In 1796 when Mary Lamb, in a sudden attack of violent frenzy, killed her mother, her brother Charles pledged himself to be responsible for her care, thus sparing her from threatened incarceration in Bedlam. For the next thirty odd years they lived, and wrote, together. Informed by feminist and psychoanalytic literary theory, this book provides an entirely new perspective on the lives and writings of Charles and Mary Lamb. It argues that the Lambs's ideological inheritance as the children of servants, their work experience as clerk and needlewoman respectively, and the role that madness and matricide played in both their lives, resulted in writings which were at variance with the spirit of their age. In particular, the intensity of their sibling bond is seen, in Charles Lamb's case, as resulting in texts stylistically and thematically opposed to the masculinist stance currently considered characteristic of Romantic writers.

This book draws attention to the controversy that surrounds Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, and Simone de Beauvoir's lives and the important role that their life stories have played in their feminist writing. Directly and indirectly, the four women have contributed to battles over feminism's meaning through autobiographically informed political writing. Inevitably, therefore, their biographers are also participants in these battles, yet not always on the same side as their subjects. Writing Feminist Lives introduces a further fold of nuance into considerations of biography and feminism by showing that the biographers of the four women have made methodological choices that reflect their loyalty to, or their scepticism towards, competing ideological definitions of the exemplary feminist life.

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.

Resting on the multifaceted and multicultural voices of women - secular and religious, old-timers and newcomers, at the center or on the periphery of their communities - it brings into sharper focus rarely raised issues related to gender borders and to the private and public spheres. Beyond the specific society they treat, these essays contribute to our understanding of the social mechanisms that (re)produce gender inequality in modernity, in its socialist, capitalist, or postindustrial versions. They also provide additional evidence for the limits of any attempt to achieve gender equality by focusing on the transformation of women, without challenging hegemonic masculinities.

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.

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.

This book takes a reproductive justice approach to argue that surrogacy as practised in the contemporary neoliberal biomarkets crosses the humanitarian thresholds of feminism. Drawing on her ethnographic work with surrogate mothers, intended parents and medical practitioners in India, the author shows the dark connections between poverty, gender, human rights violations and indignity in the surrogacy market. In a developing country like India, bio-technologies therefore create reproductive objects of certain female bodies while promoting an image of reproductive liberation for others. India is a classic example for how far these biomarkets can exploit vulnerabilities for individual requirements in the garb of reproductive liberty. This critical book refers to a range of liberal, radical and postcolonial feminist frameworks on surrogacy, and questions the individual reproductive rights perspective as an approach to examine global surrogacy. It introduces 'humanitarian feminism' as an alternative concept to bridge feminist factions divided on contextual and ideological grounds. It hopes to build a global feminist solidarity drawing on a 'reproductive justice' approach by recognizing the histories of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age and immigration oppression in all communities. This work is of interest to researchers and students of medical sociology and anthropology, gender studies, bioethics, and development studies.

As part of the emerging new research on civic innovation, this book explores how sexual politics and gender relations play out in feminist struggles around body politics in Brazil, Colombia, India, Iran, Mexico, Nepal, Turkey, Nicaragua, as well as in East Africa, Latin America and global institutions and networks. From diverse disciplinary perspectives, the book looks at how feminists are engaged in a complex struggle for democratic power in a neoliberal age and at how resistance is integral to possibilities for change. In making visible resistances to dominant economic and social policies, the book highlights how such struggles are both gendered and gendering bodies. The chapters explore struggles for healthy environments, sexual health and reproductive rights, access to abortion, an end to gender-based violence, the human rights of LGBTIQA persons, the recognition of indigenous territories and all peoples' rights to care, love and work freely. The book sets out the violence, hopes, contradictions and ways forward in these civic innovations, resistances and connections across the globe.

Revisiting Iris Marion Young on Normalisation, Inclusion and Democracy presents an innovative collection of politically and theoretically inspiring papers by feminist, queer and postcolonial writers. All authors engage with Young's politics of cultural difference and a 'politics of positional difference' read against her critique of normalisation.

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.

