remind many readers of other kinds of outlaws who have resisted tyranny throughout history."—Chicago Sun-Times

I, Phoolan Devi


Phoolan Devi - 1996
    At 11, she was married off and endured beatings, rapes and persecution. She survived being kidnapped by bandits and became one of them, learning how to shoot like a man. She also found love for the first time, but her lover was brutally murdered. Without his protection, she was paraded naked through villages and gang-raped; but she survived and for three years claimed retribution for herself and all low-caste women, before negotiating her own surrender. After 11 years in prison, she is now free to tell her own story.

Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol


Nell Irvin Painter - 1996
    She championed the disadvantaged--black in the South, women in the North--yet spent much of her free life with middle-class whites, who supported her, yet never failed to remind her that she was a second class citizen. Slowly, but surely, Sojourner climbed from beneath the weight of slavery, secured respect for herself, and utilized the distinction of her race to become not only a symbol for black women, but for the feminist movement as a whole.

Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement


Kimberlé Crenshaw - 1996
    Questioning the old assumptions of both liberals and conservatives with respect to the goals and the means of traditional civil rights reform, critical race theorists have presented new paradigms for understanding racial injustice and new ways of seeing the links between race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. This reader, edited by the principal founders and leading theoreticians of the critical race theory movement, gathers together for the first time the movement's most important essays.

Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness


Marion Woodman - 1996
    She embodies the energy of chaos and creativity, creation and destruction, death and rebirth. Images of Her, however, have been conspicuously missing in the Western world for centuries—until now, when awareness of the Goddess is re-arising in many spheres, from the women's movement to traditional religion, from the new discoveries of quantum physics to the dreams of ordinary men and women. Why now particularly? The answer provided by Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson is bold and thrilling: the reemergence of the Divine Feminine in our time indicates our readiness to move to an entirely new level of consciousness. The reemerging Goddess calls for a shattering of rigid categories, a willingness to hold opposition. She calls us to marry reason and order to creativity, and to embrace the chaos that can ultimately lead to wisdom and transformation on personal and global levels.

When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973


Leslie J. Reagan - 1996
    Wade, it's crucial to look back to the time when abortion was illegal. Leslie J. Reagan traces the practice and policing of abortion, which although illegal was nonetheless widely available, but always with threats for both doctor and patient. In a time when many young women don't even know that there was a period when abortion was a crime, this work offers chilling and vital lessons of importance to everyone. The linking of the words "abortion" and "crime" emphasizes the difficult and painful history that is the focus of Reagan's important book. Her study is the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with Roe v. Wade in 1973. Although illegal, millions of abortions were provided during these years to women of every class, race, and marital status. The experiences and perspectives of these women, as well as their physicians and midwives, are movingly portrayed here. Reagan traces the practice and policing of abortion. While abortions have been typically portrayed as grim "back alley" operations, she finds that abortion providers often practiced openly and safely. Moreover, numerous physicians performed abortions, despite prohibitions by the state and the American Medical Association. Women often found cooperative practitioners, but prosecution, public humiliation, loss of privacy, and inferior medical care were a constant threat. Reagan's analysis of previously untapped sources, including inquest records and trial transcripts, shows the fragility of patient rights and raises provocative questions about the relationship between medicine and law. With the right to abortion again under attack in the United States, this book offers vital lessons for every American concerned with health care, civil liberties, and personal and sexual freedom.

Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution


Brenda Knight - 1996
    The Beats helped make literature a democracy. All one needed, they believed, was passion and a love of the written word. The names of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William Burroughs and their friends are well known to the reading public at large, and on its face the beat movement appears to have been an exclusively male phenomenon. But the Beat movement's publicity did not necessarily reflect the reality of its literature and spirit. This singular book is devoted to contributions of women to the body and spirit of the Beat revolution.The women included in this anthology run the gamut from the famous---Carolyn Cassady and Jan Kerouac-to the relatively undiscovered-Mary Fabilli and Helen Adam. The art, prose, and poetry selected represent the full range and development of their work. The women whose work is featured in this anthology were talented rebels with enough courage and creative spirit to turn their backs on "the good life" that the fifties promised and forge their way to San Francisco and Greenwich Village. They dared to attempt to create lives of their own and make their own way. Today an unprecedented amount of brilliant, imaginative and highly experimental writing by women is being recognized and applauded. This anthology looks back to the antecedents for this greater liberty of expression. It is a testament to the lives of the women who helped shape the Beat era. Together, their voices form an energetic force field of consciousness that manifested at a rich and difficult time in cultural history.Women of the Beat Generation profiles 40 women --Precursors, MusesWriters, and Artists-including Elise Cowen, Diane di Prima, Hettie Jones, Joan Vollmer Burroughs, Jan Kerouac, Jane Bowles, Carolyn Cassady, Edie Parker KerouacEileen Kaufman, Joyce Johnson, Denise Levertov, Brenda Frazer, Anne Waldman, Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, and many othersWomen of the Beat Generation highlights the lives and work of these female iconoclasts, and ensures the world will not forget their contributions to its transformation.

Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920


Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore - 1996
    She explores the pivotal and interconnected roles played by gender and race in North Carolina politics from the period immediately preceding the disfranchisement of black men in 1900 to the time black and white women gained the vote in 1920. Gender and Jim Crow argues that the ideology of white supremacy embodied in the Jim Crow laws of the turn of the century profoundly reordered society and that within this environment, black women crafted an enduring tradition of political activism. According to Gilmore, a generation of educated African American women emerged in the 1890s to become, in effect, diplomats to the white community after the disfranchisement of their husbands, brothers, and fathers. Using the lives of African American women to tell the larger story, Gilmore chronicles black women's political strategies, their feminism, and their efforts to forge political ties with white women. Her analysis highlights the active role played by women of both races in the political process and in the emergence of southern progressivism. In addition, Gilmore illuminates the manipulation of concepts of gender by white supremacists and shows how this rhetoric changed once women, black and white, gained the vote.

Thinking Class: Sketches from a Cultural Worker


Joanna Kadi - 1996
    Examining the elite's supposed hegemony over intellectual work, Thinking Class rejects the ideaa that working class people are not thinkers, and affirms the culture that springs up, beautiful and honest, from this society's true base.

The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film


Barry Keith Grant - 1996
    Indeed, in this pioneering exploration of the cinema of fear, Barry Keith Grant and twenty other film critics posit that horror is always rooted in gender, particularly in anxieties about sexual difference and gender politics.The book opens with the influential theoretical works of Linda Williams, Carol J. Clover, and Barbara Creed. Subsequent essays explore the history of the genre, from classic horror such as King Kong and Bride of Frankenstein to the more recent Fatal Attraction and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Other topics covered include the work of horror auteurs David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and George Romero; the Aliens trilogy; and the importance of gender in relation to horror marketing and reception.Other contributors include Vera Dika, Thomas Doherty, Lucy Fischer, Christopher Sharrett, Vivian Sobchack, Tony Williams, and Robin Wood. Writing across a full range of critical methods from classic psychoanalysis to feminism and postmodernism, they balance theoretical generalizations with close readings of films and discussions of figures associated with the genre.The Dread of Difference demonstrates that horror is hardly a uniformly masculine discourse. As these essays persuasively show, not only are horror movies about patriarchy and its fear of the feminine, but they also offer feminist critique and pleasure.

Empowering Women: Every Woman's Guide to Successful Living


Louise L. Hay - 1996
    Louise L. Hay, author of You Can Heal Your Life, The Power Is Within You, and Life: Reflections on YourJourney, shows you how to become a strong and powerful being. She emphasizes that no matter what your past was like, you can learn to empower yourself and rise to the top. Some of the points Louise makes are: Developing self-worth and self-esteem are the most powerful tools women can have, a modern woman has the whole world in front of her--she can rise as high as her belief in herself; joy and happiness are always within you; you do not have to feel incomplete without a man by your side; and your most important relationship is with yourself.

Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies


bell hooks - 1996
    Reel To Real collects hooks' classic essays on films such as Paris Is Burning or the infamous "Whose Pussy Is It" essay about Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, as well as newer work on Pulp Fiction, Crooklyn and Waiting To Exhale. hooks also examines the world of independent cinema. Conversations with filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Arthur Jaffa are linked with critical essays, including a piece on Larry Clark's Kids, to show that cinema can function subversively as well as maintain the status quo.

Ornament and Silence : Essays on Women's Lives, from Virginia Woolf to Germaine Greer


Kennedy Fraser - 1996
    In Ornament and Silence we see Virginia Woolf, haunted and eventually destroyed by the sexual secrets of her childhood. We meet Flaubert's theatrically importunate mistress, Louise Colet, the one woman who could briefly slip past the master's misogyny. Fraser offers vibrant portraits of the Russian novelist Nina Berberova and the English naturalist Miriam Rothschild. And here is Fraser herself, learning her craft at The New Yorker, tending her English garden and--on every page--delighting us with the manifold felicities of her prose."A wonderfully idiosyncratic set of essays on women famous and unknown whose public and private lives Fraser examines with great feeling and exactitude...insight, intelligence, and grace."--Newsday"Subtlety, fluency, candor, an agile sensate intellect--Kennedy Fraser brings all these gifts to bear on a subject that is not always contemplated so untendentiously, with such independence of mind, and from such a generous and worldly point of view."--Phillip Roth

The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability


Susan Wendell - 1996
    Among the topics it addresses are who should be identified as disabled; whether disability is biomedical, social or both; what causes disability and what could 'cure' it; and whether scientific efforts to eliminate disabling physical conditions are morally justified.Wendell provides a remarkable look at how cultural attitudes towards the body contribute to the stigma of disability and to widespread unwillingness to accept and provide for the body's inevitable weakness.

