Best of
Womens-Studies

2014

Letters, to the Men I Have Loved


Mirtha Michelle Castro Mármol - 2014
    At the age of five her family migrated to Miami, Florida. She wrote her first poem at the age of six and since then cultivated a passion for poetry. "Letters, To The Men I Have Loved" is her debut as an author. In it she expresses her feelings through distinct letters and poems to various men whom she considers motivated personal growth and her transition from young adult to womanhood. With words she paints a vivid picture of feelings such as passion, forgiveness, lust, and hope. Gracefully playing with the universal theme of the pursuit of love and the desire for change that can resonate with women all around the world.

What Women Want When They Test Men: How To Decode Female Behavior, Pass A Woman's Tests, And Attract Women Through Authenticity


Bruce Bryans - 2014
    Women want to be with a man who knows how to take the lead and make decisions; one who has strong personal boundaries and knows how to love her like...a man.Unfortunately, a lot of men have difficulty accepting the truth that many women prefer to be with a man who isn't afraid to stand up to them, who challenges them, and who refuses to be pushed around by women (or anything else for that matter). This is especially true of women who seek a more traditional male-female gender role dynamic in their romantic relationships.Even if a man knows how to attract women, cultivating a mind-blowing relationship with one requires a different set of skills entirely. Women want men who can make them feel secure - men with strong boundaries and unwavering commitment.Sadly, most dating and relationship books rarely show men how to keep a woman happy without them having to sacrifice their manhood in the process. How to Understand Women and Pass Their Tests With "Unshakeable" ConfidenceMen around the world have no idea that the women they know and love are testing them. These men go about their lives interacting with the opposite sex in absolute darkness, ignorant to the fact that they're being judged, appraised, approved, and rejected based on their subconscious reactions to female testing.If you had no idea that women test men and why they have to, you're about to take a journey onto a road less traveled - the more mysterious side of female psychology and how women think. Attract Women Through Authenticity and Be the "Strong" Man a Woman Wants For a RelationshipIt's important for a man to learn how to walk that thin line between caring, thoughtful lover and firm, assertive leader. The man who masters the art of being the perfect gentleman and a strong alpha male is the ideal specimen to a high-quality woman.This is what you're going to learn in this book.So if you're dating or in a relationship and women constantly create drama, lose interest in you, or manipulate you, it's time you finally got some advice from one of the only relationship books for men that won't turn you into a doormat.Here's what you're going to learn inside: How to be radically honest with a woman and why this makes her MORE attracted to you.The reason why women test men CONSISTENTLY and how to use this knowledge to deepen a woman's desire. (Hint: This is the key to female psychology and how women think.)How to be confident with difficult women.What women want in a man and how to give it to them.How to make a woman happy without becoming a complete doormat of a man.How to seduce your wife and get her in the mood by responding like a MAN whenever she "pokes the bear."How to be firm and say "No" to the woman you love without destroying intimacy.How to keep a woman interested in you by doing the ONE thing MOST men are deathly afraid of doing.How to avoid unnecessary arguments, fights, and drama with a woman by using a simple communication technique.The best way to secretly test a woman's level of romantic interest in you (as well as her emotional maturity) before making a long-term commitment.How to stop living in fear of what a woman might think, say, or do if she disagrees with or disapproves of you in any way.And much, much more...Would You Like to Know More?Get started right away and learn how to become the attractive man that has "zero" difficulty keeping a woman's respect, desire, and unwavering support.Scroll to the top of the page and select the 'buy butto

A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power


Jimmy Carter - 2014
    His urgent report is current. It covers the plight of women and girls–strangled at birth, forced to suffer servitude, child marriage, genital cutting, deprived of equal opportunity in wealthier nations and "owned" by men in others. And the most vulnerable, along with their children, are trapped in war and violence.He addresses the adverse impact of distorted religious texts on women, by Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims. Special verses are often omitted or quoted out of context to exalt the status of men and exclude women. In a remark that is certain to get attention, Carter points out that women are treated more equally in some countries that are atheistic or where governments are strictly separated from religion.Carter describes his personal observations of the conditions and hardships of women around the world. He describes a trip in Africa with Bill Gates, Sr. and his wife, where they are appalled by visits to enormous brothels. He tells how he joined Nelson Mandela to plead for an end to South Africa's practice of outlawing treatments to protect babies from AIDS-infected mothers.Throughout, Carter reports on observations of women activists and workers of The Carter Center. This is an informed and passionate charge about human rights abuses against half the world's population. It comes from one of the world's most renowned human rights advocates.

