Best of
Feminism

2005

Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire


Angela Y. Davis - 2005
    Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world’s leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America’s most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI’s "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.

Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide


Andrea Lee Smith - 2005
    In Conquest, Smith places Native American women at the center of her analysis of sexual violence, challenging both conventional definitions of the term and conventional responses to the problem.Beginning with the impact of the abuses inflicted on Native American children at state-sanctioned boarding schools from the 1880s to the 1980s, Smith adroitly expands our conception of violence to include environmental racism, population control and the widespread appropriation of Indian cultural practices by whites and other non-natives. Smith deftly connects these and other examples of historical and contemporary colonialism to the high rates of violence against Native American women—the most likely women in the United States to die of poverty-related illnesses, be victims of rape and suffer partner abuse.Essential reading for scholars and activists, Conquest is the powerful synthesis of Andrea Smith’s intellectual and political work to date. By focusing on the impact of sexual violence on Native American women, Smith articulates an agenda that is compelling to feminists, Native Americans, other people of color and all who are committed to creating viable alternatives to state-based “solutions.”

Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems


June Jordan - 2005
    . . is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”—Alice Walker“Always urgent, inspiring, and demanding, Jordan’s work has left its indelible mark everywhere from Essence to The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and from theater stages to the floors of the United Nations and the United States Congress.”—BOMBDirected by Desire is the definitive overview of the poetry of June Jordan, considered one of the most lyrically gifted poets of the late twentieth century. Directed by Desire gathers the finest work from Jordan’s 10 volumes, as well as 70 new, never-before-published poems that she wrote while dying of breast cancer. Throughout over 600 pages readers will find intimate lyricism, elegance, fury, meditative solos, and dazzling vernacular riffs.As Adrienne Rich writes in her introduction, June Jordan “wanted her readers, listeners, students, to feel their own latent power—of the word, the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value. . . . She believed, and nourished the belief, that genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality.”From These PoemsThese poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready?June Jordan taught at the University of California Berkeley for many years and founded Poetry for the People. Her 28 books include poetry, essays, fiction, and children’s books. She was a regular columnist for The Progressive and a prolific writer whose articles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and The Nation. Her numerous awards include a PEN West Freedom to Write Award and a lifetime achievement award from the National Black Writers Conference. After her death from breast cancer in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honor.

Doris: An Anthology, 1991-2001


Cindy Gretchen Ovenrack Crabb - 2005
    Making sense of more complex things, the essays touch on the satisfaction from doing useful work, natural curiosity, the ability to use logic, gender dynamics, introspection, the need for challenge and change, combating depression, and creating art and literature.

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference


Cordelia Fine - 2005
    Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it, and everywhere we hear about vitally important “hardwired” differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math, men too focused for housework.Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men’s and women’s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men’s brains aren’t wired for empathy, and women’s brains aren’t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men’s and women’s behavior. Instead of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.Delusions of Gender provides us with a much-needed corrective to the belief that men’s and women’s brains are intrinsically different--a belief that, as Fine shows with insight and humor--all too often works to the detriment of ourselves and our society.

Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life


Julia Briggs - 2005
    She was original, passionate, vivid, dedicated to her art. Yet most writing about her still revolves around her social life and the Bloomsbury set.   In this fresh, absorbing book, Julia Briggs puts the writing back at the center of Woolf’s life, reads that life through her work, and mines the novels themselves to create a compelling new form of biography. Analyzing Woolf’s own commen­tary on the creative process through her letters, diaries, and essays, Julia Briggs has produced a book that is a convincing, moving portrait of an artist, as well as a profound meditation on the nature of creativity.

Amelia to Zora: Twenty-Six Women Who Changed the World


Cynthia Chin-Lee - 2005
    From Amelia Earhart, pilot and adventurer, to Zora Neale Hurston, writer and anthropologist, learn about the hardships and triumphs that inspired each woman to change the world around her. Detailed collages and illustrations draw from various events in the women's lives.

Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts


Ayana Byrd - 2005
    Original.

Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty


Annelise Orleck - 2005
    Declaring "We can do it and do it better," these women proved that poor mothers are the real experts on poverty. In 1972 they founded Operation Life, which was responsible for many firsts for the poor in Las Vegas-the first library, medical center, daycare center, job training, and senior citizen housing. By the late 1970s, Operation Life was bringing millions of dollars into the community. These women became influential in Washington, DC-respected and listened to by political heavyweights such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ted Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter. Though they lost their funding with the country's move toward conservatism in the 1980s, their struggles and phenomenal triumphs still stand as a critical lesson about what can be achieved when those on welfare chart their own course.

Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred


M. Jacqui Alexander - 2005
    Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism. Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer studies to take up transnational frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the heteronormative regulatory practices of modern state formations; and for feminists to wrestle with the spiritual dimensions of experience and the meaning of sacred subjectivity.In these meditations, Alexander deftly unites large, often contradictory, historical processes across time and space. She focuses on the criminalization of queer communities in both the United States and the Caribbean in ways that prompt us to rethink how modernity invents its own traditions; she juxtaposes the political organizing and consciousness of women workers in global factories in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada with the pressing need for those in the academic factory to teach for social justice; she reflects on the limits and failures of liberal pluralism; and she presents original and compelling arguments that show how and why transgenerational memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently constituted women-of-color communities as it operates as a powerful antidote to oppression. In this multifaceted, visionary book, Alexander maps the terrain of alternative histories and offers new forms of knowledge with which to mold alternative futures.

Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity


Afsaneh Najmabadi - 2005
    Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of the centrality of gender and sexuality to the shaping of modern culture and politics in Iran and of how changes in ideas about gender and sexuality affected conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, marriage, education, and citizenship. She concludes with a provocative discussion of Iranian feminism and its role in that country's current culture wars. In addition to providing an important new perspective on Iranian history, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates how using gender as an analytic category can provide insight into structures of hierarchy and power and thus into the organization of politics and social life.

Women's Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present


Lisa Grunwald - 2005
    In 1775, Rachel Revere tries to send financial aid to her husband, Paul, in a note that is confiscated by the British; First Lady Dolley Madison tells her sister about rescuing George Washington’s portrait during the War of 1812; one week after JFK’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy pens a heartfelt letter to Nikita Khrushchev; and on September 12, 2001, a schoolgirl writes a note of thanks to a New York City firefighter, asking him, “Were you afraid?”The letters gathered here also offer fresh insight into the personal milestones in women’s lives. Here is a mid-nineteenth-century missionary describing a mastectomy performed without anesthesia; Marilyn Monroe asking her doctor to spare her ovaries in a handwritten note she taped to her stomach before appendix surgery; an eighteen-year-old telling her mother about her decision to have an abortion the year after Roe v. Wade; and a woman writing to her parents and in-laws about adopting a Chinese baby.With more than 400 letters and over 100 stunning photographs, Women’s Letters is a work of astonishing breadth and scope, and a remarkable testament to the women who lived–and made–history.

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage


Kathryn J. Edin - 2005
    Now 27, she is the unmarried mother of three and is raising her kids in one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to have children before they can afford to take care of them? Over a span of five years, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms like Millie to learn how they think about marriage and family. Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead.Read an excerpt here: Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, With a New Prefaceby Kathryn Edin and M... by University of California Press

Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America


Rickie Solinger - 2005
    Reproductive politics were at play when slaveholders devised breeding schemes, when the U.S. government took Indian children from their families in the nineteenth century, and when doctors pressed Latina women to be sterilized in the 1970s. Tracing the diverse plot lines of women's reproductive lives throughout American history, Solinger redefines the idea of reproductive freedom, putting race and class at the center of the effort to control sex and pregnancy in America over time.Solinger asks which women have how many children under what circumstances, and shows how reproductive experiences have been encouraged or coerced, rewarded or punished, honored or exploited over the last 250 years. Viewed in this way, the debate over reproductive rights raises questions about access to sex education and prenatal care, about housing laws, about access to citizenship, and about which women lose children to adoption and foster care.Pregnancy and Power shows that a complete understanding of reproductive politics must take into account the many players shaping public policy--lawmakers, educators, employers, clergy, physicians--as well as the consequences for women who obey and resist these policies. Tracing the diverse plotlines of women's reproductive lives throughout American history, Solinger redefines the idea of reproductive freedom, putting race and class at the center of the struggle to control sex and pregnancy in America.

