In the last decades, women's role in the workforce has dramatically changed, though gender inequality persists and for women, gender identity still prevails over work identity. It is important not to forget or diminish the historical role of women in the labour market though and this book proposes a critical overview of the most recent historical research on women's roles in economic urban activities. Covering a wide area of early modern Europe, from Portugal to Poland and from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, Bellavitis presents an overview of the economic rights of women - property, inheritance, management of their wealth, access to the guilds, access to education - and assesses the evolution of female work in different urban contexts.

As Islamic states struggle to modernize and, in some cases, democratize, the issue of women's rights continues to elicit strong feelings and controversy and there are many paradoxes surrounding the idea of Islamic Feminism. Why are conservative Islamists winning elections? Why are educated and professional Muslim women still choosing to wear the veil? Many of the populist revolutions we are witnessing in the Middle East focus on the legitimate grievances of marginalized groups and populations. This book highlights the voices of cultural elites in the oil-rich State of Kuwait, where we have been witness to a modern suffrage movement since when women were given their political rights in 2005. The result is a new brand of feminism, one born out of a traditional and culturally conservative climate, which gives Islamic Feminists in Kuwait the edge they need to soar to new heights.

Transnational Borderlands: The Making of Cultural Resistance in Women's Global Networks investigates the implications of transnational feminist methodologies at multiple levels: collective actions, theory, pedagogy, discursive, and visual productions. It addresses a substantial gap in the field of transnational feminisms; namely, the absence of a voice that links social and theoretical outcomes to the politics of representation in literature, visual art, discourses of rights and citizenships, and pedagogy. The book encompasses three categories of relevance to contemporary transnational methodologies: the politics of cultural representation in literature and visual art, the de-centering of human/women's rights, and pedagogies of crossing and dissent. Given current interest in the cultures of globalization and the role women and other minorities play in them, we expect this book will appeal to scholars in the fields of Women's and Gender Studies, Borderlands Studies, Transnational Studies, and to anyone interested in how transnational processes shape a culture of resistance in women's global networks.

From the NPR host of The Indicator and correspondent for Planet Money comes an "accessible, funny, clear-eyed, and practical" (Sarah Knight, New York Times bestselling author) guide for how women can apply the principles of 16th-century philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli to their work lives and finally shatter the glass ceiling--perfect for fans of Feminist Fight Club, Lean In, and Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office. Women have been making strides towards equality for decades, or so we're often told. They've been increasingly entering male-dominated areas of the workforce and consistently surpassing their male peers in grades, university attendance, and degrees. They've recently stormed the political arena with a vengeance. But despite all of this, the payoff is--quite literally--not there: the gender pay gap has held steady at about 20% since 2000. And the number of female CEOs for Fortune 500 companies has actually been declining. So why, in the age of #MeToo and #TimesUp, is the glass ceiling still holding strong? And how can we shatter it for once and for all? Stacy Vanek Smith's advice: ask Machiavelli "with this delicious look at what we have to gain by examining our relationship to power" (Sally Helgesen, New York Times bestselling author). Using The Prince as a guide and with charm and wit, Smith applies Renaissance politics to the 21st century, and demonstrates how women can take and maintain power in careers where they have long been cast as second-best. "Machiavelli For Women is the ultimate battle guide for our times. Brimming with hard-boiled strategies, laced with wit, it's a must-read for every woman ready to wield power unapologetically" (Claire Shipman, coauthor of The Confidence Code).

If the first part of the title hints at a sensual book written by a young female scholar attempting to make 'male'-stream philosophy sexy again, the second evokes the repetitious feminist claim that women are the victims of an oppressive patriarchal structure. However, this book is neither a feminist manifesto nor a cleverly marketed erotic novel lacking in substance. Its aim is both more ambitious and provocative. Drawing on the ambiguous meaning of the notion of vulnerability, the book offers an innovative approach to the topic of the female body in relation to women's rights; going beyond the age-old dichotomy of casting women as either passive victims or conscious agents. Thanks to a profound confrontation with the works of Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero on the concept of vulnerability, the book offers also a unique insight into the different feminist 'schools' to which these philosophers belong.

