Best of
Womens-Studies

1994

Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times


Elizabeth Wayland Barber - 1994
    In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women.Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture.Elizabeth Wayland Barber has drawn from data gathered by the most sophisticated new archaeological methods—methods she herself helped to fashion.

Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women


Jane Hirshfield - 1994
    . . an astonishing array of women writers from the 22nd century BC poet Enheduanna to Nelly Sachs and Anna Akhmatova."--Library Journal

Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World


Jan Goodwin - 1994
    Award-winning journalist Jan Goodwin traveled through ten Islamic countries and interviewed hundreds of Muslim women, from professionals to peasants, from royalty to rebels. The result is an unforgettable journey into a world where women are confined, isolated, even killed for the sake of a "code of honor" created and zealously enforced by men.Price of Honor brings to life a world in which women have become pawns in a bitter power game, and gives readers a provocative look inside Muslim society today--in their own words.

A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II


Anne Noggle - 1994
    These brave women, the first ever to fly in combat, proved that women could be among the best of warriors, withstanding the rigors of combat and downing the enemy. The women who tell their stories here began the war mostly as inexperienced girls - many of them teenagers. In support of their homeland, they volunteered to serve as bomber and fighter pilots, navigator-bombardiers, gunners, and support crews. Flying against the Luftwaffe, they saw many of their friends - as well as many of their foes - fall to earth in flames. Their three combat Air Force regiments fought as many as one thousand missions during the war. For their heroism and success against the enemy, two of the women's regiments were honored by designation as "Guard" regiments. At least thirty women were decorated with the gold star of Hero of the Soviet Union, their nation's highest award. But equally courageous were the women's efforts to show the Red Army that they were entirely adequate to the great role they sought. For even though Stalin had decreed equality for both sexes, the women had to grapple initially with deep distrust from male pilots and Red Army officers, against whom they eventually prevailed. War, Stalin-era politics, and human emotion mix in these gripping, first-person accounts. Supported by photographs of the women at war, the stories are unforgettable. Portraits of the women as they are now taken by award-winning photographer Anne Noggle, add the perspective of time to the experiences of the survivors of this great dance with death.

I Am Becoming The Woman I've Wanted


Sandra Martz - 1994
    In the emotionally evocative style that characterizes Martz's previous collections, this book explores coming of age, sexuality, child-birth, physical power, menopause, aging, and much more. This is more than just another book about body image. Using her talent for bringing together extraordinary stories, poems, and photographs about women's lives, editor Sandra Martz explores the broader question of how the physical aspects of being female affect women's experiences. This best-selling anthology will have women reading and thinking and sharing for a long time.

Daughters of the Goddess


Linda Johnsen - 1994
    Stories, interviews, and reflections focus on women who are considered by Indian devotees to be incarnations of the Goddess.

Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies


Kobena Mercer - 1994
    The ten essays collected here examine new forms of cultural expression in black film, photography and visual art exerging with a new generation of black British artists, and interprets this prolific creativity within a sociological framework that reveals fresh perspectives on the bewildering complexity of identity and diversity in an era of postmodernity. Kobena Mercer documents a wealth of insights opened up by the overlapping of Asian, African and Caribbean cultures that constitute Black Britain as a unique domain of diaspora.

Crossing to Avalon: A Woman's Midlife Quest for the Sacred Feminine


Jean Shinoda Bolen - 1994
    Jean Shinoda Bolen's extraordinary memoir celebrates the pilgrimage that heralded her spiritual awakening and leads readers down the path of self-discovery. In this account of her journey to Europe in search of the sacred feminine, she unveils the mythological significance of the midlife search for meaning and renewal."[Bolen] charts a path that will lead many readers to the heart of their own emotional and spiritual pilgrimages."- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review"This wise and challenging work, the most personal of Jean Shinoda Bolen's books, is an absorbing often uncannily perceptive, and useful companion for the soul journeys of our time, which is The Time of the Goddess Returning.- Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple"In Crossing to Avalon, Jean Shinoda Bolen turns her acute and brilliant eye toward the interconnectedness of women's mysteries, sacredness of the body, the effect of pilgrimage on soul, and deep feminine friendships."- Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., author of Women Who Run with the WolvesJean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., is a Jungian analyst and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of Goddesses in Everywoman, Gods in Everyman, and The Tao of Psychology.