Yoni Shakti: A Woman's Guide to Power and Freedom Through Yoga and Tantra


Uma Dinsmore-Tuli - 2014
    Yoni Shakti combines real life stories with radical feminism, poetic meditations with guided yoga practices, and historical explorations with philosophical debates. Literally translated as "Source Power," Yoni Shakti unearths the freedom and power that women can experience through a feminine approach to yoga that nourishes their health, self-esteem, sexuality and spirituality.

If Nuns Ruled the World: Ten Sisters on a Mission


Jo Piazza - 2014
    During a time when American nuns are under attack from the very institution to which they pledge, these sisters offer inspiring, provocative counterstories that are sure to spark debate.Overthrowing our popular perception of nuns as killjoy schoolmarms content to live in the annals of nostalgia, Piazza defines them instead as the most vigorous catalysts of change in an otherwise constricting patriarchy.

Alice Paul: Claiming Power


J.D. Zahniser - 2014
    Raised by Quaker parents in Moorestown, New Jersey, she would become a passionate and outspoken leader of the woman suffrage movement. In 1913, she reinvigorated the American campaign for a constitutional suffrage amendment and, in the next seven years, dominated that campaign and drove it to victory with bold, controversial action-wedding courage with resourcefulness and self-mastery.This riveting account of Paul's early years and suffrage activism offers fresh insight into her private persona and public image, examining for the first time the sources of Paul's ambition and the growth of her political consciousness. Though many historians regard her Quaker upbringing as thegreatest influence in her commitment to women's rights, J. D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry explore the ways in which her political zeal developed out of years of education, as well as from her early involvement with British suffragists Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. These two women helped to honePaul's instincts and skills, which equipped her for later dealings with two important political adversaries, Woodrow Wilson and rival suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt.Using oral history interviews and the rich trove of Paul's correspondence, Zahniser and Fry substantially revise our understanding Paul's role in the suffrage movement. This compelling biography analyzes Paul's charisma and leadership qualities, sheds new light on her life and work, and is essentialreading for anyone interested in the woman suffrage movement, particularly as the American centennial of the women's vote approaches.

A Woman's Book of Inspiration


Carol Kelly-Gangi - 2014
    "Amelia Earhart: " Please know that I am aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others. . "Madeleine Albright: " I especially treasure the young women who say that my example has inspired them to raise their sights so that they now feel that serving as secretary of state or in even higher office is a realistic goal. . "Isabel Allende: " I can promise you that women working together linked, informed, and educated can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet. . "Gloria Vanderbilt: " I ve always believed that one woman s success can only help another woman s success. . "George Eliot: " Animals are such agreeable friends they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms. . "Margaret Thatcher: " Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren t. . And many more!"

The Medieval Housewife: & Other Women of the Middle Ages


Toni Mount - 2014
    More has been written about medieval women in the last twenty years than in the two whole centuries before that. Female authors of the medieval period have been rediscovered and translated; queens are no longer thought of as merely decorative brood mares for their royal husbands and have merited their own biographies. In the past, historians have tended to look at what women could not do. In this book we will look at the lives of medieval women in a more positive light, finding out what rights and opportunities women did enjoy, attempting to uncover the real women beneath the layers of dust accumulated over the centuries.

Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History


Leila J. Rupp - 2014
    history and contextualization for the modern world. This is the first book designed for university and high school teachers who want to integrate queer history into the standard curriculum. With its inspiring stories, classroom-tested advice, and rich information, it is a valuable resource for anyone who thinks history should be an all-inclusive story.Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History offers a wealth of insight for teachers. Introductory essays by Leila J. Rupp and Susan K. Freeman make clear why queer history is important and provide global historical context, showing that same-sex sexual desire and gender change are not new, modern phenomena. Teachers in diverse educational settings provide narratives of their experiences teaching queer history. A topical section offers 17 essays on such themes as sexual diversity in early America, industrial capitalism and emergent sexual cultures, and gay men and lesbians in World War II. Contributors include detailed suggestions for integrating these topics into a standard U.S. history curriculum, including creative and effective assignments. A final section addresses sources and interpretive strategies well-suited to the history classroom.Taken as a whole, Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History will help teachers at all levels navigate through cultural touchstones and political debates and provide a fuller knowledge of significant events in history.