"Twine and Blee break new ground with case studies of international, feminist, and antiracist struggles"
-- "Feminist Collections"

aThe editors have done an admirable job of drawing together works of diversely positioned authors, each of whom approach the topic of feminism and antiracism from their own unique personal and disciplinary standpoint.a
--Anne Wagner, Dept of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, University of Toronto

"Focuses on what is happening in the "streets," in feminist, antiracist social movements around the globe."
-- "Signs"

A collection of international scholars and activists answer the questionshow does gender and region/nation play a defining role in how feminists engage in anti-racist practices? How has the restructuring in the world economy affected anti-racist organizing? How do Third World Feminists counter the perception that feminism is a "Western" ideology and how effective are their methods? What opportunities does globalization bring for cross-cultural organizing?

From essays on the race and gender issues in organizing exotic dancers to resistance art in Africa and the U.S., this timely and necessary anthology will be sure to spark debate and controversy.

Contributors: Angela Davis, Kathleen Blee, France Winddance Twine, Heater Merrill, Veronica Magar, Siobhan Brooks, Delores Walters, Michelle Rosenthal, Ellen Kaye Scott, andrea breen, Yoshiko Nozaki, Sohera Syeda, Becky Thompson, Paola Bacchetta, Carolyn Martin Shaw, Eileen O'Brien and Michael Armato, Jane Freedman, Cathleen Armstead, Ashwini Deshpande, and Minelle Mahtani.

The eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's reputation for writing in apparent inconsistencies and paradoxes is well deserved. He confronts the reader with ironies of all sorts. In this engaging new work, Penny A. Weiss wrestles with issues of gender in the works of Rousseau. She addresses the apparent male/female role contradictions that run through many of his works and attempts to resolve them by placing them within the context of themes and principles that provide the framework for his political philosophy. Rousseau advocated separate family roles for men and women as a way of encouraging them to become more effective social and political beings. His advocacy of sexual differentiation has often been criticized as antifeminist. In Emile, for example, Rousseau argues that women engaged in activities outside the home will become neglectful of their domestic duties. Penny A. Weiss maintains that Rousseau's antifeminist convictions arise not out of any belief that biology determines different family roles for men and women or that the traditional nuclear family is naturally better than other types of families. Rather, he believes that sexual differentiation forces individuals to look beyond themselves for certain functions and to become more interdependent, social beings. Some have argued that rigidly defined roles for men and women have the effect of making both sexes incomplete. Such incompleteness is, however, precisely what Rousseau seeks since it helps people to overcome a natural egoism and selfishness and prepares them to be effective participants in the political order. It is tempting to attribute Rousseau's remarks on the sexes to the times in which hewrote or to his personal idiosyncratic preferences, so starkly do they seem to conflict with his principled commitments to freedom and equality. Weiss examines the debates about Rousseau's concepts of gender, justice, freedom, community, and equality, making a significant contribution to feminist theory. In recovering the connection between Rousseau's sexual politics and his political theory, Weiss advances a new, more complete picture of Rousseau's work. She convinces us that Rousseau's political strategy is ultimately unworkable, undermining, as it does, the very community it is meant to establish. Addressing important contemporary questions regarding families, citizens, and communities, Gendered Community also reveals the variety and complexity of antifeminist writing.

This book is a thought-provoking study that expands on film scholarship on noir and feminist scholarship on postfeminism, subjectivity, and representation to provide an inclusive, sophisticated, and up-to-date analysis of the femme fatale , fille fatale , and homme fatal from the classic era through to recent postmillennial neo-noir .

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Read the Introduction.

Romantic love has challenged and vexed feminist thought from its origins. Judging from the shelves of books advising women on love problems, there seems to be an ongoing difficulty in maintaining equality in romantic relationships. Does romance weaken or empower women? Why do women seem overwhelmingly attracted to romantic love in spite of raised consciousness in other areas of life that is a legacy of feminism? Have women always been seen as the sex which most seeks love and is best suited for love?

