Science and the Construction of Women is a multi-disciplinary exploration of the major questions currently challenging feminist scholars of science. The authors ask key questions: What constitutes science? How have feminists investigated it? How does science 'construct' women? How can we create a feminist discourse of science? Are the current developments to women's advantage or disadvantage? Their answers draw on material from a wide range of natural scientific, humanities and social science sources, critically examining theoretical approaches from the postmodern to the materialist to the cyborgian. A key argument of the book is that there are strong intellectual and pragmatic reasons - the rapid development of information technology, advances in fertility treatment and genetic engineering, feminist concern for environmental issues - why feminism must rigorously engage with issues of a scientific and technological nature. Science and the Construction of Women provides an important contribution to the opening-up and broadening of debate in the field. This book will be an important text for students of gender and women's studies, and science studies. It is also designed to be read by feminists both inside and outside the academy and to appeal to all those with interests in the sociology of knowledge and the history of ideas.

A systematic and original study of feminist issues, The Sceptical Feminist fights a battle on two fronts: against the view that little or nothing is wrong with women's position, and at the same time against much current feminist dogma. It is written by a philosopher who, in the tradition of John Stuart Mill's classic The Subjection of Women, avoids the psychological and sociological speculation characteristic of much recent feminism and concentrates on the analysis of arguments. By these means she constructs a powerful and often unexpected case for radical change in the position of women, as well as for a change of attitude among many feminists. From her analysis, Janet Radcliffe Richards argues that positive discrimination in favour of women is essential for justice, that traditional sexual roles never had anything to do with beliefs about each sex's capabilities, that current abortion practice reflects a disguised wish to punish women's sexual activity, that 'women's work' is rightly little valued, and that traditional ideals of femininity are inherently pernicious. But she also argues that a movement for sexual justice cannot 'take the woman's side in everything', that feminism should not be thought of as the primary struggle, that dismissing 'male' logic and science will undermine feminists' own intentions, that the state should not subsidise motherhood, that ever available creches would be disastrous for women, that there is no inherent degradation in prostitution, and that contempt for beauty and adornment has nothing to do with feminism. This is a book for feminists, for their critics, and for students of moral, political and social philosophy.

This study examines the leadership of three African-American women administrators in higher education, and how they have used their spirituality as a lens to lead in the academy. The central questions in this case study include: How do African-American women make meaning of their spiritual selves in their everyday leadership practices? How does their spirituality influence their work and the type of relationships they develop with others in the academy? What are the ways in which these three women have used their spirituality as a lens to lead, and how does this leadership impact the social, cultural and political construct of a male-dominated arena?

First published in 1984, this book made an important and timely contribution to the development of the idea that the law is a major source of women's oppression. Based on research of the theory and practice of family law, it examines the way in which private law operates to sustain, reproduce and reinforce the dependence of women in the most private of spheres, namely marriage. The author focuses on the point of break down or divorce, where the economic vulnerability of women caused by marriage and the sexual division of labour is most clearly expressed. She points to the way in which the law, while mitigating the worst excesses of men's power over women in marriage, has consistently failed to tackle the economic structure of marriage and women's fundamental material vulnerability inside the family. She confronts various myths on divorce legislation in Britain and discusses alternative feminist proposals for tackling the problems caused by women's economic dependence in marriage. Although Smart writes in 1984, many of the issues she discusses retain their significance in today's society.

Drawing from an interdisciplinary body of research and data, Women of Piracy employs a criminological lens to explore how women have been involved in, and impacted by, maritime piracy operations from the 16th century to present day piracy off the coast of Somalia. The book challenges and resists popular understandings of women as peripheral to the criminal enterprise of piracy by presenting and analyzing their roles and experiences as victims, perpetrators, and criminal justice actors, showing that women have been, and continue to be, central figures in maritime piracy. Unfolding in three parts, part one sets the context by providing readers with a history of the masculinization of the sea. Part two focuses on the gendered division of labor in piracy operations, discussing how and why the roles and responsibilities associated with this gendered labor have emerged, persisted, evolved, and/or ceased over time, as well as considering which roles and responsibilities appear to be context-specific and which seem to transgress geographical locations. Part three explores how women have (or have not) been brought to justice for their participation in crimes of piracy as well as the roles of women in efforts to combat piracy. The overarching objective is to ignite a broader discussion about the various cultural, social, historical, and economic forces that create opportunities for women to participate in maritime piracy and counter-piracy, why women continue to be invisible figures of piracy, and what implications this has for how we study, police, and bring pirates to justice. The first criminologically-grounded, global study exploring the continuity and evolution of women in maritime piracy, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, gender, feminist studies, international relations, anthropology, history, and political geography. It will also be useful to maritime and law enforcement professionals.

