The first comprehensive collection to trace the development of African-American feminist thought.

    Riane Eisler shows us how history has consistently promoted the link between sex and violence—and how we can sever this link and move to a politics of partnership rather than domination in all our relations.

    Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.

    How did women in 16th century western Europe cope with the consequences of being considered inherently sinful--as well as being legally and economically subordinate to their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons? What might become of a woman unable to raise a dowry? What were the difficulties faced by spinsters, single mothers, and widows? In this brilliant investigation into the lives of women from all social strata, Hufton leads us from poor-house to palazzo, from cradle to grave, illuminating what it meant to be female in western Europe during the years 1500 to 1800.

    With more than 300 photographs, it provides invaluable information on the dress styles and designs of women's clothing in the 19th century. It also includes descriptions of accessories and construction tips for those involved with reenactments and living history. Now in use extensively in the Hollywood film industry.

    Jack Halberstam offers a rereading of the monstrous that revises our view of the Gothic. Moving from the nineteenth century and the works of Shelley, Stevenson, Stoker, and Wilde to contemporary horror film exemplified by such movies as Silence of the Lambs, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Candyman, Skin Shows understands the Gothic as a versatile technology, a means of producing monsters that is constantly being rewritten by historically and culturally conditioned fears generated by a shared sense of otherness and difference.Deploying feminist and queer approaches to the monstrous body, Halberstam views the Gothic as a broad-based cultural phenomenon that supports and sustains the economic, social, and sexual hierarchies of the time. She resists familiar psychoanalytic critiques and cautions against any interpretive attempt to reduce the affective power of the monstrous to a single factor. The nineteenth-century monster is shown, for example, as configuring otherness as an amalgam of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Invoking Foucault, Halberstam describes the history of monsters in terms of its shifting relation to the body and its representations. As a result, her readings of familiar texts are radically new. She locates psychoanalysis itself within the gothic tradition and sees sexuality as a beast created in nineteenth century literature. Excessive interpretability, Halberstam argues, whether in film, literature, or in the culture at large, is the actual hallmark of monstrosity.

    The authors celebrate the variety and complexity in the lives of modern women: from giving birth and facing death, to the whys of listening to teenagers and the wherefores of being good neighbors. Whether writing at the hearth of family concerns or in the arena of public issues, the two authors embrace honest differences as they bridge distances, seek harmony in the midst of change, and hold fast to faith.

    More than 135 color illustrations; 4 tear-out postcard sheets.

    Anthony didn't live long enough to see women get the vote, but her tireless dedication shines through on every page."--The Washington Post Book World Failure Is Impossible brings together--for the first time--a wide-ranging, spirited collection of Susan B. Anthony's speeches, letters, and quotes, linked by contemporary reports and Lynn Sherr's insightful biographical commentary.By allowing the legendary suffragist to speak for herself, Sherr brushes the dust off of the Susan B. Anthony icon, introducing a new generation to the brave, brilliant, funny, and, most of all, prescient woman she really was."Lynn Sherr has done us all a great service by bringing to spectacular light the too long neglected story of one of our greatest patriots--a genuine hero who helped change for the better the lives of a majority of American citizens."--Ken Burns

    Whites everywhere rioted. The furor, Gail Bederman demonstrates, was part of two fundamental and volatile national obsessions: manhood and racial dominance. In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americans—Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—she illuminates the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve.

    In rural South Asia, few women own land and even fewer control it. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including field research, the author addresses the reason for this imbalance, and asks how the barriers to ownership can be overcome. The book offers original insights into the current theoretical and policy debates on land reform and women's status.

    An egalitarian strain in early Christianity affirmed that once she asserted her commitment to Christ through a vow of chastity, monastic profession, or renunciation of family ties, a woman could become virile, or equal to a man. While the ideal of the virile woman never disappeared, another ideal slowly evolved in medieval Christianity. By virtue of some gender-related trait--spotless virginity, erotic passion, the capacity for intense suffering, the ability to imagine a feminine aspect of the Godhead--a devout woman could be not only equal, but superior to men; without becoming male, she could become a womanChrist, imitating and representing Christ in uniquely feminine ways.Rooted in women's concrete aspirations and sufferings, Newman's womanChrist model straddles the bounds of orthodoxy and heresy to illuminate the farther reaches of female religious behavior in the Middle Ages. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist will generate compelling discussion in the fields of medieval literature and history, history of religion, theology, and women's studies.