These are some of the questions Women and Romance: A Reader seeks to address in bringing together a collection of texts specifically focused on the subject of women's conflicted but powerful urge to experience the pleasure and endure the pain of romantic love. The first anthology of its kind, Women and Romance includes historical as well as contemporary selections, personal letters as well as theoretical essays, and social science perspectives as well as literary criticism of the novel and the popular mass-market romance. Wiesser lays out in systematic order for the first time the varying viewpoints and conflicted history of feminist views on romance, from Mary Wollstonecraft and Emma Goldman to Germaine Greer and Lillian Faderman.

Introductions to each entry and section clarify the emerging themes of each era and of separate disciplines, while representing the views of traditionalists and anti-romance second-wave feminists alike.

Contributors include: Charlotte Bronte, Barbara Bross, Eliza Southgate Bowne, Rita Mae Brown, Andreas Capellanus, Patricia Hill Collins, Simone de Beauvoir, Christine Delphy, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Lillian Faderman, Shulamith Firestone, Moderata Fonte, Mary Gaitskill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, Vivian Gornick, Germaine Greer, Lynne Harne, bell hooks, Karen Horney, Carolyn Heilbrun, Audre Lorde, Tania Modleski, Gloria Naylor, Mary Poovey, Janice Radway, William Robinson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jane Rule, Barbara Ryan, Ann Snitow, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gloria Steinem, Mary Wollstonecraft, Victoria Woodhull, Virginia Woolf.

This anthology hopes to contribute, in particular, to the analysis of the mutually constitutive interaction of the use of cyberspace and Asian cultures, with particular attention to ethical, feminist, and religious perspectives especially within Catholic Christianity.

Feminist Time Against Nation Time offers a series of essays that explore the complex and oftentimes contradictory relationship between feminism and nationalism through a problematization of temporality. Although there has been much recent discussion in the U.S. of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the "War on Terror" as signaling a new period of "permanent war," feminist voices have not been at all prominent in this discussion. This collection considers not only the ways in which public spaces for dissent are limited, but also the ways in which the time for such dissent is cut short. Feminist Time Against Nation Time combines philosophical examinations of "Women's Time" by Julia Kristeva and "The Time of Thought" by Elizabeth Grosz, with essays offering case studies of particular events, including Kelly Oliver's essay on the media coverage of the U.S. wars on terror and in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Betty Joseph's on the anti-colonial uses of "women's time" in the creation of nineteenth-century Indian nationalism. Feminist Time Against Nation Time juxtaposes feminist time against nation time in order to consider temporalities that are at once contrary to, but also drawing toward each other. Yet Hesford and Diedrich also argue that because, as an untimely project, feminism necessarily operates in a different temporality from that of the nation, against-ness is also used to provoke a rupture, a momentary opening up of a disjuncture between the two that will allow us to explore the possibilities of creating a space and time for feminists to think against the current of the present moment.

In Nice White Ladies, race and gender professor Jessie Daniels looks beyond the "Karens" and the pussy hats, to offer an illuminating look at how white women participate in, benefit from, and--crucially--can combat racism. Chapter by chapter, Daniels looks at the most urgent examples of how white womanhood has been weaponized today, and then dives deeper into the history and the false narratives behind these events. She examines specific figures including Amy Cooper and the Central Park birdwatcher, and Linda Fairstein and the Central Park Five, but also looks at larger social shifts and the role white women have had in deepening existing inequalities. Seemingly empowering movements for white women have also harmed people of color, from a feminism that had pushed the voices of Brown and Black women aside, to an entire wellness industry that insulates white women in bubble of their own privilege. White women are often unwilling to examine the fact that their day to day choices, including selecting only the best schools and neighborhoods for their children, results in a hoarding of resources for white families and a return to segregation. In a nation deeply divided by race, Jessie Daniels boldly addresses white women's complicity in discrimination but also in their unique potential to resist and dismantle the white nationalism that threatens us all. The stakes are deeply personal for Daniels, as a white woman seeking to call in fellow white women, with an invitation to think together and act-rather than simply call out and criticize. By excavating her own life for examples of failing, learning, evolving, and changing course, Daniels provides a roadmap for other white women looking to make much needed change. Ultimately, she shows how white women can be more than allies, but trusted accomplices in a shared mission to secure equality for all.