Invisible Girls: The Truth About Sexual Abuse--A Book for Teen Girls, Young Women, and Everyone Who Cares About Them


Patti Feuereisen - 2005
    Patti Feuereisen has been working with teenage girls for twenty-five years and has been a pioneer in helping abused girls find their voices. What she discovered in listening to hundreds of girls was not only that sexual abuse of young girls is in fact epidemic, but if the abuse can be processed when girls are still young-in their teens and early twenties-remarkable healing can take place. Girls and young women who are given an opportunity to speak out will most often go on to thrive as adults; without such an opportunity the traumatic effects of their abuse will often continue to cause them difficulty long into adulthood. Invisible Girls weaves together powerful first-person narratives with gentle guidance and seasoned insights to help girls through the maze of feelings that swirl around the abuse experience. This gives every young woman who struggles with the scars of sexual abuse the courage that comes from knowing that she is not alone, while other girls come out from behind the veil of secrecy to become vibrant, healthy, and whole.

Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre — Anarchist, Feminist, Genius


Voltairine de Cleyre - 2005
    This important book brings de Cleyre's eloquent and incisive work out of undeserved obscurity. Twenty-one essays are reprinted here, including her classic works: "Anarchism and the American Tradition," "The Dominant Idea," and "Sex Slavery." Three biographical essays are also included: two new ones by Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell, and a rarely reprinted one from Emma Goldman.At a time when the mainstream women's movement asked only for the right to vote and rarely challenged the status quo, de Cleyre demanded an end to sex roles, called for economic independence for women, autonomy within and without marriage, and offered a radical critique of the role of the Church and State in oppressing women. In today's world of anti-globalization actions, de Cleyre's anarchist ideals of local self-rule, individual conscience, and decentralization of power still remain fresh and relevant.

Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West


Sheila Jeffreys - 2005
    However, in the last two decades the brutality of western beauty practices seems to have become much more severe, requiring the breaking of skin, spilling of blood and rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Beauty and Misogyny seeks to make sense of why beauty practices are not only just as persistent, but in many ways more extreme. It examines the pervasive use of makeup, the misogyny of fashion and high-heeled shoes, and looks at the role of pornography in the creation of increasingly popular beauty practices such as breast implants, genital waxing and surgical alteration of the labia. It looks at the cosmetic surgery and body piercing/cutting industries as being forms of self-mutilation by proxy, in which the surgeons and piercers serve as proxies to harm women s bodies, and concludes by considering how a culture of resistance to these practices can be created.This essential work will appeal to students and teachers of feminist psychology, gender studies, cultural studies, and feminist sociology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and to anyone with an interest in feminism, women and beauty, and women s health.

Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980


Kimberly Springer - 2005
    Through original oral history interviews with key activists and analysis of previously unexamined organizational records, Kimberly Springer traces the emergence, life, and decline of several black feminist organizations: the Third World Women’s Alliance, Black Women Organized for Action, the National Black Feminist Organization, the National Alliance of Black Feminists, and the Combahee River Collective. The first of these to form was founded in 1968; all five were defunct by 1980. Springer demonstrates that these organizations led the way in articulating an activist vision formed by the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality.The organizations that Springer examines were the first to explicitly use feminist theory to further the work of previous black women’s organizations. As she describes, they emerged in response to marginalization in the civil rights and women’s movements, stereotyping in popular culture, and misrepresentation in public policy. Springer compares the organizations’ ideologies, goals, activities, memberships, leadership styles, finances, and communication strategies. Reflecting on the conflicts, lack of resources, and burnout that led to the demise of these groups, she considers the future of black feminist organizing, particularly at the national level. Living for the Revolution is an essential reference: it provides the history of a movement that influenced black feminist theory and civil rights activism for decades to come.

Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan


Lorna Jowett - 2005
    Sex and the Slayer explores one of the most talked-about topics in relation to this pioneering TV series--gender. As fantasy, Buffy potentially opens up a space for alternative representations of gender. But how alternative can popular television be? Taking a feminist cultural studies approach, Jowett explores the ways in which the series represents femininity, masculinity, and gendered relations, including sexuality and sexual orientation. Written for undergraduates, Sex and the Slayer provides an introduction to the most important theoretical and historical underpinnings of contemporary gender criticism as it examines a range of thought-provoking issues: role reversal, the tension between feminism and femininity, the "crisis" of masculinity, gender hybridity, the appeal of bad girls, romance, and changing family structures. Through this introductory analysis, Jowett shows that Buffy presents a contradictory mixture of "subversive" and "conservative" images of gender roles and as such is a key example of the complexity of gender representation in contemporary television.

Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology


Kwok Pui-Lan - 2005
    An essential task facing theology is thus to decolonize the mind and free Christianity from colonizing bias and structures. Here, in this truly groundbreaking study, highly respected feminist theologian Kwok Pui-lan offers the first full-length theological treatment of what it means to do postcolonial feminist theology. She explains her methodological basis and explores several specific topics, including Christology, pluralism, and creation.

Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage


Stephanie Coontz - 2005
    But the same things that have made it so have also made a good marriage more fulfilling than ever before. In this enlightening and hugely entertaining book, historian and marriage expert Stephanie Coontz takes readers from the marital intrigues of ancient Babylon to the sexual torments of Victorian couples to demonstrate how recent the idea of marrying for love is-and how absurd it would have seemed to most of our ancestors. It was only 200 years ago that marriage began to be about love and emotional commitment, and since then the very things that have strengthened marriage as a personal relationship have steadily weakened it as a social institution. Marriage, A History brings intelligence, wit, and some badly needed perspective to today's marital debates and dilemmas.

The Return Message: Poems


Tessa Rumsey - 2005
    Will this uncontainable desire lead to the possession of the other, or to the dissolution of the self? Such are the book's ethical, cultural, and spiritual imperatives.

Vagina Warriors


Eve Ensler - 2005
    Vagina Warriors- people committed to ending violence against women and girls around the world- are at the heart of V-Day. This powerful book features Ensler's essay "Vagina Warriors: An Emerging Paradigm, An Emerging Species" alongside Tenneson's portraits of V-Day activists, many of them well-known celebrities, with personal statements and quotations from the subjects. The celebrities featured include Glen Close, Salma Hayek, Gloria Steinem, Isabella Rossellini, Jane Fonda, and numerous others.

Just Sex?: The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape


Nicola Gavey - 2005
    This shift in perception has revealed the startling frequency of occurrences of date rape, obscuring the divide between rape and what was once just sex. Just Sex? combines an overview of the existing literature with an analysis of recent research to examine the psychological and cultural implications of this new epidemic. The result is the conclusion that feminist theory on sexual victimisation has gone both too far and not far enough. The reader is presented with a challenging and original perspective on the issues of rape, sex and the body, incorporating subjects including:* rape as a social problem* the social constructionism of sex, subjectivity and the body* heterosexuality under the microscopeThis book succeeds in making a valuable contribution to feminist and social contructionist work on rape that will be of interest to those studying psychology, gender studies, cultural studies and sociology. Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape was selected as a 2005 winner of AWP's (Association for Women in Psychology) distinguished publication award.