    Otto Kernberg, the internationally renowned psychoanalytic theorist and clinician, here examines the success and failure of sexual love in couples, from adolescence to old age.Dr. Kernberg considers the two partners' conscious and unconscious emotional interactions and their unconsciously activated superego interactions. He also suggests that they establish a joint ego ideal as a couple, which plays an important role in the success of the relationship. And because the couple experiences love and sex in the context of the social environment, he studies the nature of relations between the couple and the group. After describing the biological and psychological determinants and elements of the sexual experience, Dr. Kernberg traces the nature of that experience over time in the light of object relations theory. He shows how the activation of unconscious, internalized object relations from the past triggers the most troubling conflicts and is also responsible for the most exciting aspects of a couple's love life. Throughout, Dr. Kernberg considers both so-called normal and pathological relationships, including the role of narcissism, masochism, and aggression in each. The result is a book that expands the boundaries of our current understanding of love relations.

    Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge provide a full and candid account of Brittain's life that alters in important respects the self-portrait she presented in Testament of Youth and her later autobiographical work, Testament of Experience. Drawing on a treasure trove of private family papers and memorabilia, Berry and Bostridge chronicle her conservative and provincial upbringing, university education, and the devastating losses of her fiance, younger brother, and two friends in the first World War. They examine her struggles to become a successful writer, her close relationship with writer Winifred Holtby, her unconventional marriage to political scientist George Catlin, and her courageous stance against Britain's saturation bombing of Germany in World War II.

    Kim F. Hall's eagerly awaited book is the first to view these evocations of blackness in the contexts of sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery in early modern England. Her work reveals the vital link between England's expansion into realms of difference and otherness--through exploration and colonialism-and the highly charged ideas of race and gender which emerged.How, Hall asks, did new connections between race and gender figure in Renaissance ideas about the proper roles of men and women? What effect did real racial and cultural difference have on the literary portrayal of blackness? And how did the interrelationship of tropes of race and gender contribute to a modern conception of individual identity? Hall mines a wealth of sources for answers to these questions: travel literature from Sir John Mandeville's Travels to Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa; lyric poetry and plays, from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest to Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness; works by Emilia Lanyer, Philip Sidney, John Webster, and Lady Mary Wroth; and the visual and decorative arts. Concentrating on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hall shows how race, sexuality, economics, and nationalism contributed to the formation of a modern ( white, male) identity in English culture. The volume includes a useful appendix of not readily accessible Renaissance poems on blackness.

    In an unusually broad spectrum of essays, a distinguished group of international feminist scholars and activists explores the complexity of contemporary sexual politics around the globe. Using reproduction as an entry point in the study of social life and placing it at the center of social theory, the authors examine how cultures are produced, contested, and transformed as people imagine their collective future in the creation of the next generation.The studies encompass a wide variety of subjects, from the impact of AIDS on reproduction in the United States to the aftereffects of Chernobyl on the Sami people in Norway and the impact of totalitarian abortion and birth control policies in Romania and China. The contributors use historical and comparative perspectives to illuminate the multiple and intersecting forms of power and resistance through which reproduction is given cultural weight and social form. They discuss the ways that seemingly distant influences shape and constrain local reproductive experiences such as the international flows of adoptive babies and childcare workers and the Victorian and imperial legacy of eugenics and family planning.

    Miller accompanies his narrative with essays and excerpts from contemporary and historical writings, and the text is illustrated with photos and line drawings.Neil Miller is the author of Sex-Crime Panic and winner of the 2003 Randy Shilts Award for nonfiction and an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. He is also the author of In Search of Gay America, winner of the 1990 American Library Association prize for gay and lesbian literature. He teaches journalism and nonfiction writing at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

    Now 150 biographic sketches shed new light on such familiar figures as the Bronte sisters and Clara Barton, while revealing the rarely studied yet remarkable achievements of women warriors. Historical essays place these women in the context of their times, while sidebars highlight women's wit, wisdom, and inventions on all frontiers, from science to fashion.Queen Hatshepsut --Sappho --Aspasia --Cleopatra --The Trung sisters --Boudica --Hypatia --Empress Theodora --Wu Chao --Murasaki Shikibu --Sultana Razia --Christine de Pizan --Joan of Arc --Queen Isabella I --La Malinche --Catherine de Médicis --Queen Elizabeth I --Mary Queen of Scots --Artemisia Gentileschi --Judith Leyster --Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz --Catherine the Great --Mary Wollstonecraft --Deborah Sampson --Jane Austen --Emma Willard --Sacajawea --Sarah Grimké and Angelina Grimké --La Pola --Sojourner Truth --Catharine Beecher --Dorothea Dix --Margaret Fuller Harriet Beecher Stowe --Harriet Tubman --Elizabeth Cady Stanton --Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë --Maria Mitchell --Clara Schumann --Queen Victoria --Susan B. Anthony --Florence Nightingale --Elizabeth Blackwell --Clara Barton --Antoinette Brown Blackwell --Mary Harris "Mother" Jones --Lakshmi Bai --Emily Dickinson --Louisa May Alcott --Tz'u-hsi --Queen Liliuokalani --Sarah Bernhardt --Mary Cassatt --Sarah Winnemucca --Carry Nation --Louisa Lawson --Olive Schreiner --Fannie Farmer --Charlotte Perkins Gilman --Jane Addams --Ida B. Wells --Beatrix Potter --Marie Curie --Sophia Hayden --Alexandra David-Neel --Emma Goldman --Rosa Luxemburg --Maria Montessori --Alexandra Kollontai --Qiu Jin --Mary McLeod Bethune --Huda Shaarawi --Margaret Sanger --Helen Keller --Anna Pavlova --Virginia Woolf --Rose Schneiderman --Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel --Eleanor Roosevelt --Georgia O'Keeffe --Gabriela Mistral --Ichikawa Fusae --Bessie Smith --Martha Graham --Marian Anderson --Amelia Earhart --Golda Meir --Zora Neale Hurston --Margaret Mead --Margaret Bourke-White --Greta Garbo --Frida Kahlo --Rachel Carson --Simone de Beauvoir --Mother Teresa --Mildred "Babe" Didrikson --Mary Leakey --Indira Gandhi --Jessie Lopez De La Cruz --Eva Perón --Betty Friedan --Diane Arbus --Shirley Chisholm --Margaret Thatcher --Nguyen Thi Binh --Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis --Violeta Chamorro --Toni Morrison --Corazon Aquino --Barbara Jordan --Valentina Tereshkova --Marian Wright Edelman --Wilma Rudolph --Billie Jean King --Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams --Antonia Novello --Aung San Suu Kyi --Wilma Mankiller --Eka Esu-Williams --Rigoberta Menchú