1) This book provides a comprehensive understanding of gender diversity on boards in China and India. 2) This presents a crucial data based comparative analysis of women on boards in these two countries. 3) The volume will be of interest to departments of gender studies, China studies, India studies and business management across UK and USA.

Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy is an interdisciplinary historical re-reading of a series of representative texts that complicate our current understanding of the portrayal of masculinity in the Italian fascist era. Examining paintings, films, music and literature in light of some of the ideological and material contradictions that animated the regime, it argues that fascist masculinity was itself highly contradictory. It brings to the fore works that have tended to be under-studied, and argues that, while fascist inclusive strategies of patronage worked to bind artists to the regime, an official policy of non-interference may inadvertently have opened up a space whereby the arts expressed a more complicated and contestatory view of masculinity than the one proffered by kitsch photos of a bare-chested Mussolini skiing.

Champagne seeks to evaluate how the aesthetic analysis of the artefacts explored offer a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of what world politics is, what is at stake when something like masculinity is rendered as being an element of world politics, and how such an understanding differs from more orthodox cultural analyses common to international relations.

Providing a significant contribution to understandings of representations of masculinities in modernist art, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of gender studies, queer studies, political science, Italian studies and art history.

Legislative and institutional affirmative and positive action policies, intended to increase accessibility and the participation of historically disadvantaged groups in employment and education, have been with us for some time, particularly in Anglo Saxon countries. One of the major issues they are intended to address is gender inequality. Proponents of these policies have hailed quota initiatives as a key to promoting equal opportunities and reducing discrimination. At the same time, affirmative action policies and processes have been challenged in courts and have caused controversy in educational establishments, highlighting the fact that these practices can have negative consequences. Exploring the application of quotas and affirmative action at an institutional or organizational level from a variety of different perspectives, the contributions in Diversity Quotas, Diverse Perspectives provide an understanding of the complexity and controversial nature of policies and actions in different countries. Even within Europe, implementation has varied widely from country to country. For example, while most European countries have employment quotas for people with disabilities, there is little consistency among the European Union's member states when it comes to quotas and other policies relating to ethnic minorities in employment and educational settings. Focussing here particularly on gender-related initiatives, but raising questions pertinent to other aspects of diversity, the contributions from international researchers investigate variances between and differing justifications for policies. The book offers a global perspective on the subject and expands the discussion of it beyond Anglo-Saxon contexts.

The First of Causes to Our Sex is a study of the first movement in the United States for social change by and for women. Female moral reform in the 1830s and '40s was a campaign to abolish sexual vice and the sexual double standard, and to promote sexual abstinence among the young as they entered the marriage market. The movement has earned a place in U.S. women's history, but most research has focused on it as an urban phenomenon, and sought its significance in relation to the cause of women's rights or to the regulation of prostitution. This study explores the appeal of moral reform to rural women, who were the vast majority of its constituency, and sees it as a response to seminal changes in family formation and family size in the context of an increasingly market-oriented and mobile society. It was led by Yankee women who were fired by Second Great Awakening revivals and supported by reformist clergy.

Routledge Library Editions: Feminist Theory brings together as one set, or individual volumes, a series of previously out-of-print classics from a variety of academic imprints. With titles ranging from The Liberation of Women to Feminists and State Welfare, from Married to the Job to Julia Kristeva, this set provides in one place a wealth of important reference sources from the diverse field of gender studies.

Sport, Masculinities and Sexualities examines the impact of decreasing cultural homophobia on both gay and straight male athletes. It suggests that the study of sport, masculinities and sexualities emerged during a time of extreme homophobia- the 1980. Cultural homophobia declined, however, throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennia. Consequently, this research argues that the way young men view homosexuality and masculinity has also changed, resulting not only in improved conditions for sexual minorities in sport, but it has also promoted a culture of softer, more tactile and emotional forms of heterosexual masculinities. The ten studies presented in this book reflect this shift in masculinities; highlighting the necessity of developing new ways of theorizing the changing dynamics between masculinities, sexualities and physical cultures in the next decade. This book is based on the original special issue published in the Journal of Homosexuality.

