This collection of speeches by Amelia Jenks Bloomer, a 19th-century feminist reformer, explores women's issues and lives during the period from 1850 to 1880. Bloomer lived in Seneca Falls, New York, and was the founder of a woman's newspaper, the Lily. She supported dress reform and was internationally famous for her introduction of bloomers. She was a staunch supporter of women's rights and worked closely with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom she introduced to one another. Bloomer was an extremely popular public speaker who traveled throughout New York State and the mid-West lecturing on temperance and greater opportunities for women in employment and education. This volume is the only collection of her speeches, and Coon's introduction creates a narrative of Bloomer's life as the story of a shy, modest woman whose commitment to reform and the endorsement of a new style of women's dress catapulted her into public life.

In Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman, Mari Ruti traces the development of feminist film theory from its foundational concepts such as the male gaze, female spectatorship, and the masquerade of femininity to 21st-century analyses of neoliberal capitalism, consumerism, postfeminism, and the revival of "girly" femininity as a cultural ideal. By interpreting Pretty Woman as a movie that defies easy categorization as either feminist or antifeminist, the book counters the all-too-common critical dismissal of romantic comedies as mindless drivel preoccupied with trivial "feminine" concerns such as love and shopping. The book's lucid presentation of the key concerns of feminist film theory, along with its balanced reading of Pretty Woman, shed light on a Hollywood genre often overlooked by film critics: the romantic comedy.

In this book Paddy McQueen examines the role that 'recognition' plays in our struggles to construct an identity and to make sense of ourselves as gendered beings. It analyses how such struggles for gender recognition are shaped by social discourses and power relations, and considers how feminism can best respond to these issues.

'Captivating, emphatic and deeply inspiring, Sexual Revolution lifted me greatly by envisioning the possibilities of our moment' V (formerly Eve Ensler) 'Brilliant; vital; revolutionary' Kate Manne _________________ This is a story about how modern masculinity is killing the world, and how feminism can save it. It's a story about sex and power and trauma and resistance and persistence. Sex and gender are changing, and the world is changing with them. In this time of crisis, we are also witnessing a productive transformation: a revolutionary change in how we define gender, sex, consent and whose bodies matter. This sexual revolution is a threat to the social and economic order. It undermines the existing power structures and weakens the authority of institutions from the waged workplace to the nuclear family. No wonder the far right is fighting back so hard. Told with Laurie Penny's trademark urgency and candour, Sexual Revolution is a hand-grenade of a book: both a manifesto for social change and a story of how feminism can save us.

Winner of the 2019 SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication In The Riddle of Jael, Peter Scott Brown offers the first history of the Biblical heroine Jael in medieval and Renaissance art. Jael, who betrayed and killed the tyrant Sisera in the Book of Judges by hammering a tent peg through his brain as he slept under her care, was a blessed murderess and an especially fertile moral paradox in the art of the early modern period. Jael's representations offer insights into key religious, intellectual, and social developments in late medieval and early modern society. They reflect the influence on art of exegesis, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, humanism and moral philosophy, misogyny and the battle of the sexes, the emergence of syphilis, and the Renaissance ideal of the artist.

This book traces the artistic trajectories of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, examining their literary representations of the nomadic ethic pervading the twentieth-century expatriate movements in and out of America. The book argues that these authors contribute to the nomadic aesthetic of American modernism: its pastoral ideographies, (post)colonial ecologies, as well as regional and transcultural varieties. Mapping the pastoral moment in different temporalities and spaces (Barnes representing the 1920s expatriation in Europe while Bowles comments on the 1940s exodus to Mexico and North Africa), this book suggests that Barnes and Bowles counter the critical trend associating American modernity primarily with urban spaces, and instead locate the nomadic thrust of their times in the (post)colonial history of the American frontier.

Too often feminism has been defined as a "woman only" arena, or in competitive terms of male versus female privilege, rather than as a cooperative effort to improve the quality of life for everyone. Indeed, a good deal of feminist scholarship has failed to take into account the relational nature of gender, preferring instead to focus on the ways in which men and women are irreconcilably opposed.

With a view to beginning a more constructive dialogue between women and men, the contributors to Feminism and Men argue that the feminist movement can no longer stand to view with suspicion those men who have proved themselves sympathetic to issues of gender equity. Bringing together the work of scholars across various disciplines committed to maximizing the inclusion of pro-feminist men in the feminist movement, the book convincingly demonstrates how and why feminist goals cannot be realized until men and women come together to eliminate the shared harm of patriarchal realities.

