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"Choice Magazine" Outstanding Academic Titles 2005 Winner

"[William's] theory is elegant in its explication and provocative in its implications for government restrictions on speech ranging from the hateful, the symbolic, the politically subversive, and the costly. A must read."--"Choice," A 2005 "Choice" Outstanding Academic Title

"Meticulously argued and clearly organized, her account of free speech is both fundamentally feminist and optimistic."--"The Law and Politics Book Review"

"What emerges from this well-written work of careful scholarship is an important contribution to free speech literature."
--Frederick Schauer, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Amidst the vast array of literature on the First Amendment, it is rare to hear a fresh voice speak about the First Amendment, but in Truth, Autonomy, and Speech, Susan H. Williams presents a strikingly original interpretation and defense of the First Amendment, written from a feminist perspective. Drawing on work from several disciplines--including law, political theory, philosophy, and anthropology--the book develops alternative accounts of truth and autonomy as the foundations for freedom of expression. Building on feminist understandings of self and the social world, Williams argues that both truth and autonomy are fundamentally relational.

With great clarity and insight, Williams demonstrates that speech is the means by which we create rather than discover truth and the primary mechanism through which we tell the stories that constitute our autonomy. She examines several controversial issues in the law of free speech--includingcampaign finance reform, the public forum doctrine, and symbolic speech--and concludes that the legal doctrine through which we interpret and apply the First Amendment should be organized to protect speech that serves the purposes of truth and autonomy.

Oriana Fallaci (b. 1930) is an awkward presence on Italian bookshelves, in world journalism and among feminists. This book, the first literary study of Fallaci, examines the implications of the storms and silences that she keeps rousing. A fully emancipated and successful woman in the man's world of political journalism, she has antagonised many feminists by her championship of motherhood and her idolization of heroic manhood. In journalism, her critics have felt that she has outraged the conventions of interviewing and reporting. As a novelist, she shatters the invisible diaphragm of literariness and is accused of betraying, or simply failing, literature.
This book focuses on Fallaci's direct engagement as a writer with major political and social issues such as women's liberation, Vietnam, Islamic fundamentalism and the space programme. A distinctive and controversial feature of her writing is the way in which she blurs the interface between reportage and fiction in an attempt to obliterate the gap that separates the word from the world.

Based on her award-winning blog, "The Feminist Spectator," Jill Dolan presents a lively feminist perspective in reviews and essays on a variety of theatre productions, films and television series--from The Social Network and Homeland to Split Britches' Lost Lounge.
Demonstrating the importance of critiquing mainstream culture through a feminist lens, Dolan also offers invaluable advice on how to develop feminist critical thinking and writing skills. This is an essential read for budding critics and any avid spectator of the stage and screen.

Drawing on the writings of diverse authors, including Jean Baker Miller, Bell Hooks, Mary Daly, Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire and Ignacio Martin-Baro, as well as on women's experiences, this book aims to develop a 'liberation psychology'; which would aid in transforming the damaging psychological patterns associated with oppression and taking action to bring about social change. The book makes systematic links between social conditions and psychological patterns, and identifies processes such as building strengths, cultivating creativity, and developing solidarity.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the founding philosophers of America's women's rights movement. The first woman's rights convention in the United States was held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848; there she helped write and present the Declaration of Sentiments, a woman's bill of rights which articulated the inferior and unjust position of women in law, church, and society and called for redress. From this grew the organized demands by women in the United States for the ballot and other social change. In this fourth volume in Greenwood's series of book-length studies of great American orators, Waggenspack focuses on the rhetoric of an outstanding orator who has been hailed as one of the earliest and most outspoken advocates of women's rights issues. This needed addition to the history and criticism of American public address is based on Waggenspack's original research of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton papers and will facilitate not only the study of feminist rhetoric but will also meet the needs of those wishing to evaluate the effects of American public address and the impact of an advocate or speech upon history.

