America's founding mothers and fathers built gender bias into American politics. This book examines traditional prejudices against women's political participation as well as efforts to overcome these prejudices during a revolutionary era. It inquires into the shifting male hierarchies that kept some men out of politics, admitted others to a limited citizenship, and privileged a few men with leadership authority. It also assesses the impact of the founders' gender bias on modern American politics. The gendering of American poltics began as a compromise between traditional patriarchal ideals that subordinated all women to male authority and revolutionary norms that recognized women's capacity for independence, reason, and patriotism. That compromise was manifested in the doctrine of "republican womanhood" which perpetuated women's exclusion from citizenship but afforded women sufficient educational opportunity and family influence to raise citizens and educate statesmen for the new republic. The gendering of American politics was concluded by a second compromise. The founders often expressed a desire to exclude disorderly men from public life and empower a few heroic men to exercise great leadership powers, but they generally settled for granting weak citizenship to most white family men and supporting elite government by accomplished gentleman legislators.

This interdisciplinary collection is concerned with important theoretical and methodological issues facing women's studies. Drawing on feminist theory and politics it addresses a range of questions raised for women's studies by work conducted in history, literature, politics and sociology. The editors provide a context for these debates in their introductory essay which gives an overview of the development of women's studies and reflects on its current position. In their concluding chapter they also suggest a framework from which women's studies might move forward.

The essays in this book examines such topics as the autobiographical basis of Nadine Gordimer's fiction, her relationship to feminism, the place of the white woman in black Africa, the ambiguity of revolutionary politics, her ambivalent relationship to Judaism, her use of irony, the symbolism of landscape, and the ways in which she has revised recurring topics throughout her career as a writer. There are essays on "The Conservationist", "Burger's Daughter", "July's People", "A Sport of Nature" and "My Son's Story" and the later short fiction. The editor provides an introduction to the reasons why Gordimer's work has changed so radically.

Simone de Beauvoir made her own distinctive contribution to existentialism in the form of an ethics which diverged sharply from that of Jean-Paul Sartre. In her novels and philosophical essays of the 1940s she produced not just a recognizably existentialist ethics, but also a character ethics and an ethics for violence. These concerns, stemming from her own personal philosophical background, give a vital, contemporary resonance to her work. De Beauvoir's feminist classic The Second Sex reflects her earlier philosophical interests, and is considerably strengthened by this influence. This book defends her existentialist feminism against the many reproaches which have been levelled against it over several decades, not least the criticism that it is steeped in Sartrean masculinism.

Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel: Erotic "Victorians" focuses on the work of British, Irish, and Commonwealth women writers such as A.S. Byatt, Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters, Helen Humphreys, Margaret Atwood, and Ahdaf Soueif, among others, and their attempts to re-envision the erotic. Kathleen Renk argues that women writers of the neo-Victorian novel are far more philosophical in their approach to representing the erotic than male writers and draw more heavily on Victorian conventions that would proscribe the graphic depiction of sexual acts, thus leaving more to the reader's imagination. This book addresses the following questions: Why are women writers drawn to the neo-Victorian genre and what does this reveal about the state of contemporary feminism? How do classical and contemporary forms of the erotic play into the ways in which women writers address the Victorian "woman question"? How exactly is the erotic used to underscore women's creative potential?

In this provocative new book, France's leading feminist theorist launches a broadside against the way in which feminism has evolved since the 1990s. After the victories of the previous decades, during which women had made some real advances in social and political life, a new sensibility began to emerge in the 1990s which led to a reversal in the hierarchy of values. The cult of victimhood has become widespread and has affected feminism. Women are viewed as defenceless and oppressed, social violence and sexual violence are treated as the same and a finger is pointed at the guilty one: man in all his guises. But by conflating real and false victims, feminism runs the risk of misunderstanding the battles that need to be waged and of losing all credibility with the younger generation, which doesn't see things see things this way. Preoccupied by putting men on trial, the feminism of the last few years has reactivated old stereotypes and left behind the very battles that have long been its raison d'etre - this, argues Badinter, is a dead end.

A huge bestseller in France, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the changing relations between the sexes and our ways of thinking about sex and gender today.

ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The Nordic countries are regarded as frontrunners in promoting equality, yet women's experiences on the ground are in many ways at odds with this rhetoric. Putting the spotlight on the lived experiences of women working in tech-driven research and innovation areas in the Nordic countries, this volume explores why, despite numerous programmes, women continue to constitute a minority in these sectors. Contributors flesh out the differences and similarities across different Nordic countries and explore how the shifts in labour market conditions have impacted on women in research and innovation. This is an invaluable contribution to global debates around the mechanisms that maintain gendered structures in research and innovation, from academia to biotechnology and IT.

Anti-porn feminism is back. Countering the ongoing 'pornification' of Western culture and society, with lads' mags on the middle shelf and lap-dancing clubs in residential areas, anti-porn movements are re-emerging among a new generation of feminist activists worldwide. This essential new guide to the problems with porn starts with a history of modern pro and anti political stances before examining the ways in which the new arguments and campaigns around pornography are articulated, deployed and received. Drawing on original ethnographic research, it provides an in-depth analysis of the groups campaigning against the pornography industry today, as well as some eye-opening facts about the damage porn can do to women and society as a whole. This unique and inspiring book explains the powerful comeback of anti-porn feminism, and it controversially challenges liberal perspectives and the mainstreaming of a porn culture that threatens to change the very nature of our intimate relationships.

"The idea of feminism being everywhere and nowhere is a perfect description of the contemporary movement. Jo Reger provides badly needed new data on a movement that is still very much alive. By looking at three contemporary communities of feminists, Reger shows how feminism is practiced and shaped within different political and cultural contexts. This book is an extremely welcome addition to the literature on contemporary feminism. "-Suzanne Staggenborg, Professor of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh "Contesting multiple myths circulating in popular culture, Everywhere and Nowhere documents the nuances and diverse contexts of feminism in the contemporary era. Exploring the factors that contribute to its flourishing and the manifold forms feminism takes, Jo Reger paints a rich portrait of vibrant modes of activism that transform identities, communities, and cultural values."-Mary Hawkesworth, Professor, Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University Challenging the idea that feminism in the United States is dead or in decline, Everywhere and Nowhere examines the contours of contemporary feminism. Through a nuanced investigation of three feminist communities, Jo Reger shows how contemporary feminists react to the local environment currently shaping their identities, tactics, discourse, and relations with other feminist generations. By moving the analysis to the community level, Reger illustrates how feminism is simultaneously absent from the national, popular culture-"nowhere"-and diffused into the foundations of American culture-"everywhere." Reger addresses some of the most debated topics concerning feminists in the twenty-first century. How do contemporary feminists think of the second-wave generation? Has contemporary feminism succeeded in addressing racism and classism, and created a more inclusive movement? How are contemporary feminists dealing with their legacy of gender, sex, and sexuality in a world of fluid identity and queer politics? The answers, she finds, vary by community. Everywhere and Nowhere offers a clear, empirical analysis of the state of contemporary feminism while also revealing the fascinating and increasingly complex development of community-level feminist groups in the United States.

The Metaphysics of Gender is a book about gender essentialism: What it is and why it might be true. It opens with the question: What is gender essentialism? The first chapter distinguishes between essentialism about kinds of individuals (e.g. women and men as groups) and essentialism about individuals (e.g. you and me). Successive
chapters introduce the ingredients for a theory of gender essentialism about individuals, called uniessentialism. Gender uniessentialism claims that a social individual's gender is uniessential to that individual. It is modeled on Aristotle's essentialism in which the form or essence of an individual is the principle of unity of that individual. For example, the form or essence of an artifact, like a house, is what unifies the material parts of the house into a new individual (over and above a sum of parts). Since an individual's gender is a social role (or set of social norms), the kind of unity in question is not the unity of material parts, as it is in the artifact example. Instead, the central claim of gender uniessentialism is that an individual's gender provides that individual with a principle of normative unity-a principle that orders and organizes all of that individual's other social roles. An important ingredient in gender uniessentialism concerns exactly which individuals are at issue-human organisms, persons, or social individuals? The Metaphysics of Gender argues that a social individual's gender is uniessential to it. Gender uniessentialism expresses the centrality of gender in our lived experiences and explores the social normativity of gender in a way that is useful for feminist theory and politics.

