From sexual harassment charges against international figures to the challenge that caste politics poses to feminism, from the ban on the veil in France to the attempt to impose skirts on international women badminton players, from queer politics to domestic servants' unions to the Pink Chaddi campaign, Menon deftly illustrates how feminism complicates the field irrevocably. Incisive, eclectic and politically engaged, Seeing like a Feminist is a bold and wide-ranging book that reorders contemporary society.

    Harnessing an immense amount of data, they call attention to discrepancies between national laws protecting women and the enforcement of those laws, and they note the adverse effects on state security of abnormal sex ratios favoring males, the practice of polygamy, and inequitable realities in family law, among other gendered aggressions.The authors find that the treatment of women informs human interaction at all levels of society. Their research challenges conventional definitions of security and democracy and shows that the treatment of gender, played out on the world stage, informs the true clash of civilizations. In terms of resolving these injustices, the authors examine top-down and bottom-up approaches to healing wounds of violence against women, as well as ways to rectify inequalities in family law and the lack of parity in decision-making councils. Emphasizing the importance of an R2PW, or state responsibility to protect women, they mount a solid campaign against women's systemic insecurity, which effectively unravels the security of all.

    Hot & Heavy rejects the idea that being thin is best, instead embracing the many fabulous aspects of being fat—building fat-positive spaces, putting together fat-friendly wardrobes, turning society’s rules into personal politics, and creating supportive, inclusive communities. Writers, activists, performers, and poets—including April Flores, Alysia Angel, Charlotte Cooper, Jessica Judd, Emily Anderson, Genne Murphy, and Tigress Osborn—cover everything from fat go-go dancing to queer dating to urban gardening in their essays, exploring their experiences with the word "fat," pinpointing particular moments that have impacted the way they think and feel about their bodies, and telling the story of how they each became fat revolutionaries.Ground-breaking and long overdue, Hot & Heavy is a fierce, sassy, thoughtful, authentic, and joyous collection of stories about unapologetically—and unconditionally—loving the body you’re in.

    Arguing that class struggle manifests itself as the conflict between the reproduction and survival of the human race, the general theme of the collected essays leans left and warns of market exploitation, war, and ecological disaster. Spanning nearly six decades and compiling essays that have appeared in anthologies or are selections from Selma James' books—some printed here for the first time—these selections preach equality in wages for men and women alike, especially in nontraditional work environments.

    The reader is pulled through Ryan's transition from infant to child, child to body-obsessed teenage girl, teenage girl to eating-disordered young woman, female to male, daughter to son, and finally a beloved partner to a cherished fiance'. A unique lens on life and love. Ryan candidly shares his struggle to find love and acceptance; a struggle that transcends through every layer of society. He nearly died from an extreme case of anorexia as an insecure female college student. The only thing that saved him was his inner spirit begging for a chance to live. ? Second Son chronicles Ryan's battle with his family, his romantic partner, and his body. He unblinkingly focuses on the empowerment he achieved as he underwent gender reassignment surgeries and traces his evolution into manhood. ? It took twenty-nine years for Ryan to find himself. The world is now ready for this intimate and honest autobiography that will educate and empower men and women around the globe. At a time when fighting to find oneself is popular, Ryan's story will resonate with people everywhere who are journeying to find their own destinies, love, and life.

    UPRISING tells a remarkable story about women claiming their own space – against all odds - and how this shift from oppression to emancipation will improve the economy, reduce poverty and curtail conflict. Sally Armstrong, also known as the war correspondent for the world’s women, has been following the action on the front line for women and girls in Bosnia, Egypt, Congo, The Middle East, Afghanistan and America for twenty-five years. She says the manifesto for this revolution is being written in mud-brick huts in Afghanistan and on Tehrir Square in Egypt and in the forests of the Congo, as well as on the streets of Kenya, where 160 girls sued their government for failing to protect them from being raped, and won, and in Pakistan, where Malala Yousafzai, is fighting for the rights of all girls. Armstrong has been an eye witness to the worst atrocities and is now the first to write about the astonishing changes that are happening in Asia, Africa and the Americas.Her eye-witness reporting has earned her many awards including the Gold Award from the National Magazine Awards Foundation and the Author's Award from the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters. She received the Amnesty International Canada Media Award in 2000, 2002 and again in 2011. She was a member of the International Women’s Commission a UN body that consists of 20 Palestinian women, 20 Israeli women and 12 internationals whose mandate is assisting with the path to peace in the Middle East.