    In this groundbreaking work, Kathleen Rowe explores how the unruly woman—often a voluptuous, noisy, joke-making rebel or "woman on top"—uses humor and excess to undermine patriarchal norms and authority.At the heart of the book are detailed analyses of two highly successful unruly women—the comedian Roseanne Arnold and the Muppet Miss Piggy. Putting these two figures in a deeper cultural perspective, Rowe also examines the evolution of romantic film comedy from the classical Hollywood period to the present, showing how the comedic roles of actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, and Marilyn Monroe offered an alternative, empowered image of women that differed sharply from the "suffering heroine" portrayed in classical melodramas.

    With its breadth and richness of sources it will be of interest and use to feminists, church historians, and students.

    Author Lois Underhill tells how Woodhull challenged the manly status quo not only in politics and business, but on the social scene as well. She fought for sexual freedom for women. She published a weekly newspaper that was the first to expose the Henry Ward Beecher scandal, as a protest against the double standard and the famous minister's hypocrisy, not his immorality. She herself led an unconventional private life, the stuff of a Bronte novel.

    Identification Papers is the first book to track the evolution of identification's emergence in psychoanalytic theory. Diana Fuss seeks to understand where this notion of identification has come from, and why it has emerged as one of the most difficult problems in contemporary theory and politics.Identification Papers situates the recent critical interest in identification in the intellectual tradition that first gave the idea its theoretical relevance: psychoanalysis. Fuss begins from the assumption that identification has a history, and that the term carries with it a host of theoretical problems, conceptual difficulties, and ideological complications. By tracking the evolution of identification in Freud's work over a forty year period, Fuss demonstrates how the concept of identification is neither a theoretically neutral notion nor a politically innocent one.Identification Papers closely examines the three principal figures -- gravity, ingestion, and infection -- that psychoanalysis invokes to theorize identification. Fuss then deconstructs the psychoanalytic theory of identification in order to open up the possibility of more innovative rethinkings of the political.Drawing on literature, film, and Freud's own case histories, and engaging with a wide range of disciplines -- including critical theory, philosophy, film theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and feminism -- Identification Papers will be a necessary starting point in any future theoretical project that seeks to mobilize the concept of identification for a feminist politics.

    It is a study of the influence of culture and religion—particularly of traditional African cultures and Christianity—on African women's lives. Mercy Amba Oduyoye illustrates how myths, proverbs, and folk tales (called "folktalk") operate in the socialization of young women, working to preserve the norms of the community. Daughters of Anowa reveals how global patriarchy manifests itself in these social structures, in both patrilineal and matrilineal communities.Organized as a narrative in three cycles, Daughters of Anowa demonstrates how folktalk alienates women from power, discourages individuality and encourages conformity. It also considers the possibilities for the future. Oduyoye posits that change will come about only when the daughters of Anowa (the mythic representative of Africa itself) confront the realities of culture and religion in perpetuating patriarchal oppression and work to realize the goal of a new woman in a new Africa.

