Essential characteristics of Women's decision-making have long been ignored or, if considered at all, have been viewed in relationship to male-based factors. Veeder, drawing on experiences of Irish women, establishes that women making important choices do so differently than men. The women, ranging in age from as young as thirteen to over sixty-five, were divided into three age groupings, thereby offering insights into variables over much of the life-span. Themes, born from common experiences emerge from the poignant, compelling accounts of individual women. The author's analysis and commentary structure the book's development and maintain its focus on the context wherein women make their private, but immensely important, decisions--the family. Education, vocation, marriage, and childbearing are considered relative to the thought and emotional factors that influenced the women's decisions. Veeder concludes that women show strength and insight in their approach to choices. She sees women, in comparison with men, as taking more factors into consideration, being more aware of consequences, being more practical, flexible, and valuing of relationships. Women's participation in the workforce and their increased societal roles make this a most timely book. It is, too, an important contribution to, and stimulus for, additional research on gender and decision-making.

This is the first collection to bring together well-known scholars writing from feminist perspectives within critical discourse analysis. The theoretical structure of CDA is illustrated with empirical research in Eastern and Western Europe, New Zealand, Asia, South America and the US, demonstrating the complex workings of power and ideology in discourse in sustaining particular gender(ed) orders. These studies deal with texts and talk in domains ranging from parliamentary settings, news and advertising media, the classroom, community literacy programs and the workplace.

"This book is a true love letter, not only to Jha's own son but also to all of our sons and to the parents--especially mothers--who raise them." -Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race and Mediocre Beautifully written and deeply personal, this book follows the struggles and triumphs of one single, immigrant mother of color to raise an American feminist son. From teaching consent to counteracting problematic messages from the media, well-meaning family, and the culture at large, the author offers an empowering, imperfect feminism, brimming with honest insight and actionable advice. Informed by Jha's work as a professor of journalism specializing in social justice movements and social media, as well as by conversations with psychologists, experts, other parents and boys--and through powerful stories from her own life--How to Raise a Feminist Son shows us all how to be better feminists and better teachers of the next generation of men in this electrifying tour de force. Includes chapter takeaways, and an annotated bibliography of reading and watching recommendations for adults and children. "A beautiful hybrid of memoir, manifesto, instruction manual, and rumination on the power of story and possibilities of family." -Rebecca Solnit, author of The Mother of All Questions

A decade ago, Caitlin Moran thought she had it all figured out. Her instant bestseller How to Be a Woman was a game-changing take on feminism, the patriarchy, and the general ‘hoo-ha’ of becoming a woman. Back then, she firmly believed ‘the difficult bit’ was over, and her forties were going to be a doddle.

If only she had known: when middle age arrives, a whole new bunch of tough questions need answering. Why isn’t there such a thing as a ‘Mum Bod’? How did sex get boring? What are men really thinking? Where did all that stuff in the kitchen drawers come from? Can feminists have Botox? Why has wine turned against you? How can you tell the difference between a Teenage Micro-Breakdown, and The Real Thing? Has feminism gone too far? And, as always, WHO’S LOOKING AFTER THE CHILDREN?

Now with ageing parents, teenage daughters, a bigger bum and a To-Do list without end, Caitlin Moran is back with More Than A Woman: a guide to growing older, a manifesto for change, and a celebration of all those middle-aged women who keep the world turning.

Beyond Citizenship? Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging pushes debates about citizenship and feminist politics in new directions, challenging us to think 'beyond citizenship', and to engage in feminist re-theorizations of the experience and politics of belonging. Citizenship is a troubling proposition for feminism - promising inclusion yet always enacting exclusions. This book asks whether citizenship is a worthwhile object for feminist politics and scholarship, or whether we should find a different language to express our desires to belong, and alternative means to enact our yearnings for equality, justice and reciprocity. Grounded in feminist perspectives that emphasize the importance of affect, subjectivity, embodiment and the collective, it offers important new analyses of the state of citizenship and meanings of belonging in the contemporary globalizing world. This book is key reading for scholars and students of citizenship, social movements, and feminist and gender theory from a wide range of disciplines, including art practice, comparative literature, gender studies, philosophy, political theory, psychosocial studies, social policy, socio-legal studies, and sociology.