Women's Lives, Men's Laws


Catharine A. MacKinnon - 2005
    As Peter Jennings once put it, more than anyone else in legal studies, she has made it easier for other women to seek justice. This collection, the first since MacKinnon's celebrated Feminism Unmodified appeared in 1987, brings together previously uncollected and unpublished work in the national arena from 1980 to the present, defining her clear, coherent, consistent approach to reframing the law of men on the basis of the lives of women.By making visible the deep gender bias of existing law, MacKinnon has recast legal debate and action on issues of sex discrimination, sexual abuse, prostitution, pornography, and racism. The essays in this volume document and illuminate some of the momentous and ongoing changes to which this work contributes; the recognition of sexual harassment, rape, and battering as claims for sexual discrimination; the redefinition of rape in terms of women's actual experience of sexual violation; and the reframing of the pornography debate around harm rather than morality. The perspectives in these essays have played an essential part in changing American law and remain fundamental to the project of building a sex-equal future.

Domestic Violence at the Margins: Readings on Race, Class, Gender, and Culture


Natalie J. SokoloffKathryn Laughon - 2005
    Campbell, Anna D. Wolf Chair, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing"An exciting and powerful collection that eloquently critiques some of the current thinking in domestic violence and raises key concerns for advocates and scholars working in the area."—Sujata Warrier, president, board of directors, Manavi: An organization for South Asian women"Sokoloff has assembled an impressive array of authors who challenge us to ‘think outside of our contemporary domestic violence box.’"—Angela M. Moore Parmley, chief, violence and victimization research division, National Institute of JusticeThis groundbreaking anthology reorients the field of domestic violence research by bringing long-overdue attention to the structural forms of oppression in communities marginalized by race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or social class.Reprints of the most influential recent work in the field as well as more than a dozen newly commissioned essays explore theoretical issues, current research, service provision, and activism among Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, and lesbians. The volume rejects simplistic analyses of the role of culture in domestic violence by elucidating the support systems available to battered women within different cultures, while at the same time addressing the distinct problems generated by that culture. Together, the essays pose a compelling challenge to stereotypical images of battered women that are racist, homophobic, and xenophobic.The most up-to-date and comprehensive picture of domestic violence available, this anthology is an essential text for courses in sociology, criminology, social work, and women’s studies. Beyond the classroom, it provides critical information and resources for professionals working in domestic violence services, advocacy, social work, and law enforcement.

The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003


Judith Plaskow - 2005
    Section II addresses her nuanced understanding of oppression and includes her important work on anti-Judaism in Christian feminism. Section III contains a variety of short and highly readable pieces that make clear Plaskow's central role in the creation of Jewish feminism, including the essential "Beyond Egalitarianism." Finally, section IV presents her writings on the significance of sexual ethics to the larger project of transforming Judaism.Intelligently edited with the help of Rabbi Donna Berman, and including pieces never before published, The Coming of Lilith is indispensable for religious studies students, fans of Plaskow's work, and those pursuing a Jewish education.

Childfree and Loving It!


Nicki Defago - 2005
    Interviewees speak freely and honestly about their experiences, providing readers with both the many reasons people choose to live child-free and insight into what seems to them an unhealthy amount of societal pressure to become mothers and fathers. This book also presents interviews with parents who wish they had not had children while offering their reasons for feeling regret. Concluding with a look into the workplace, this title evaluates the fairness of allowing parents shorter days and time off to accommodate children, compared to the working environment of those who have chosen to live without children.

Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power


Elizabeth Grosz - 2005
    Time Travels brings her trailblazing essays together to show how reconceptualizing temporality transforms and revitalizes key scholarly and political projects. In these essays, Grosz demonstrates how imagining different relations between the past, present, and future alters understandings of social and scientific projects ranging from theories of justice to evolutionary biology, and she explores the radical implications of the reordering of these projects for feminist, queer, and critical race theories.Grosz’s reflections on how rethinking time might generate new understandings of nature, culture, subjectivity, and politics are wide ranging. She moves from a compelling argument that Charles Darwin’s notion of biological and cultural evolution can potentially benefit feminist, queer, and antiracist agendas to an exploration of modern jurisprudence’s reliance on the notion that justice is only immanent in the future and thus is always beyond reach. She examines Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration in light of the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and William James, and she discusses issues of sexual difference, identity, pleasure, and desire in relation to the thought of Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Luce Irigaray. Together these essays demonstrate the broad scope and applicability of Grosz’s thinking about time as an undertheorized but uniquely productive force.

African Gender Studies: A Reader


Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí - 2005
    Bringing together the essential writing on this topic from the last 25 years, these essays discuss gender in Africa from a multi-disciplinary perspective. With a theoretical and conceptual focus, African Gender Studies will inform debate in African Studies, Women's Studies, History, Sociology and Anthropology.

Pinay Power: Peminist Critical Theory


Melinda L. de Jesús - 2005
    This volume brings together for the first time critical work by Pinays of different generations and varying political and personal perspectives to chart the history of the Filipina experience.

Hidden Passages: Tales to Honor the Crones


Vila SpiderHawk - 2005
    Each of the eight stories is unique, has a dynamic story line, and a marvelous ending These stories reached in and gripped my heart and soul and just did not let go. They gave me a new vision for myself as an elder woman, and gave me new perspectives on earlier life experiences as well. SpiderHawk does word magic

Community development: A critical approach


Margaret Ledwith - 2005
    This book, developed from her classic text, Participating in transformation, is an invaluable new resource for students and practitioners in the field. The book advocates a critical approach to community development that locates theory in practice, emphasising its transformative rather than ameliorative potential. Grounded in the pedagogy of Paulo Freire and drawing on feminist and other relevant theories, it helps readers to: - gain an understanding of key community development theories; - develop practical skills alongside the ability to analyse and reflect; - relate ideas and theories to skills and practice in community development. The text is brought to life through a series of narrative case studies, drawn from the author's own experiences, which clearly illustrate how to apply the ideas, models and analyses discussed. Practitioners, students and educators involved in community development, youth and community work, social work, health and education, as well as those in other professions that have a community development focus, will find this an invaluable contribution to theory and practice today. BASW/Policy Press series The BASW/Policy Press partnership provides the very best in accessible and practical high-quality resources for social work professionals and students. For other titles in this series, please follow the series link from the main catalogue page.

Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom


Linda M.G. Zerilli - 2005
    In Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, Linda M. G. Zerilli argues that the persistence of this subject-centered frame severely limits feminists' capacity to think imaginatively about the central problem of feminist theory and practice: a politics concerned with freedom. Offering both a discussion of feminism in its postmodern context and a critique of contemporary theory, Zerilli here challenges feminists to move away from a theory-based approach, which focuses on securing or contesting "women" as an analytic category of feminism, to one rooted in political action and judgment. She revisits the democratic problem of exclusion from participation in common affairs and elaborates a freedom-centered feminism as the political practice of beginning anew, world-building, and judging.  In a series of case studies, Zerilli draws on the political thought of Hannah Arendt to articulate a nonsovereign conception of political freedom and to explore a variety of feminist understandings of freedom in the twentieth century, including ones proposed by Judith Butler, Monique Wittig, and the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective. In so doing, Zerilli hopes to retrieve what Arendt called feminism's lost treasure: the original and radical claim to political freedom.

EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa


AnaLouise Keating - 2005
    Her work, which is frequently anthologized and often cited, as well as widely taught at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate level, has challenged and expanded previous views in American Studies, Chicano/a Studies, composition studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, feminism, literary studies, critical pedagogy, and queer theory. Here scholars from a number of disciplines gather to reflect critically and anecdotally on Anzaldua's writing, her ideas, and the wider significance of her work. Highlighting some of Anzaldúa's lesser explored theories, EntreMundos challenges readers to re-examine Anzaldúa's writings and theorizing from additional perspectives. The goal is to broaden Anzaldúan scholarship, shifting the conversation in new directions while underscoring the visionary yet pragmatic social-justice dimensions of her work.

Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World (Eco Feminism, Mother Earth, for Readers of Goddesses in Everywoman)


Jean Shinoda Bolen - 2005
    What cannot be done by men, or by individual women, can be done by women together. Earth is Home. Jean Shinoda Bolen's life's work -- her Jungian-inspired insights in The Tao of Psychology, the blockbuster Goddesss in Every Woman, the empowering Crones Don't Whine and The Millionth Circle -- all lead up to this book. It is an urgent message and an empowering one. When women are strong together, women can be fiercely protective of what we love. Bolen's poetic polemic explores the psychological, spiritual, and scientific aspects of women as collaborators for change. She begins with a Jungian examination of the idea of the Holy Grail archetype as every woman's secret and the transformative power of the sacred feminine -- the Goddess, Gaia, Earth Mother. Bolen explains Rupert Sheldrake's Theory of Morphic Resonance, which describes how societies and even species can undergo rapid evolution when they reach a tipping point. She explains that we've learned that women gathering together in groups and telling the truth of their lives can actually change the world. She points to a fascinating UCLA study proving that women react to stress differently than their male counterparts. Instead of the fight or flight reaction, women have a tend and befriend response as a result of an increase in oxytocin, the maternal bonding hormone. While men become more adrenalized and aggressive, women nurture and protect -- biologically. From this and other compelling evidence Bolen makes a strongly convincing case that now is the time for women to lead -- to fiercely protect all that we love. Urgent Message from Mother offers a unique combination of visionary thinking and practical how-to and is Jean Shinoda Bolen's most activist work to-date. Written in a lyrical language that inspires, this book seeks to galvanize the still untapped power of women coming together to change our world. Listen to your mother; she is calling.

Other People's Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy


Amy Shuman - 2005
    Drawing on innovative research and contemporary theory, she describes what happens when one person's story becomes another person's source of inspiration, or when entitlement and empathy collide.   The resulting analyses are wonderfully diverse, integrating narrative studies, sociolinguistics, communications, folklore, and ethnographic studies to examine the everyday, conversational stories told by cultural groups including Latinas, Jews, African Americans, Italians, and Puerto Ricans. Shuman offers a nuanced and clear theoretical perspective derived from the Frankfurt school, life history research, disability research, feminist studies, trauma studies, and cultural studies. Without compromising complexity, she makes narrative inquiry accessible to a broad population.

Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art


Mignon Nixon - 2005
    A pivotal figure in twentieth-century art, Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, France) emigrated to New York in 1938 and is still actively working and exhibiting today. From Bourgeois's formative struggle with the father figures of surrealism, including Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp, to her galvanising role in the feminist art movement of the 1970s, to her subsequent emergence as a leading voice in postmodernism, this book explores the artist's responses to war, dislocation, and motherhood, to the predicament of the woman artist and the politics of sexual and social liberation, as a dialogue with psychoanalysis. Convinced that she could express deeper things in three dimensions, Bourgeois abandoned painting for sculpture in the 1940s,

The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self


Annie Finch - 2005
    Finch's germinal work on the art of verse has earned her the admiration of a wide range of poets, from new formalists to hip-hop writers. And her ongoing commitment to women's poetry has brought Finch a substantial following as a "postmodern poetess" whose critical writing embraces the past while establishing bold new traditions. The Body of Poetry includes essays on metrical diversity, poetry and music, the place of women poets in the canon, and on poets Emily Dickinson, Phillis Wheatley, Sara Teasdale, Audre Lorde, Marilyn Hacker, and John Peck, among other topics. In Annie Finch's own words, these essays were all written with one aim: "to build a safe space for my own poetry. . . . [I]n the attempt, they will also have helped to nourish a new kind of American poetics, one that will prove increasingly open to poetry's heart."Poet, translator, and critic Annie Finch is director of the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She is co-editor, with Kathrine Varnes, of An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, and author of The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse, Eve, and Calendars. She is the winner of the eleventh annual Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award for scholars who have made a lasting contribution to the art and science of versification.

Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany


Dagmar Herzog - 2005
    What exactly were Nazism's sexual politics? Were they repressive for everyone, or were some individuals and groups given sexual license while others were persecuted, tormented, and killed? How do we make sense of the evolution of postwar interpretations of Nazism's sexual politics? What do we make of the fact that scholars from the 1960s to the present have routinely asserted that the Third Reich was sex-hostile?In response to these and other questions, Sex after Fascism fundamentally reconceives central topics in twentieth-century German history. Among other things, it changes the way we understand the immense popular appeal of the Nazi regime and the nature of antisemitism, the role of Christianity in the consolidation of postfascist conservatism in the West, the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s-1970s, as well as the negotiations between government and citizenry under East German communism. Beginning with a new interpretation of the Third Reich's sexual politics and ending with the revisions of Germany's past facilitated by communism's collapse, Sex after Fascism examines the intimately intertwined histories of capitalism and communism, pleasure and state policies, religious renewal and secularizing trends.A history of sexual attitudes and practices in twentieth-century Germany, investigating such issues as contraception, pornography, and theories of sexual orientation, Sex after Fascism also demonstrates how Germans made sexuality a key site for managing the memory and legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust.

What If Your Mother


Judith Arcana - 2005
    Judith Arcana, a reproductive rights activist formerly involved in Chicago's pre-Rose v. Wade underground abortion service, imbues her poetry, fiction and essays with the same ferocity, humor and passion that informs her activism. "It's a passionate rush of language, hope in a hard time, truth in the middle of lies. This poetry sparks and burns with the hidden language and stories of women"-Minnie Bruce Pratt.

A Colored Woman In A White World


Mary Church Terrell - 2005
    Active in both the civil rights movement and the campaign for women’s suffrage, Terrell was a leading spokesperson for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and the first black woman appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education and the American Association of University Women. She was also a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In this autobiography, originally published in 1940, Terrell describes the important events and people in her life.Terrell began her career as a teacher, first at Wilberforce College and then at a high school in Washington, D.C., where she met her future husband, Robert Heberton Terrell. After marriage, the women’s suffrage movement attracted her interests and before long she became a prominent lecturer at both national and international forums on women’s rights. A gifted speaker, she went on to pursue a career on the lecture circuit for close to thirty years, delivering addresses on the critical social issues of the day, including segregation, lynching, women’s rights, the progress of black women, and various aspects of black history and culture. Her talents and many leadership positions brought her into close contact with influential black and white leaders, including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and others.With a new introduction by Debra Newman Ham, professor of history at Morgan State University, this new edition of Mary Church Terrell’s autobiography will be of interest to students and scholars of both women’s studies and African American history.

The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton


Vivian Gornick - 2005
    Anthony—was one of the most important leaders of the movement to gain American women the vote. But, as Vivian Gornick argues in this passionate, vivid biographical essay, Stanton is also the greatest feminist thinker of the nineteenth century. Endowed with a philosophical cast of mind large enough to grasp the immensity that women's rights addressed, Stanton developed a devotion to equality uniquely American in character. Her writing and life make clear why feminism as a liberation movement has flourished here as nowhere else in the world.Born in 1815 into a conservative family of privilege, Stanton was radicalized by her experience in the abolitionist movement. Attending the first international conference on slavery in London in 1840, she found herself amazed when the conference officials refused to seat her because of her sex. At that moment she realized that "In the eyes of the world I was not as I was in my own eyes, I was only a woman." At the same moment she saw what it meant for the American republic to have failed to deliver on its fundamental promise of equality for all. In her last public address, "The Solitude of Self," (delivered in 1892), she argued for women's political equality on the grounds that loneliness is the human condition, and that each citizen therefore needs the tools to fight alone for his or her interests.Vivian Gornick first encountered "The Solitude of Self" thirty years ago. Of that moment Gornick writes, "I hardly knew who Stanton was, much less what this speech meant in her life, or in our history, but it I can still remember thinking with excitement and gratitude, as I read these words for the first time, eighty years after they were written, ‘We are beginning where she left off.' "The Solitude of Self is a profound, distilled meditation on what makes American feminism American from one of the finest critics of our time.