    She’s Barbie—an icon of femininity to generations of American girls. She’s also multiethnic and straight—or so says Mattel, Barbie’s manufacturer. But, as Barbie’s Queer Accessories demonstrates, many girls do things with Barbie never seen in any commercial. Erica Rand looks at the corporate marketing strategies used to create Barbie’s versatile (She’s a rapper! She’s an astronaut! She’s a bride!) but nonetheless premolded and still predominantly white image. Rand weighs the values Mattel seeks to embody in Barbie—evident, for example, in her improbably thin waist and her heterosexual partner—against the naked, dyked out, transgendered, and trashed versions favored by many juvenile owners and adult collectors of the doll.Rand begins by focusing on the production and marketing of Barbie, starting in 1959, including Mattel’s numerous tie-ins and spin-offs. These variations, which include the much-promoted multiethnic Barbies and the controversial Earring Magic Ken, helped make the doll one of the most profitable toys on the market. In lively chapters based on extensive interviews, the author discusses adult testimony from both Barbie "survivors" and enthusiasts and explores how memories of the doll fit into women’s lives. Finally, Rand looks at cultural reappropriations of Barbie by artists, collectors, and especially lesbians and gay men, and considers resistance to Barbie as a form of social and political activism.Illustrated with photographs of various interpretations and alterations of Barbie, this book encompasses both Barbie glorification and abjection as it testifies to the irrefutably compelling qualities of this bestselling toy. Anyone who has played with Barbie—or, more importantly, thought or worried about playing with Barbie—will find this book fascinating.

    Reading these settings performatively, Carol Mavor shifts the focus toward the subjectivity of these girls and women, and toward herself as a writer.Mavor’s original approach to these photographs emphatically sees sexuality where it has been previously rendered invisible. She insists that the sexuality of the girls in Carroll’s pictures is not only present, but deserves recognition, respect, and scrutiny. Similarly, she sees in Cameron’s photographs of sensual Madonnas surprising visions of motherhood that outstrip both Victorian and contemporary understandings of the maternal as untouchable and inviolate, without sexuality. Finally she shows how Hannah Cullwick, posing in various masquerades for her secret paramour, emerges as a subject with desires rather than simply a victim of her upper-class partner. Even when confronting the darker areas of these photographs, Mavor perseveres in her insistence on the pleasures taken—by the viewer, the photographer, and often by the model herself—in the act of imagining these sexualities. Inspired by Roland Barthes, and drawing on other theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, Mavor creates a text that is at once interdisciplinary, personal, and profoundly pleasurable.

    It engages questions about masculinity and masculine sexuality such as "Is there a necessary relation between difference and phallic desire?" "Can the masculine subject imagine otherness?" "Is there a will-to-asceticism in this (masculine) sexual surrender to indifferentiation?"

    Opera, long viewed as strictly an establishment tradition, has in particular been given a second look by gender theorists. Can opera - an antiquated, Eurocentric bastion of high culture - in fact be subverting patriarchal authority in some fundamental way?

    It questions how national identity might have influenced gender and class affiliations, and, reciprocally, how gender might have determined a nationalist impulse, particularly as it played out during the revolutionary period (1770-1800) in which most of the texts were written.

    Some of the issues explored include sex education, critical thinking skills, sexual harrassment and popular culture and media images of sexuality.

    Drawing on the little-known work of Henriette Browne, other `lost' women Orientlist artists and the literary works of George Eliot, Reina Lewis challenges masculinist assumptions relating to the stability and homogeneity of the Orientalist gaze.Gendering Orientalism argues that women did not have a straightforward access to an implicitly nale position of western superiority, Their relationship to the shifting terms of race, nation and gender produced positions from which women writers and artists could articulate alternative representations of racial difference. It is this different, and often less degrading, gaze on the Orientalized `Other' that is analysed in this book. By revealing the extent of women's involvement in the popular field of visual Orientalism and highlighting the presence of Orientalist themes in the work of Browne, Eliot and Charlotte Bronte, reina Lewis uncovers women's roles in imperial culture and discourse.Gendering Orientalism will appeal to students, lecturers and researchers in cultural studies, literature, art history, women's studies and anthropology.

    She also calls into question those feminist perspectives that have either demonized the modern as inherently patriarchal, or else assumed a simple opposition between men's and women's experiences of the modern world.Combining cultural history with cultural theory, and focusing on the fin de si�cle, Felski examines the gendered meanings of such notions as nostalgia, consumption, feminine writing, the popular sublime, evolution, revolution, and perversion. Her approach is comparative and interdisciplinary, covering a wide variety of texts from the English, French, and German traditions: sociological theory, realist and naturalist novels, decadent literature, political essays and speeches, sexological discourse, and sentimental popular fiction. Male and female writers from Simmel, Zola, Sacher-Masoch, and Rachilde to Marie Corelli, Wilde, and Olive Schreiner come under Felski's scrutiny as she exposes the varied and often contradictory connections between femininity and modernity.Seen through the lens of Felski's discerning eye, the last fin de si�cle provides illuminating parallels with our own. And Felski's keen analysis of the matrix of modernism offers needed insight into the sense of cultural crisis brought on by postmodernism.