Contributors include R.W. Connell, Riane Eisler, Kay Leigh Hagan, bell hooks, Christine A. James, Robert Jensen, Michael S. Kimmel, Gary Lemons, Michael Messner, Matthew Shepherd, and John Stoltenberg.

This book is the outcome of a study conducted in the eastern city of Kolkata in India in the mid-2000s. It is an ethnographic study that looks closely at women from the upper and middle classes who work with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that help empower women from all classes of society. Unlike many studies that focus on grassroots women who are the beneficiaries of NGO and developmental projects, this book looks at those women who, as volunteers and activists, help carry out these projects to the best of their abilities. These women are often overlooked from mainstream studies on women in developing nations. But their role is invaluable and crucial in defining the agendas and strategies used to enhance feminist consciousness and developing organizational structures. This book is significant because it offers awareness and alternative views to the challenges (and motivations) faced by middle and upper-class women volunteers and activists in building a career in the non-profit sector of NGOs in Kolkata. Through the testimonies of these women, it examines alternative processes of agency and change in order to define these challenges and motivations. Also revealed by the analysis, is useful information about the oppression and subordination of these women in contemporary gender-stratified civil society in India. But more importantly, this book examines the various ways urban, educated Indian women construct a feminist praxis in terms of their everyday lived experiences as volunteers and activists. In terms of their lived experiences, the women in this study reflect on the social challenges they encounter and motivations they experience as volunteers and activists, while also discussing their understanding of feminism and views on the image of a "feminist" in the postcolonial context. The results demonstrate the power of feminist standpoint theorizing and how it raises consciousness, empowers women and stimulates resistance to patriarchal oppression and injustices. Finally, this book produces new knowledge and research on the conception of feminism among women volunteers and activists in a non-western setting and how they construct the image of a feminist. It offers directions for research in transnational feminism, International Women's Movement, Womanism, and Social Inequality Studies.

In the early years of contesting patriarchy in the academy and religious institutions, feminist theology often presented itself as a unified front, a sisterhood. The term "feminist theology," however, is misleading. It suggests a singular feminist purpose driven by a unified female cultural identity that struggles as a cohesive whole against patriarchal dominance. Upon closer inspection, the voice of feminist theology is in fact a chorus of diverging perspectives, each informed by a variety of individual and communal experiences, and an embattled scholarly field, marked by the effects of privilege and power imbalances. This complexity raises an important question: How can feminist theologians respect the irreducible diversity of women's experiences and unmask entrenched forms of privilege in feminist theological discourse? In Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference, Margaret D. Kamitsuka urges the feminist theological community to examine critically its most deeply held commitments, assumptions, and goals-especially those of feminist theologians writing from positions of privilege as white or heterosexual women. Focusing on women's experience as portrayed in literature, biblical narrative, and ethnographic writing, Kamitsuka examines the assumptions of feminist theology regarding race and sexuality. She proposes theoretical tools that feminist theologians can employ to identify and hopefully avoid the imposition of racial or sexual hegemony, thus providing invaluable complexity to the movement's identity, and ultimately contributing to current and future Christian theological issues. Blending poststructuralist and postcolonial theoretical resources with feminist and queer concerns, Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference makes constructive theological proposals, ranging from sin to christology. The text calls feminist theologians to a more rigorous self-critical approach as they continue to shape the changing face of Christian theological discourse.

In an age when Western feminism is continuously undergoing redefinition, the struggles of women in Muslim countries are often overlooked. This volume illustrates how women in Islamic societies have become more actively involved not only in learning their rights under the sharia (Islamic law) but in rereading this law to improve their status and gain increased equality and freedom. Surveying Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt and Arab societies in general, the essays in feminism and Islam focus on such subjects as crimes of honor and the construction of gender in Arab societies; law and the desire for social control; women ad entrepreneurship; family legislation; and the political strategies of feminists in the Islam world.

This volume honors the lifetime achievements of the distinguished activist and scholar Elise Boulding (1920-2010) on the occasion of her 95th birthday. Known as the "matriarch" of the twentieth century peace research movement, she made significant contributions in the fields of peace education, future studies, feminism, and sociology of the family, and as a prominent leader in the peace movement and the Society of Friends. She taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder from 1967 to 1978 and at Dartmouth College from 1978 to 1985, and was instrumental in the development of peace studies programs at both institutions. She was a co-founder of the International Peace Research Association (1964), the Consortium on Peace Research Education and Development (1970), and various peace and women's issues-related committees and working groups of the American Sociological Association and International Sociological Association.

