Music and the Commedia dell'Arte narrates the story of the most famous commedia dell'arte troupe of the late Renaissance, focusing in particular on the representation of women on stage and on the role of music-making in their craft. It provides a rich context for the study of musical-theatrical performance before the advent of opera and re-defines our perceptions of women, music and theatre in the Renaissance.

What is 'fun' about the Hollywood version of girlhood? Through re-evaluating notions of pleasure and fun, The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film forms a study of Hollywood girl teen films between 2000-2010. By tracing the aesthetic connections between films such as Mean Girls (Waters, 2004), Hairspray (Shankman, 2007), and Easy A (Gluck, 2010), the book articulates the specific types of pleasure these films offer as a means to understand how Hollywood creates gendered ideas of fun. Rather than condemn these films as 'guilty pleasures' this book sets out to understand how they are designed to create experiences that feel as though they express desires, memories, or fantasies that girls supposedly share in common. Providing a practical model for a new approach to cinematic pleasures The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film proposes that these films offer a limited version of girlhood that feels like potential and promise but is restricted within prescribed parameters.

"Deviant and Useful Citizens" explores the conditions of women and perceptions of the female body in the eighteenth century throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru, which until 1776 comprised modern-day Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Mariselle Melendez introduces the reader to a female rebel, Micaela Bastidas, whose brutal punishment became a particularly harsh example of state response to women who challenged the system. She explores the cultural representation of women depicted as economically productive and vital to the health of the culture at large. The role of women in religious orders provides still another window into the vital need to sustain the image of women as loyal and devout -- and to deal with women who refused to comply.

The book focuses on the different ways male authorities, as well as female subjects, conceived the female body as deeply connected to notions of what constituted a useful or deviant citizen within the Viceroyalty. Using eighteenth-century legal documents, illustrated chronicles, religious texts, and newspapers, Mariselle Melendez explores in depth the representation of the female body in periods of political, economic, and religious crisis to determine how it was conceived within certain contexts.

"Deviant and Useful Citizens" presents a highly complex society that relied on representations of utility and productivity to understand the female body, as it reveals the surprisingly large stake that colonial authorities had in defining the status of women during a crucial time in South American history.

In Colonial America, the lives of white immigrant, black slave, and American Indian women intersected. Economic, religious, social, and political forces all combined to induce and promote European colonization and the growth of slavery and the slave trade during this period. This volume provides the essential overview of American women's lives in the seventeenth century, as the dominant European settlers established their patriarchy. Women were essential to the existence of a new patriarchal society, most importantly because they were necessary for its reproduction. In addition to their roles as wives and mothers, Colonial women took care of the house and household by cooking, preserving food, sewing, spinning, tending gardens, taking care of sick or injured members of the household, and many other tasks. Students and general readers will learn about women's roles in the family, women and the law, women and immigration, women's work, women and religion, women and war, and women and education, literature, and recreation. The narrative chapters in this volume focus on women, particularly white women, within the eastern region of the current United States, the site of the first colonies. Chapter 1 discusses women's roles within the family and household and how women's experiences in the various colonies differed. Chapter 2 considers women and the law and roles in courts and as victims of crime. Chapter 3 looks at women and immigration--those who came with families or as servants or slaves. Women's work is the subject of Chapter 4. The focus is work within the home, preparing food, sewing, taking care of children, and making household goods, or as businesswomen or midwives. Women andreligion are discussed in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 examines women's role in war. Women's education is one focus of Chapter 7. Few Colonial women could read but most women did receive an education in the arts of housewifery. Chapter 7 also looks at women's contributions to literature and their leisure time. Few women were free to pursue literary endeavors, but many expressed their creativity through handiwork. A chronology, selected bibliography, and historical illustrations accompany the text.

Russian women of the nineteenth century are often thought of in their literary incarnations as the heroines of novels such as Anna Karenina and War and Peace. But their real-life counterparts are now becoming better understood as active contributors to Russia's varied cultural landscape. This collection of essays examines the lives of women across Russia - from wealthy noblewomen in St Petersburg to desperately poor peasants in Siberia - discussing their interaction with the Church and the law, and their rich contribution to music, art, literature and theatre. It shows how women struggled for greater autonomy and, both individually and collectively, developed a dynamic but often overlooked presence in Russia's culture and society during the long nineteenth century (1800-1917). Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia provides invaluable reading for anyone interested in Russian history, nineteenth-century culture and gender studies.