    In Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself, Lorena Garcia examines how Latina girls negotiate their emerging sexual identities and attempt to create positive sexual experiences for themselves. Through a focus on their sexual agency, Garcia demonstrates that Latina girls' experiences with sexism, racism, homophobia and socioeconomic marginality inform how they engage and begin to rework their meanings and processes of gender and sexuality, emphasizing how Latina youth themselves understand their sexuality, particularly how they conceptualize and approach sexual safety and pleasure. At a time of controversy over the appropriate role of sex education in schools, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself, provides a rare look and an important understanding of the sexual lives of a traditionally marginalized group.

    When she finally realizes that being the best girl - and woman - she can be is no match for being the man she's supposed to be, there's only one solution, and it's not another purse, pair of pumps, or push-up bra. Teeny Weenies and Other Short Subjects takes a long, hard look at getting the short end of the stick, both before and after transition from female to male. This collection of humorous essays from award-winning author and transsexual man Matt Kailey explores identity, sexuality, and growing up female in a world with two sexes, two genders - and no exceptions.

    She grew up in a working-class home in New Mexico. Seeking options not available in her small-town community of origin, she broke away and joined the Air Force. She was given a "�blue discharge” (named for the blue paper on which these letters were printed) from the Air Force because she was a lesbian. This experience galvanized Grahn into public ownership of her lesbianism, into the writing of poetry, into lesbian activism, and into the project of publishing lesbian literature. She co-founded the Women's Press Collective in Oakland, California in 1969; using a barrel mimeograph machine, the WPC published the work of Grahn and other lesbians, including Pat Parker, Willyce Kim, and more. Grahn is the author of several poetry collections, including The Common Woman, A Woman is Talking to Death, and Love Belongs to Those Who Do the Feeling. Aunt Lute Books published a collection of Grahn's work, The Judy Grahn Reader, in 2009. In addition to her poetry, Grahn has written several celebrated nonfiction works exploring woman-centered spirituality, gay history and culture, and lesbian writing.

    “The feminine forms we have inherited in terms of sanctified literature pretty much make me want to punch someone in the face”: An expansion of Vanessa Veselka and Lidia Yuknavitch’s conversation on women, writing, and violence, which originally appeared online at the Believer blog.

    Profiles of Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony provide insights into the origins of the movement, while reflections from Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Geraldine Ferraro, and others reveal the passion and dedication required to maintain progress in the continuing struggle for women’s equality. © 2012 HighBridge Audio

    As a result of this condemnation, LGBT people have been subjected to great spiritual, emotional and physical abuse and violence. This issue has taken on a particular urgency in light of the horrific string of suicides over the last year of young LGBT people who were subjected to harassment and bullying by their classmates.Cheng argues that people need to be liberated from the traditional legal model of thinking about sin and grace as a violation of divine and natural laws in which grace is understood as the strength to refrain from violating such laws. Rather Cheng proposes a Christological model based upon the theologies of Irenaeus, Bonaventure and Barth, in which sin and grace are defined in terms of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.This book will serve as a useful resource for all people who struggle to make sense of the traditional Christian doctrines of sin and grace in the context of the 21st century.-ChurchPublishing.org

    We know what happened: she was challenged, disbelieved, and humiliated; he was given a life-long appointment to decide America's judicial fate. What is less known is how many women and men were inspired because of Anita Hill's bravery, how her testimony changed the feminist movement, and how she singlehandedly brought public awareness to the issue of sexual harassment. Thomas might have won his seat, but Anita Hill's legacy mobilized the women's movement and our need to demand more than the status quo.Twenty years later, this collection brings together three generations to witness, respond to, and analyze Hill's impact and present insights in law; politics; the confluence of race, class, and gender; the persistent questioning of women's credibility; and current cases of sexual harassment. With original contributions by Anita Hill, Melissa Harris-Perry, Catharine MacKinnon, Patricia J. Williams, Eve Ensler, Ai Jen Poo, Kimberly Crenshaw, Lynn Nottage, Gloria Steinem, Lani Guinier, Lisa Kron, Mary Oliver, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Powell, and many others.Amy Richards is the author of Opting In, co-author of Manifesta, and co-founder of Soapbox, Inc.Cynthia Greenberg organized Sex, Power, and Speaking Truth: Anita Hill 20 Years Later, a conference at Hunter College in 2011.

    From sex to science, illness to ejaculation, Szumowski covers all the bases and does so with humor, a love for myth-busting, and substantial factual backing.

