In the Image of God: A Feminist Commentary on the Torah is a unique blend of traditional Judaism and radical feminism and is a groundbreaking commentary on the Bible, the central document of Jewish life. Using classical Jewish sources as well as supplementary material from history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, ancient religion, and feminist theory, Judith Antonelli has examined in detail every woman and every issue pertaining to women in the Torah, parshah by parshah. The Torah is divided into fifty-four portions; each portion, or parshah, is read in the synagogue on the Sabbath (combining a few to make a yearly cycle of readings). This book is modeled on that structure; hence there are fifty chapters, each of which corresponds to a parshah. One may, therefore, read this book from beginning to end or use it as a study guide for the parshah of the week. The reader will discover in these pages that the Torah is not the root of misogyny, sexism, or male supremacy. Rather, by looking at the Torah in the context in which it was given, the pagan world of the ancient Near East, it becomes clear that far from oppressing women, the Torah actually improved the status of women as it existed in the surrounding societies. Not only does this book refute the common feminist stereotype that Judaism is a 'patriarchal religion' but it also refutes the sexism found in Judaism by exposing it as sociological rather than 'divine law.'

This new socio-historical study explores the dynamics of growing up female in the second half of the nineteenth century--a time when traditional patriarchal standards were beginning to be questioned by small groups of courageous reformers. Donnelly chronicles the lives of middle class and working women--white and black--from childhood to old age, the hardships they endured, their daily activities and their concerns, pleasures, and accomplishments.

In the last five years, the feminist movement has seen a radical upswell of energy and activism. We have been inspired by #LeanIn, we have found solidarity in #MeToo. We've pushed one another to be stronger and try harder. Caroline Criado-Perez's landmark book of feminist inspiration introduces us to the pioneers who motivated us to do it like a woman, including a female fighter pilot in Afghanistan; a Chilean revolutionary; the Russian punks who rocked out against Putin; and the Iranian journalist who dared to uncover her hair. This is a brilliant, necessary manifesto for women everywhere.

Family stories of the ties between mothers and daughters form the foundation of Mothers and Daughters: Complicated Connections Across Cultures. Nationally and internationally known feminist scholars frame, analyze, and explore mother-daughter bonds in this collection of essays. Cultures from around the world are mined for insights which reveal historical, generational, ethnic, political, religious, and social class differences. This book focuses on the tenacity of the connection between mothers and daughters, impediments to a strong connection, and practices of good communication. Mothers and Daughters will interest those studying communication, women s studies, psychology, sociology, anthropology, counseling, and cultural studies.

In the midst of political agitation and increased public visibility, late Victorian feminists turned to writing novels as a means of furthering their political cause without alienating readers. Subversive Discourse reevaluates this culturally significant literature that has long been considered sub-literary. An engaging investigation into the specific circumstances surrounding the production of late Victorian feminist novels, Subversive Discourse delves into the politics and ideologies feminist novels addressed and challenged. This study also considers how aesthetic ideologies served to contain and negate progressive literary agendas such as that of the feminists. Kranidis argues that the Realists appropriated feminist literary and social accomplishments and hence challenges the notion that the Realists were pro-feminist. The author outlines the character of late Victorian feminism, reactionary opposition to it, and the narrative and textual strategies devised by feminists to ensure their texts' publication in a conservative literary marketplace.