Directed by Dorothy Arzner


Judith Mayne - 1994
    In Part One, Dorothy Arzner's film career--her work as a film editor to her directorial debut, to her departure from Hollywood in 1943--is documented, with particular attention to Arzner's roles as "star-maker" and "woman's director." In Part Two, Mayne analyzes a number of Arzner's films and discusses how feminist preoccupations shape them, from the women's communities central to Dance, Girl, Dance and The Wild Party to critiques of the heterosexual couple in Christopher Strong and Craig's Wife. Part Three treats Arzner's lesbianism and the role that desire between women played in her career, her life, and her films.

Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina


Alexandra Stiglmayer - 1994
    The women—primarily of Muslim but also of Croatian and Serbian origin—have endured the atrocities of rape and the loss of loved ones. Their testimony, published in the 1993 German edition, is bare, direct, and its cumulative effect overwhelming. The first English edition contains Stiglmayer's updates to her own two essays, one detailing the historical context of the current conflict and the other presenting the core of the book, interviews with some twenty victims of rape as well as interviews with three Serbian perpetrators. Essays investi-gating mass rape and war from ethnopsychological, sociological, cultural, and medical perspectives are included.New essays by Catharine A. MacKinnon, Rhonda Copelon, and Susan Brownmiller address the crucial issues of recognizing the human rights of women and children. A foreword by Roy Gutman describes war crimes within the context of the UN Tribunal, and an afterword by Cynthia Enloe relates the mass rapes of this war to developments and reactions in the international women's movement.Accounts of torture, murder, mutilation, abduction, sexual enslavement, and systematic attempts to impregnate—all in the name of "ethnic cleansing"—make for the grimmest of reading. However brutal and appalling the information conveyed here, this book cannot and should not be ignored.

Finding Peace: Letting Go and Liking It


Paula Peisner Coxe - 1994
    It is where you can trust more and worry less, compare yourself to no one, love and accept yourself, forgive the pain from the past and grow from your losses. Filled with carefully crafted thoughts, suggestions and uplifting quotes, Finding Peace asks you to contemplate how deeply you believe in these four affirmations, which form the foundation for inner peace: Faith: I find comfort and support in my beliefs. Other-directedness: I seek to understand rather than be understood. Loss: I have experienced loss in many ways. It has enriched my soul and softened my heart. Finding Peace is for everyone looking to feel more comfortable with themselves and their situations.

Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother


Sherry Thurer - 1994
    Analyzing data from the psychoanalyst’s couch to the hidden history of wet nursing, psychologist Shari L. Thurer wends her way from the Stone Age to the age of Hillary Rodham Clinton, painting a vivid, often frightening picture of life for mothers and children in a time when their roles were constructed by men. Along the way, she debunks myth after myth—exposing the not-so-golden ages of Classical Greece and the Italian Renaissance, and revealing the pervasive ideal of Dr. Spock’s selfless, stay-at-home mother as the historical aberration it actually was. A work of impassioned scholarship and astonishing range, The Myths of Motherhood does nothing less than recast our conception of good mothering.

Body & Soul: The Black Women's Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being


Linda Villarosa - 1994
    Sponsored by the National Black Women's Health Project, this honest, straight-from-the-heart guide addresses the physical, emotional, and spiritual health issues and concerns of Black women today.