    Her rise to prominence as the spoken word artist known as Cheryl B brought with it a series of desctructive girlfriends and boyfriends and a dependence on drugs and alcohol that would take nearly a decade to shake.In the months following her death, members of Burke’s close-knit writing group, who had met continuously for nine years, worked to compile her drafts, essays and emails into a completed manuscript which was eventually synthesized into its final form by Burke’s close friend, novelist Sarah Schulman. This autobiography tracks her struggle to transcend her working class New Jersey roots and define herself as an artist against the backdrop of an unforgiving city, a series of disastrous girlfriends and boyfriends, and an intense, intimate relationship with drugs and alcohol. By the time Burke got sober in 2001, she had witnessed–and made major contributions to– one of the most remarkable artistic transformations that New York City has ever experienced.

    Organized historically and by theoretical perspectives, author Susan Archer Mann:* Highlights the relationship between feminist theory and political practice and examines the diversity of feminist visions and voices by race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and global location* Interweaves the history of feminist thought with the history of the U.S. women's movement to ground feminist perspectives in their socio-historical contexts* Bridges the local and global using theory application sections devoted to feminist analyses of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization* Offers a critical and dynamic approach to theory that is interdisciplinary and inclusive of alternative forms of theory construction, such as poetry, music, and zines* Illuminates how transformations in contemporary feminist thought reflect paradigm shifts from modernity to postmodernity

    Her career and commitments took her many places: colonial Africa in 1936, the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, the founding meeting of the United Nations, Nazi-occupied Berlin, Stalin's Russia, and China two months after Mao's revolution. She was a woman of unusual accomplishment—an anthropologist, a prolific journalist, a tireless advocate of women's rights, an outspoken anti-colonial and antiracist activist, and an internationally sought-after speaker. Yet historians for the most part have confined Essie to the role of Mrs. Paul Robeson, a wife hidden in the large shadow cast by her famous husband. In this masterful book, biographer Barbara Ransby refocuses attention on Essie, one of the most important and fascinating black women of the twentieth century.Chronicling Essie's eventful life, the book explores her influence on her husband's early career and how she later achieved her own unique political voice. Essie's friendships with a host of literary icons and world leaders, her renown as a fierce defender of justice, her defiant testimony before Senator Joseph McCarthy's infamous anti-communist committee, and her unconventional open marriage that endured for over 40 years—all are brought to light in the pages of this inspiring biography. Essie's indomitable personality shines through, as do her contributions to United States and twentieth-century world history.

    Her writing has appeared across the Internet in places like The Guardian, AlterNet, Feministe, Jezebel, The Good Men Project, and Time Out Chicago - and this is a selection of her best articles. Also included is Clarisse's commentary on the context in which she wrote each piece, the process of writing it, and how she's changed since then. Plus, there are "study guides" to help readers get the maximum mileage from each section!Clarisse has delivered sexuality workshops and lectures to a variety of audiences, including museums and universities across the USA. In 2009, she created and curated the ongoing Sex+++ sex-positive documentary film series at Chicago's historic feminist site, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. In 2010, she returned from working on HIV mitigation in southern Africa. She has also volunteered as an archivist, curator and fundraiser for that venerable S&M institution, the Leather Archives & Museum. For anyone with an interest in activism, S&M, polyamory (open relationships), dating dynamics and/or sex theory, this book is guaranteed to give you plenty to think about.Find Clarisse's blog at clarissethorn.com, or follow her on Twitter @ClarisseThorn.

    A comical memoir about a klutz's sex change, Bumbling into Body Hair shows how a sense of humor - and true love - can triumph over hair disasters, resurrected breasts, and even the most crippling self-doubt.

    It offers a view that will educate everyone about the trans experience. It offers emotional support to family and friends close to someone experience transition and educations to those who may not fully understand what the “T” in LGBTQ means. What do mothers really think of their transgender and gender variant children? Sharing stories of love, struggle, and acceptance, this collection of mother's voices, representing a diversity of backgrounds and sexual orientations, affirms the experience of those who have raised and are currently raising transgender and gender variant children between the ages of 5-50.  There are stories here of birth mothers and adoptive mothers, single mothers and married mothers, stepmothers and grandmothers, and heterosexual mothers and lesbian mothers. They have children of all ages, ranging fro six to sixty. Their children are gender nonconforming, gender variant, gender queer, transgender, and “pink boys.” Many mothers are active in PFLAG groups and other community based support groups. Often "transitioning" socially and emotionally alongside their child but rarely given a voice in the experience, mothers hold the key to familial and societal understanding of gender difference. Edited by Rachel Pepper, a gender specialist and co-author of the acclaimed book The Transgender Child, Transitions of the Heart includes both a glossary of terms as well as a resource guide. It will prove an invaluable resource for parents coming to terms with a child's gender variance or transition.