Reinforce the relationship between healthy bodies and healthy relationships in families!
Feminist Perspectives in Medical Family Therapy explores the groundbreaking collaboration of therapy and medicine to form a biopsychosocial approach to health care. In this book, feminists from several fields of study offer their ideas, research, and personal experiences to show how gender, culture, and other diversity issues affect medical treatment. This invaluable tool provides tips and suggestions for interdisciplinary medical teams working with patients' bodies, minds, spirits, and relationships simultaneously.
Medical family therapy is a relatively new specialty, and this book demonstrates its advantages and opportunities with an easy-to-understand, applicable approach. Clinicians, researchers, trainers, and students in medicine, social work, family therapy, psychology, and others can use Feminist Perspectives in Medical Family Therapy to examine more closely the medical issues that are most relevant to women and families. In this unique resource, you'll learn about: how both biological factors and environment create gender differences--and how they apply to women with depression how the issues of power and gender influence the experiences of male and female medical family therapists incorporating feminist principles in family medicine education the benefits of collaborative care to both physicians and patients in a family medicine setting using couples therapy in cases of vulvar vestibulitis syndrome how a woman's diagnosis of cancer affects the family system Feminist Perspectives in Medical Family Therapy offers a variety of viewpoints from patients and providers, using hard data, interviews, practicum models, case examples, and reflections on personal experiences.

Olive Schreiner and The Progress of Feminism explores two key areas: the debates taking place in England during the last two decades of the 19th century about the position of women and the volatile events of the 1890s in South Africa, which culminated in war between the British empire and the Boer republics in 1899. Through a detailed reading of fictional and non-fictional writing of one extraordinary woman, Olive Schreiner, the book traces the complex relations between gender and empire in a modern world.

From Menarche to Menopause: The Female Body in Feminist Therapy examines the latest research on the menstrual cycle and women's reproductive health. This timely volume focuses on women in therapy who are disconnected fromor even repelled bytheir own bodies due to cultural attitudes, abuse, trauma, or the natural aging process. Experts in the fields of psychology and women's health unite to celebrate the physical life stages of women and girls and to offer practical advice for therapists to use when addressing negativity caused by appearance, age, menstrual symptoms, or reproductive concerns. In this book, you will gain new understanding about the effects on a woman's mental health that transitional life stages can cause, from preadolescence through the childbearing years to menopause. The suggestions in From Menarche to Menopause can help women resist the bombardment of negative messages and misleading information they receive about their bodies and their reproductive concerns. This helpful resource can also assist you in opening new lines of communication between mothers and daughter, women and men, and women and other women. From Menarche to Menopause discusses how to handle topics such as: self-loathing caused by media and cultural messages that affect women's acceptance of their bodies overcoming a daughter's reluctance to discuss sensitive topics of bodily maturation, menstruation, and emerging sexual development helping women, men, and couples cope with infertility assisting women in overcoming a disappointing birth experience providing therapeutic care to women and couples who experience perinatal loss addressing perimenopause in midlife women and the concerns, negative attitudes, and uncertainty of this transition This unique book fills the gap in feminist therapy literature with practical advice concerning the functions of women's bodies that can be used within the therapy context. From Menarche to Menopause includes extensive references and several book reviews to further your research and provide reading and other resources you can recommend to your clients. This practical resource on women's reproductive healthas it relates to mental healthis an important addition to the bookshelves of feminist psychologists, clinical practitioners, social workers, and health practitioners as well as faculty and students of these disciplines.

Goddess characters are revered as feminist heroes in the popular media of many cultures. However, these goddess characters often prove to be less promising and more regressive than most people initially perceive. Goddesses in film, television, and fiction project worldviews and messages that reflect mostly patriarchal culture (included essentialized gender assumptions), in contrast to the feminist, empowering levels many fans and critics observe. Building on critiques of other skeptical scholars, this feminist, folkloristic approach deepens how our remythologizing of the ancient past reflects a contemporary worldview and rhetoric. Structures of contemporary goddess myths often fit typical extremes as either vilified, destructive, dark, and chaotic (typical in film or television); or romanticized, positive, even utopian (typical in women's speculative fiction). This goddess spectrum persistently essentializes gender, stereotyping women as emotional, intuitive, sexual, motherly beings (good or bad), precluded from complex potential and fuller natures. Within apparent good-over-evil, pop-culture narrative frames, these goddesses all suffer significantly. However, a few recent intersectional writers, like N. K. Jemisin, breakthrough these dark reflections of contemporary power dynamics to offer complex characters who evince "hopepunk." They resist typical simplified, reductionist absolutes to offer messages that resonate with potential for today's world. Mythic narratives featuring goddesses often do, but need not, serve merely as ideological mirrors of our culture's still problematically reductionist approach to women and all humanity.