Feminist theory has grown into a vast field. Feminist writers, thinkers, and activists have produced an often bewildering body of knowledge concerned with difference and diversity, identity and inequality, ethnicity, race, and class, as well as gender. Despite its growing influence, however, no single comprehensive text encompasses the past, present, and future of feminist theory.

"Contemporary Feminist Theories" was inspired by a dissatisfaction with existing introductions, which often fail to fully track change and capture diversity within feminist thought. The volume draws on the expertise of a range of Western feminists in order to reflect the breadth of feminist theory as well as shifts within it. Each chapter maps the development of feminist thought in a particular area over time, and suggests future directions.

Reflecting the diversity of feminist theory in fields from literature and linguistics to science and politics, this multi-disciplinary map of feminist thinking is an ideal classroom text.

The contributors include Lisa Adkins, Vicki Bertram, Deborah Cameron, Elizabeth Frazer, Caroline Gonda, Penelope Harvey, Maggie Humm, Kadiatu Kanneh, Mary Maynard, Sara Mills, Jane Scoular, Sue Thornham, Sue Vice, and Patricia Waugh.

Marking the 100-year anniversary of women's suffrage, Leslie Hill provides a fascinating survey of the history of first wave feminism in British theatre, from the London premiere of Ibsen's A Doll's House in 1889 through the militant suffrage movement. Hill's approachable overview explores some of the pivotal ways in which theatre makers both engaged with and influenced feminist discourse on topics such as sexual agency, reproductive rights, marriage equality, financial independence and suffrage. Clear and concise, this is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Theatre and Performance Studies taking courses on Women in Theatre and Performance, Staging Feminism, Early Feminist Theatre, Theatre and Suffrage, Gender and Theatre, Political Theatre and Performance Historiography. This text will also appeal to scholars, lecturers, and Literature students.

This book examines contemporary relations between ethnic majority and ethnic minority women's movements in Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, and women's movements' participation in and influence on public policy that focuses on violence against women.

Grassroots Russian women's organizations faced multiple challenges in the early 1990s. Like their members, they were confronted with both potentially hostile attitudes and numerous practical difficulties. Post-Soviet ideologies of gender difference produced a gender climate which was particularly unsympathetic to female activism in support of other women. This book presents a detailed study of grassroots Russian women's organizations in 1991-96, against the background of a careful analysis of gender relations and attitudes to women's place in post-Soviet Russian society.

This book opens up a new field at the intersections of transnational, feminist, and media studies. The collection brings feminist theories to bear on the discourses of transnationality embedded in a range of recent films and video art from diverse locations in North Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Paying particular attention to new frontiers of migration, an increasing vigilance vis-a-vis the foreign, and the gendered and racialized representations of mobility, the book charts innovative feminist strategies for the interpretation of contemporary visual cultures. This ambitious volume will be an important guide for scholars and students interested in approaching global media cultures from transnational feminist perspectives

What are the political and aesthetic dimensions of video art, documentary, and global cinema in contemporary image culture? Here, Lynes makes visible how sites of political struggle, exploitation, and armed conflict can be theorized and interpreted through a feminist politics of location, attentive to the frictions and flows within transnational circuits of exchange. Prismatic Media, Transnational Circuits traces how formal modes of experimentation provide prismatic visions of sites of political struggle - multiple, mediated points of view - and thus open space for complex and emancipatory relations among cultural producers, activists, and viewers in a globalized present.

As the Victorian era drew to a close, American culture experienced a vast transformation. In many ways, the culture changed even more rapidly and profoundly for women. The "new woman," the "new freedom," and the "sexual revolution" all referred to women moving out of the Victorian home and into the public realm that men had long claimed as their own.