    Chapman explores the gender and sexual politics of this modern racial ethos and reveals the constraining and exploitative underside of the New Negro era's vaunted liberation and opportunities. Chapman's cultural history documents the effects on black women of the intersection of primitivism, New Negro patriarchal aspirations, and the early twentieth-century consumer culture. As U.S. society invested in the New Negroes, turning their expressions and race politics into entertaining commodities in a sexualized, primitivist popular culture, the New Negroes invested in the idea of black womanhood as a pillar of stability against the unsettling forces of myriad social and racial transformations. And both groups used black women's bodies and identities to "prove" their own modern notions and new identities. Chapman's analysis brings together advertisements selling the blueswoman to black and white consumers in a "sex-race marketplace," the didactic preachments of New Negro reformers advocating a conservative gender politics of "race motherhood," and the words of the New Negro women authors and migrants who boldly or implicitly challenged these dehumanizing discourses. Prove It On Me investigates the uses made of black women's bodies in 1920s popular culture and racial politics and black women's opportunities to assert their own modern, racial identities.

    It covered jazz, of course, but it also included Davis’s ruminations on race, politics and culture. Fascinated, Hef sent the writer—future Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Alex Haley, an unknown at the time—back to glean even more opinion and insight from Davis. The resulting exchange, published in the September 1962 issue, became the first official Playboy Interview and kicked off a remarkable run of public inquisition that continues today—and that has featured just about every cultural titan of the last half century.To celebrate the Interview’s 50th anniversary, the editors of Playboy have culled 50 of its most (in)famous Interviews and will publish them over the course of 50 weekdays (from September 4, 2012 to November 12, 2012) via Amazon’s Kindle Direct platform. Here is the interview with the feminist crusader Betty Friedan from the September 1992 issue.

    Many people lived together in long-term, quasimarital heterosexual relationships, unable to marry if one was in holy orders or if the partners were of different religions. Social norms militated against the marriage of master to slave or between individuals of very different classes, or when the couple was so poor that they could not establish an independent household. Such unions, where the protections that medieval law furnished to wives (and their children) were absent, were fraught with danger for women in particular, but they also provided a degree of flexibility and demonstrate the adaptability of social customs in the face of slowly changing religious doctrine.Unmarriages draws on a wide range of sources from across Europe and the entire medieval millennium in order to investigate structures and relations that medieval authors and record keepers did not address directly, either in order to minimize them or because they were so common as not to be worth mentioning. Ruth Mazo Karras pays particular attention to the ways women and men experienced forms of opposite-sex union differently and to the implications for power relations between the genders. She treats legal and theological discussions that applied to all of Europe and presents a vivid series of case studies of how unions operated in specific circumstances to illustrate concretely what we can conclude, how far we can speculate, and what we can never know.

    Working from the premise that transgender is both material and cultural, the contributors address such aspects of the university as administration, sports, curriculum, pedagogy, and the appropriate location for transgender studies.Combining feminist theory, transgender studies, and activism centered on social diversity and justice, these essays examine how institutions as lived contexts shape everyday life."Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies is a very worthwhile book. Enke is knowledgeable about the field, and frames the issues nicely, explicitly addressing some of the core problems in feminism and women’s studies. This anthology shrewdly demonstrates how transgender studies can do feminist work, and it goes a long way toward furthering that important critical/political task."—Susan Stryker, Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, and author of Transgender History

    1200 BCE), the last ruling descendent of Ramesses the Great, and one of only two female monarchs buried in Egypt's renowned Valley of the Kings. Though mentioned even in Homer as the pharaoh of Egypt who interacted with Helen at the time of the Trojan War, she has long remained a figure shrouded in mystery, hardly known even by many Egyptologists. Nevertheless, recent archaeological discoveries have illuminated Tausret's importance, her accomplishments, and the extent of her influence. Tausret: Forgotten Queen and Pharaoh of Egypt combines distinguished scholars whose research and excavations have increased our understanding of the life and reign of this great woman. This lavishly illustrated book utilizes recent discoveries to correctly position Tausret alongside famous ruling queens such as Hatshepsut and Cleopatra, figures who have long dominated our view of the female monarchs of ancient Egypt. Tausret brings together archaeological, historical, women's studies, and other approaches to provide a scholarly yet accessible volume that will be an important contribution to the literature of Egyptology -- and one with appeal to both scholars and anyone with an interest in ancient Egypt culture.