How Can I Let Go If I Don't Know I'm Holding On?: Setting Our Souls Free


Linda Douty - 2005
    It's also about letting go of attitudes and ideas, such as perfectionism, resentment, worry, and judgmentalism-that keep us from growing in our relationships with God and others. Letting go is crucial to our spiritual and emotional health.In How Can I Let Go If I Don't Know I'm Holding On?, Linda Douty examines a variety of letting-go struggles and offers ways to move on to a deeper spirituality. Weaving together her own experiences and the stories of others, she offers strategies for letting go of the things that keep us from a deeper relationship with the Divine. With practical suggestions and updated versions of spiritual classics such as lectio divina, plus questions for study and reflection, this book is a rich resource for personal spiritual growth as well as for group study.

Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism


Norma Broude - 2005
    Garrard that challenge art history from a feminist perspective. Following their Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (1982) and The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (1992), this new volume identifies female agency as a central theme of recent feminist scholarship. Framed by a lucid and stimulating critical introduction, twenty-three essays on artists and issues from the Renaissance to the present, written in the 1990s and after, offer a nuanced critique of the poststructuralist premises of 1980s feminist art history. Contributors: Allison Arieff, Janis Bergman-Carton, Babette Bohn, Norma Broude, Anna C. Chave, Julie Cole, Bridget Elliott, Mary D. Garrard, Sheila ffolliott, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Ruth E. Iskin, Geraldline A. Johnson, Amelia Jones, Maud Lavin, Julie Nicoletta, Carol Ockman, Erica Rand, John B. Ravenal, Lisa Saltzman, Mary D. Sheriff

Midwifing Death: Returning to the Arms of the Ancient Mother


Leslene della Madre - 2005
    Patriarchy now threatens the world with terminal illness generated by nuclear weapons of mass destruction. A brilliant combination of scholarship, art, spirituality, and experience, Leslene della-Madre's book powerfully brings us back to ancient ways of honouring divinity both in our lives and deaths. I highly recommend it." Mary Condren, author of The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion and Power in Celtic Ireland.

Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers: Bridging Differences


Joey Sprague - 2005
    Written in a clear, balanced fashion, Joey Sprague's treatment of qualitative and quantitative methods shows that all can be used effectively by progressive researchers. She describes and evaluates a wide array of methodological options for the production of knowledge. Unique to this volume, Sprague avoids the stereotype that tarnishes all quantitative research as inherently anti-feminist, showing through an analysis of model studies how surveys and experimental designs are being used by critical scholars. She traces how the social organization of the academy has produced a bias against feminist methodology and proposes a program to overcome these limitations. Sprague's book will be of value to scholars of many disciplines, and a essential text or supplement for methods classes."

Shakespeare and Women


Phyllis Rackin - 2005
    In so doing, this book seeks to challenge currently prevalent views of Shakespeare's women-both the women he depicted in his plays and the women he encountered in the world he inhabited.Chapter 1, A Usable History, analyses the implications and consequences of the emphasis on patriarchal power, male misogyny, and women's oppression that has dominated recent feminist Shakespeare scholarship, while subsequent chapters propose alternative models for feminist analysis. Chapter 2, The Place(s) of Women in Shakespeare's World, emphasizes the frequently overlooked kinds of social, political, and economic agency exercised by the women Shakespeare would have known in both Stratford and London. Chapter 3, Our Canon, Ourselves, addresses the implications of the modern popularity of plays such as The Taming of the Shrew which seem to endorse women's subjugation, arguing that the plays--and the aspects of those plays--that we have chosen to emphasize tell us more about our own assumptions than about the beliefs that informed the responses of Shakespeare's first audiences. Chapter 4, Boys will be Girls, explores the consequences for women of the use of male actors to play women's roles. Chapter 5, The Lady's Reeking Breath, turns to the sonnets, the texts that seem most resistant to feminist appropriation, to argue that Shakespeare's rewriting of the idealized Petrarchan lady anticipates modern feminist critiques of the essential misogyny of the Petrarchan tradition. The final chapter, Shakespeare's Timeless Women, surveys the implication of Shakespeare's female characters in the process of historical change, as they have been repeatedly updated to conform to changing conceptions of women's nature and women's social roles, serving in ever-changing guises as models of an unchanging, universal female nature.

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives


J. Jack Halberstam - 2005
    Jack Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. He presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture.In a Queer Time and Place opens with a probing analysis of the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was brutally murdered in small-town Nebraska. After looking at mainstream representations of the transgender body as exhibited in the media frenzy surrounding this highly visible case and the Oscar-winning film based on Brandon's story, Boys Don t Cry, Halberstam turns his attention to the cultural and artistic production of queers themselves. He examines the transgender gaze, as rendered in small art-house films like By Hook or By Crook, as well as figurations of ambiguous embodiment in the art of Del LaGrace Volcano, Jenny Saville, Eva Hesse, Shirin Neshat, and others. He then exposes the influence of lesbian drag king cultures upon hetero-male comic films, such as Austin Powers and The Full Monty, and, finally, points to dyke subcultures as one site for the development of queer counterpublics and queer temporalities.Considering the sudden visibility of the transgender body in the early twenty-first century against the backdrop of changing conceptions of space and time, In a Queer Time and Place is the first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music. This pioneering book offers both a jumping off point for future analysis of transgenderism and an important new way to understand cultural constructions of time and place."

Why Aren't Jewish Women Circumcised? Gender & Covenant in Judaism


Shaye J.D. Cohen - 2005
    With a lively command of a wide range of Jewish sources—from the Bible and the Talmud to the legal and philosophical writings of the Middle Ages to Enlightenment thinkers and modern scholars—Shaye J. D. Cohen considers the varied responses to this provocative question and in the process provides the fullest cultural history of Jewish circumcision available.

Nellie Bly


Shannon Knudsen - 2005
    To help pay rent, Elizabeth held many jobs, but her angry letter to a newspaper landed her in a writing career. The newspaper offered her a job writing articles, and she found her passion. Using the pen name Nellie Bly, she became famous for her honest, funny, and sometimes serious stories. One of her most famous articles chronicled her 72-day trip around the world.

'Honour': Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women


Lynn Welchman - 2005
    In addition, this book identifies relevant intersecting thematic issues from practice-orientated academic perspective. It seeks to highlight a human rights based framework in seeking to address "crimes of honour" rather than taking a culturally relativist approach.

Aesthetic Surgery


Angelika Taschen - 2005
    Topics include: ? History of aesthetic surgery (with unpublished medical photos!) ? Ethnicity and aesthetic surgery ? Surgery in movies ? Spotlight on Ivo Pitanguy, the ?Michelangelo of the scalpel? ? Interviews with the world's most famous aesthetic surgeons ? Before and after photos of transformed body parts, from the top of the head to the tips of the toes ? Caricatures and jokes about aesthetic surgery ? Bibliography including links to plastic surgery websites

Living on the Boundaries: Evangelical Women, Feminism and the Theological Academy


Nicola Hoggard Creegan - 2005
    In spite of a considerable degree of shared history, they are quite often defined against each other. Most of the rhetoric from and about the movements assumes that there are few connections and little overlap, and that individuals might locate themselves within one or the other, but not within both. Yet some evangelical women in the academy find themselves living on the boundary between feminism and evangelicalism, or on the boundaries between the multiple forms of both feminism and evangelicalism."--from the first chapter What happens when evangelicalism meets feminism? In their own biblical and theological training, Nicola Creegan and Christine Pohl have each lived at the intersection of these two movements They now both teach in Christian institutions of higher education where others follow along a similar pathway. They have a story to tell about their experience along with those of ninety other women they surveyed who have lived on the boundary between evangelicalism and feminism. They explore what it was like for evangelical women who pursued doctorates in biblical and theological studies. What were their experiences as they taught and wrote, were mentored and became mentors? What are the theological issues they faced, and how did they respond? How have they negotiated professional, family and church commitments? This well-informed, multidimensional and sensitive narrative of women's experience will be illuminating for anyone involved in the academic theological world.