Modern middle-class women made a distinction between emotional styles that they considered Victorian and those they considered modern. They expected fulfillment in marriage, companionship, and career, and actively sought up-to-date versions of love and happiness, relieved that they lived in an age free from taboo and prudery.

Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of women from a wide range of backgrounds and geographic regions, this volume offers insights into middle-class women's experiences of American culture in this age of transition. It documents the ways in which that culture--including new technologies, advertising, and movies--shaped women's emotional lives and how these women appropriated the new messages and ideals. In addition, the authors describe the difficulties that women encountered when emotional experiences failed to match cultural expectations.

... cover[s] the effects of the life-cycle experiences of teenage pregnancy and childbearing, divorce, and years of widowhood on women's economic status and poverty rate (the feminization of poverty). . . . Ozawa finds a conflict between women's traditional nurturing and caring roles and the development of their earning capability. Interesting statistical tables and a selected bibliography. Choice Gender, like race and ethnicity, is an increasingly important factor in assessing social policy in the U.S. For those who want to understand the role of gender in the poverty problem today, Women's Life Cycle and Economic Insecurity provides a splendid collection of articles containing new knowledge and fresh insights. Sheila B. Kamerman Columbia University School of Social Work According to a global United Nations study, women perform 66 percent of all work, but receive only 10 percent of all income and own less than 1 percent in material assets. Although the economic status of American women has been somewhat higher than that of women globally, it is increasingly apparent that the United States is facing the emerging social problem of women's economic insecurity in the midst of growing affluence. In this timely study, ten experts methodically survey every vital aspect in the life of American women, from early sex-role socialization in the home to long-term elderly care, and examine their economic implications. Ozawa's introductory chapter provides a helpful overview of the subject; her concluding chapter summarizes recommendations for change and proposes steps necessary to the establishment of economic and social equality between the sexes. In Educational Preparation of American Women, Shirley M. Clark analyzes female socialization and discusses women in higher education: enrollment trends, degrees earned, and women faculty. James P. Smith's chapter investigates Women, Mothers, and Work and considers wage prospects. Other chapters explore teenage pregnancy: patterns, consequences, and prevention strategies; divorce and child support issues, the history and effects of inheritance, old age, and care of the elderly. The text is enhanced by twenty-five tables and eight figures that present vital statistical information, including labor force participation rates of various groups of women, data relating to children and their care, fertility, income, life expectancy, and health. Women's Life Cycle and Economic Insecurity presents a comprehensive assessment of the condition of women in the United States today. This groundbreaking study provides insights and statistics that will be especially useful for research in the areas of women's studies, sociology, economics, and American history.

Thousands of diverse museums, including art galleries and heritage sites, exist around the world today and they draw millions of people, audiences who come to view the exhibitions and artefacts and equally importantly, to learn from them about the world and themselves. This makes museums active public educators who imagine, visualise, represent and story the past and the present with the specific aim of creating knowledge. Problematically, the visuals and narratives used to inform visitors are never neutral. Feminist cultural and adult education studies have shown that all too frequently they include epistemologies of mastery that reify the histories and deeds of 'great men.' Despite pressures from feminist scholars and professionals, normative public museums continue to be rife with patriarchal ideologies that hide behind referential illusions of authority and impartiality to mask the many problematic ways gender is represented and interpreted, the values imbued in those representations and interpretations and their complicity in the cancellation of women's stories in favour of conventional masculine historical accounts that shore up male superiority, entitlement, privilege, and dominance. Feminist Critique and the Museum: Educating for a Critical Consciousness problematises museums as it illustrates ways they can be become pedagogical spaces of possibility. This edited volume showcases the imaginative social critique that can be found in feminist exhibitions, and the role that women's museums around the world are attempting to play in terms of transforming our understandings of women, gender, and the potential of museums to create inclusive narratives.