This comprehensive and sophisticated feminist analysis contradicts the negative evaluations of earlier feminist critics to define Oates' feminist accomplishments. Wesley presents Oates' fiction as a dynamic structure that grew out of her obsessive concern with the American family and shows her literary patterns of resistance to the gender ideology that shapes it. She illustrates how Oates' disturbing portrayals of troubled families can and do address complex issues of power in contemporary society--economic dislocation, gender inequity, and violence--as they are experienced in intimate relationships. The author defines and exemplifies the central concepts of family, power, and resistance in Oates' work with reference to her own literary criticism and the theoretical principles of Frederic Jameson. She begins by examining the presentation of the mother and the father in Oates' earliest works and then charts mother and daughter, brother and sister, and other family relationships. Wesley contends that the power dynamics of Oates' families relegate daughters to a position of impotence and sons to one of isolation and shows that the evolution of the children's refusal to identify themselves with their male or female models is a major focus in Oates' fiction.

The question of the representation of women in the media has been an important one for feminists over the past three decades. This diverse collection of essays represents three major trends in feminist media studies: the liberal feminist perspective, which focuses on the media's tendency to misrepresent and oppress women; the postmodern perspective, which illustrates the ways in which women can participate in, enjoy, and sometimes subvert the dominant media; and the more recent attempts to identify and challenge the subtle backlash that threatens to obliterate feminist gains. The contributors cover a wide range of subjects, from advertisements for women's stockings to the life and death of Princess Diana.

This collection of essays systematically explores how a sample of political groupings not founded on suffrage reacted and accommodated the issue of suffrage within their official discourses and structures. The volume leads to the heart and core of suffragism while examining the dynamics and versatilities of the Edwardian political fabric.

This collection of portraits of women at the Cape brings to life some extraordinary personalities from the early day of the settlement. Cape Town was a wild “frontier town”, attracting the most desperate, hopeful and intrepid adventurers from the Old World – who both clashed and mingled with the local people. Women had to have extraordinary strength of character to survive at the Cape, facing war, wild animals, slavery, and the stern laws and punishments of the powerful VOC. But women also found opportunity at the Cape: vastly outnumbered by men, they were in great demand – many went through several husbands, as their menfolk succumbed to lion attacks, Khoekhoe assegais or ill health. Although historical background is given, what makes this book different is that it focuses on individual personalities and life stories. These portraits are what make A Tapestry of Women Lives sparkle and distinguish it from more conventional historical texts. We meet familiar figures such as the Khoekhoe Krotoa and her mistress, Maria de Queilleirie, as well as lesser-known characters: Maria Mouton, who had an affair with her slave and suffered terrible punishment; the shadow Nicola Six, the power behind Simon van der Stel's throne; the remarkable slave Angela of Bengal, who escaped the hell of slavery and entered in Society, and intrepid Anna Rodolphus, who disguised herself as a soldier to find love and adventure at the Cape. The approximately 40 women and girls profiled in the book come frome every walk of life – the original Khoekhoe and Bushman inhabitants, the bourgeois governors' wives; the peasant farmers, inn-keepers and prostitutes of the rough port city; and the slave women who were brought to the Cape from the East and other parts of Africa. Filled with detail and painstakingly researched, the book ranges from the Governor's drawing room to the sordid Slave Lodge, from hunter-gathering to stoking beacon fires on Robben Island and wine-farming in the Stellenbosch valley. An added attraction for many readers will be the fun of discovering one's forebears mentioned in the text – the women featured here, slave, settler and Khoekhoe, are the stammoeders of very well-known South African families. Almost any South African reader will find some familiar name in the many mentioned. Illustrated, this is a fascinating contribution to popular South African history: an intimate, personalised women's account of the first permanent settlement in the country.