Covering the period from the beginning of the twentieth century to the outbreak of the First World War, this entertaining account describes the lives of women in all classes of society: the entertainments they watched, the clothes they wore, their education and the effect it had on women's magazines, the work they did and the rise of the 'office' as the Mecca for working women. The author also considers the changing attitudes to contraception and sex. This period, particularly its latter part, saw the rejection of old leaders and old habits. In politics, in the trade unions, and especially in the women's movement, the refusal of a so-called reforming government to accede to moderate demands resulted in the rise to power of militants. While primarily about Britain the book also studies women in Germany, France and the United States, offering a particularly revealing account of the stories of women, famous and not, with a lucid, readable outline of the society in which they lived and the social changes that affected their lives and to which they themselves contributed.

Since the publication of the Coleman report in the US many decades ago, it has been widely accepted that the evidence that schools are marginal in the grand scheme of academic achievement is conclusive. Despite this, educational policy across the world remains focused almost exclusively on schools. With contributions from such figures as Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Doris Entwistle and Richard Arum this book is an important contribution to a debate that has implications across the board in social sciences and policy-making. It will be required reading for students and academics within sociology, economics and education and should also find a place on the bookshelves of education policy-makers.

Since the 1970s, the literary and cultural politics of the turn-of-the-century New Woman have received increasing academic attention. Whether she is seen as the emblem of sexual anarchy, an agent of mediation between mass market and modernist cultures, or as a symptom of the consolidation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century political liberation movements, the New Woman represents a site of cultural and socio-political contestation and acts as a marker of modernity. This book explores the diversity of meanings ascribed to the New Woman in the context of cultural debates conducted within and across a wide range of national frameworks including the UK, Canada, North America, Europe, and Japan. The key concept of 'hybridities' is used to elucidate the national and ethnic multiplicity of the 'modern woman' as well as to locate this figure both within international consumer culture and within feminist writing. The book is structured around four key themes. 'Hybridities' examines the instabilities of New Woman identities and discourses in relation to both national/ethnic contexts and the textual parameters of New Woman writings. 'Through the (Periodical) Looking Glass' is concerned with the periodical press and its production and circulation of New Woman images. 'Feminist Counter Cultures?' interrogates feminist efforts to influence and shape this process by mimicking or subverting dominant models of representation and by establishing alternative spaces for the articulation of New Woman subjectivities. 'Race and the New Woman' inspects white New Women's investment in hegemonic racial discourses, looking at the way in which black and non-Western women inserted liberationist discourses into the New Woman debate. This book will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers of American Studies, Women's Studies, and Women's History.

In this ground-breaking Research Handbook, leading international researchers analyse how negotiators' gender shapes their behaviour and outcomes at the bargaining table, in both work and non-work contexts. World-class experts from the field of negotiation present cutting-edge research on gender and negotiation, highlighting controversies and generating new questions for consideration. The Research Handbook offers helpful insights to negotiators and forges a path for future research. The first section highlights how gender shapes negotiation within close relationships and identifies informal social rules for how women and men are expected to negotiate, exploring the socialization patterns and historical contexts that produced these norms and the implications for women at the bargaining table. Chapters discuss how underlying negotiation processes such as trust, emotion, communication and non-verbal behaviour are shaped by gender, as well as considering a number of pragmatic solutions to the obstacles women face as self-advocates. Offering insights for both practitioners and researchers, this Research Handbook will be invaluable to teachers and, also, female professionals who want to understand how to get better outcomes from negotiation. It will also be required reading for HR professionals who wish to understand how and why organizational policies regarding negotiation can level the playing field. Contributors include: E.T. Amanatullah, J.B. Bear, L. Berg, J.E. Bochantin, H.R. Bowles, T.H. Burns, A. Dickson, A.L. Elias, K.R. Gallagher, B.A. Gazdag, M.P. Haselhuhn, H. Jazaieri, J.A. Kennedy, S. Kesebir, D. Kolb, L.J. Kray, C.T. Kulik, S.Y. Lee, M. Liu, B.A. Livingston, S. Mor, M. Olekalns, J. Overbeck, M. Pillutla, T.L. Pittinsky, J. Qiu, L. Ramic-Mesihovic, I.Y. Ren, S.W. Ryu, A. Sabanovic, Z. Semnani-Azad, W. Shan, R. Sinha, A.F. Stuhlmacher, N.R. Toosi, C. Trombini, J. Wareham, L. Zervos