This work explores matrophobia - the fear not of one's mother or of motherhood but of becoming one's mother - in past and present white feminist analyses of motherhood and mothering. By tracing white second wave feminism's strategic choice to organize first as sisters then as daughters, O'Brien Hallstein argues matrophobia became embedded in past and continues to linger in contemporary feminist analyses. As a result, contemporary analyses reveal crucially important but limited understandings of contemporary motherhood and mothering. This important work concludes that matrophobia can be reduced and eliminated by reorienting analyses to mutual responsiveness between sisters and daughters, second and third wave feminists.

This collection brings together seventeen essays by well-known feminist scholars across the disciplines that make up Renaissance Studies. It forms an accessible introduction to the ways in which feminism has replaced the universal, abstract 'Renaissance Man' of traditional scholarship with strategies for the analysis of the conceptual work of gender in the formation of European modernity.

The epidemic of mass rape in the former Yugoslavia has illustrated once again, and in particularly brutal fashion, the inextricable relationship between national politics, sexual politics, and body politics. The nexus of these three forces is highly charged in any culture, at any time in history, but especially so among cultures in which rapid, even cataclysmic, changes in material realities and national self-conceptions are eroding or overwhelming previously secure boundaries.
The postcommunist moment in the so-called Second World--Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union--has dramatically exposed the opportunities and dangers that arise when the political, cultural, and economic foundations of a society are de- and then re-structured. Gender roles and relations, expressions of sexuality or attempts to recontain them, representations of the body, especially the female body, and the larger, cultural meanings it assumes, are particularly marked sites to witness the performance of complex national dramas of crisis and change.
This groundbreaking volume turns its attention to the Second World, specifically to such subjects as the birth of the sex media and porn industry in Russia; Russian women and alcoholism; cinema in post-communist Hungary; patriotism and gender in Poland; sexual dissidence in Eastern Europe; and women in the former Yugoslavia.

go to the Genders website ]

Across societies and throughout time, women have been traditionally classified as caregivers and relationship builders. However, as we enter the future, the roles of girls and women are changing. "Who Cares?" offers investigations from theoretical and empirical perspectives into the ever changing views about the responsibilities of women. Contributions from current, outstanding feminist theorists examine the view that the ethic of care is gender related. The contributors explore the arguments for and against the traditional view that the ethic of care is associated with girls and women and the ethic of justice with boys and men. "Who Cares?" presents the work of scholars from philosophy, theology, psychology, and education who critically examine the questions surrounding the ever changing roles of women.

The book begins with an historical discussion of caring as described by women philosophers of the past two millenia. Further chapters discuss the ethic of care; the gender relatedness of care; the political and psychological price of attributing care to women; the socialization experiences that shape and develop the caring response and the caring self; the relationship between care and rationality and between care and justice; the distinction between a theory of care based on the norms of society and moral philosophy; ethical framework of Black, Third World, and pink collar women. This book is a must for students, educators, researchers, and professionals in women's studies.

Classical Presences
Series Editors: Lorna Hardwick, Professor of Classical Studies, Open University, and James I. Porter, Professor of Greek, Latin, and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan
The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.
Laughing with Medusa explores a series of inter-linking questions, including: Does history's self-positioning as the successor of myth result in the exclusion of alternative narratives of the past? How does feminism exclude itself from certain historical discourses? Why has psychoanalysis placed myth at the center of its explorations of the modern subject? Why are the Muses feminine? Do the categories of myth and politics intersect or are they mutually exclusive? Does feminism's recourse to myth offer a script of resistance or commit it to an ineffective utopianism? Covering a wide range of subject areas including poetry, philosophy, science, history, and psychoanalysis as well as classics, this book engages with these questions from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. It includes a specially commissioned work of fiction, "Iphigeneia's Wedding," by the poet Elizabeth Cook.