From modern pop culture to anti-Blackness, faith and family, politics, education, creativity and working life; this anthology gives visibly Muslim women a space to speak. SPOILER ALERT: We won't be answering the usual questions! Perceived as the visual representation of Islam, hijab-wearing Muslim women are nevertheless rarely afforded a platform on their own terms. Harangued by awkward questions, radical commentators sensationalising our existence, non-Muslims and non-hijabis making assumptions, men speaking on our behalf, or stereotypical norms being perpetuated by the same old faces, hijabis are tired. Cut from the Same Cloth? seeks to tip the balance back in our favour. Here, twenty-one women of all ages and races look beyond the tired tropes, exploring the breadth of our experience and spirituality. It's time we, as a society, stop with the hijab-splaining and make space for the women who know. Essays by Negla Abdalla, Zahra Adams, Sabeena Akhtar, Mariam Ansar, Fatima Ahdash, Shaista Aziz, Suma Din, Khadijah Elshayyal, Ruqaiya Haris, Raisa Hassan, Fatha Hassan, Sumaya Kassim, Rumana Lasker Dawood, Suhaiymah Manzoor Khan, Asha Mohamed, Sofia Rehman, Yvonne Ridley Aisha Rimi, Khadijah Rotimi, Sophie Williams, Hodan Yusuf.

A DOROTHY KOOMSON BOOK OF THE YEAR AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Such a beautiful read, like chatting to a friend over a cuppa. This is the intimate, insightful read that I didn't know I needed. Just brilliant.' Dorothy Koomson Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah spent decades talking openly and intimately to African women around the world about sex. In this book, she brings together their extraordinary stories, whilst also chronicling her own journey towards sexual freedom. From finding queer community in Egypt to living a polyamorous life in Senegal to understanding the intersectionality of religion and pleasure in Cameroon, their necessary narratives are individual and illuminating. This stunning collection provides crucial insight into our quest for sexual power and offers all women inspirational examples to live a truly liberated life. 'Touching, joyful, defiant - and honest.' Economist, Books of the Year 2021 'Fascinating.' Bernadine Evaristo 'Honest and moving. A vital treasure.' Bolu Babalola, author of Love in Colour 'Stunning. Essential read! I couldn't put it down.' Nicole Dennis-Benn, bestselling author of Patsy and Here Comes the Sun 'Leaves you feeling deliciously empowered.' Lola Shoneyin, author of The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives 'Boundary-breaking, fascinating and deeply affirming.' Otegha Uwagba, author of Little Black Book

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.

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

This book examines the professional discourses produced in women's media in Malaysia and the subject positions that they make available for career women. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis, critical stylistics and feminist conversation analysis, it identifies a range of gendered discourses around employment and motherhood that are underpinned by postfeminism and neoliberal feminism. Through close linguistic analysis of magazine and newspaper articles and radio talk, the study reveals that these discourses substitute balance, individual success, self-transformation and positive feelings for structural change, and entrench the very issues hindering gender workplace equality. Chapters discuss topics such as sexism, work-family balance, extensive and intensive mothering, breadwinning, gender stereotypes, beauty work, 'synthetic sisterhood', media practices and gender equality policies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of language and gender, discourse analysis, and media, communication and cultural studies as well as policy-makers, media practitioners and feminist activists.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

Ectogenesis refers to the artificial gestation of a fetus outside the womb. Despite certain advantages for women's reproductive liberty, feminist groups remain divided regarding this technology. This book argues that reproduction imposes unjust burdens on women, and thus the ideals of equal opportunity demand continued research into ectogenesis.

This book forwards a line of argument that indicates how feminist analyses can ameliorate the standard consequential (and occasionally deontological) lines in applied ethics. Drawing on core concepts in feminist philosophy, Feminist Analyses of Applied Ethics investigates five major issues: immigration, environmental preservation, intervention in medical areas, the peace movement, and matters of citizenship. Although most of these areas have received extensive analysis, there is no one work that covers all five areas from a feminist point of view. This book aims to remedy that defect. The work draws on key thinkers in feminist ethics, such as Card and Gilligan, and also ventures to other areas of feminist philosophy.