This book is about understanding feminist theories and feminist economics through a multi-paradigmatic approach. For this purpose, the book starts with a discussion of four most diverse worldviews or paradigms (i.e., functionalist, interpretive, radical humanist, radical structuralist). Then, it discusses six relevant social aspects (i.e., human nature, feminist theories, family, patriarchy, discrimination, feminist economics) from the viewpoints of the four most diverse worldviews or paradigms. Next, the book looks at some of the writings in the feminist theories and feminist economics literature (such as: feminist research, feminist education, economics versus sociology, and men versus women) from the point of view of the multi-paradigmatic approach to gain a better understanding of the differences. The book concludes by recommending paradigm diversity. This book crosses two existing lines of literature: social philosophy and feminism. The book maintains that social theory can usefully be conceived in terms of four broad paradigms: functionalist, interpretive, radical humanist, and radical structuralist. The book emphasizes that the four paradigms are equally scientific and informative; each looks at a given phenomenon from a certain paradigmatic viewpoint. An understanding of different paradigms leads to a broader and balanced understanding of the phenomenon. Overall, the book advocates paradigm diversity.

Women and other oppressed and deprived people sometimes collude with the forces that perpetuate injustice against them. Women's acceptance of their lesser claim on household resources like food, their positive attitudes toward clitoridectemy and infibulations, their acquiescence to violence at the hands of their husbands, and their sometimes fatalistic attitudes toward their own poverty or suffering are all examples of "adaptive preferences," wherein women participate in their own deprivation.
Adaptive Preferences and Women's Empowerment offers a definition of adaptive preference and a moral framework for responding to adaptive preferences in development practice. Khader defines adaptive preferences as deficits in the capacity to lead a flourishing human life that are causally related to deprivation and argues that public institutions should conduct deliberative interventions to transform the adaptive preferences of deprived people. She insists that people with adaptive preferences can experience value distortion, but she explains how this fact does not undermine those people's claim to participate in designing development interventions that determine the course of their lives. Khader claims that adaptive preference identification requires a commitment to moral universalism, but this commitment need not be incompatible with a respect for culturally variant conceptions of the good. She illustrates her arguments with examples from real-world development practice.
Khader's deliberative perfectionist approach moves us beyond apparent impasses in the debates about internalized oppression and autonomous agency, relativism and universalism, and feminism and multiculturalism.

Following Francoise d'Eaubonne's creation of the term "ecofeminism" in 1974, scholars around the world have explored ways that the degradation of the environment and the subjugation of women are linked. In the nearly three decades since the publication of the classical work Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva in 1993, several collections have appeared that apply ecofeminism to literary criticism, also known as feminist ecocriticism. The most recent of these include anthologies that emphasize international perspectives, furthering the comparative task launched by Mies and Shiva. To date, however, there have been no books devoted to gaining a broad-based understanding of feminist ecocriticism in India, understood in its own terms. Our new volume Indian Feminist Ecocriticism offers a survey of literature as seen through an ecofeminist lens by Indian scholars, which places contemporary literary analysis through a sampling of its diverse languages and in the context of millennia-old mythic traditions of India.

From Adelaide in "Guys and Dolls" to Nina in "In the Heights" and Elphaba in "Wicked," female characters in Broadway musicals have belted and crooned their way into the American psyche. In this lively book, Stacy Wolf illuminates the women of American musical theatre - performers, creators, and characters -- from the start of the cold war to the present day, creating a new, feminist history of the genre. Moving from decade to decade, Wolf first highlights the assumptions that circulated about gender and sexuality at the time. She then looks at the leading musicals to stress the key aspects of the plays as they relate to women, and often finds overlooked moments of empowerment for female audience members. The musicals discussed here are among the most beloved in the canon--"West Side Story," "Cabaret," "A Chorus Line," "Phantom of the Opera," and many others--with special emphasis on the blockbuster "Wicked." Along the way, Wolf demonstrates how the musical since the mid-1940s has actually been dominated by women--women onstage, women in the wings, and women offstage as spectators and fans.