Women, Poverty, and AIDS: Sex, Drugs, and Structural Violence


Paul Farmer - 1996
    

A Woman's Book of Life


Joan Borysenko - 1996
    Examines the link between mind, body, and spirit in women, and shows how women can increase their levels of health and well-being and explore the power present in each stage of life.

Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures


M. Jacqui Alexander - 1996
    It provides a comparative, relational, historically grounded conception of feminist praxis that differs markedly from the liberal pluralist, multicultural understanding that shapes some of the dominant version of Euro-American feminism. As a whole, the collection poses a unique challenge to the naturalization of gender based in the experiences, histories and practices of Euro-American women.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia


Kathleen M. Brown - 1996
    Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia. But the rise of racial slavery also transformed gender relations, including ideals of masculinity. In response to the presence of Indians, the shortage of labor, and the insecurity of social rank, Virginia's colonial government tried to reinforce its authority by regulating the labor and sexuality of English servants and by making legal distinctions between English and African women. This practice, along with making slavery hereditary through the mother, contributed to the cultural shift whereby women of African descent assumed from lower-class English women both the burden of fieldwork and the stigma of moral corruption. Brown's analysis extends through Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, an important juncture in consolidating the colony's white male public culture, and into the eighteenth century. She demonstrates that, despite elite planters' dominance, wives, children, free people of color, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia.

Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations


Toni Cade Bambara - 1996
    Included are tales of mothers and daughters, rebels and seeresses, community activists and aging gangbangers, as well as essays on film and literature, politics and race, and on the difficulties and necessities of forging an identity as an artist, activist, and black woman. It is a treasure trove not only for those familiar with Bambara's work, but for a new generation of readers who will recognize her contribution to contemporary American letters.

The Audre Lorde Compendium: Essays, Speeches, And Journals


Audre Lorde - 1996
    Both The Cancer Journals and A Burst of Light give an insight over a ten year period of her life with cancer. Sister Outsider continues her writing and documents her essays and speeches.

Angry Women in Rock


Andrea Juno - 1996
    It features interviews (that read like thoughtful essays) with Joan Jett, Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill), Valerie Agnew (7 Year Bitch), Lois Maffeo, Naomi Yang (Galaxie 500), Kendra Smith, Phranc, Candice Pederson (K Records), Bettina Richards, Chrissie Hynde, and June Millington (Fanny, the "Godmothers of Womyn's Rock").

True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women: The Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military...


Keith Howard - 1996
    Yet successive post-war Japanese governments have refused to acknowledge what took place and no reparations have been made to the mainly Korean victims. Recent developments in human rights and women's rights in Korea have led to the surviving Comfort Women to overcome traditional taboos of chastity, defilement and shame to speak out for the first time.

Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe


Anne Middleton Wagner - 1996
    Anne Wagner looks at their imagery and careers, relating their work to three decisive moments in the history of American modernism: the avant-garde of the 1920s, the New York School of the 1940s and 1950s, and the modernist redefinition undertaken in the 1960s. Their artistic contributions were invaluable, Wagner demonstrates, as well as hard-won. She also shows that the fact that these artists were women—the main element linking the three—is as much the index of difference among their art and experience as it is a passkey to what they share.

Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century


Ada María Isasi-Díaz - 1996
    Continually drawing on her Cuban roots, Isasi-Diaz focuses on the life journeys and struggles of Hispanic women as she develops a theology to support and empower their daily struggles for meaning. With her own life journey always firmly connected to the grassroots experience of Hispanic women and to the struggle for liberation, Isasi-Diaz is a major spokesperson for the continuing need for liberation theology today. The first part of Mujerista Theology describes the experience of self-discovery: what it is like to live in a foreign land as the oppressed "other." The second part focuses on the methodology of doing mujerista theology and its major themes: solidarity, empowerment, anthropology, encountering God, and liturgy and rituals.

Twenty-Four Aspects of Mother Kali


Babaji Bob Kindler - 1996
    Her ineffable presence somehow overlooked! This oversight, this loss of memory, is tragic and the cause of great suffering and misery among the inhabitants of the world. Only those beset with chronic spiritual amnesia could be so forlorn as to arrive at such a lamentable condition!The Twenty-Four Aspects of Mother Kali represent in book form an attempt to remind humanity of their divine parentage, of their source of origin, and of their perfect inner nature. In order to re-introduce humanity to the Universal Mother, twenty-four powerful representations which attend Her remarkable personage and which are eternal portions of Her august form are discussed throughout these pages.This book is a "must read," not only for aspirants and devotees, but also for followers of Eastern religion and philosophy and for every interested advocate of the Divine Mother path, regardless of cultural bias, personal preference, or historical orientation.Mother Kali is the Universal Archetype, the primeval Matriarch, the all-pervasive, indivisible ocean of pure Consciousness which is simultaneously Transcendent, Immanent and Absolute. As the great sage, Vyasa, has stated in the ancient writings of Vedic lore and scripture: "The power of the Divine Mother is very great. This whole cosmos is urged into activity by Her and thus goes rolling on and on incessantly. Even the Divine Incarnations are under the inluence of Her power and perform their various functions continually."