Part One, using a case study format, presents critical analyses of the orator and her speeches with the focus on rhetorical considerations of speaker and speech, purpose and effect. Part Two contains seven definitive speech texts of the commanding oratory analyzed in Part One. Of special note is the inclusion of Cady Stanton's famous The Solitude of Self, a speech appealing to the highest qualities and aspirations to people everywhere. A chronology details all of Cady Stanton's known addresses and the bibliography contains carefully annotated biographies on the orator as well as a detailed list of the contents of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers in the Library of Congress. The volume closes with notes and an index. This notable study will be a valuable research tool for students and scholars of rhetoric, public oratory, American history, and women's studies; it will also fascinate the general reader.

Following in the tradition of the Southern Women series, Arkansas Women highlights prominent Arkansas women, exploring women's experiences across time and space from the state's earliest frontier years to the late twentieth century. In doing so, this collection of fifteen biographical essays productively complicates Arkansas history by providing a multidimensional focus on women, with a particular appreciation for how gendered issues influenced the historical moment in which they lived. Diverse in nature, Arkansas Women contains stories about women on the Arkansas frontier, including the narratives of indigenous women and their interactions with European men and of bondwomen of African descent who were forcibly moved to Arkansas from the seaboard South to labor on cotton plantations. There are also essays about twentieth-century women who were agents of change in their communities, such as Hilda Kahlert Cornish and the Arkansas birth control movement, Adolphine Fletcher Terry's antisegregationist social activism, and Sue Cowan Morris's Little Rock classroom teachers' salary equalization suit. Collectively, these inspirational essays work to acknowledge women's accomplishments and to further discussions about their contributions to Arkansas's rich cultural heritage.

Women writers have often felt alienated from both the Bible and the canonical literary tradition that has been built on its foundation. Yet contemporary American women writers seem to be as haunted by the Bible as their nineteenth-century predecessors. This study of feminist biblical revision argues that women writers' contentious dialogues with the Bible ultimately reconstruct the writers' own basis of authority. The author traces the evolution of this phenomenon from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and analyzes biblical revision in works by Emily Dickinson, H.D., Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison.

An important volume connecting classical studies with feminism," Feminism and Ancient Philosophy" provides an even-handed assessment of the ancient philosophers' discussions of women and explains which ancient views can be fruitful for feminist theorizing today. The papers in this anthology range from classical Greek philosophy through the Hellenistic period, with the predominance of essays focusing on topics such as the relation of reason and the emotions, the nature of emotions and desire, and related issues in moral psychology. The volume contains some new, ground-breaking essays on Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, as well as previously published pieces by established scholars like Martha Nussbaum and Julia Annas. It promises to be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including those working in classics, ancient philosophy, and feminist theory.

This series of four volumes honors the lifetime achievements of the distinguished activist and scholar Elise Boulding (1920-2010) on the occasion of her 95th birthday. This first anthology documents the breadth of Elise Boulding's contributions to Peace Research, Peacemaking, Feminism, Future Studies, and Sociology of the Family. 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.

What is the relationship between feminist theology and classical Christian theology? Is feminist theology "Christian," and if so, in what respect and to what extent? This study seeks to analyze and evaluate the relation of feminist "reconstructions" to traditional Christian teaching. Greene-McCreight uses the extent to which the biblical depiction of God is allowed to guide theological hermeneutics as a test of orthodoxy. She looks at the writings of a wide range of contemporary feminist theologians, discusses their doctrinal patterns, and demonstrates how the Bible is used in undergirding their theological reconstructions.

Traditional histories of the American transcendentalist movement begin in Ralph Waldo Emerson's terms: describing a rejection of college books and church pulpits in favor of the individual power of "Man Thinking." This essay collection asks how women who lacked the privileges of both college and clergy rose to thought. For them, reading alone and conversing together were the primary means of growth, necessarily in private and informal spaces both overlapping with those of the men and apart from them. But these were means to achieving literary, aesthetic, and political authority-- indeed, to claiming utopian possibility for women as a whole.

"Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism" is a project of both archaeology and reinterpretation. Many of its seventeen distinguished and rising scholars work from newly recovered archives, and all offer fresh readings of understudied topics and texts. First quickened by the 2010 bicentennial of Margaret Fuller's birth, the project reaches beyond Fuller to her female predecessors, contemporaries, and successors throughout the nineteenth century who contributed to or grew from the transcendentalist movement.

Geographic scope also widens--from the New England base to national and transatlantic spheres. A shared goal is to understand this "genealogy" within a larger history of American women writers; no absolute boundaries divide idealism from sentiment, romantics from realists, or white discourse from black. Primary-text interludes invite readers into the ongoing task of discovering and interpreting transcendentally affiliated women. This collection recognizes the vibrant contributions women made to a major literary movement and will appeal to both scholars and general readers.

In the newly-identified genre of medieval patience literature, female protagonists move to the center of the action-an unusual advance for medieval literature. In addition, the patience genre shifts from one mainly concerned with mimicry to one mainly concerned with reduplication, so that fresh interpretations of early medieval works can arise and exciting revisions to genre-theory can develop, often from a surprisingly feminist point of view. As a result, this book helps to redress popular notions of the Middle Ages as a time when women had 'no rights' and 'no voices' and were treated as mere sex objects and as the property of men.

Analyzing women labeled as terrorists in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gender and the Political examines Western cultural constructions of the female terrorist. The chapters argue that the development of the discourse on terrorism evolves in parallel with, and in response to, radical feminism in the US during this time.

This exhaustive exploration of the sociocultural, political, and economic roles of African women through history demonstrates how African women have shaped-and continue to shape-their societies. Women play essential, critical roles in every society; African women south of the Sahara are certainly no different. Women's Roles in Sub-Saharan Africa adds significantly to our understanding of the ways in which women contribute to the fabric of human civilization. This book provides an in-depth exploration of African women's roles in society from precolonial periods to the contemporary era. Topical sections describe the roles that women play in family, courtship and marriage, religion, work, literature and arts, and government. Each of the six chapters has been structured to elucidate women's roles and functions in society as partners, as active participants, as defenders of their status and occupations, and as agents of change. Authors Nana Akua Amponsah and Toyin Falola present a thought-provoking work that looks at the complicated victimhood/powerful-female paradigm in women and gender studies in Africa, and challenge ideological interest in African historiography that privilege male representation. Describes chronological events in women's lives covering precolonial to postcolonial Africa Includes photographs of powerful women in colonial Africa; arts such as bead-making, pottery, and basketry; contemporary women in politics; and more Lists significant bibliographical materials from historical, anthropological, ethnographical, and sociological sources

After a decade of Thatcherism, rising illegitimacy and the moral panic over child sexual abuse, the family is more of a political issue than ever. But is it 'the family' that is in crisis, or family ideology? In this revised edition of an important and controversial book, Diana Gittins adds to a broad range of historical, anthropological and feminist evidence, a new chapter on child sexual abuse.

"A lively mix of memoir, cultural and historical analysis, statistics, and cross-generational profiles of women who shoot
--blasting the notion that feminism and firearms are incompatible."
--"Peace News"

Women, we are told, should not own guns. Women, we are told, are more likely to be injured by their own guns than to fend off an attack themselves. This "fact" is rooted in a fundamental assumption of female weakness and vulnerability. Why should a woman "not" be every bit as capable as a man of using a firearm in self-defense?

And yet the reality is that millions of American women--somewhere between 11,000,000 and 17,000,000--use guns confidently and competently every day. Women are hunting, using firearms in their work as policewomen and in the military, shooting for sport, and arming themselves for personal security in ever-increasing numbers. What motivates women to possess firearms? What is their relationship to their guns? And who exactly are these women? Crucially, can a woman be a gun-owner and a feminist too?

Women's growing tendency to arm themselves has in recent years been political fodder for both the right and the left. Female gun owners are frequently painted as "trying to be like men" (the conservative perspective) or "capitulating to patriarchal ideas about power" (the liberal critique). Eschewing the polar extremes in the heated debate over gun ownership and gun control, and linking firearms and feminism in novel fashion, Mary Zeiss Stange and Carol K. Oyster here cut through the rhetoric to paint a precise and unflinching account of America's gun women.