The Women's Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press


Beth Baron - 1994
    This flourishing women's press provided a forum for debating such topics as the rights of woman, marriage and divorce, and veiling and seclusion, and also offered a mechanism for disseminating new ideologies and domestic instruction. In this book, Beth Baron presents the first sustained study of this remarkable material, exploring the connections between literary culture and social transformation.Starting with profiles of the female intellectuals who pioneered the women's press in Egypt—the first generation of Arab women to write and publish extensively—Baron traces the women's literary output from production to consumption. She draws on new approaches in cultural history to examine the making of periodicals and to reconstruct their audience, and she suggests that it is impossible to assess the influence of the Arabic press without comprehending the circumstances under which it operated.Turning to specific issues argued in the pages of the women's press, Baron finds that women's views ranged across a wide spectrum. The debates are set in historical context, with elaborations on the conditions of women's education and work. Together with other sources, the journals show significant changes in the activities of urban middle- and upper-class Egyptian women in the decades before the 1919 revolution and underscore the sense that real improvement in women's lives—the women's awakening—was at hand. Baron's discussion of this extraordinary trove of materials highlights the voices of the female intellectuals who championed this awakening and broadens our understanding of the social and cultural history of the period.

Sisters at the Well: Women and the Life and Teachings of Jesus


Richard Neitzel Holzapfel - 1994
    Modern saints can learn valuable lessons from the examples of stalwarts such as Elisabeth, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. The authors not only examine the Savior’s teachings to and about women but also discuss the women specifically mentioned in the four Gospels and their relationship to the first-century world in which they lived. Some of the characteristics of this time period are quite shocking by modern standards. Sisters at the Well serves as a reminder to all that God sees men and women as individuals equally deserving of his love and attention.

Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America: A Critical Edition of the "symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum" (Symphony of the Harmon


Janet Farrell Brodie - 1994
    Janet Farrell Brodie introduces this engaging pair early in a book that is certain to be the definitive study of family limitation in nineteenth-century America. She makes adroit use of Mary's diaries and letters to lift a curtain on the intimate life of a Victorian couple attempting to control the size of their family.Were the Poors typical? Who used reproductive control in the years between 1830 and 1880? What methods did they use and how did they learn about them? By examining a wide array of sources, Brodie has determined how Americans gradually were able to get birth control information and products that allowed them to choose among newer, safer, and more effective contraceptive and abortive methods.Brodie's findings in druggists' catalogues, patent records, advertisements, vice society'' documents, business manuscripts, and gynecological advice literature explain how information spread and often taboo matters were made commercial. She retraces the links among obscure individuals, from itinerant lecturers, to book publishers, to contraceptive goods manufacturers and explains the important contributions of two nascent networks-medical practitioners known as Thomsonians and watercurists, and iconoclastic freethinkers.Brodie takes her narrative to the backlash at the end of the century, when American ambivalence toward abortion and contraception led to federal and state legislative restrictions, the rise of special purity legions, the influence of powerful reformers such as Anthony Comstock, and the vehement opposition of medical professionals. In this balanced and timely book Brodie shows a keen sensitivity to the complex factors behind today's politically, emotionally, and intellectually charged battles over reproductive rights.

Script Girls: Women Screenwriters In Hollywood


Lizzie Francke - 1994
    Tracing the history of women in the screenwriting profession - from Gene Gauntier's 1911 version of Ben Hur to Callie Khouri's Thelma and Louise - this work looks at the lives and fortunes of the women who put pen to screen. Complete with extensive interviews with women working today - including Nora Ephron, Callie Khouri and Caroline Thompson - plus filmographies, this book aims to put women back into the Hollywood picture.

Not Counting Women and Children: Neglected Stories from the Bible


Megan McKenna - 1994
    These true stories call for an examination of our lives both individually and collectively, and reveal an understanding of the good news that is dynamic and alive today.

Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell


Constance Classen - 1994
    Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours. They can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. This book breaks the olfactory silence of modernity. It offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history - from antiquity to the present. It also covers a wide variey of non-Western societies. Its topics range from the medieval concept of the odour of sanctity, to the aromatherapies of South America, and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity. Its subject matter will fascinate anyone who likes to nose around in the inner workings of culture.

Daughter Of The Goddess: The Sacred Priestess


Naomi Ozaniec - 1994
    She follows the Goddess from her beginnings of the dawn of early Patriarcal Society, into the dawn of the Mesopotamian Civilization, and onward threw Egypt, Creete, Rome, Greece, Japan and Okinawa..and threw many more interesting and deep mysteries of these ages.