The Divine Feminine: Recovering the Feminine Face of God Around the World


Andrew Harvey - 1996
    Well-known author Andrew Harvey takes us through a fascinating tour of the feminine face of God in the traditions of Greece, Egypt, Sumeria, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism, among others.

What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era


Stephanie J. Shaw - 1996
    Shaw takes us into the inner world of American black professional women during the Jim Crow era. This is a story of struggle and empowerment, of the strength of a group of women who worked against daunting odds to improve the world for themselves and their people. Shaw's remarkable research into the lives of social workers, librarians, nurses, and teachers from the 1870s through the 1950s allows us to hear these women's voices for the first time. The women tell us, in their own words, about their families, their values, their expectations. We learn of the forces and factors that made them exceptional, and of the choices and commitments that made them leaders in their communities.What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do brings to life a world in which African-American families, communities, and schools worked to encourage the self-confidence, individual initiative, and social responsibility of girls. Shaw shows us how, in a society that denied black women full professional status, these girls embraced and in turn defined an ideal of "socially responsible individualism" that balanced private and public sphere responsibilities. A collective portrait of character shaped in the toughest circumstances, this book is more than a study of the socialization of these women as children and the organization of their work as adults. It is also a study of leadership—of how African American communities gave their daughters the power to succeed in and change a hostile world.

The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism


Aída Hurtado - 1996
    Aída Hurtado advances the theory of relational privilege to explain those differing conceptions. Previous theories about feminism have predominantly emphasized the lives and experiences of middle-class white women. Aída Hurtado argues that the different responses to feminism by women of color are not so much the result of personality or cultural differences between white women and women of color, but of their differing relationship to white men. For Hurtado, subordination and privilege must be conceived as relational in nature, and gender subordination and political solidarity must be examined in the framework of culture and socioeconomic context. Hurtado's analysis of gender oppression is written from an interdisciplinary, multicultural standpoint and is enriched by selections from poems by Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Elba Sanchez, and from plays by El Teatro Campesino, the United Farm Workers theater group. A final chapter proposes that progressive scholarship, and especially feminist scholarship, must have at its core a reflexive theory of gender oppression that allows writers to simultaneously document oppression while taking into account the writer's own privilege, to analyze the observed as well as the observer. Aída Hurtado is Associate Professor of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Feminism and History


Joan Wallach Scott - 1996
    Dismissing essentialist accounts of a universal female identity, the contributors examine how ideas about sexual difference are shaped by specific socio-historical circumstances. How, for example, do issues such as race, class, gender, and sexuality impact on the experience of women? How are such categories defined in widely disparate cultures and time periods? Refreshingly open to non-western, as well as western, perspectives, Feminism and History addresses subjects from the experience of women in Colonial Asia to the ideology of sexual difference in Nazi Germany. Timely, provocative, and influential, these essays raise intriguing questions about the future direction of women's history.

The Thin Woman: Feminism, Post-Structuralism and the Social Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa


Helen Malson - 1996
    Medicine, psychiatry and psychology have all presented us with particular ways of understanding eating disorders, yet the notion of 'anorexia' as a medical condition limits our understanding of anorexia and the extent to which we can explore it as a socially, discursively produced problem.Based on original research using historical and contemporary literature on anorexia nervosa, and a series of interviews with women diagnosed as anorexic, The Thin Woman offers new insights into the problem. It will prove useful both to those with an interest in eating disorders and gender, and to those interested in the new developments in feminist post-structuralist theory and discourse analytic research in psychology.

Defending Our Lives: Getting Away From Domestic Violence & Staying Safe


Susan Murphy-Milano - 1996
    While the O.J. Simpson trial raised domestic abuse to the forefront of public consciousness, no one has offered women concrete advice on how to protect themselves and get safely away from their abusers.With detailed, practical information, Susan Murphy-Milano guides women through the process of protecting themselves from domestic violence and stalking. She explains what domestic violence is, how to deal with the police and enlist their help, how to make the decision to leave, what steps to take during the actual move, how to secure one's home after leaving an abuser, how to navigate the legal system, how to ensure the safety of one's children, and how to defend against stalking. Family and friends can be crucial in this process, and throughout the book Murphy-Milano suggests numerous ways in which they can help.Defending Our Lives is a much needed resource in the struggle of millions of women to protect themselves from domestic violence and stalking.