The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness


Barbara Johnson - 2014
    Johnson achieved renown early in her career, both as a brilliant student of the Yale School of literary criticism and as the translator of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination. She went on to lead the way in extending the insights of structuralism and poststructuralism into newly emerging fields now central to literary studies, fields such as gender studies, African American studies, queer theory, and law and literature. Stunning models of critical reading and writing, her essays cultivate rigorous questioning of universalizing assumptions, respect for otherness and difference, and an appreciation of ambiguity.Along with the classic essays that established her place in literary scholarship, this Reader makes available a selection of Johnson's later essays, brilliantly lucid and politically trenchant works exploring multilingualism and translation, materiality, ethics, subjectivity, and sexuality. The Barbara Johnson Reader offers a historical guide through the metamorphoses and tumultuous debates that have defined literary study in recent decades, as viewed by one of critical theory's most astute thinkers.

Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath


Julia Gordon-Bramer - 2014
    Plath wrote of tarot cards, Ouija boards, astrology, crystal gazing, and much more. Hughes’ work has been widely explored in this light, yet in the fifty years since Plath’s death, no one thought to approach her work in this way.In Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, volume one, author Julia Gordon-Bramer aligns Plath’s great poetry collection, Ariel, with the tarot and Qabalah opening it up to entirely new—and quite obvious meanings.--Understand Plath’s Jewish imagery references the Qabalah (Kabbalah/Cabala), ancient Jewish mysticism--Understand how Plath’s Holocaust, color, and chemical imagery connects to Jungian alchemy and shamanism--Understand Plath’s concern for African-American, Native American, Women’s, and even LGBT’s civil rights, as well as her fear of the Cold War and nuclear annihilation and how she wove these themes into Ariel--Appreciate the historical, scientific, and artistic correspondences that support Plath’s themes and thus “cast a spell” on the reader, resonating on all levels of consciousness to explain Sylvia Plath’s timelessnessThis is volume one of Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, exploring the first 22 poems in Ariel: The Restored Edition, from “Morning Song” through to “The Courage of Shutting-Up,” as they reflect the tarot deck’s major arcana cards.

Nearly Orthodox: On being a modern woman in an ancient tradition


Angela Doll Carlson - 2014
    She takes us with her on a deep and revealing exploration of the forces that drove her toward Orthodoxy and the challenges that long kept her from fully entering in.

The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent


Piya Chatterjee - 2014
    The Imperial University brings together scholars, including some who have been targeted for their open criticism of American foreign policy and settler colonialism, to explore the policing of knowledge by explicitly linking the academy to the broader politics of militarism, racism, nationalism, and neoliberalism that define the contemporary imperial state.The contributors to this book argue that “academic freedom” is not a sufficient response to the crisis of intellectual repression. Instead, they contend that battles fought over academic containment must be understood in light of the academy’s relationship to U.S. expansionism and global capital. Based on multidisciplinary research, autobiographical accounts, and even performance scripts, this urgent analysis offers sobering insights into such varied manifestations of “the imperial university” as CIA recruitment at black and Latino colleges, the connections between universities and civilian and military prisons, and the gender and sexual politics of academic repression.Contributors: Thomas Abowd, Tufts U; Victor Bascara, UCLA; Dana Collins, California State U, Fullerton; Nicholas De Genova; Ricardo Dominguez, UC San Diego; Sylvanna Falcón, UC Santa Cruz; Farah Godrej, UC Riverside; Roberto J. Gonzalez, San Jose State U; Alexis Pauline Gumbs; Sharmila Lodhia, Santa Clara U; Julia C. Oparah, Mills College; Vijay Prashad, Trinity College; Jasbir Puar, Rutgers U; Laura Pulido, U of Southern California; Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo, California State U, Long Beach; Steven Salaita, Virginia Tech; Molly Talcott, California State U, Los Angeles.

Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet


Terrie Dopp Aamodt - 2014
    It marked the transition from a pre-modern to a modern way of life. Ellen Harmon White's life (1827-1915) spanned those years and then some, but the last three months of a single year, 1844, served as the pivot for everything else. When the Lord failed to return on October 22, as she and other followers of William Miller had predicted, White did not lose heart. Fired by a vision she experienced, White played the principal role in transforming a remnant minority of Millerites into the sturdy sect that soon came to be known as the Seventh-day Adventists. She and a small group of fellow believers emphasized a Saturday Sabbath and an imminent Advent. Todaythat flourishing denomination posts eighteen million adherents globally and one of the largest education, hospital, publishing, and missionary outreach programs in the world. Over the course of her life White generated 70,000 manuscript pages and letters, and produced 40 books that have enjoyed extremely wide circulation. She ranks as one of the most gifted and influential religious leaders in American history and this volume tells her story in a new and remarkablyinformative way. Some of the contributors identify with the Adventist tradition, some with other Christian denominations, and some with no religious tradition at all. Their essays call for White to be seen as a significant figure in American religious history and for her to be understood within thecontext of her times.