Visibility matters in contemporary societies; online, in the media and in the public eye. But who is seen and how? Are women still seen through a male gaze? This book explores the politics of looking and being looked at, and the relationship between actual and virtual worlds, for example in sport, art and cinema.

Going beyond the hype of recent fMRI "findings," this interdisciplinary collection examines such questions as: Do women and men have significantly different brains? Do women empathize, while men systematize? Is there a "feminine" ethics? What does brain research on intersex conditions tell us about sex and gender?

For over half a century, the countless organizations and initiatives that comprise the Women's Liberation movement have helped to reshape many aspects of Western societies, from public institutions and cultural production to body politics and subsequent activist movements. This collection represents the first systematic investigation of WLM's cumulative impacts and achievements within the West. Here, specialists on movements in Europe systematically investigate outcomes in different countries in the light of a reflective social movement theory, comparing them both implicitly and explicitly to developments in other parts of the world.

Jin Young Choi rereads discipleship in the Gospel of Mark from a postcolonial feminist perspective, developing an Asian and Asian American hermeneutics of phronesis. Colonized subjects perceive Jesus' body as phantasmic. Discipleship means embodying the mystery of this body while engaging with invisible, placeless and voiceless others.

"Notions of Identity, Diaspora, and Gender in Caribbean Women's Writing" uses a unique four-dimensional lens to frame questions of diaspora and gender in the writings of women from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti. These divergent and interconnected perspectives include violence, trauma, resistance, and expanded notions of Caribbean identity. In these writings, diaspora represents both a wound created by slavery and Indian indenture and the discursive praxis of defining new identities and cultural possibilities. These framings of identity provide inclusive and complex readings of transcultural Caribbean diasporas, especially in terms of gender and minority cultures.

There is presently an immense scholarly interest in Latin American female literary production, specifically on the subject of the body. Latin American publications on weight and eating disorders abound, especially in the fields of psychology and sociology. However, there are only a few articles addressing these themes in the fictional work of Latin American women authors. What Is Eating Latin American Women Writers fills a theoretical void because it speaks to an ever-growing interest in Latin American literature about women, food, and the body. This study not only traces for the first time the historical development of the topics of food, eating consumption, and body image but also features well-known authors and others who are yet to be discovered in United States. The book contributes to the ongoing critical dialogue about women and food by offering an analysis of food, weight, and eating disorders in Latin American and Latina literary production. It demonstrates that since the 1990s, authors have been expanding the subject of food by exploring its connection to the social and cultural pressures associated with the postmodern obsession with the thin body. The texts in What Is Eating Latin American Women Writers are examined with an interdisciplinary critical approach that considers cultural, sociological, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories. It takes into consideration the specificity of Latin American cultures and it combines Latin American theories with those brought forth by North American and European critics in an effort to account more accurately for the idiosyncratic manifestations presently occurring in Latin American writings.

Far too often, Black women's anger has been caricatured into an ugly and destructive force that threatens the civility and social fabric of American democracy. But Cooper shows us that there is more to the story than that. Black women's eloquent rage is what makes Serena Williams such a powerful tennis player. It's what makes Beyonce's girl power anthems resonate so hard. It's what makes Michelle Obama an icon. Eloquent rage keeps us all honest and accountable. It reminds women that they don't have to settle for less. When Cooper learned of her grandmother's eloquent rage about love, sex, and marriage in an epic and hilarious front-porch confrontation, her life was changed. And it took another intervention, this time staged by one of her homegirls, to turn Cooper into the fierce feminist she is today. This book argues that ultimately feminism, friendship, and faith in one's own superpowers are all we really need to turn things right side up again.