Sexuality is arguably the most under-researched of all diversity areas in work organizations. This book brings together and relates stories of minority sexual identity from six organizations drawn from three different industry sectors: the Emergency Services, the Civil Service and the Banking sector. Here sexual minorities freely recount stories of their own workplace experiences. Three main themes emerge from the data: silence, disclosure and response. Issues of voice and silence are particularly pertinent for those who are not part of the dominant heterosexual discourse; issues of disclosure are highly important for sexual minorities for whom coming out is a major defining moment; and, highly unusually, in this book readers get an insight into how people respond to sexual minorities, as other employees' reactions to stories are related too. This book makes a significant contribution to our understanding discursive construction of identity in the workplace, as experienced by sexual minorities and provides a snapshot of minority working lives at the beginning of the 21st century. This is an extremely well written, highly innovative, timely and engaging book which as well as human resources management, it will also be of interest to scholars in other areas such as sociology and general business and management.

How do women writers use science fiction to challenge assumptions about the genre and its representations of women? To what extent is the increasing number of women writing science fiction reformulating the expectations of readers and critics? What has been the effect of this phenomenon upon the academic establishment and the publishing industry? These are just some of the questions addressed by this collection of original essays by women writers, readers and critics of the genre. But the undoubted existence of a recent surge of women's interest in science fiction is by no means the full story. From Mary Shelley onwards, women writers have played a central role in the shaping and reshaping of this genre, irrespective of its undeniably patriarchal image. Through a combination of essays on the work of writers such as Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin, with others on still-neglected writers such as Katherine Burdekin and C. L. Moore and a wealth of contemporaries including Suzette Elgin, Gwyneth Jones, Maureen Duffy and Josephine Saxton, this anthology takes a step towards redressing the balance. Perhaps, above all, what this collection demonstrates is that science fiction remains as particularly well-suited to the exploration of woman as 'alien' or 'other' in our culture today, as it was with the publication of Frankenstein in 1818.

This collection of new feminist essays represents the work of young critics researching and teaching in British Universities. Aiming to set the agenda for feminist criticism in the nineties, the essays debate themes crucial to the development of feminist thought: among them, the problems of gendered knowledge and the implications of accounts of gendered language, cultural restraints on the representation of sexuality, women's agency, cultural and political change, a feminist aesthetics and new readings of race and class. This variety is given coherence by a unity of aim - to forge new feminist discourses by addressing conceptual and cultural questions central to problems of gender and sexual difference. The topics of discussion range from matrilinear thought to seventeenth-century prophecy; the poetry of Amelia Lanyer to Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs; from Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf to eighteenth-century colonial painting of the South Pacific; from medieval romance to feminist epistemology. The essays utilise and question the disciplines of literary criticism, art history, photography, psychoanalysis, Marxist history and post-structuralist theory.

This collection of essays, both feminist and historical, analyzes power relations between men and women in the Victorian period. This volume is the first to reshape Victorian studies from the perspective of the postmodern return to history, and is variously influenced by Marxism, sociology, anthropology, and post-structuralist theories of language and subjectivity. It analyzes the struggle for legitimacy and recognition in Victorian institutions and the struggle over meanings in ideological representation of the gendered subject in texts. Contributors cover diverse topics, including Victorian ideologies of motherhood, the male gaze, the cult of the male child genius in narrative painting, the press, and Victorian women and the French Revolution, discussing both well-known and less familiar Victorian texts.