Bonnet Strings: An Amish Woman's Ties to Two Worlds


Saloma Miller Furlong - 2014
    Romance also blossoms with a Yankee toymaker. Soon, however, a vanload of people from her community, including the Amish bishop, arrive to take her back into the fold. Saloma's freedom comes to an abrupt end when she goes back home to Ohio with them.Thus begins a years-long struggle of feeling torn between two worlds: will she remain Amish and embrace the sense of belonging and community her Amish life offers, or will she return to the newfound freedom she tasted in Vermont?Saloma settles into teaching in an Amish school and does her best to fit back into Amish ways, but a legacy of childhood abuse, struggles with an eating disorder, and questions of identity plague her. Her ties to the outside world remain, mostly through the quiet perseverance of the toymaker from Vermont. He keeps sending her cards, never giving up hope that their love could survive the strain of living in two different worlds.Bonnet Strings by Saloma Miller Furlong offers a universal story of overcoming adversity and a rare look inside an Amish community. Readers of Amish fiction and viewers of the PBS documentaries such as The Amish and The Amish: Shunned will find in it a true story: of woundedness and healing, of doubt and faith, and of the often competing desires for freedom and belonging.

Forbidden Fruit: Stories of Unwise Lesbian Desire


Cheyenne Blue - 2014
    In Jean Roberta’s Shelter the bad girl’s back from prison. An upper-class lady seduces her maid in Laila Blake’s poignant story set in Regency England, while a Catholic nun is beguiled by a hooker in Lisabet Sarai’s powerful The First Stone.These women are cops, slave owners, doctors, Dommes, and horse thieves, and you’ll find them at the pool, being seduced by older women, putting their job on the line for lust, or seducing the salt-and-pepper butch.With stories from writers at the top of their game, including Sacchi Green, Erzabet Bishop, Beth Wylde, Harper Bliss, and Allison Wonderland, this collection is sure to thrill.

American Women's Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age


Dara Downey - 2014
    Featuring uncanny tales that range from the big city to the small town and the empty prairie, she offers a new perspective on an old genre. Rather than seeing the spectres that stalk the pages of women's writing in Gilded-Age America as mere hallucinations or signs of mental disturbance, Downey examines the unusual motif of haunted houses without ghosts. Rarely appearing as ghosts, the dead women in the tales studied here hide away in the patters of furniture and wallpaper, offering a radical critique of the male gaze that reduced female bodies to alluring objects. Covering murderous nightcaps, haunted boarding houses and spectral china closets, it allows the object matter of the ghost story to, almost literally, come out of the closet.

The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution


Lynne Ann Hartnett - 2014
    Born in 1852 in the last years of serfdom, Vera Figner came of age as Imperial Russian society was being rocked by the massive upheaval that culminated in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. At first champion of populist causes and champion of women's higher education, Figner later became a leader of the terrorist party The People's Will and was an accomplice in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Drawing on extensive archival research and careful reading of Figner's copious memoirs, Lynne Ann Hartnett reveals how Figner survived the Bolshevik revolution and Stalin's Great Purges and died a lionized revolutionary legend as the Nazis bore down on Moscow in 1942.

The Nassaus of Luxembourg


Kassandra Pollock - 2014
    We, however, wanted to know more. Thus, we braved our way through whatever foreign language materials we could find, and as we learned more about the princesses' lives our interest grew to include the account of their parents' courtship and eventual marriage, a union which is one of the more touching but tragic of history's untold royal love stories. Nor would the narrative of the sisters' lives be complete without an explanation of how their grandfather came to inherit the Luxembourg throne. We hope you enjoy our effort..." Sabrina and Kassandra Pollock. Hardbound, glossy print, 240 pages, 405 rare images of the grand ducal family and other related royal and princely families.

Tell Me of Brave Women


Laura Riley - 2014
    Samara, a famous storyteller, creates Secret Sisters, an underground society that shelters battered women in the Middle East. Shes hunted for her beliefs and stalked for her beauty. Thelma, a tough waitress in Appalachia, witnesses a beating, gets a gun, and changes Samaras destiny forever. Evangelina, a South American teen, is forced to be a drug lords sex-slave until shes emboldened to flee to Secret Sisters. To escape, she must use a killers own tactics against him. Through escalating dangers, the three heroic women battle abuse and wager their lives for liberty.

Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations


Tami Williams - 2014
    Through her filmmaking, writing, and cine-club activism, Dulac’s passionate defense of the cinema as a lyrical art and social practice had a major influence on twentieth century film history and theory.In Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations, Tami Williams makes unprecedented use of the filmmaker's personal papers, production files, and archival film prints to produce the first full-length historical study and critical biography of Dulac. Williams's analysis explores the artistic and sociopolitical currents that shaped Dulac's approach to cinema while interrogating the ground breaking techniques and strategies she used to critique conservative notions of gender and sexuality. Moving beyond the director’s work of the 1920s, Williams examines Dulac's largely ignored 1930s documentaries and newsreels establishing clear links with the more experimental impressionist and abstract works of her early period.This vivid portrait will be of interest to general readers, as well as to scholars of cinema and visual culture, performance, French history, women’s studies, queer cinema, in addition to studies of narrative avant-garde, experimental, and documentary film history and theory.

A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South


Audrey Thomas McCluskey - 2014
    From the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, these individuals fought discrimination as members of a larger movement of black women who uplifted future generations through a focus on education, social service, and cultural transformation. Born free, but with the shadow of the slave past still implanted in their consciousness, Laney, Bethune, Brown, and Burroughs built off each other's successes and learned from each other's struggles as administrators, lecturers, and suffragists. Drawing from the women's own letters and writings about educational methods and from remembrances of surviving students, Audrey Thomas McCluskey reveals the pivotal significance of this sisterhood's legacy for later generations and for the institution of education itself.

Texas Adoption Activist Edna Gladney: A Life and Legacy of Love


Sherrie McLeroy - 2014
    Born in 1886, Edna Gladney was labeled as "illegitimate" from birth and, as an adult, lobbied for that label's removal from all birth certificates. During World War I, when many women left the home to work, Edna opened an innovative daytime nursery to care for the children of these workingwomen. What became the Gladney Center for Adoption has changed the lives of families and children the world over. Author and Gladney parent Sherrie McLeRoy tells Edna's amazing story alongside the making of the movie that launched Edna and adoption reform beyond Fort Worth's borders to national recognition.."

Feminist Edges of the Qur'an


Aysha A. Hidayatullah - 2014
    Synthesizing prominent feminist readings of the Qur'an in the United States since the late twentieth century, she provides an essential introduction to this nascent field of Qur'anic scholarship and engages in a deep investigation-as well as a radical critique-of its methods and approaches. With a particular focus on feminist "impasses" in the Qur'anic text, she argues that many feminist interpretations rely on claims about feminist justice that are not fully supported by the text, and she proposes a major revision to their exegetical foundations. A provocative work of Muslim feminist theology, Feminist Edges of the Qur'an is a vital intervention in urgent conversations about women and the Qur'an.

Madonna: Her Story


Caroline Sullivan - 2014
    Indeed, in Billboard's 2008 100 All-time Top Artists, she was ranked second only to the Beatles. During a 30-year career she has released 12 studio albums (plus numerous more compilations, live albums, soundtracks, remixes, EPs, and box sets). With each album she has consistently reinvented her music and image, pushing the boundaries both lyrically and in the form of elaborate and often sex-charged stage shows. But she is far more than just a 'pop star'. With a career that has encompassed not just music but books, movies, fashion and humanitarian work, she has transcended the world of pop to become a global cultural icon and a role model to millions of women. Indeed, almost every successful female recording artist of the last 30 years - from Jennifer Lopez to Rihanna and, of course, Lady Gaga - cites her as a major influence.

The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention


Sameena Mulla - 2014
    Drawing on four years of participatory research in a Baltimore emergency room, Sameena Mulla reveals the realities of sexual assault response in the forensic age. Taking an approach developed at the intersection of medical and legal anthropology, she analyzes the ways in which nurses work to collect and preserve evidence while addressing the needs of sexual assault victims as patients. Mulla argues that blending the work of care and forensic investigation into a single intervention shapes how victims of violence understand their own suffering, recovery, and access to justice--in short, what it means to be a "victim." As nurses race the clock to preserve biological evidence, institutional practices, technologies, and even state requirements for documentation undermine the way in which they are able to offer psychological and physical care. Yet most of the evidence they collect never reaches the courtroom and does little to increase the number of guilty verdicts. Mulla illustrates the violence of care with painstaking detail, illuminating why victims continue to experience what many call "secondary rape" during forensic intervention, even as forensic nursing is increasingly professionalized. Re-victimization can occur even at the hands of conscientious nurses, simply because they are governed by institutional requirements that shape their practices. The Violence of Care challenges the uncritical adoption of forensic practice in sexual assault intervention and post-rape care, showing how forensic intervention profoundly impacts the experiences of violence, justice, healing and recovery for victims of rape and sexual assault.