Interweaving phenomenological, hermeneutical, and sociopolitical analyses, this book considers the ways in which feminists conceptualize and produce the temporalities of feminism, including the time of the trace, narrative time, calendar time, and generational time.

This study discusses the contribution of individual men to the emancipation of women between 1850 and 1920. These include the pioneer of feminism, J.S. Mill, the allies of Josephine Butler, the men who risked imprisonment for making available information on contraception, and sympathetic writers such as Meredith and Shaw. There are also chapters on the suffrage movement, education, religion, medicine and entry to other professions. The role of men in the removal of women's social disabilities is described as well as Gandhi's innovative involvement of women in the independence movement.

Where is feminist state theory today? This book offers novel insights into social science debates by analyzing feminist theories of the state. It argues that we need feminist tools for analyzing states and focuses on two debates, domestic violence and childcare, as areas where feminists discursively construct the state. These themes are developed within a comparative perspective. Focusing on devolution in Scotland and the European Union, the book further explores how feminist state theories conceive multi-level governance.

Playing Hard at Life brings contemporary relational thinking to bear on the psychodynamic treatment of a notably difficult group of young patients. Working with New York City teenagers who have survived the wars of inner-city life and Israeli teenage soldiers who have survived the wars of the Middle East, author Etty Cohen documents the extraordinary challenges of forming a treatment alliance with these shattered youngsters, of engaging them psychodynamically, and of working toward a viable termination. The result is not only a poignant record of courage and committment (on the part of patient and therapist alike), but also a valuable extension of modern trauma theory to adolescence as a developmental stage with its own challenges and requirements.
The heart and strength of Cohen's book is her vivid documentation of hands-on encounters with her adolescent patients, seen both individually and in group. Cohen makes plain that, with young people so horrendously traumatized, treatment assures a necessarily improvisational character. And yet, she argues, even in the type of pragmatic encounters dictated by massive and repeated trauma, contemporary relational theory provides a compass with which to navigate through the rocky shoals of the clinical work.

Again and again, the reader is shocked by just how much happened to these adolescents, astonished at how resilient they proved to be, and, finally, moved by how much Cohen was able to accomplish with them. Her relational approaches to these treatments, teamed with her realization that work with multiply traumatized adolescents cannot be structured in the manner of conventioanl therapy, makes this book an invaluable, timely, and deeply sobering contribution to the literature.

What should public prosecutors do when victims withdraw support for domestic violence prosecutions? The answer to this question that motivates the investigation undertaken in this book defends the claim that (other things being equal) domestic violence prosecutors should respond as feminists.
This claim is intended as a provocative formulation of the proposition that domestic violence prosecutors should act for reasons generated by the value of reconstituting communities as less patriarchal.
This thesis is defended first by developing a general theory of prosecutorial practical reasoning, and then by considering the prosecution of domestic violence offences in particular. Along the way, this book provides an original account of the nature of prosecutorial action, the values that can be realized through such action, and the relationship between these values and the practical reasoning of criminal prosecutors.
Moreover, it provides original analyses of two key concepts, domestic violence and patriarchy, and explains the relevance of the latter to a proper understanding of the former.
These insights are put to work in answering the motivating question stated above, and provide answers both in terms of what prosecutors would be justified in doing, and what prosecutors should do in order to be effective.

Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives brings together some of the leading modern religious responses to major French feminist writings on religion. It considers central figures such as Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Catherine Clément, and its focus on questions of divinity, subjectivity and ethics provides an accessible introduction to an area of growing philosophical interest.
Ilustrating the ways in which French feminism has become a valuable tool in feminist efforts to rethink religion, and responding to its promise as an intellectual resource for religious philosophy in the future, Religion in French Feminist Thought is ideal both for independent use and as a companion book to French Feminism on Religion: A Reader (Routledge, 2001).