The rise and fall of feminist counterculture is traced through feminisM's liberation of popular media such as music, cinema, and television and provides portraits of personalities as countercultural models. In addition, the decline of feminism after 1980 is explored.

The book begins by suggesting relevant countercultural problems and failures throughout American history to provide a broad historical perspective. It also describes how the New Left countercultural stress influenced the women's liberation movement. Individual chapters focus on how feminists used music as a counterculture and how they attempted to liberate media such as cinema, television, and advertising. Cultural portraits of Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, and Gloria Steinem suggest how individual women can be effective countercultural models. The book examines the decline of feminism since 1980 and links that decline to the fall of feminist counterculture. Feminists of the 1960s seemed to be repeating the history of the 1920s, when feminists gained the vote, but then lost the next generation. Contemporary feminists made many economic and political gains, but again lost the next generation of women. Despite this loss, the book concentrates primarily on the positive and predicts that countercultural feminism will rise phoenix-like into a new future, feminist era.

Emphasizing sociopolitical and cultural behaviors, this collection provides broad insight into the diverse experiences and perspectives of Korean American women in the light of feminism. In their discussions, the authors focus on the status and progress of Korean American women in contemporary society. Twenty-one selections examine the collective experience and Western feminist issues from minority feminist perspectives. The content is interdisciplinary and raises many thought-provoking, seldom-discussed issues. This book will be of interest to students and faculty in sociology, feminist and women's studies, ethnic studies, and Asian studies.

Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture employs an individual life lived under many names to investigate nineteenth-century British culture while also embodying a critical and historical engagement with theoretical questions. The book examines the histories of gender, knowledge, families, bodies, art, and political thought in Victorian Britain, contributing to both literary studies and cross-disciplinary feminist scholarship. By exploring key facets of British cultural and political history in the 1800s, this new work rigorously addresses wider themes of narrative, figuration, and historical writing and reading.

Traditionally the ethic of care has been associated with women while the ethic of justice has been associated with men. In recent years some feminist philosophers have turned their energies to developing theories of care and to exploring the epistemological assumptions on which the ethic of care is based. This volume proposes an original theory of care, building on insights of both feminist and non-feminist critics of liberal moral theory, gleaning ideas from feminist ethics and epistemologies, and stimulated by the writings of post-colonial feminists. The author shows that a number of ethical and epistemological imperatives can be defined through the philosophical elaboration of an ethic of care and the endeavor to know and to care well.

Can the actual experienced practices of caring and the abstract conceptual thought process of philosophy be mutually informing? The author argues that the concrete everyday response of care provides the grounds for new ways of thinking about both ethics and reason. By examining the works of Kant, Mill, and Rawls, she describes and defends a radical critique of the liberal moral theory of Gilligan and Noddings and a transformed ethic of care, accounting for care as both action and disposition. This vigorous study will have applications in the fields of sociology, ethics, moral and political philosophy, political science, nursing, medicine, and education. A comprehensive and up-to-date Bibliography provides readers with excellent resources for further study.

"Unleashing Our Unknown SelveS" begins with a critique of central paradigms in contemporary social science and ends with a provocative new theory of psychosexual development. Dr. Morrow brilliantly demonstrates why men are just as damaged as women by our present patriarchal sex/gender system. . . . I highly recommend it] as a primary text for graduate courses in human development, psychology of gender, and cultural studies.

Joseph L. White, Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and Comparative Culture, University of California, Irvine

Described as a hopeful book, "Unleashing Our Unknown SelveS" presents a new theory of psychosexual development and, concurrently, of psychosocial evolution. France Morrow claims that the sexual division of nature was a primordial organizing principle for all cultures. However, evolving qualities and psychological characteristics have been assigned by culture to women and men. Real biological differences have, over millennia, been incorporated, absorbed, or superceded by cultural differences. The resultant schism between femininity and masculinity represents the deepest cleavage in the human species, crippling both men and women through the cultural subordination of women. Morrow believes that to be truly whole, both sexes must be allowed to release the repressed qualities of the opposite sex.

France MorroW's interdisciplinary focus finds hope in the explanatory power of a theory which systematically explores the crippling of both sexes by the cultural invisibility of women. The book's chapters explore, among other subjects, the structure of gender evolution, Sigmund Freud's impact on the future of femininity and masculinity, and the internal repression of the majority self. MorroW's study affirms the dependence of human survival on the integrating of our feminine selves with our masculine selves. Her work is particularly directed to courses in developmental and social psychology, gender studies, sociology, and women's studies.

