Best of
Gender

1989

Women, Culture, and Politics


Angela Y. Davis - 1989
    A collection of her speeches and writings which address the political and social changes of the past decade as they are concerned with the struggle for racial, sexual, and economic equality.

Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism


Trinh T. Minh-ha - 1989
    methodologically innovative... precise and perceptive and conscious... " --Text and Performance QuarterlyWoman, Native, Other is located at the juncture of a number of different fields and disciplines, and it genuinely succeeds in pushing the boundaries of these disciplines further. It is one of the very few theoretical attempts to grapple with the writings of women of color." --Chandra Talpade MohantyThe idea of Trinh T. Minh-ha is as powerful as her films... formidable... " --Village Voice... its very forms invite the reader to participate in the effort to understand how language structures lived possibilities." --ArtpaperHighly recommended for anyone struggling to understand voices and experiences of those 'we' label 'other'." --Religious Studies Review

The Second Shift


Arlie Russell Hochschild - 1989
    As the majority of women entered the workforce, sociologist and Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild was one of the first to talk about what really happens in dual-career households. Many people were amazed to find that women still did the majority of childcare and housework even though they also worked outside the home. Now, in this updated edition with a new introduction from the author, we discover how much things have, or have not, changed for women today.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity


Judith Butler - 1989
    This is the text where Judith Butler began to advance the ideas that would go on to take life as "performativity theory," as well as some of the first articulations of the possibility for subversive gender practices, and she writes in her preface to the 10th anniversary edition released in 1999 that one point of Gender Trouble was "not to prescribe a new gendered way of life [...] but to open up the field of possibility for gender [...]" Widely taught, and widely debated, Gender Trouble continues to offer a powerful critique of heteronormativity and of the function of gender in the modern world.

Letters from a War Zone


Andrea Dworkin - 1989
    Reflections on writing and writers, freedom of speech and censorship, pornography, violence against women, and the politics of our time.

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics


Kimberlé Crenshaw - 1989
    

Cunt Coloring Book


Tee A. Corinne - 1989
    Just ask Tee Corinne. Sometime in the early 70's, she began asking her friends if they would show her their vaginas so she could draw them. A few years later, she left her husband, came out as a lesbian & published a book of all her pussy portraits. She called it the Cunt Coloring Book. "Coloring, according to Tee, was a very good way for kids to learn about the female sex, 'because a major way we learn to understand the world, as children, is by coloring.'" But there were many who did not agree. They found the book's cover & title offensive. So they made Tee change it to the O'Keefeian Labia Flowers, & mask the cartographic vagina on the front with sketches of actual flora. That's when sales started to plummet. People didn't want flowers. They wanted cunts. Thus the original title & cover were restored.

Visual And Other Pleasures


Laura Mulvey - 1989
    The essays collected in this book reflect some of the commitments and changes during the period that saw the women's movement shift into feminism and the development of feminism's involvement with the politics of representation, psychoanalytic film theory and avant-garde aesthetics.

The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective


Antonio Benítez Rojo - 1989
    This co-winner of the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize has been expanded to include three entirely new chapters that add a Lacanian perspective and a view of the carnivalesque to an already brilliant interpretive study of Caribbean culture. As he did in the first edition, Benítez-Rojo redefines the Caribbean by drawing on history, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and nonlinear mathematics. His point of departure is chaos theory, which holds that order and disorder are not the antithesis of each other in nature but function as mutually generative phenomena. Benítez-Rojo argues that within the apparent disorder of the Caribbean—the area’s discontinuous landmasses, its different colonial histories, ethnic groups, languages, traditions, and politics—there emerges an “island” of paradoxes that repeats itself and gives shape to an unexpected and complex sociocultural archipelago. Benítez-Rojo illustrates this unique form of identity with powerful readings of texts by Las Casas, Guillén, Carpentier, García Márquez, Walcott, Harris, Buitrago, and Rodríguez Juliá.

Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science


Donna J. Haraway - 1989
    Haraway's discussions of how scientists have perceived the sexual nature of female primates opens a new chapter in feminist theory, raising unsettling questions about models of the family and of heterosexuality in primate research.

Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing


Alison M. Jaggar - 1989
    Some contributors challenge and revise western conceptions of the body as the domain of the biological and 'natural, ' the enemy of reason, typically associated with women.