The Wounding and Healing of Desire: Weaving Heaven and Earth


Wendy Farley - 2005
    Considering human life from the perspective of the wounding and healing of desire, with desire being that within us which longs for connection, home, and beauty, Farley presents a passionate, moving account of the human condition that draws strongly upon the Christian meditative and mystical spiritual traditions. In doing so, Farley shifts the traditional images of sin and redemption into images of healing and power. The result is a theological memoir that reaches into the human depths and draws forth a response of the soul--in courage, compassion, and delight.

Beyond the Exotic: Women's Histories in Islamic Societies


Amira El-Azhary Sonbol - 2005
    Muslim women have been depicted as different, and by exoticizing (orientalizing) them--or Islamic society in general--they have been dealt with outside of general women's history and regarded as having little to contribute to the writing of world history or to the life of their sisters worldwide. By approaching widely used sources with different questions and methodologies, and by using new or little-used material (with much primary research), this book redresses these deficiencies. Scholars revisit and reevaluate scripture and scriptural interpretation; church records involving non-Muslim women of the Arab world; archival court records dating from the present back to the Ottoman period; and the oral and material culture and its written record, including oral history, textbooks, sufi practices, and the politics of dress. By deconstructing the past, these scholars offer fresh perspectives on women's roles and aspirations in Middle East societies.

We Are Poor But So Many: The Story of Self-Employed Women in India


Ela R. Bhatt - 2005
    Known as the gentle revolutionary, she has dedicated her life to improving the lives of India's poorest and most oppressed citizens. In India, where 93 percent of the labor force are self-employed, 94 percent of this sector are women. Yet self-employed women have historically enjoyed few legal protections or worker's rights. In fact, most are illiterate and subject to exploitation and harassment by moneylenders, employers, and officials. Witnessing the terrible conditions faced by women working as weavers, stitchers, cigarette rollers, and waste collectors, Ela Bhatt began helping these women to organize themselves. In 1972, Ela Bhatt founded the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) to bring poor women together and give them ways to fight for their rights and earn better livings. Three years after SEWA was founded, it had 7,000 members. Today it has a total membership of 700,000 women, making it the largest single primary trade union in India. Bhatt lead SEWA to form a cooperative bank in 1974 - with a share capital of $30,000 - that offered microcredit loans to help women save and become financially independent. Today the SEWA Cooperative Bank has $1.5 million in working capital and more than 30,000 depositors with a loan return rate of 94 percent. Through years of organization and strategic action, Ela Bhatt developed SEWA from a small, often ignored group into a powerful trade union and bank with allies around the world. During the last three decades, SEWA's efforts to increase the bargaining power, economic opportunities, health security, legal representation, and organizational abilities of Indian women have brought dramatic improvements to hundreds of thousands of lives and influenced similar initiatives around the globe. We Are Poor but So Many is a first-hand account of the vision, rise, and success of SEWA, in India as well as internationally. The book begins with a history of the early days of SEWA and an exploration of the Ghandian philosophy that helped shape SEWA's formation and vision. It follows with an account of the struggles and challenges that SEWA faced in its journey and describes how these were addressed and overcome. It then explores the freedom that SEWA has facilitated for women working in the informal economy by presenting several inspirational stories of individual SEWA members. The final chapter describes the international extension of SEWA's work, the challenges that women face in the informal economy worldwide, and how SEWA can be effectively replicated in other parts of the world. This volume is unique in that it will elaborate the specific experience and knowledge of Ela Bhatt in her and SEWA's journey and provide insights and knowledge that no outside researcher would ever be in a position to replicate.

The Body Myth: Adult Women and the Pressure to Be Perfect


Margo Maine - 2005
    Meanwhile, many of us believe that eating disorders and body image issues are problems for adolescent girls, not for mature women. So we're often too ashamed to talk honestly with anyone about our dilemma. Now there is hope. Clinical psychologist Margo Maine has been successfully helping women over thirty overcome eating disorders and body image problems for more than twenty years. In The Body Myth, she explains the terrible toll these problems can take on your life. More importantly, she provides healing insights and proven techniques for reclaiming your life—or the life of someone you love—from the debilitating belief that a woman's self-worth and her worth to others are derived from how she looks, how much she weighs, and what she eats—our culture's Body Myth.With the help of poignant real-life stories from women of various ages and walks of life, Dr. Maine explores the complex emotional, social, and cultural forces that perpetuate the Body Myth. She describes the dynamics of how and why it seduces so many otherwise sensible women into self-loathing, destructive behaviors, and unhealthy relationships with food and the body.A unique and invaluable source of information and inspiration, this breakthrough guide equips everyone with the knowledge and tools to find release from the clutches of the Body Myth and live a more balanced, fulfilling life.

She Is Everywhere!: An Anthology of Writing in Womanist/Feminist Spirituality


Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum - 2005
    This book will be enormously useful and stimulating to women's studies classes and the emerging vibrant study of women's spirituality."By venerating Her I am able to salute the divinity in all women and myself."--Luisah Teish"We are at the brink of new age which will be defined by new concepts in science, religion, and the reclamation of the values of the Dark Mother."--Necia Harkless"In my micro-geography, she is everywhere: in a sweat lodge in Indian Canyon, or in the Guadalupe chapel in San Juan Bautista, in a field of blue corn in Aromas protected with corn dollies, or in the Rodriquez Street Laundry in Watsonville..."--Jennifer Colby"In bringing memories of Her to the surface, I feel reborn, reconnected to the Earth, reunited with my Great Mother."--Sandy Miranda"Traveling to lands and sacred sites where evidence of the Goddess is irrefutable gives me a new spark and added hope...Sardinia herself is the Great Mother."--Leslene della Madre"The more women's voices I heard; the more I came to see the Sacred Feminine as immanent; the more I saw women who seemed to be filled with joy even in the midst of adverse circumstances..."--Deborah Grenn

Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement


Robert Cooney - 2005
    Largely image-driven, the reference is based on research Cooney carried out in manuscript collections, subject files, and photo collections at 100 public and private repositories including the Library of Congress, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, and the Huntington and Bancroft libraries. Many of the images (photographs, posters, and other ephemera) have not previously been published. Cooney is a graphic designer who started the Woman Suffrage Media Project in 1993. Oversize: 9x11.5". Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Voices of Courage: Inspiration from Survivors of Sexual Assault


Mike Domitrz - 2005
    An eye-opening journal of personal growth and recovery, Voices of Courage will forever change your perspective on life after a sexual assault. All proceeds benefit organizations addressing sexual assault.

Worlds Apart?: Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias


Dunja M. Mohr - 2005
    What has often been overlooked is the emergence of a new hybrid subgenre, particularly in science fiction and fantasy, which incorporates utopian strategies within the dystopian narrative, particularly in the feminist dystopias of the 1980s and 1990s. The author names this new subgenre “transgressive utopian dystopias.” Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy, Suzy McKee Charna's Holdfast series, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale are thoroughly analyzed within the context of this this new subgenre of “transgressive utopian dystopias.” Analysis focuses particularly on how these works cover the interrelated categories of gender, race and class, along with their relationship to classic literary dualism and the dystopian narrative. Without completely dissolving the dualistic order, the feminist dystopias studied here contest the notions of unambiguity and authenticity that are generally part of the canon.

PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion


Glenys D. Livingstone - 2005
    The author situates this original synthesis in her context of being female and white European transplanted to the Southern Hemisphere. Her sense of alienation from her place, which is personal, cultural and cosmic, fires a cosmology that re-stories Goddess metaphor of Virgin-Mother-Crone as a pattern of Creativity, which unfolds the cosmos, manifests in Earth's life, and may be known intimately. PaGaian Cosmology is an ecospirituality grounded in indigenous Western religious celebration of the Earth-Sun annual cycle. By linking to story of the unfolding universe this practice can be deepened, and a sense of the Triple Goddess-central to the cycle and known in ancient cultures-developed as a dynamic innate to all being. The ritual scripts and the process of ritual events presented here, may be a journey into self-knowledge through personal, communal and ecological story: the self to be known is one that is integral with place.PaGaian Cosmology may be used as a resource for individuals or groups seeking new forms of devotional expression and an Earth-based pathway to wisdom within.

Discovering Dorothea: The Life of the Pioneering Fossil-Hunter Dorothea Bate


Karolyn Shindler - 2005
    At the time, no women were employed there as scientists. For the determined Dorothea Bate, however, this was the first step in an extraordinary career as a pioneering explorer and fossil-hunter as well as the beginning of a 50-year association with the Museum. A woman of immense charm, wit, and intelligence, Bate came to know many of the greatest archaeologists and paleontologists of the 20th century. Although internationally respected as a paleontologist during her lifetime, she was largely forgotten after her death. Now, drawing on letters, papers, and diaries, Karolyn Shindler’s compelling biography rediscovers the life of a unique and indomitable woman.

Red Light: Superheroes, Saints, and Sluts


Anna CamilleriLenelle Moise - 2005
    Red Light is an anthology of essays and visual materials that identifies and deconstructs female icons, past and present, and re-imagines them for the twenty-first century.For Anna, the red light is a beacon, a warning signal that declares the incendiary power of women; the icons found in this book are red lights as well: Wonder Woman, Amelia Earhart, the Virgin Mary, Jayne Mansfield, Florence Nightingale, Aileen Wuornos, Belle Starr, Foxy Brown, the Avon Lady, and many more. Further, the categories these icons fall into—superheroes, saints, and sluts—are reconfigured and redeemed by their portrayers.Alternately fiery, sexy, angry, and eloquent, the works in this book cast these powerful, conflicted women in the (red) light of a new day.Contributors include: Sandra Alland, Sharon Bridgforth, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Daphne Gottlieb, Collin Kelley, Billie Mandel, Lenelle Moise, Sara Seinberg, and Zoe Whittall.Anna Camilleri is a Toronto-based writer and performer. She co-edited the anthology Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity, a Lambda Award nominee, as well as co-authored Boys Like Her as a member of the Taste This collective. In 2004, she published her memoir, I Am a Red Dress.

Rape Work: Victims, Gender, and Emotions in Organization and Community Context


Patricia Yancey Martin - 2005
    This book takes a critical look at the organizations and officials that process rape victims to see how the structure of their respective organizations often prevent them from providing responsive care.

Just Advocacy?: Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminism, and the Politics of Representation


Wendy S. HesfordLeigh Gilmore - 2005
    Marked by both substance and rhetoric, they are situated at the heart of many foreign policy decisions and doctrines of social change, and often serve as a justification for aggressive actions. In humanitarian and political debates about the topic, women and children are frequently considered first. Since the 1990s, human rights have become the most legitimate and legitimizing juridical and cultural claim made on a woman's behalf. But what are the consequences of equating women's rights with human rights? As the eleven essays in this volume show, the impact is often contradictory. Bringing together some of the most respected scholars in the field, including Inderpal Grewal, Leela Fernandes, Leigh Gilmore, Susan Koshy, Patrice McDermott, and Sidonie Smith, Just Advocacy? sheds light on the often overlooked ways that women and children are further subjugated when political or humanitarian groups represent them solely as victims and portray the individuals that are helping them as paternal saviors. Drawn from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, Just Advocacy? promises to advance a more nuanced and politically responsible understanding of human rights for both scholars and activists.

A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings


Louise Bogan - 2005
    A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan showcases her devotion to compression, eloquence, and sharp truths. Louise Bogan was poetry reviewer for the New Yorker for thirty-eight years, and her criticism was remarkable for its range and effect. Bogan was responsible for the revival of interest in Henry James and was one of the first American critics to notice and review W. H. Auden. She remained intellectually and emotionally responsive to writers as different from one another as Caitlin Thomas, Dorothy Richardson, W. B. Yeats, André Gide, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Bogan’s short stories appeared regularly in magazines during the 1930s, penetrating the social habits of the city as well as the loneliness there. The autobiographical element in her fiction and journals, never entirely confessional, spurred some of her finest writing. The distinguished poet and critic Mary Kinzie provides in A Poet’s Prose a selection of Bogan’s best criticism, prose meditations, letters, journal entries, autobiographical essays, and published and unpublished fiction.

Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography


Rebecca Whisnant - 2005
    From sex industries survivors to social activists and theorists such as Taylor Lee, Adriene Sere, and Kristen Anderberg, this volume assesses from a feminist perspective the racism, poverty, militarism, and corporate capitalism of selling sex through strip clubs, brothels, mail-order brides, and child pornography.

Feminism After Bordieu


Lisa Adkins - 2005
    A meeting ground for mainstream social theory and contemporary feminist theory.Brings feminist theory face to face with Pierre Bourdieu's social theory.Demonstrates how much Bourdieu's theory has to offer to contemporary feminism.Comprises a series of contributions from key contemporary feminist thinkers.Defines new territories for feminist theorizing.Transforms and advances Bourdieu's social and cultural theory.

On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political, and Literary Essays


Namascar Shaktini - 2005
    This collection of essays on Wittig's work is the first sustained examination of her broad-ranging literary and theoretical works in English. A major feminist theorist on a par with Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, Wittig relocated to teach in the U.S. while maintaining an intellectual presence in Europe before her unexpected death in January 2003. On Monique Wittig includes twelve essays, including three previously unpublished pieces by Wittig herself. Their contents run the gamut of Wittig's corpus, from the political, to the theoretical, to the literary, while representing French, Francophone, and U.S. critics: Diane Griffin Crowder looks at the U.S. feminist movement, Linda Zerilli considers gender and will philosophically, and Teresa de Lauretis examines the development of lesbian theory. Together, these essays situate Wittig's work in terms of the cultural contexts of its production and reception. This is the first book to appear on Wittig following her death, and an indispensable tool for feminist scholars.

Critical Disability Theory: Essays in Philosophy, Politics, Policy, and Law


Dianne Pothier - 2005
    In this book, twenty-four scholars from a variety of disciplines contend that achieving equality for the disabled is not fundamentally a question of medicine or health, nor is it an issue of sensitivity or compassion. Rather, it is a question of politics, and of power and powerlessness. This book argues that we need a new understanding of participatory citizenship that encompasses the disabled, new policies to respond to their needs, and a new vision of their entitlements.

Steel & Silk: Men and Woman Who Have Shaped Syria 1900-2000


Sami Moubayed - 2005
    Syria has led the Arab World in many ways for the past 100 years. It was the headquarters of the Arab nationalist movement in the 1910s and leader of women's emancipation in the 1920s. It was among the first Arab countries to achieve independence from colonial rule in 1946, and among the region's earliest and healthiest democracies in the 1950s. From this point on, Syria produced an array of leading poets, writers, and painters. In the 1970s, Syria was the first Arab country to appoint women as judges, parliamentary deputies, ministers, and ambassadors. Meet the nationalists who led the independence struggle in Syria. Meet the politicians who maneuvered its politics into becoming a central power-broker in the Middle East. Meet the poets, the painters and thinkers as well as the diplomats, journalists, and civil servants. Meet the women and men who shaped 20th century Syria. This book includes a workshop for journalists and researchers that includes an annotated timeline of 20th Century Syria, facts on Syria, and brief bios of the current leadership.