In Their Own Words: Women and the Story of Nauvoo


Carol Cornwall Madsen - 1994
    These women found their lives transformed by their conversion to Mormonism and shaped by their experiences thereafter. The voices you hear as you read these documents are clearly their own, from their own perspectives and in their vernacular as they lived in the City of Joseph.Each woman's background and setting at the time of her writing are explained by the author. The writings include diary entries, letters to loved ones and dear friends, and reminiscences. Readers will find thoughts and experiences about family and friends, religion, material struggles, sorrow, self-appraisal and faith.

Soulwork: Clearing the Mind, Opening the Heart, and Replenishing the Spirit


Bettyclare Moffatt - 1994
    A unique blend of lyrical prose and practical exercises to help readers work through many external layers to reach their inner wisdom. Preface by Sue Patton Thoele.

Acrylic Painting Techniques


Stephen Quiller - 1994
    Acrylic Painting Techniques shows you why, as it explores the full range of what you can achieve with these durable, inexpensive, easy-to-use, and fast-drying paints. Author Stephen Quiller has researched the most up-to-date materials available, the many and varied paints and mediums, and he gives good counsel concerning the brushes, palettes, and painting surfaces the acrylic painter ought to have. To prepare the reader to exploit the richness and vibrancy of acrylics, he also offers a lesson on basic color relationships, illustrated with a color wheel he has devised for acrylics. From there he thoroughly explores all the painting techniques that unleash the power of acrylics. In the creation of images, the same acrylic paints can be utilized transparently, translucently, or opaquely. The author shows not only how the techniques of painting in watercolor and oil can be applied using acrylics, but also how their versatility is greatly extended with gels, acrylic gouaches, metallic colors, and gessos. The important differences between the other media and acrylics are carefully explained, and the demonstrations of how different media-including charcoal, Conte crayon, and casein—can be integrated into one composition will spark any painter's creativity. Throughout, Quiller's full-color studies and finished paintings illuminate his text. The reader gains a greater understanding of the use of acrylics by examining the step-by-step development of numerous beautiful works, and then by applying the techniques in a series of exercises at the end of each lesson. Always in search of the ways to communicate in his art a love for the natural landscape, the author shows how he has explored the potential of acrylic painting to achieve the most exciting and satisfying results. His deeper message is that by learning to master this brilliant medium, you will expand upon your own powers of artistic self-expression.• Teaches the tips and techniques used by professional artists in clear, easy-to-follow exercises• Fully illustrated with hundreds of dazzling color reproductions of finished paintings

Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women. Volume 2, From 1865 to the Present


Ruth Barnes Moynihan - 1994
    But women refused to remain silent. This volume of Second to None, like volume 1, presents a multiplicity of voices, demonstrating that there is not a representative American woman, but many women worth remembering. Here are women who are shapers of history, as well as its victims. In diaries, letters, speeches, songs, petitions, essays, photographs, and cartoons they describe, rejoice, exhort, complain, advertise, and joke, revealing women's role as community builders in every time and locale and registering their emergence into the public spheres of political, social, and economic life. The documents also demonstrate the value of gender analysis, for women's differences—in age, race, sexual orientation, class, geographical or ethnic origin, abilities or disabilities, and values—are shown to be as important as their commonalities.Volume 2 contains 122 selections, ranging from a tract by Elizabeth Cady Stanton to the testimony of Anita Hill. Both volumes include section introductions that set the historical stage and comment on the significance of the selections.

Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet, Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert's Muse


Francine du Plessix Gray - 1994
    Line art.

Medicine of the Gods


Kris Morgan - 1994
    Medical ideas underpin a great deal of Eastern thought especially Tantrism, alchemy, yoga and the science of love. This book is not intended as a series of health tips or as a textbook for the clinical practice of medicine, which in the Ayurveda tradition requires at least seven years intensive training. The book is aimed at students and lovers of South Asian culture, perhaps also anthropologists and others with a need for a straightforward introduction to the core principles of another scientific tradition.

Encyclopedia of Tibetan Medicine: Being the Tibetan Text of Rgyud Bzi and Sanskrit Restoration of Amtrta Htrdaya Arsteagnga Guhyopadebsa Tantra and Ex


Vaidya Bhagwan Dash - 1994