Women In Prehistory


Margaret R. Ehrenberg - 1989
    By examining skeletons and grave goods, archeological evidence from settlement sites, and rock carvings and sculpted figurines, and by drawing anthropological parallels to later societies, Ehrenberg throws new light on the lives and social status of women in Europe from the Palaeolithic era to the Iron Age. The high status almost certainly enjoyed by women as the main providers of food in early prehistoric societies probably diminished in the later Neolithic Age, as men assumed an increasingly dominant role in farming. Even so, in the Bronze Age and Iron Age societies, individual women held positions of power: Ehrenberg considers the possibility that Minoan Crete was a matriarchy and that Boudica was only one of a number of female Celtic leaders.

Man Cannot Speak for Her: Volume II; Key Texts of the Early Feminists


Karlyn Kohrs Campbell - 1989
    In these two volumes, Campbell provides a basic understanding of two processes: the development of the rhetoric used by the women who argued for equal rights, and the constraints and sanctions applied to those women who affronted the norms of society's expectation that true women were seldom seen and never spoke in public. The first volume lays the foundation for the analysis of rhetorical style and content by its fine introduction and by a succession of chapters organized chronologically, with biographical sketches and excerpts from speeches. It includes a chapter specifically addressed to issues of sex, race, and class faced by African American women. Volume 2 is not a continuation of the first, but contains the texts on which the first volume is based. The biographical and historical sections are gracefully written and well organized, but the greatest value of the set lies in the actual words of the feminist leaders and Campbell's skillful analyses. Every women's studies program must have this available. ChoiceThis collection of key speeches by national leaders provides a vivid and accurate documentary history of American woman's rights and suffrage movement from its beginnings in the 1840s through 1920. Offering many rare and previously unpublished selections, it brings together the work of fifteen notable reformers who played central roles in shaping and directing the movement and in articulating the diverse issues and viewpoints that characterized it. The discourses reveal the strategies used by early woman's rights advocates in adapting their appeals to varied audiences, responding to opposition, and advancing their cause in the political arena.Each of the twenty-six selections is annotated to supply historical information that is likely to be unfamiliar to contemporary readers. The earliest speeches deal primarily with anti-slavery platforms and the repressive patriarchal laws that gave men complete control over property, women, and children. Several speeches by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth follow; Susan B. Anthony is represented by her famous speech in defense of her vote. Racial issues--especially lynching and Jim Crow laws--are addressed in speeches by Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell. Speeches by Anna H. Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt--leaders in the fight for woman suffrage--are also included. The volume ends with an address by Crystal Eastman laying out a feminist agenda that is pertinent today. This work and its companion volume make a significant contribution to our knowledge of the early woman's rights movement and the persuasive message it brought to the American people. It is a valuable source book for an introduction to women's studies or courses in American Public Address, women's rhetoric, and U.S. women's history.

Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan


Janice Boddy - 1989
    Based on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Muslim village in northern Sudan, Wombs and Alien Spirits explores the zâr cult, the most widely practiced traditional healing cult in Africa.  Adherents of the cult are usually women with marital or fertility problems, who are possessed by spirits very different from their own proscribed roles as mothers.  Through the woman, the spirit makes demands upon her husband and family and makes provocative comments on village issues, such as the increasing influence of formal Islam or encroaching Western economic domination.  In accommodating the spirits, the women are able metaphorically to reformulate everyday discourse to portray consciousness of their own subordination.    Janice Boddy examines the moral universe of the village, discussing female circumcision, personhood, kinship, and bodily integrity, then describes the workings of the cult and the effect of possession on the lives of men as well as women.   She suggests that spirit possession is a feminist discourse, though a veiled and allegorical one, on women's objectification and subordination.  Additionally, the spirit world acts as a foil for village life in the context of rapid historical change and as such provides a focus for cultural resistance that is particularly, though not exclusively, relevant to women.