The searing, must-read feminist essay from the author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing 'Fearless ... A fierce and fascinating manifesto in McBride's persuasive prose' Sinead Gleeson 'Formidable' Vogue In this galvanizing essay, Eimear McBride unpicks the contradictory forces of disgust and objectification that control and shame women. From playground taunts of 'only sluts do it' but 'virgins are frigid', to ladette culture, and the arrival of 'ironic' porn, via Debbie Harry, the Kardashians and the Catholic church - she looks at how this prejudicial messaging has played out in the past, and still surrounds us today. McBride asks - are women still damned if we do, damned if we don't? How can we give our daughters (and sons) the unbounded futures we want for them? And, in this moment of global crisis, might our gift for juggling contradiction help us to find a way forward? 'A satisfying feminist polemic' Susie Orbach 'Remarkable' Scotsman 'Eimear McBride is that old fashioned thing, a genius' Guardian

The angel of the house is a critical commonplace in studies of the 19th-century woman. Through readings of Victorian gothic and sensation fiction, this book interrogates current feminist assumptions about the relation of women to the private sphere, and reveals the unexpectedly radical potential of this association. It is argued that this potential is an intrinsic aspect of the female gothic tradition traceable back to Ann Radcliffe. A new typology of male and female gothic is shown to be relevant to contemporary French feminist debates about sexual difference.

In recent years, feminist and queer theory have effectively disavowed both the human and revolutionary politics. In the face of massive geopolitical crisis, posthumanists have called for us to reconsider fundamentally the superiority and centrality of mankind and the human, and question how Man can presume to change the world by revolutionary action, particularly when Marx s dreams seem to have been swept into the dustbin of history. This provocative book reaffirms what is most basic in feminism the attack on the universality and sovereignty of Man but contends that the only way this can mean anything other than pessimistic rhetoric is to embrace human agency and the struggle against colonialism and capitalism. In a series of creolized readings Foucault with Ali Shari ati, Lacan with Fanon, and Spinoza with Sylvia Wynter the authors demonstrate what is at stake in the ongoing debate between humanism and posthumanism, putting this debate in the context of contemporary global crises and the possibilities of revolution. In its defense of political spirituality, this book pushes for a new trajectory in response to the gross inequalities of today, one that offers us a very different view of revolution and its present-day potential.

The rise and spread of feminism should be at the center of the world historical narrative, but feminism is often treated as a sub-heading. For specific cultural reasons, feminism grew out of democratic ideals right after the Protestant Reformation and developed into the most powerful force currently shaping the world. Traditional "Western-Civ." narratives often connect the Protestant Reformation to the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment to the development of participatory governments. However, given that democratic ideals also produced feminism, maybe it is time to recognize that the most impressive outcome of the Declaration of Independence was not that it produced an American Revolution and a Constitution, but that it inspired the genius of Mary Wollstonecraft. It is true that democratic ideals created both the American Congress and feminism, but which is more important? Femocracy: How Educators can Teach Democratic Ideals and Feminism is an indispensable work for teachers of history, sociology, and women's studies.

Despite the vast difference between first and third world societies, the subordination of women to men seems to be a universal fact. Originally published in 1984, the chapters in this book look specifically at the marital bond/contract, and locate the subordination of women in terms of that contract. Others examine the development and expansion of market relations and show how that affects marital relations, husbands' control over wives, men's over women.

This book explores the capacities and desires of academic women to reimagine and transform academic cultures. Embracing and championing feminist scholarship, the research presented by the authors in this collection holds space for a different way of being in academia and shifts the conversation toward a future that is hopeful, kind and inclusive. Through exploring lived experiences, building caring communities and enacting an ethics of care, the authors are reimagining the academy's focus and purpose. The autoethnographic and arts-based research approaches employed throughout the book provide evocative conceptual content, which responds to the symbolic nature of transformation in the academy. This innovative volume will be of interest and value to feminist scholars, as well as those interested in disrupting and rejecting patriarchal academic structures.