Feminist Erasures presents a collection of essays that examines the state of feminism in North America and Western Europe by focusing on multiple sites such as media, politics and activism. Through individual examples, the essays reveal the extent to which feminism has been made (in)visible and (ir)relevant in contemporary Western culture.

SlutWalk explores representations of the global anti-rape movement of the same name, in mainstream news and feminist blogs around the world. It reveals strategies and practices used to adapt the movement to suit local cultures and contexts and explores how social media organized, theorized and publicized this contemporary feminist campaign.

In this comparative study of contemporary Black Atlantic women writers, Samantha Pinto demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and location. Thinking beyond national identity to include African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black British literature, Difficult Diasporasbrings together an innovative archive of twentieth-century texts marked by their break with conventional literary structures. These understudied resources mix genres, as in the memoir/ethnography/travel narrativeTell My Horseby Zora Neale Hurston, and eschew linear narratives, as illustrated in the book-length, non-narrative poem by M. Nourbese Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Such an aesthetics, which protests against stable categories and fixed divisions, both reveals and obscures that which it seeks to represent: the experiences of Black women writers in the African Diaspora.Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship in her study of authors such as Jackie Kay, Elizabeth Alexander, Erna Brodber, Ama Ata Aidoo, among others, Pinto argues for the critical importance of cultural form and demands that we resist the impulse to prioritize traditional notions of geographic boundaries. Locating correspondences between seemingly disparate times and places, and across genres, Pinto fully engages the unique possibilities of literature and culture to redefine race and gender studies.Samantha Pintois Assistant Professor of Feminist Literary and Cultural Studies in the English Department at Georgetown University.In theAmerican Literatures Initiative

The bestselling classic that redefined our view od the relationship between beauty and female identity.

In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife. It's the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society's impossible definition of "the flawless beauty."

For centuries, the "great man" format and masculine discourse of biography and autobiography have eclipsed women. If we accept this history, we remain ignorant of "Lady Sarashina," a Japanese woman of the Han period, whose book survives from the 11th century. We overlook Margaret Cavendish and Dame Julian, two early English autobiographers. And we fail to consider sufficiently slave narratives, oral histories, or lesbian "coming out" stories.

Telling Women's Lives assesses existing traditions of autobiography and biography in search of a method capable of conveying the distinctive content of women's lives while retaining the tenor of feminine subjectivity. Drawing on feminist research methodologies of the past two decades as well as anthropology and sociology, Long paves the way for the formulation of an emergent feminist methodology for telling women's lives.

This highly original study seeks to revise and recreate the genre so as to accommodate a feminine discourse, narrator, reader, and subject. The "messiness" of women's lives-the daily work and detail that men have programmatically excluded-acquires new meaning as Long develops here an innovative theory of sociobiography.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them - from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies. Exploring the cultural and philosophical implications of this fact, Bodies of Water develops an innovative new mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it. Building on the works by Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Astrida Neimanis's book is a landmark study that brings a new feminist perspective to bear on ideas of embodiment and ecological ethics in the posthuman critical moment.

This book investigates the relation between left-wing populism and feminist politics by analysing three specific aspects. First, whether left-wing populist parties promote gender equality policies, against charges of a general inconsistency between both political projects; Second, how do these parties form their policy-making coalitions in the field of gender equality; Third, how much impact on policy do women's movements have when left-wing populists are in power. The book is focused on the case of Bolivia during the first twelve years of Evo Morales's presidency. The empirical analysis is based on the qualitative content analysis of documents and semi-structured interviews with women's movements' activists, policy-makers and experts in women's movements. The central issue of the book is present throughout the volume, but each empirical chapter can be also read as a semi-autonomous analysis of a specific aspect of the relation between left-wing populism and feminist politics, which increases the interest of the book for different audiences including experts in gender and politics and feminist activists, specialists in Latin American politics, indigenous politics and social movements.

Male rape is a feminist issue - but perhaps not in the way that you might think. This work is an experiment in Foucauldian thought that attempts to satisfy Foucault's imperative to 'think differently'. From this positioning, feminist constructions of 'male rape' can plausibly be claimed to operate as a 'regime of truth', but one must necessarily question whether this is running counter to patriarchy.
This book seeks to problematize knowledge and practices regarding 'male rape', examining the social realms of the Academy, popular culture, policy and provision in the constitution of the subject. Discussion is moved beyond notions of fairness or justice. Instead, Cohen seeks to ascertain the discursive regularities in these sites, considers the power-effects of such discourse and thus conceives of 'male rape' as illustrating the success of governmentality.