The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome


Jane McIntosh Snyder - 1989
    and ending with Hypatia and Egeria in the fifth century A.D., Jane McIntosh Snyder listens carefully to the major women writers of classical Greece and Rome, piecing together the surviving fragments of their works into a coherent analysis that places them in their literary, historical, and intellectual contexts.While relying heavily on modern classical scholarship, Snyder refutes some of the arguments that implicitly deny the power of women’s written words—the idea that women’s experience is narrow or trivial and therefore automatically inferior as subject matter for literature, the notion that intensity in a woman is a sign of neurotic imbalance, and the assumption that women’s work should be judged according to some externally imposed standard.The author studies the available fragments of Sappho, ranging from poems on mythological themes to traditional wedding songs and love poems, and demonstrates her considerable influence on Western thought and literature.An overview of all of the authors Snyder discusses shows that ancient women writers focused on such things as emotions, lovers, friendship, folk motifs, various aspects of daily living, children, and pets, in distinct contrast to their male contemporaries’ concern with wars and politics.Straightforwardness and simplicity are common characteristics of the writers Snyder examines. These women did not display allusion, indirection, punning and elaborate rhetorical figures to the extent that many male writers of the ancient world did.Working with the sparse records available, Snyder strives to place these female writers in their proper place in our heritage.

White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response


Jacquelyn Grant - 1989
    Because Jesus was undeniably male and because the Christian church claims him as the unique God-bearer, feminist christology confronts the dual tasks of explaining the significance of a male God-bearer for women and creating a christological model adequate to feminist experience. Jacquelyn Grant rehearses the development and challenges of feminist christology and argues that, because it has reflected the experience of White women predominantly, it fails to speak to the concerns of non-white and non-western women. In response to this failure, Grant proposes a womanist theology and christology that emerge from and are adequate to the reality of contemporary Black women.

Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality


Judith PlaskowRosemary Radford Ruether - 1989
    The writings presented here deal with a reconceptualization of the central religious categories of theology through a wide range of voices and traditions. Contributors are white, black, Chicana, Asian American, and Native American, and represent Jewish, Christian, Goddess, Native American, Yoruba, Voudou, and other perspectives. “Feminist too often have avoided and denied [our] differences,” write the editors, “but difference is the source of our creativity, the ‘raw and powerful’ connection from which our personal power is forged.”

Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience


Bettina Aptheker - 1989
    concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Chicana cannery workers and southern cotton-mill girls, older lesbians and elderly Jews, Afro-American women in slavery and contemporary Afro-American writers, and others, in order to explore women's ways of seeing. Her analyses of oral histories, novels, legends, poetry, and art show how we can use these records of women's and men's lives.' -- Sandra Harding, Women's Review of Books

The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War


Susan Jeffords - 1989
    She argues that the war, instead of leading to a reexamination of the US value system, has spurred a revitalization of the traditional values of capitalism and bourgeois individualism.

The Female Fear: THE SOCIAL COST OF RAPE


Margaret T. Gordon - 1989
    The authors examine the female fear of rape, probe the myths and realities of rape and society's response, and explore strategies women have developed to protect themselves from its horrifying occurrence.

Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England


Carolyn Merchant - 1989
    Her analysis of how human communities are related to their environment opens a perspective that goes beyond overt changes in the landscape. Merchant brings to light the dense network of links between the human realm of economic regimes, social structure, and gender relations, as they are conditioned by a dominant worldview, and the ecological realm of plant and animal life. Thus we see how the integration of the Indians with their natural world was shattered by Europeans who engaged in exhaustive methods of hunting, trapping, and logging for the market and in widespread subsistence farming. The resulting colonial ecological revolution was to hold sway until roughly the time of American independence, when the onset of industrialization and increasing urbanization brought about the capitalist ecological revolution. By the late nineteenth century, Merchant argues, New England had become a society that viewed the whole ecosphere as an arena for human domination. One can see in New England a mirror of the world, she says. What took place there between 1600 and 1850 was a greatly accelerated recapitulation of the evolutionary ecological changes that had occurred in Europe over a span of 2,500 years.

Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors


Bobette Perrone - 1989
    In a truly grass-roots project, the authors take the reader along to listen to the voices of Native American medicine women, Southwest Hispanic curanderas, and women physicians as they describe their healing paths.This book will fascinate anyone interested in the relationship between illness and healing-medical practitioners and historians, patients, anthropologists, feminists, psychologists, psychiatrists, theologians, sociologists, folklorists, and others who seek understanding about our relationship to the forces of both illness and healing.

Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West


Margaret R. Miles - 1989
    Margaret Miles looks at how men have treated women's bodies - in their actions, art and writings, and why, in Christian history, naked female bodies have symbolized shame.