This set reproduces seminal writings by three exceptional nineteenth-century women. Georgina Weldon, Louisa Lowe and Susan Willis Fletcher were certified as insane by the Victorian medical establishment and were threatened with incarceration for their eccentric and transgressive behaviour. All three were remarkably resourceful and very successfully manipulated the sensationalist press to expose the 'lunacy laws' to the late-Victorian public. In doing this, they contributed to the emerging feminist critique of medicine and science. Each volume is devoted to the work of one of these exceptional women.
New introductions by the editors and the late Roy Porter provide context and discussion of the pieces included, pointing to the themes and issues that they raise. With an extensive index, this collection provides an invaluable resource for those studying the role of feminism in the history of medicine and the power of the medical profession in the Victorian era.

The Commonwealth Novel since 1960 is the first survey of the new English literatures for over a decade. There are essays, by an international body of writers and critics. There are also comparative essays on indigenous novelists, post modernism, feminist novelists, the novel as national epic and regionalism in the post modern era. Bruce King's introduction discusses changes in the Commonwealth novel and its contexts over recent decades and the causes for the new popularity of post-colonial literature among readers and critics.

In the first book-length treatment of the application of feminist theories of international law, Charlesworth and Chinkin argue that the absence of women in the development of international law has produced a narrow and inadequate jurisprudence that has legitimated the unequal position of women worldwide rather than confronting it. The boundaries of international law provides a feminist perspective on the structure, processes and substance of international law, shedding new light on treaty law, the concept of statehood and the right of self-determination, the role of international institutions and the law of human rights. Concluding with a consideration of whether the inclusion of women in the jurisdiction of international war crimes tribunals represents a significant shift in the boundaries of international law, the book encourages a dramatic rethinking of the discipline of international law. With a new introduction that reflects on the profound changes in international law since the book's first publication in 2000, this provocative volume is essential reading for scholars, practitioners and students alike. -- .

International film has received some of its most original impulses from German filmmakers. However, the works by women directors in German-speaking countries have been largely ignored in spite of the important social, political and historical issues they have raised. This volume is part of a work which considers the broad spectrum of German cinema through the category of gender and to present feminist interventions in the current lively discussion of German film and film criticism. From Lubitsch's The Doll (1919) to von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg (1985), films are drawn from a number of historical periods and both female and male directors. From a variety of feminist approaches, contributors analyze cinematic techniques, narrative discourse, production, reception and the politics of representation.

The international feminist contributors to this book look through the lens of poststructuralism at how child sexual abuse is differently represented and understood in the populist, academic, clinical, media and legal contexts. Reworking earlier feminist analyses, they show how child sexual abuse is not just about gender and power but also about class, race and sexuality. The first, theoretical section of the book critiques normative theories of the 'effects' of abuse, explores the impact and consequences of feminist interventions and critically examines the potential usefulness of a feminist post-stucturalist approach. In the second part, these understandings are applied to specific arenas of practice with the aim of providing a framework for critical intervention and alternative and better ways of working with child sexual abuse.

This book brings together a collection of essays by Western scholars about women in the era of Stalin. It explores both the realities of women's experience in the 1930s and 1940s, and the various forms in which womanhood and feminity were represented and constructed in these decades. This book challenges the scholarly neglect which women's history has suffered at the hands and pens of Russian and Western historians of the Stalin period.

One of the most innovative examples of the use of fantastic forms in recent feminist fiction is the work of East German author Irmtraud Morgner. Little-known outside German-speaking countries, her unique blend of fantastic realism testifies both to the subversive nature of a literature of fantasy and the transgressive power of a feminist writing practice. This book looks at the way Morgner uses fantasy both as a form of feminist critique of the history of partiarchy and as an anticipatory device to test the viability of feminist alternatives.