Waking the World


Allan B. Chinen - 1996
    Not so in the stories discussed in this book! Chosen from some seven thousand read by the author, these stories focus on mature women and set traditional plots on their pretty little ears. In these stories it is the man who sleeps, and the woman who must break the spell that imprisons both king and kingdom. Psychiatrist A. B. Chinen has collected tales from Germany, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Russia, Siberia, and Swaziland whose themes are the rigors of womanhood rather than the fantasies of adolescence. Their protagonists face challenges that are universally recognized, sometimes shocking, and always catalysts of transformation. Brutalized women transform cruel husbands, and unfaithful wives reform themselves. Trusting daughters are mutilated by their fathers, and clever sisters outwit sultans. There are good men and bad, virtuous mothers and treacherous crones. And always there is complexity and duality, sunlight and shadow, iniquity and redemption. Dr. Chinen has chosen unfamiliar versions of well-known stories to present afresh the ancient wisdom they contain. With commentaries drawn from his clinical experience and literature from around the world, he skewers stereotypes and challenges us to rethink our concept of authentic womanhood. Waking the World reminds readers that there is more to women's culture and mythology than spinning wheels, pricked fingers, and spellbound sleep. There is unwavering vigilance, a passion not only to survive but to prevail, and within every woman'sthroat, a clarion cry to awaken and galvanize the world.

Charlotte Bront� and Victorian Psychology


Sally Shuttleworth - 1996
    Using texts ranging from local newspapers to medical tomes belonging to the Brontes, Sally Shuttleworth explores Victorian constructions of psychology, sexuality and insanity, and traces the ways in which Charlotte Bronte's texts operate in relation to this complex framework. Shuttleworth offers a reading of Bronte's fiction informed by a new understanding of the psychological debates of her time.

Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader


Stevi Jackson - 1996
    Contributors include Judith Butler, bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Catherine MacKinnon, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, Judith Walkowitz and Monique Wittig.

Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800


Anthony Fletcher - 1996
    Patriarchy—the social and cultural dominance of the male—has long been a fundamental feature of western civilization yet has only recently begun to be systematically investigated by historians. This book is the first attempt to provide a rounded portrait of its workings over a long stretch of the English past.Anthony Fletcher's account draws from a vast range of sources—literary, medical, religious, and historical—to investigate the mechanisms through which men and women interpreted and understood their social worlds. He explores the early modern view of the body, of sexual desire and appetites, and of gender difference. He looks at the nature of marital relationships and shows how subordination was implemented and consolidated through church, school, home, and community. And in a text that is poignant, humane, and beautifully written, he exposes patriarchy's tragic consequences: smothered opportunity, crushed sexuality, and a pall across many women's lives.Yet, over these three centuries, the conventional foundations of male superiority came under acute pressure. Fletcher reveals the depth of male anxiety in the face of women's volatility, verbal assertiveness, and alleged vibrant sexuality, and he shows how the gender system began to be transformed as men sought to detach it from its biblical foundations and inculcate gender identities on something like their modern ideological basis. This revolution in the entire premise upon which gender was grounded is fundamental to an understanding of the structure of English society today.

Pop Out: Queer Warhol


Jennifer Doyle - 1996
    A fabulous queen, a fan of prurience and pornography, a great admirer of the male body, he was well known as such to the gay audiences who enjoyed his films, the police who censored them, the gallery owners who refused to show his male nudes, and the artists who shied from his swishiness, not to mention all the characters who populated the Factory. Yet even though Warhol became the star of postmodernism, avant-garde, and pop culture, this collection of essays is the first to explore, analyze, appreciate, and celebrate the role of Warhol’s queerness in the making and reception of his film and art. Ranging widely in approach and discipline, Pop Out demonstrates that to ignore Warhol’s queerness is to miss what is most valuable, interesting, sexy, and political about his life and work.Written from the perspectives of art history, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, cinema studies, and social and literary theory, these essays consider Warhol in various contexts and within the history of the communities in which he figured. The homoerotic subjects, gay audiences, and queer contexts that fuel a certain fascination with Warhol are discussed, as well as Batman, Basquiat, and Valerie Solanas. Taken together, the essays in this collection depict Warhol’s career as a practical social reflection on a wide range of institutions and discourses, including those, from the art world to mass culture, that have almost succeeded in sanitizing his work and his image. Contributors. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, Marcie Frank, David E. James, Mandy Merck, Michael Moon, José Esteban Muñoz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Brian Selsky, Sasha Torres, Simon Watney, Thomas Waugh

Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women's Stories


Michael Gorkin - 1996
    In recording these stories, Michael Gorkin and Rafiqa Othman have preserved each woman's distinctive voice, capturing in vivid and moving detail a broad range of experience—everything from recollections of native villages to an account of incarceration as a political prisoner. Highly personal events such as courting, marriage, and childbirth are interwoven with memories of upheavals such as the wars of 1948 and 1967. The women speak with surprising candor about conflicts between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, men and women, Arabs and Jews. These beautifully written narratives bear witness to the power of Palestinian culture in sustaining the often difficult lives of women. The book also provides brilliant testimony to the experience of living in the midst of the Arab-Israeli conflict.Michael Gorkin, a Jewish-American psychologist who lives in Israel, and Rafiqa Othman, a Palestinian special education teacher, have collected the narratives from different cultural and geographic locations within the boundaries of historical Palestine—including East Jerusalem, a refugee camp on the West Bank, and an Arab village within Israel. With surprising intimacy, the mothers and daughters discuss their views about sex, marriage, and child-rearing; ideas about themselves and their relationship to God, their families, and their homeland; and questions of shame, devotion, freedom, and honor.In the preface, introduction and epilogue, Gorkin and Othman frame the stories and describe the project. The linked stories of mothers and daughters attest to the profound changes that have occurred in the lives of Palestinian women during this century—in the areas of education, work, political involvement and personal freedom. In addition to delineating this astonishing historical and cultural transformation, the stories create lasting images of the people these women have loved and hated, the pleasures they have enjoyed, the dangers they have survived, and the hopes they continue to cherish.