This collection of essays examines the relationship of women of color's armed resistance to their aesthetic struggles, tension and transformation in feminist practice, and the impact of the gender-based design of state-sponsored terror, human rights debates, and the economic development for women of color. Athey brings together new scholarship testing the possibility of transnational feminist action and theorizing historical and contemporary aspects of resistance for women of color. Included are essays by and about women of Africa, India, and the Americas, including women of African American, Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Yaqui origins. Essays examine regional and historical contexts to demonstrate the central role of women of color in armed resistance struggle and in sustaining cultures of resistance, despite the fact that the agency, speech, and writing of women of color have received the least attention in studies of resistance. Contributors challenge thinking across many disciplines: sociology, literary and cultural studies, history, political science, and education. Resistance struggles examined include women in armed struggle for national self-determination, political and economic struggle for human rights and against state-sponsored repression; and women sustaining political and cultural resistance against specific religious, feminist, or nationalist doctrines, and against the repression of multiple forms of political, sexual, intellectual, and artistic expression.

Few would argue that war has been a defining experience for people born in Europe and North America in the twentieth century. The degree to which war has been instrumental in improving women's social situation remains a vexed question, however. Conventional wisdom repeats the cliche that the Great War liberated women by allowing them to demonstrate their fitness for equality by recruiting them to work in men's jobs previously considered beyond their capabilities. In fact, their patriotic enthusiasm was used against them after the war, when they were seen to have profited from the deaths of the men they replaced. As Europe prepared for the Second World War, this resentment of women's perceived war-profiteering helped to smooth their transition from sacred, protected icon to target.

In "Beyond The Home Front," Yvonne M. Klein provides selections from autobiographical writing by women in the two World Wars that illustrate the richness and complexity of women's war-time lives. Although women generally did not take up arms, this collection reminds us that their war stories are neither peripheral nor secondary to the battle stories of men. This volume helps to reclaim women's experience of war as part of the universal experience of the twentieth century, different from that of men, but not as different as might be thought.

Bringing together more than forty selections from the two wars, "Beyond the Home Front" includes the work, much of it long out of print, of a wide array of voices including Sylvia Pankhurst, Vera Brittain, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Lee Settle, Mary Borden, Gertrude Stein, and Joy Kogawa. The volume, which will appeal to the general reader as well as to the student of history and literature, includes contextual introductions as well as brief biographies of each of the writers.

In the quiet Balti villages, high in the Karakoram Mountains of North Pakistan, life goes on. The women live peacefully as they prepare for the seasonal harvest and take in views of the breathtaking high mountains and pastures. Deeply rooted female relationships bloom and mature, as do their sustainable, ecologically friendly lifestyles. The Balti women have been living in the mountains for centuries, so why does there seem to be change in the air? There's the war on terror, going on just outside their village. There are the growing influences and stresses of modernization. How will this society cope with such changes, and is there any hope for its survival? Social geographer Farida Azhar-Hewitt has spent months living in the Karakoram Mountains with the Balti women; now she presents her detailed study and firsthand experience in "The Other Side of Silence: The Lives of Women in the Karakoram Mountains. " Azhar-Hewitt takes a careful look at this mountain society-gaining recent media attention for its close proximity to the war on terror. Through the violence and fear, the Balti people have remained peaceful; the women have remained fruitful. Living as an insider, Azhar-Hewitt takes us behind the veil of these rural Muslim women, revealing a world of seclusion, community, and joy, despite all odds.

In an era when women were supposed to be disciplined and obedient, Anna proved to be neither. Defying 16th-century social mores, she was the frequent subject of gossip because of her immodest dress and flirtatious behavior. When her wealthy father discovered that she was having secret, simultaneous affairs with a young nobleman and a cavalryman, he turned her out of the house in rage, but when she sued him for financial support, he had her captured, returned home and chained to a table as punishment. Anna eventually escaped and continued her suit against her father, her siblings and her home town in a bitter legal battle that was to last 30 years and end only upon her death.

Drawn from her surviving love letters and court records, The Burgermeister's Daughter is a fascinating examination of the politics of sexuality, gender and family in the 16th century, and a powerful testament to the courage and tenacity of a woman who defied the inequalities of this distant age.

Animal rights is one of the fastest growing social movements today. Women greatly outnumber men as activists, yet surprisingly, little has been written about the importance and impact of gender on the movement. Women and the Animal Rights Movement combats stereotypes of women activists as mere sentimentalists by exploring the political and moral character of their advocacy on behalf of animals. Emily Gaarder analyzes the politics of gender in the movement, incorporating in-depth interviews with women and participant observation of animal rights organizations, conferences, and protests to describe struggles over divisions of labor and leadership. Controversies over PETA advertising campaigns that rely on women's sexuality to ""sell"" animal rights illustrate how female crusaders are asked to prioritize the cause of animals above all else. Gaarder underscores the importance of a paradigm shift in the animal liberation movement, one that seeks a more integrated vision of animal rights that connects universally to other issues--gender, race, economics, and the environment--highlighting that many women activists recognize and are motivated by the connection between the oppression of animals and other social injustices.