    50 establishing Department of Education in Second Front, Nov. 2, 1958.

    By the first years of the twentieth century, however, as heterosexuality became associated with an enlightened modernity, love between men was increasingly branded as "feudal" or immature. The resulting rupture in what has been called the "male homosocial continuum" constitutes one of the most significant markers of Japan's entrance into modernity. And yet, just as early Japanese modernity often seemed haunted by remnants of the premodern past, the nation's newly heteronormative culture was unable and perhaps unwilling to expunge completely the recent memory of a male homosocial past now read as perverse.Two-Timing Modernity integrates queer, feminist, and narratological approaches to show how key works by Japanese male authors--Mori Ōgai, Natsume Sōseki, Hamao Shirō, and Mishima Yukio--encompassed both a straight future and a queer past by employing new narrative techniques to stage tensions between two forms of temporality: the forward-looking time of modernization and normative development, and the "perverse" time of nostalgia, recursion, and repetition.

    Revolutionary black women have evoked strong reaction throughout American history. Magazines, political campaigns, music, television, and movies have relied upon deep-seated archetypes and habitually cast strong, countercultural black women as mammies and sexual objects. In Iconic Lakesia Johnson explores how this belittling imagery is imposed by American media, revealing an immense cultural fear of black women's power and potential.But the media does not have the last word. Johnson chronicles how strong black women--truly revolutionary black women--have nonetheless taken control of their own imaging despite consistent negative characterizations. Through their speech, demeanor, fashion, and social relationships, women from Sojourner Truth to Michelle Obama have counteracted these depictions. With ingenuity, fortitude, and focus on the greater good, these revolutionary women transformed the cultural images of themselves and, simultaneously, those of American black women as a whole.Seamlessly weaving together role models of past and present, from women in politics to artists and musicians, Johnson eloquently demonstrates how the revolutionary black woman in many public forums has been--and continues to be--a central figure in challenging long-standing social injustices.--Jacquelina Dyer "Africanus Journal"

    A couple visits a doctor asking to "create more space" in the woman for intercourse. A doctor finds testicular tissue in a woman with appendicitis, and decides to keep his findings quiet. These are just a few of the three hundred European case histories of people whose sex was doubted during the long nineteenth century that Geertje Mak draws upon in her remarkable new book.How did people deal with such situations? How did they decide to which sex a person should belong? This groundbreaking analysis of clinical case histories shows how sex changed from an outward appearance inscribed in a social body to something to be found deep inside body and self. A fascinating, easy to follow, yet sophisticated argument addressing major issues of the history of body, sex, and self, this volume will fit advanced undergraduate courses, while challenging specialists.

    Keeping their own households in line occupied too much of their time. Under Household Government reveals the extent to which family members took on the role of watchdog in matters of sexual indiscretion.In a society where one's sister's husband's brother's wife was referred to as "sister," kinship networks could be immense. When out-of-wedlock pregnancies, paternity suits, and infidelity resulted in legal cases, courtrooms became battlegrounds for warring clans. Families flooded the courts with testimony, sometimes resorting to slander and jury-tampering to defend their kin. Even slaves merited defense as household members--and as valuable property. Servants, on the other hand, could expect to be cast out and left to fend for themselves.As she elaborates the ways family policing undermined the administration of justice, M. Michelle Jarrett Morris shows how ordinary colonists understood sexual, marital, and familial relationships. Long-buried tales are resurrected here, such as that of Thomas Wilkinson's (unsuccessful) attempt to exchange cheese for sex with Mary Toothaker, and the discovery of a headless baby along the shore of Boston's Mill Pond. The Puritans that we meet in Morris's account are not the cardboard caricatures of myth, but are rendered with both skill and sensitivity. Their stories of love, sex, and betrayal allow us to understand anew the depth and complexity of family life in early New England.

    This book investigates not only how feminists understand pornography, but also how feminists do porn—that is, direct, act in, produce, and consume one of the world's most lucrative and growing industries. With original contributions by Susie Bright, Candida Royalle, Betty Dodson, Nina Hartley, Buck Angel, and more, The Feminist Porn Book updates the debates of the porn wars of the 1980s, which sharply divided the women's movement, and identifies pornography as a form of expression and labor in which women and other minorities produce power and pleasure.Tristan Taormino is an award-winning author, columnist, editor, sex educator, and feminist pornographer. She is the author of seven books including The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women and Opening Up. She runs the adult film production company Smart Ass Productions and is an exclusive director for Vivid Entertainment.Celine Parreñas Shimizu is an associate professor of film and performance studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and founding editor of Camera Obscura. She is the author of Straitjacket Sexualities and the 2009 Cultural Studies Book Award winning, The Hypersexuality of Race.Mireille Miller-Young is assistant professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her forthcoming book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography (Duke University Press) examines African American women’s sex work in the porn industry.