Far from being a conservative writer endorsing women's domestic role, Agatha Christie's book depicts women as adventurous, independent women who renegotiate sexual relationships along more equal lines. Women are also allowed the dangerous competency to disrupt society and yet the texts refuse to see them as double deviant because of their femininity. This detailed textual analysis of her oeuvre demonstrates exactly how quietly innovatory Christie was in relation to gender, beginning in nineteen twenty and concluding in the early seventies.

In this major new book, Griselda Pollock engages boldly in the culture wars over `what is the canon?` and `what difference can feminism make?` Do we simply reject the all-male line-up and satisfy our need for ideal egos with an all women litany of artistic heroines? Or is the question a chance to resist the phallocentric binary and allow the ambiguities and complexities of desire - subjectivity and sexuality - to shape the readings of art that constantly displace the present gender demarcations?

Female anatomy, especially the womb, has for centuries been shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding, defining the social place of women in male dominated cultures. Even with advances in medicine, some in today's society believe they can control women's sexual identity.
The Wandering Womb is a provocative tour through religious, medical, and social histories, pinpointing humorous, outrageous, and hair-raising beliefs, practices, and longstanding falsehoods that permeate human cultures. In Egyptian times, it was believed that the womb was an entity unto itself capable of "wandering" in the body, and also into the world beyond in search of nourishment This idea, and many others were entwined in medical ignorance and religious superstition, which have often labeled women as incomplete, inferior, imperfect, and even inherently evil.
Sexual myths have viewed menstruation as dirty, designing outrageous rituals around this natural process, from strange diets and prescriptions to mandated isolation and violent practices. Sexuality and desire in women has been viewed as taboo and dangerous, while child rearing is considered the highest calling. In Western history, women's health problems were often written off simply as an "unsatisfied uterus," or "hysteria" of their weak and demon possessed bodies, while physical characteristics were used to label women as witches.
This fascinating, often maddening romp through the bedrooms and birthing rooms of time illustrates why women have been sexually "enslaved," and reminds us that we've come a long way from the mythical virgin birth to women's liberation and beyond.

'Hill's advice is straightforward and no-nonsense' - The Guardian 'A life-transforming book... fascinating - Daily Mail 'Maisie Hill has written a bloody brilliant book (pun intended). Everything you need to know about periods and how they affect you and your life is here. It's revolutionary' - Miranda Sawyer 'Thank GOODNESS for Maisie Hill! Flipping open the lid on a vital conversation. It's about time we claimed the power of our periods!' - Gemma Cairney, broadcaster & co-founder of Boom Shakalaka Productions 'This is such an important book. Maisie's insights and cycle strategy have changed my life and my cycle. Period Power is written with such intelligence, humour and a deep understanding of women's health. If you have a period you need to read this book.' - Anna Jones, author of The Modern Cook's Year A profound and practical blueprint for aligning daily life with your menstrual cycle. Period Power is the handbook to periods and hormones that will leave you wondering why the hell nobody told you this sooner. The hormones of the menstrual cycle profoundly influence our energy, mood and behaviour, but all too often we're taught that our hormones make us unreliable, moody bitches, or that it's our lot in life to put up with 'women's problems'. Maisie Hill, a women's health practitioner, knows the power of working with the menstrual cycle and refuses to accept this theory. Instead, Maisie believes that our hormones are there to serve us and, if utilized correctly, can be used to help you get what you want out of life. Yes, we are hormonal, and that's a very good thing. This revolutionary book reveals everything you need to know about taking control of your menstrual cycle and outlines The Cycle Strategy to help us perform at our best, throughout our cycle. In Period Power you will discover how to: - maximise your natural superpowers each month while making adjustments for the darker days, and use Maisie's favourite tips to improve them - identify your personal patterns, powers and pitfalls for each phase of the menstrual cycle - plan your month to perform at your best in all aspects of your life - figure out if you have a hormonal imbalance and what to do about it. Period Power is a no-nonsense guide with all the tools you need to improve your menstrual health.