Le prisme de la prostitution


Gail Pheterson - 1996
    These essays examine those patterns both inside and outside the context of explicit sex commerce. The author elaborates a cross-cultural critique of the categories "prostitute" and "prostitution" as constructed in science, policy and society. At every level of analysis, terms and social categories prove to be slippery, consequential and reflective of an underlying political logic that subordinates women to men. Key to that logic is the whore stigma, an official and traditional mechanism of social control inextricable from issues as diverse as migration, health care, sexual autonomy, employment and freedom of speech.

Rocking The Cradle Of Sexual Politics: What Happened When Women Said Incest


Louise Armstrong - 1996
    The once taboo topic has mushroomed today into False Memory Syndrome and adult survivors undergoing exorcisms, while legitimate concern for abused children is still overlooked.

The Material Queer: A Lesbigay Cultural Studies Reader


Donald Morton - 1996
    It then situates classic and (post)modern discourses in a dialectical relation to historical materialist theories that go beyond the ethics of desire to relate sexuality to global social struggles. Offering such surprising intellectual conjunctures as those between Heraclitus, Hegel, and Engels; Freud and Volosinov; Lacan and Kollontai; Derrida and Dennis Altman; queer theorists and the Socialist Worker Collective, the volume disrupts the status quo in sexuality studies. Rather than reinforcing (post)structuralist orthodoxies about the difference of/in sexualities, The Material Queer provides sustained materialist interventions in today's dominant theories, which, while calling for social progress, actually obscure the most effective line of resistance against sexual and other forms of oppression and exploitation.That effective line is a historical materialist analysis aimed at establishing a posthomophobic society in which sexuality is not deployed to justify differences of class that are actually produced in the social relations of production.

Knowledge, Difference, And Power: Essays Inspired By Women's Ways Of Knowing


Mary Field Belenky - 1996
    In essence, this dynamic collection poses the ultimate question: Can we come to understand and respect diverse ways of knowing? Features: 15 essays, all written exclusively for this volume the essays are by the original authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing and prominent contributors, including Sandra Harding, Aida Hurtado, Sara Ruddick, Michael Mahoney, and Patricinio Schweickart in separate chapters, the authors explore how their thinking has developed and changed since Women’s Ways of Knowing argument is expanded beyond gender and knowledge to address the factors of color, class, and culture.

Women in the Trees: U.S. Women's Short Stories About Battering and Resistance, 1839-2000


Susan Koppelman - 1996
    Drawing on well over a century of research into American women's short stories, Susan Koppelman uncovers a powerful literary legacy of women speaking truth to power to write about the brutal reality in the lives of women.While it resonates with the force of shared experience, Women in the Trees cuts across lines of race, ethnicity, class, region, and time. The Women's Review of Books writes, "One of the strongest aspects of this anthology is that while the collection as a whole reveals the similarities in the patterns of abuse, the stories singly do not read the same. Koppelman has selected well. These are not in any sense sociological tracts to prove a point. Focused, as fiction should be, on individual lives, they reveal the variations in the patterns as they are lived out by individual women, who come from different backgrounds, inhabit different communities, and respond to their situations in distinctly personal ways."Acclaimed on its first publication by critics, educators, and activists, this new edition of Women in the Trees includes several new selections, over thirty stories in all. Together, these stories form a unique and ultimately empowering collection notable for both its emotional impact and its literary wealth.

Soul Weavings: A Gathering of Women's Prayers


Lyn Klug - 1996
    They are gathered from historic and contemporary women of faith from around the world, including: Julian of Norwich, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Flora Slosson Wuellner, Zephania Kameeta, Mother Teresa, Marjorie Holmes, Amy Carmichael, Hildegard of Bingen, Avery Brooke, Corrie ten Boom, Lois Walfrid Johnson, Ann Weems, Teresa of Avila, Christina Rosetti, Macrina Wiederkehr, Mildred Tengbom, Dorothy Day, Elizabeth Goudge, Catherine of Siena, Sue Monk Kidd, and Miriam Therese Winter.

Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy


Kristin Luker - 1996
    Will motherhood make this young woman poorer? Will it make the United States poorer as a nation? That's what the voices raised against babies having babies would have us think, and what many Americans seem inclined to believe. This powerful book takes us behind the stereotypes, the inflamed rhetoric, and the flip media sound bites to show us the complex reality and troubling truths of teenage mothers in America today.Would it surprise you to learn that Michelle is more likely to be white than African American? That she is most likely eighteen or nineteen--a legal adult? That teenage mothers are no more common today than in 1900? That two-thirds of them have been impregnated by men older than twenty? Kristin Luker, author of the acclaimed Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, puts to rest once and for all some very popular misconceptions about unwed mothers from colonial times to the present. She traces the way popular attitudes came to demonize young mothers and examines the profound social and economic changes that have influenced debate on the issue, especially since the 1970s. In the early twentieth century, reformers focused people's attention on the social ills that led unmarried teenagers to become pregnant; today, society has come almost full circle, pinning social ills on sexually irresponsible teens.Dubious Conceptions introduces us to the young women who are the object of so much opprobrium. In these pages we hear teenage mothers from across the country talk about their lives, their trials, and their attempts to find meaning in motherhood. The book also gives a human face to those who criticize them, and shows us why public anger has settled on one of society's most vulnerable groups. Sensitive to the fears and confusion that fuel this anger, and to the troubled future that teenage mothers and their children face, Luker makes very clear what we as a nation risk by not recognizing teenage pregnancy for what it is: a symptom, not a cause, of poverty.

Doria Shafik Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart


Cynthia Nelson - 1996
    Doria Shafik (1908-1975), an Egyptian feminist, poet, publisher, and political activist, participated in one of her country's most explosive periods of social and political transformation. During the '40s she burst onto the public stage in Egypt, openly challenging every social, cultural, and legal barrier that she viewed as oppressive to the full equality of women. As the founder of the Daughters of the Nile Union in 1948, she catalyzed a movement that fought for suffrage and set up programs to combat illiteracy, provide economic opportunities for lower-class urban women, and raise the consciousness of middle-class university students. She also founded and edited two prominent women's journals, wrote books in both French and Arabic, lectured throughout the world, married, and raised two children. For a decade, she ignited the imagination of the press, where she was variously described as the perfumed leader, a danger to the Muslim nation, a traitor to the revolution, and the only man in Egypt. Then, in 1957, following her hunger strike in protest against the populist regime of Gamal Abdul Nasser, she was placed under house arrest. Within months her magazines folded, her name was officially banned from the press, and she entered a long period of seclusion that ended with her suicide in 1975. With the cooperation of Shafik's daughters, who made available her three impressionistic, unpublished, and sometimes contradictory memoirs, Nelson has uncovered Shafik's story and brings the life and achievements of this remarkable woman to a Western audience. Brilliantly re-creates the untold story of Doria Shafik, the most impressive exponent of liberal Egyptian feminism. . . . Magically, the delicately sketched background gives the reader a wonderful sense of the sweep of modern Egyptian history. . . . The effect is mesmerizing. --Raymond W. Baker, Williams College A compelling story, beautifully written. --Jacqueline S. Ismail, University of Calgary

Controlling Reproduction: An American History


Andrea Tone - 1996
    Divisive opinions abound. This informative, detailed text contains 39 writings on the history of reproduction in the U.S. The historical path of reproduction control is viewed in the contexts of politics, law, medicine, sexuality, business, and social change. Because birth control has been construed chiefly as a female responsibility, Controlling Reproduction stresses the centrality of gender in the history of reproduction and explores how and why reproduction-as a biological, social, and economic function-became a gender-assigned issue. Controlling Reproduction also includes some of the most significant debates currently guiding the study of reproduction. Students will find this work a powerful, enlightening source on women's issues and the history of birth control in the United States.

The Penguin Book of International Women's Stories


Kate Figes - 1996
    A collection of thirty-three short stories from around the world celebrates the diversity of women's experiences and includes selections from both famous and lesser-known female authors.

Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives


Mai Yamani - 1996
    This volume illustrates how women in Islamic societies have become more actively involved not only in learning their rights under the sharia (Islamic law) but in rereading this law to improve their status and gain increased equality and freedom. Surveying Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt and Arab societies in general, the essays in feminism and Islam focus on such subjects as crimes of honor and the construction of gender in Arab societies; law and the desire for social control; women ad entrepreneurship; family legislation; and the political strategies of feminists in the Islam world.

Buddhist Women on the Edge: Contemporary Perspectives from the Western Frontier


Marianne Dresser - 1996
    Marianne Dresser brings together the likes of Pema Chodron, Tsultrim Allione, and bell hooks, 30 women in all, who are doing just that. Writers, nuns, scholars, priests--even a martial arts master and a private investigator--discuss women in Buddhism in a range of essays. Several pieces question the suppression of emotion required for selflessness, appealing to the undeniable reality of day-to-day living. Others discuss their experiences as women in Buddhism, whether as nuns or as lay practitioners. Still others address the history of women in Buddhism, racial questions, meditation, poetry, compassion, social activism, and sexual orientation. Most of these writers have been in Buddhism for two or three decades and offer a wealth of experience and insights, targeted at women readers but no less valuable to men.