    Women, however, have been an integral part of our country's military history from the very beginning. This unprecedented encyclopedia explores the accomplishments and actions of the "fairer sex" in the various conflicts in which the United States has fought.An Encyclopedia of American Women at War: From the Home Front to the Battlefields contains entries on all of the major themes, organizations, wars, and biographies related to the history of women and the American military. The book traces the evolution of their roles--as leaders, spies, soldiers, and nurses--and illustrates women's participation in actions on the ground as well as in making the key decisions of developing conflicts. From the colonial conflicts with European powers to the current War on Terror, coverage is comprehensive, with material organized in an easy-to-use, A-Z, ready-reference format.

    A challenging look at the state of sexual assault law, legal practice and activism in Canada.

    With startling frequency, the best mother was absent, disembodied, voiceless, or dead. British culture told tales almost exclusively of wicked, surrogate, or spectral mothers—revealing the defects of domestic ideology, the cultural fascination with standards and deviance, and the desire to police maternal behaviors.Monstrous Motherhood analyzes eighteenth-century motherhood in light of the inconsistencies among domestic ideology, narrative, and historical practice. If domesticity was so important, why is the good mother’s story absent or peripheral? What do the available maternal narratives suggest about domestic ideology and the expectations and enactment of motherhood? By focusing on literary and historical mothers in novels, plays, poems, diaries, conduct manuals, contemporary court cases, realist fiction, fairy tales, satire, and romance, Marilyn Francus reclaims silenced maternal voices and perspectives. She exposes the mechanisms of maternal marginalization and spectralization in eighteenth-century culture and revises the domesticity thesis.Monstrous Motherhood will compel scholars in eighteenth-century studies, women’s studies, family history, and cultural studies to reevaluate a foundational assumption that has driven much of the discourse in their fields.

    It tells the story of a transnational network of female scholars who were active members of the seventeenth-century republic of letters and demonstrates that this intellectual commonwealth was a much more eclectic and diverse assemblage than has been assumed. These seven scholars - Anna Maria van Schurman, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Marie de Gournay, Marie du Moulin, Dorothy Moore, Bathsua Makin and Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh - were philosophers, schoolteachers, reformers and mathematicians. They hailed from England, Ireland, Germany, France and The Netherlands. And together with their male colleagues - men like Descartes, Huygens, Hartlib and Montaigne - they represented the spectrum of contemporary approaches to science, faith, politics and the advancement of learning. Carol Pal uses their collective biography to reconfigure the intellectual biography of early modern Europe, offering a new, expanded analysis of the seventeenth-century community of ideas.

    The second book, Without Apology: Old Lesbian Life Stories became available in February 2012. Both books share the stories of the lives of women who have been interviewed by the OLOHP. The retelling of the stories in the books rely heavily on direct quotes from interviews.Without Apology shares the stories of 24 ordinary, yet remarkable, women. Among them are: • Saundra, who volunteered in rural Mississippi during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.• Ellie, who at age 92, continues to work part-time as a substance abuse counselor.• Joann, who raised 17 children, five her own, five adopted, and seven fostered, many of whom were mentally and physically disabled, and now, with her partner, runs a group home.• Gloria, whose entertainment career began when she was seven and earned $5 a night dancing at clubs, went on to spend years as a “nightclub girl,” singing, dancing and doing comedy. • Bessie, who was an incredible left-handed pitcher in the women’s fastpitch softball leagues in Texas.• Edie, who traveled on the Peace Train from Finland to Beijing, China, to attend the Fourth International Conference on Women.• Shaba, who journeyed through Judaism, Islam, and Kabbalah as a black-skinned woman raised in the midst of racial segregation and Jim Crow laws. • Arden, who lived a closeted life for almost 40 years before the death of her long-term partner motivated her to begin a life of activism. • Helen, who entered the convent when she finished high school in hopes of sublimating her love for women. • Kittu, who was born in India and raised high in the Himalayas, became fascinated by the concept of nourishment and later went on to be an integral part of developing the Recommended Daily Allowance rating system as well as WIC, a nutrition program for women, infants and children. • Louise and Ruth, who after falling in love in college, were forcibly separated by school authorities. They found each other again after more than 30 years, and remain together decades later.