Unlike many other mainstream disciplines that only seek to broaden knowledge and thus become additive, women's studies try to question and posit new ways of thinking, inaugurating paradigm shifts and thus becoming subversive by trying to question established hierarchies of knowledge. This has not been an easy journey and the practitioners of this new approach have faced numerous odds as all pioneering endeavours encounter. This journey is a story that needs to be told and the present book attempts to do this by charting the trajectories of few women's studies scholars and their academic sojourn.

Within a social context where gender equality has been formally established as a social good and where feminism is generally dismissed as having achieved its purpose, third wave feminism offers an analysis of gender relations and feminist politics that has caused extensive debate. Situating third wave feminism within a late modern, postfeminist gender order this book offers a critical analysis of the assumptions that underpin the third wave perspective focusing on the solutions that third wave feminism proposes to counteract the popular perception that feminism has lost its relevance in today's society. In this analysis, the conceptual and theoretical resources that a third wave feminist perspective offers for advancing an understanding of the current state of a feminist 'politics of the self' are assessed and the claim that a set of new practices and identities are required to progress feminist interests is explored, focusing specifically upon the reconstruction of femininity through the ideals of autonomy, individuality and self-management.

This book presents critical readings of eight contemporary German novels which feature historically documented women as their main protagonist, and which reconstruct women's lives by combining source material and invention. Protagonists include Cornelia Goethe, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Karoline von Guenderrode and Charlotte Corday. Through a thorough examination of these novels, the wider complexities of female identity, feminism, literary technique and historiography are illuminated and discussed. The author examines how historical events are used to substantiate ideological positions and how the narrators consider this problematic aspect of their project.

As Japan shifted from an agricultural country before 1950 to an industrialized nation in less time than any other developed country, women felt the pressure of the shift. Husbands worked longer hours, leaving all the household chores and child rearing to their wives while fulfilling their responsibilites as corporate soldiers. The economy was fueled by a diligent, well-educated, low-paid workforce, but gender role division became even more rigid. Household incomes rose and improvement in areas such as diets, transportation, and leisure were made; modern appliances also made it possible for mothers to have part-time jobs. But pollution also rose, as did prices, and crowded living conditions began to impinge on family life. Tanaka, who has spent many years looking back at her country from an American perspective, examines marriage, motherhood, employment, independence, women's movements, and old age for women in Japan over the last 50 years.

"Queer Voices" sets out both to queer the musicological and to make queer audible, arguing that the voice, particularly the singing voice, opens up a richly queer space. Using case studies from different repertoires, the book demonstrates how queer emerges particularly audibly when the voice is heard to engage with various technologies: the external technologies of music performances and recordings, technologies of power, or the internal technologies of vocal production itself.

This first biography of V.F. Calverton gives an intellectual history of the American radical movement from 1920 to 1940 and shows how he and his Modern Quarterly led the forefront in wars of ideas about sex, lit, and party. This lively study of the career and times of Calverton examines basic questions about the relationships between literature and politics, feminist agendas, and political theory in ways that are still relevant. Students of political thought, American history, and American literature will find this biography a provocative one that brings the period alive in new ways. A short introduction shows how Calverton yearned to be an American Lenin-Cassanova-Pericles. Philip Abbott then follows Calverton's participation in a series of intellectual wars fought in the 1920s and the 1930s. Thus does Abbott reassess American radicalism and the development of American bohemia and socialism. Calverton was the central figure in two efforts to found an American radical republic, both of which were rejected by his colleagues--famous writers and thinkers of his time. One attempt sought to create a republic of being in which participants explored the capacities of sexual liberation as an agent for change. Another involved the creation of a republic of doing in which radical citizens acted out revolutionary roles. This biography of a neglected theorist reevaluates radical projects in politics, psychology, and the arts in America in a seminal period in their development.