World of the Castrati: The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon


Patrick Barbier - 1989
    Covering the lives of more than sixty singers from the end of the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, he blends history and anecdote as he examines their social origins and backgrounds, their training and debuts, their brilliant careers their relationship with society and the Church, and their decline and death.The castrati became a legend that still fascinates us today. Thousands flocked to hear and see these singing hybrids - part man, part woman, part child - who portrayed virile heroes on the operatic stage, their soprano or contralto voices weirdly at variance with their clothes and bearing. The sole surviving scratchy recording tells us little of the extraordinary effect of those voices on their audiences - thrilling, unlike any sound produced by the normal human voice.Illustrated with photographs and engravings, the book ranges from the glories of patronage and adulation to the darker side of a fashion that exploited the sons of poor families, denied them their manhood and left them, when they were old, to decline into poverty and loneliness. It is a story that will intrigue opera-lovers and general readers alike, superbly told by a writer who has researched his subject with the thoroughness of a true enthusiast.

Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America


Asunción Lavrin - 1989
    Yet, throughout history, this intimate experience has been subjected to painstaking social and religious regulation in the form of legislation and restraining social mores." With that statement, Asunci�n Lavrin begins her introduction to this collection of original essays, the first in English to explore sexuality and marriage in colonial Latin America. The nine contributors, including historians and anthropologists, examine various aspects of the male-female relationship and the mechanisms for controlling it developed by church and state after the European conquest of Mexico and Central and South America. Seldom has so much light been shed on the sexual behavior of the men and women who lived there from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. These chapters examine the variety of sexual expression in different periods and among persons of different social and economic status, the relations of the sexes as proscribed by church and state and the various forms of resistance to their constraints, the couple's own view of the bond that united them and of their social obligations in producing a family, and the dissolution of that bond. Topics infrequently explored in Latin American history but discussed her include premarital relations, illegitimacy, consensual unions, sexual witchcraft, spouse abuse, and divorce. Lavrin's opening survey of the forms of sexual relationships most discussed in ecclesiastical sources serves as a point of departure for the chapters that follow. The contributors are Serge Grunzinski, Ann Twinam, Kathy Waldron, Ruth Behar, Susan Socolow, Richard Boyer, Thomas Calvo, and Mar�a Beatriz Nizza da Silva. Asunci�n Lavrin is a professor of history at Arizona State University at Tempe. Her 1995 book, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890-1940, won the Arthur P. Whitaker Prize from the Middle Atlantic Council on Latin American Studies.

Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism


Judith Plant - 1989
    Drawing upon the combined vision and energy of feminist and ecological perspectives, Healing the Wounds challenges us to bring together body, mind, and spirit; the personal, political, and the spiritual; theory, practice, and reflection.

Feminism and the Power of Law


Carol Smart - 1989
    She comments on pornography, as well as discussing recent research on rape trials and abortion legislation.

Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love


Christine Downing - 1989
    A gay and lesbian psychic perspective may at first be startling, but once examined, it proves to be unforgettable." -The Advocate

Women Activists: Challenging the Abuse of Power


Anne Witte Garland - 1989
    They offer moving, inspiring examples of individuals doing something concrete to control their lives and improve society. Includes a foreword by Ralph Nader and an introduction by Frances T. Farenthold.

The Experiences of Tiresias: The Feminine and the Greek Man


Nicole Loraux - 1989
    The Experiences of Tiresias, its title referring to the shepherd struck blind after glimpsing Athena's naked body, captures this ambivalence in exploring how the Greek male defines himself in relationship to the feminine. In these essays, Loraux disturbs the idea of virile men and feminine women, a distinction found in official discourse and aimed at protecting the ideals of male identity from any taint of the feminine. Turning to epic and to Socrates, however, she insists on a logic of an inclusiveness between the genders, which casts a shadow over their clear, officially defined borders.The emphasis falls on the body, often associated with feminine vulnerability and weakness, and often dissociated from the ideal of the brave, self-sacrificing male warrior. But heroes such as the Homeric Achilles, who fears yet fights bravely, and Socrates, who speaks of the soul through the language of the body, challenge these representations. The anatomy of pain, the heroics of childbirth, the sorrows of tears, the warrior's wounds, and the madness of the soul: all these experiences are shown to engage with both the masculine and the feminine in ways that do not denigrate the experiences for either gender.Originally published in 1995.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Women in the United States, 1830-1945


S.J. Kleinberg - 1989
    It provides a general introduction to the history of women in industrializing America. Both a history of women and a history of the United States, its chronology is shaped by economic stages and political events.