    She dressed like a man so she could have access to areas forbidden to women, smoked in public, and scandalized Genevan society. Already multilingual (French, German, and Russian), she began studying Arabic language and Islamic culture and eventually converted to Islam and joined a Qadiriyya Sufi brotherhood. Eberhardt traveled throughout North Africa and wrote about her experiences in short stories, journals, and reflections. She married an Algerian and led a legendary and stormy life that included subversive political anarchism, the mysticism of Islam, numerous love affairs, and most importantly, writing unmatched by her contemporaries. Writings from the Sand, Volume 1, at once the document of a remarkable life and a literary treasure, appears here in English for the first time. Volume 1, including journals, diary entries, and observations of life in North Africa, offers a view of the culture and people of French Algeria rarely seen by outsiders—the peasants, prostitutes, mystics, criminals, and other marginalized members of a colonized society. This translation brings to life a brilliant woman ahead of her time while also raising questions—about North African history, colonialism, gender representation, and writing—that resonate in our day.

    Thomas (Hugo-Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords) and Sigrid Ellis bring together essays by award-winning writers and artists who celebrate the comics medium and its creators, and who examine the characters and series that they love. Gail Simone (Birds of Prey) and Carla Speed McNeil (Finder) describe how they entered the comics industry. Colleen Doran (A Distant Soil) reveals her superhero crush, while Jill Thompson (Scary Godmother) confesses to being a comics junkie. Jen Van Meter (Hopeless Savages) sings the praises of 1970s horror comics, and Seanan McGuire (the October Daye series) takes sides in the Jean Grey vs. Emma Frost battle.Other contributors include Marjorie Liu (Dark Wolverine), Rachel Edidin (Dark Horse Comics), Jill Pantozzi (Newsarama), Kelly Thompson (Comic Book Resources), and SF/F authors Sara Ryan, Delia Sherman, Sarah Monette, and Elizabeth Bear. Also featured: an introduction by Mark Waid (Kingdom Come) and exclusive interviews with Amanda Conner (Power Girl), Louise Simonson (Power Pack), Greg Rucka (Queen & Country), and Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise).

    It includes selected writings of both women and men who put forward their views on some of the key issues of new womanhood, including gender equality, chastity, divorce, education, fashion, hygiene, birth control, and the women s movement. The authors whose essays are included express a range of attitudes about the new gender ethics and practices that were deeply influenced by the incessant flow of new and modern knowledge, habits and consumer products from metropolitan Japan and the West. Emphasizing the global nature of the phenomenon of the New Woman and Modern Girl, this sourcebook provides key references to a dynamic and multifarious history of modern Korean women, whose ideals and life experiences were formed at the intersection of Western modernity, Korean nationalism, Japanese colonialism and resilient patriarchy.

    This "modern woman" archetype was also penetrating into Eastern cultures, however, challenging the Chinese and Japanese historical norm of the woman as homemaker, servant, or geisha. Through a focus on the writings of the Western women who engaged with the Far East, and the Eastern writers and personalities who reacted to this new global gender communication by forming their own separate identities, Katrina Gulliver reveals the complex redefining of the self taking place in a crucial time of political and economic upheaval. Including an analysis of the work of Nobel Prize laureate Pearl S. Buck, The Modern Woman in China and Japan is an important contribution to gender studies and will appeal to historians and scholars of China and East Asia as well as to those studying Asian and American literature.

    Jewish Masculinities explores conceptions and experiences of masculinity among Jews in Germany from the 16th through the late 20th century as well as emigrants to North America, Palestine, and Israel. The volume examines the different worlds of students, businessmen, mohels, ritual slaughterers, rabbis, performers, and others, shedding new light on the challenge for Jewish men of balancing German citizenship and cultural affiliation with Jewish communal solidarity, religious practice, and identity.

    heterosexuality) is one of many sex differences observed in humans. Sex differences can result from differential postnatal experiences (interaction with parents, environment) or from biological factors (hormones and genes) acting pre- or postnatally. The first option is often favored to explain sexual orientation although it is supported by little experimental evidence. In contrast, many sexually differentiated behaviors are organized during early life by an irreversible action of sex steroids. In particular, the preference for a male or female sex partner is largely determined in rodents by embryonic exposure to sex steroids. The early action of these steroids also seems to affect sexual orientation in humans. Indeed, clinical conditions associated with major endocrine changes during embryonic life often result in an increased incidence of homosexuality. Furthermore, multiple sexually differentiated behavioral, physiological, or even morphological traits that are known to be organized by prenatal steroids, at least in animals, are significantly different in homo- and heterosexual populations. Thus, prenatal endocrine (or genetic) factors seem to influence significantly human sexual orientation even if a large fraction of the variance remains unexplained to date. The possible interaction between biological factors acting prenatally and postnatal social influences remains to be investigated.