The Ann Oakley reader: Gender, women and social science


Ann Oakley - 2005
    There are extracts from pioneering studies such as Sex, Gender and Society, The Sociology of Housework, From Here to Maternity and Women Confined, presented alongside some of Ann Oakley's more recent reflections on methodology, scientific method and research practice.The book illustrates how Oakley's thinking has evolved over a period in which much in the field of gender and women's studies has changed. Each section of the book is prefaced by Oakley's reflections on how her original studies relate to more recent research and theoretical perspectives. There are many points of intersection with modern debates about how (and whether) to 'do' gender and what terms such as 'women' and 'men' really mean.The result is a valuable commentary on thirty years' work on women, gender and social science methodology which will be of interest to many, especially undergraduate and A-level students, as well as all those grappling with current issues about the past and future of work in the contested areas of gender, women's studies and feminist social science.

Backlash against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present


Ellen Reese - 2005
    With a wealth of original research, Ellen Reese puts recent debates about the contemporary welfare backlash into historical perspective. She provides a closer look at these early antiwelfare campaigns, showing why they were more successful in some states than others and how opponents of welfare sometimes targeted Puerto Ricans and Chicanos as well as blacks for cutbacks. Her research reveals both the continuities and changes in American welfare opposition from the late 1940s to the present. Reese brings new evidence to light that reveals how large farmers and racist politicians, concerned about the supply of cheap labor, appealed to white voters' racial resentments and stereotypes about unwed mothers, blacks, and immigrants in the 1950s. She then examines congressional failure to replace the current welfare system with a more popular alternative in the 1960s and 1970s, which paved the way for national assaults on welfare. Taking a fresh look at recent debates on welfare reform, she explores how and why politicians competing for the white vote and right-wing think tanks promoting business interests appeased the Christian right and manufactured consent for cutbacks through a powerful, racially coded discourse. Finally, through firsthand testimonies, Reese vividly portrays the tragic consequences of current welfare policies and calls for a bold new agenda for working families.

I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian


Shushanik Kurghinian - 2005
    She viewed her poetry as giving voice to the voiceless, and she saw her role as a poet as profoundly political.

An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets


Valentina PolukhinaMaura Dooley - 2005
    Valentina Polukhina surveys the entire scene, reading some 1000 collections and manuscripts, and thoroughly investigating what is accessible on the vibrant Russian literary internet. The anthology ranges from Moscow to Vladivostok. It includes writers from former Soviet Republics such as the Ukraine. Work by Russian women poets living abroad (in Britain, the United States, Italy, France, Israel, etc) is also represented. Focusing on the middle generation, with major figures like Svetlana Kekova, Vera Pavolova and Tatyana Shcherbina, the anthology includes work by the youngest generation, born after 1970 and virtually unknown outside Russia, as well as senior poets like Bella Akhmadulina and Natalya Gorbanevskaya. Consultants have included scholars, critics and editors, like Dmitry Kuzmin, who created the indispensable poetry website for younger poets, "Vavilon". Other consultants in Russia include Olga Sedakova (Moscow State University/MGU), Irina Kovaleva (MGU), and Lyudmila Zbuova (St. Petersburg University). Translators include such distinguished English poets as Elaine Feinstein, Ruth Fainlight, Maura Dooley and Carol Rumens, as well as Russianists and scholars in Britain and the United States such as Peter France (Edinburgh), Catriona Kelly (Oxford), Robert Reid (Keele) and Stephanie Sandler (Harvard). 'Russian poetry is in a healthy state as it leaves the glaciers of communism for the steamy jungle of western hedonism,' D.M. Thomas declared in Poetry London. The anthology provides a host of insights into post-Soviet reality, from the point of view of women writers who were less compromised by the Soviet system, offering more resistance to the pressures of political conformism.

Pedestals and Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority, and Equal Rights


Martha Sonntag Bradley - 2005
    Anthony, Alice Paul) and those seeking legal protections for women’s particular needs (Julia Ward Howe, Eleanor Roosevelt). Early Utah leaders such as Relief Society President Emmeline B. Wells walked hand-in-hand with Anthony and other controversial reformers. However, by the 1970s, Mormons had undergone a significant ideological turn to the mainstream, championing women’s unique roles in home and church, and joined other conservatives in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment.Looking back to the nineteenth century, how committed were Latter-day Saints of their day to women’s rights? LDS President Joseph F. Smith was particularly critical of women who “glory in their enthralled condition and who caress and fondle the very chains and manacles which fetter and enslave them!” The masthead of the church’s female Relief Society periodical,Woman’s Exponent, proudly proclaimed “The Rights of the Women of Zion and the Rights of Women of All Nations!” In leading the LDS sisterhood, Wells said she gleaned inspiration from The Revolution,published by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.Fast-forward a century to 1972 and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) by the United States Congress. Within a few years, the LDS Church, allied with Phyllis Schlafly, joined a coalition of the Religious Right and embarked on a campaign against ratification. This was a mostly grassroots campaign waged by thousands of men and women who believed they were engaged in a moral war and that the enemy was feminism itself.Conjuring up images of unisex bathrooms, homosexuality, the dangers of women in the military, and the divine calling of stay-at-home motherhood—none of which were directly related to equal rights—the LDS campaign began in Utah at church headquarters but importantly was fought across the country in states that had not yet ratified the proposed amendment. In contrast to the enthusiastic partnership of Mormon women and suffragists of an earlier era, fourteen thousand women, the majority of them obedient, determined LDS foot soldiers responding to a call from their Relief Society leaders, attended the 1977 Utah International Women’s Year Conference in Salt Lake City. Their intent was to commandeer the proceedings if necessary to defeat the pro-ERA agenda of the National Commission on the International Women’s Year. Ironically, the conference organizers were mostly LDS women, who were nevertheless branded by their sisters as feminists.In practice, the church risked much by standing up political action committees around the country and waging a seemingly all-or-nothing campaign. Its strategists, beginning with the dean of the church’s law school at BYU, feared the worst—some going so far as to suggest that the ERA might seriously compromise the church’s legal status and sovereignty of its all-male priesthood. In the wake of such horrors, a take-no-prisoners war of rhetoric and leafleteering raged across the country. In the end, the church exerted a significant, perhaps decisive, impact on the ERA’’s unexpected defeat.

Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church


Angela Bonavoglia - 2005
    Despite the movement's growing profile, the world has only recently learned that Catholic women are the driving force behind reform. Good Catholic Girls is a lively account of these courageous women, as seen through the eyes of an impassioned journalist, Angela Bonavoglia. They include Joan Chittister, the Benedictine nun who refused to obey a Vatican order not to speak at an international conference for women's ordination groups; Mary Ramerman, ordained a Catholic priest before 3,000 jubilant supporters; Frances Kissling, whose fight for women's reproductive rights has shaken the Church at its highest levels; Barbara Blaine, a priest abuse survivor who created the nation's most powerful voice for victims; and Sister Jeannine Gramick, who built a pioneering ministry to gays and lesbians, despite Vatican orders to silence her and ban her work.Backed by supporters worldwide, these and other women are rethinking Catholic theology, changing the face of ministry, and resurrecting the lost lives of female church leaders. As Bonavoglia shows, the hierarchy ignores them at its peril.

British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World


Adriana Craciun - 2005
    Based on new research in French and British archives and libraries, the book uncovers little-known writings by British women, and argues that these writers developed a distinct antinationalism, in some cases even a feminist cosmopolitanism, in their responses to the European revolutionary crisis.