Jane Gallop's book offers a clear-eyed and comprehensive history of feminist literary criticism. Why, she asks, have we so quickly buried 1970s feminist criticism? What lies buried there? Why do 1990s academic feminists accuse other academic feminists of being 'academic'? Gallop takes the novel approach of structuring her inquiry around anthologies of feminist criticism: twelve important texts that have had a wide impact on more than a decade of scholarship. In reading an anthology as a whole, she typically identifies a central, hegemonic voice (usually that of the editor/s) which would organise all the voices into a unity, and then explores the resistance within that volume to such a unity. Weight is placed behind these internal differences as a wedge against the centrist drive. Around 1981 addresses briefly 'french feminism' and psychoanalytic feminism before focusing on its principal subject: the mainstream of feminist literary criticism, before and after its general acceptance as part of the changing institution of literary studies. This brilliantly illuminates the dilemma of the feminist critic, divided by her allegiance to both feminism and literary studies.

Recent years have witnessed important new initiatives in the study of popular fictional modes of writing. At one time the field could have been described with reasonable accuracy by two traditions: one that analyzed the production and distribution of popular fiction as commodities; and one whose proponents regarded popular fiction as the negative which offered definition to the exposure of the positive - the 'great' canonic literary tradition. Generally, then, popular fictions were to be 'evaluated' according to the institutionalized norms which had been established as common sense practice around literary studies. The decade of the 1970s, however ushered in a bewildering range of theoretical debates - a crucial gain was establishment of interdisciplinary courses in communication, cultural and media studies, providing a network of contexts within which serious analysis could evolve and progress. Responding to a fundamental challenge from feminism, a primary objective of this book is to propose that all narrative and its reading are intrinsically inflected by sexual politics. Various approaches represented here demonstrate problems of confronting the gendered pleasures of reading. Questions about self, sexuality and identity within specific historical formations are raised. The objective is to frame, describe and unearth the notion of 'men as readers' as a project rather than as the usual, unquestioned normative procedure. Drawing eclectically upon Marxist, psychoanalytic and discourse theory, the essays set out readings of popular texts and genres - the Western, the sentimental novel, detective and crime fiction, political thrillers and horror and science fiction - in the interest of provoking other readers to see the critical study of popular fiction as unthinkable without gender as a central concern.

Over the past several years, the question of men's relation to feminism has become a fiercely and sometimes bitterly debated subject. Engendering Men demonstrates the creative impact that feminist modes of inquiry have already had on a new generation of male critics. In the wake of feminism, many men have found it imperative to begin the task of retheorizing the male position in our culture. This collection of new essays brings together seventeen male critics whose work - on poetry, fiction, the Broadway stage, film and television, and broader cultural and psychoanalytic texts - is opening up new avenues in criticism, as well as in gender and feminist theory.

Focusing on the ways in which female novelists have, in their creative work, challenged or scrutinised contemporary assumptions about their own sex, this book's critical interest in women's fiction shows how mid-nineteenth-century women writers confront the conflict between the pressures of matrimonial ideologies and the often more attractive alternative of single or professional life. In arguing that the tensions and dualities of their work represent the honest confrontation of their own ambivalence rather than attempted conformity to convention, it calls for a fresh look at patterns of imaginative representation in Victorian women's literature. Making extensive use of letters and non-fiction, this study relates the opinions expressed there to the themes and methods of the fictional narratives. The first chapter outlines the social and ideological framework within which the authors were writing; the subsequent five chapters deal with the individual novelists, Craik, Charlotte Bronte, Sewell, Gaskell, and Eliot, examining the works of each and also pointing to the similarities between them, thus suggesting a shared female 'voice'. Dealing with minor writers as well as better-known figures, it opens up new areas of critical investigation, claiming not only that many nineteenth-century female novelists have been undeservedly neglected but also that the major ones are further illuminated by being considered alongside their less familiar contemporaries.

Until about 1986, feminists generally considered modernism a reactionary, misogynist, and hegemonic mire not worth investigating. Since then enough studies of modernism have appeared that 17 feminist critics can now review and debate their treatment of the period. They evaluate the progress and goals of the new era of modernist scholarship. As the authors in this volume suggest, instead of condemning writers for not practicing or portraying an acceptable politics of gender, we ought instead to show how their assumptions about the nature of the sexes inform their texts, both in their creation and in their reception. This also allows examination of the complex and changing relationship between human subjectivity and aesthetics. This volume is a highly reflective dialogue, introspective and evaluative, at a moment of crisis within modernist studies and feminist studies. The analysis of critical work on early-twentieth-century literature not only helps reread and redefine a definition of modernism; it also intends to redirect and reintegrate feminist theory.