    The readers gains a sense of women not only as patrons of architecture, painting, sculpture and the applied arts, but as users of art both on special occasions, like civic festivities or pilgrimages, and in everyday social and devotional life. As they seek to adapt and embellish their persons and their environments, acquire paintings for solace or prestige, or cultivate relationships with artists, women emerge as discerning participants in the consumer culture of their time, and often as lively commentators on it. Their fervent participation in religious life is also seen in their use of art in devotional rituals, or their commissioning of tombs or altarpieces to perpetuate their memory and aid them in the afterlife.

    It is in many ways the foundation of contemporary imaginary community. The Romance of Race examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of our modern American multiculturalism.The national identity of the United States was transformed between 1880 and 1930 due to mass immigration, imperial expansion, the rise of Jim Crow, and the beginning of the suffrage movement. A generation of women writers and reformers—particularly women of color—contributed to these debates by imagining new national narratives that put minorities at the center of American identity. Jane Addams, Pauline Hopkins, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), María Cristina Mena, and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) embraced the images of the United States—and increasingly the world—as an interracial nuclear family. They also reframed public debates through narratives depicting interracial encounters as longstanding, unacknowledged liaisons between white men and racialized women that produced an incestuous, mixed-race nation.By mobilizing the sexual taboos of incest and miscegenation, these women writers created political allegories of kinship and community. Through their criticisms of the nation’s history of exploitation and colonization, they also imagined a more inclusive future. As Jolie A. Sheffer identifies the contemporary template for American multiculturalism in the works of turn-of-the century minority writers, she uncovers a much more radical history than has previously been considered.

    Has the cultural sexual objectification of girls and women increased? Are younger and younger girls sold a sexed-up version of femininity, and are adult women sold agirlish sexuality?The Sexualization of Girls and Girlhood: Causes, Consequences, and Resistance includes the best empirical research, theory, and practice stemming from the report of the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Contributors discuss evidence for this phenomenonfrom media and marketing, to interpersonal interaction, to girls' own efforts to fashion themselves after sexualized role models around them. A variety of consequences of the sexualization of girls and girlhood--for girls themselves, for others, and for society at large--are presented. Individualchapters cover topics such as athletics as a solution and problem for the sexualization of girls, sexual harassment by peers, gendered violence, body image, adolescent girls' sexual development, and healthy sexuality for girls and young women. Importantly, positive alternatives and suggestions areincluded so that those who care for girls can address this troubling cultural trend and help counter the significant risk to girls' wellbeing that it represents. This volume is a valuable resource for child advocates, parents, and educators and useful for undergraduate and graduate courses thataddress gender across disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, education, communication, media studies, and women's, and sexuality studies.

    Health First! The Black Woman’s Wellness Guide provides you with a comprehensive guide to your #1 resource: yourself. Today, as Black women face an unprecedented health crisis, denial and self-neglect are no longer viable options. This groundbreaking volume is rooted in the pioneering work of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, the nation’s only nonprofit organization devoted to advancing the health and wellness of Black women and girls. It offers a core health philosophy—too long denied Black women—based on putting your health first. Health First! explores Black women’s most critical health challenges, connecting the dots through honest discussions with experts and the uncensored stories of real women—from adolescence through  elderhood. The focus is on prevention and awareness, across generations and circumstances—from candid conversations about reproductive health and HIV/AIDS to frank explorations of Black women’s Top 10 Health Risks, including cancer, obesity, and violence. No matter what your age or health status, this unprecedented health reference will become a trusted ally as you seek accessible and relevant information to help you navigate your most pressing health needs. In an age of uncertainty, it’s time to take control and truly discover the vitality, power, and joy that can be yours when you learn how to put your health first.

    Through a highly original and detailed analysis of the memoirs, interviews and other life writings of Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli, this book explores changing notions of femininity in the early decades of the 20th century, when the democratization of fashion began.Examining idea of modernity, eternity and the ephemeral in the writings of these haute couturiers, the book reflects on fashion's ambivalent approach to women, which both celebrated and vilified them, presenting them as both ultra modern style leaders and irrational creatures stuck in the past.This fascinating text is key reading for scholars and students of fashion, gender studies, cultural studies and history.