New Ethnicities And Urban Culture: Racisms And Multiculture In Young Lives


Les Back - 1996
    

Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter


Jo Anna Isaak - 1996
    The book provides a provocative and valuable account of the diversity and revolutionary potential of women's art practice.

Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine


Tal Ilan - 1996
    This investigation concludes that extreme religious groups in Judaism of the period influenced other groups, classes, and factions to tighten their control of women. They also encouraged an understanding of ideal relationships between men and women, represented in the literature and the legal codes of the time, that required increasing chastity. Despite this, the lives of real women and their relationships to men continued to be varied and nuanced.This book integrates both Jewish and Early Christian sources together with a feminist critique. It is the most comprehensive work of this sort published thus far and offers a vast repository of relevant material, as well as a fresh interpretation.

The Lesbian Almanac: The most comprehensive reference


Lesbian and Gay Community - 1996
    Compiled by two nationally known and highly respected gay and lesbian organizations, The Lesbian Almanac is a complete reference on lesbian culture and history--chronicling everything from the lesbian community's fascinating past to the issues and ideas that concern it most today.

Urban Girls: Resisting Stereotypes, Creating Identities


Bonnie J. Ross - 1996
    However, most studies have focused on suburban youth, ignoring a large segment of the population, the urban adolescent.Urban Girls tries to reverse this trend. The researchers included in this ambitious project realize there is more to adolescence than the suburban experience. The city has unique effects on the people who live there, and they on it. Drawing on experts from across the country, Urban Girls investigates what it is like to be young in an American city. This book also explores the minority experience in America. It is wonderful to see studies of Black and Latina youth that do not automatically label them as future convicts, drug dealers, or with other negative stereotypes.-- The American Reporter Traditional psychology textbooks have ignored the normative development of urban girls and the unique situations they face on a daily basis. Lumped together with their suburban, mostly white and middle class counterparts, their voices are frequently subsumed within the larger study of adolescent development. Urban Girls is the first book to directly focus on the development of urban poor and working class adolescent girls.Including both quantitative and qualitative essays, and including contributions from psychologists, sociologists, and public health scholars, this volume explores the lives of a diverse group of girls from varying ethnic and class backgrounds. Topics covered include the identity development of Caribbean-American girls, the role of truth telling in the psychological development of African-American girls, relationships between mothers and daughters of different races and ethnicities, friendships, sexuality, health risks, career development, and other subjects of importance to human development. Filling a gap in the literature of human development, Urban Girls is sure to be of use to psychologists, sociologists, and social workers.

Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art In, Of, and from the Feminine


Catherine de Zegher - 1996
    The work of important yet previously invisible figures is highlighted alongside the work of established artists to create a re-theorized interpretation of the art of this century.

The Republican War Against Women: An Insider's Report from Behind the Lines


Tanya Melich - 1996
    The party adopted an electoral strategy that included getting votes by playing on the fear and uncertainty engendered by the civil rights and women's political movements, and continued to use this strategy in the campaigns of 1984, 1988, and 1992. Under the Reagan and Bush administrations, this strategy became a crucial part of the party's governing policies. This book is not a political science treatise nor a description of political campaigns; it is a documented account of a grab for power that, as the years pass, continues to intensify antagonism between the sexes and to sow unnecessary division among the American people. As a longtime Republican activist and a delegate to the 1992 convention, Tanya Melich has observed these actions from within; and documents this takeover and the Party's ongoing practices (such as embracing the Christian right) in a devastating, factual, and often hair-raising report. A combination of history, exposÄ, reasoned polemic, and call to arms, this book has now been enriched by two completely new chapters that assesses the outcome of the 1996 election in terms of the book's thesis and realistically lays out the future: both in terms of what it will be if the right-wing elements of the Republican party continue to set the agenda, and how it can be changed if centrist women (and men) take charge of that agenda. The heart of such change lies with Independents, who now constitute a startling 39 percent of Americans (31 percent identify themselves as Democrats and 30 percent as Republicans). We are not a country of strong party loyalties, and the enormous growth of independents is the signal that change is not only possible but achievable. As a superb political pro, the author offers hardheaded strategies for such change.

In the Time of the Right: Reflections on Liberation


Suzanne Pharr - 1996
    

Women, Abuse, and the Bible: How Scripture Can Be Used to Hurt or to Heal


Catherine Clark Kroeger - 1996
    Among other factors, it considers whether traditional views of women have made them targets. Contributors cover the relationship between belief and abuse and how Christians can intervene to break the abuse cycle.

Showgirls


Andrea Stuart - 1996
    It explores the lives and representations of showgirls through chapters on figures such as Dietrich, Colette and Madonna and the modern showgirls.

The Coming of Age


Simone de Beauvoir - 1996