In many parts of Appalachia, family ties run deep, constituting an important part of an individual's sense of self. In some cases, when Appalachian learners seek new forms of knowledge, those family ties can be challenged by the accusation that they have gotten above their raisings, a charge that can have a lasting impact on family and community acceptance. Those who advocate literacy sometimes ignore an important fact -- although empowering, newly acquired literacies can create identity conflicts for learners, especially Appalachian women. In "Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment," Erica Abrams Locklear explores these literacy-initiated conflicts, analyzing how authors from the region portray them in their fiction and creative nonfiction. Abrams Locklear blends literacy studies with literary criticism to analyze the central female characters in the works of Harriette Simpson Arnow, Linda Scott DeRosier, Denise Giardina, and Lee Smith. She shows how these authors deftly overturn stereotypes of an illiterate Appalachia by creating highly literate characters, women who not only cherish the power of words but also push the boundaries of what literacy means. "Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment" includes in-depth interviews with Linda Scott DeRosier and Lee Smith, making this an insightful study of an important literary genre.

Have you ever dreamed of running away to a tropical island? In 1996 Jane Grossman left behind a comfortable life in Chicago and set off on with her husband on their 34-foot sailboat, Iniki, to sail South America. What began as a chance to simplify their lifestyle and to see the islands gradually evolved to a sojourn of self-discovery, renewal and triumph over breast cancer. "Windshifts" is a true sailing adventure that chronicles the wonder and excitement, the difficulties and fears from a woman's perspective. Vivid details and delightful descriptions of exotic lands, cultural interactions and inevitable conflicts of a husband and wife confined to close quarters involve the reader with all of their senses. More importantly, it is a reflection on dealing with the unexpected challenges that confront us all throughout our lives.

British women who resisted their own enfranchisement were ridiculed by the suffragists and have since been neglected by historians. Yet these women, together with the millions whose indifference reinforced the opposition case, claimed to form a majority of the female public on the eve of the First World War. By 1914 the organized "antis" rivaled the suffragists in numbers, though not in terms of publicity-seeking activism. The National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage was dominated by the self-consciously masculine leadership of Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon, but also heavily dependent upon an impressive cadre of women leaders and a mostly female membership.
Women Against the Vote looks at three overlapping groups of women: maternal reformers, women writers and imperialist ladies. These women are then followed into action as campaigners in their own right, as well as supporters of anti-suffrage men. Collaboration between the sexes was not always straightforward, even within a movement dedicated to separate and complementary gender roles. As the anti-suffrage women pursued their own varied social and political agendas, they demonstrated their affinity with the mainstream social conservatism of the British women's movement. The rediscovered history of female anti-suffragism provides new perspectives on the campaigns both for and against the vote. It also makes an important contribution to the wider history of women's social and political activism in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Britain.

In this book, Sister Angelita tells her story of those 15 years in Nigeria. Sister Angelita did all this missionary activity while constantly begging for prayers and financial support to carry on her work. Her love of God shines through in everything that Sister Angelita accomplished. During her worst tribulations, and there were many, her constant prayer was "God is Good." Indeed, each of the stories Angelita relates in her little book radiates her dependence on Divine Providence. The chapters show how God worked through her to ease the afflictions of body, soul, and spirit of the people she loved so much. Because of her, their lives became a little more bearable. This little dynamo of a person never takes "no" for an answer. When the going gets tough, she works all the harder to accomplish her objectives. I know of no one with a more determined spirit. Sister Angelita and I have known each other for 45 years and this is my testimony to a woman of God who radiates the words of Jesus: "Live in Me as I do in you ... those who live in Me and I in them will bear much fruit." John 14:4-5 Sarah E. Wellinger Longtime Friend

A critique of population control narratives reproduced by international development actors in the 21st century Since the turn of the millennium, American media, scientists, and environmental activists have insisted that the global population crisis is "back"-and that the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is to ensure women's universal access to contraception. Did the population problem ever disappear? What is bringing it back-and why now? In On Infertile Ground, Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates, is bringing population back to the center of public environmental debate. While these narratives never disappeared, Sasser argues, histories of human rights abuses, racism, and a conservative backlash against abortion in the 1980s drove them underground-until now. Using interviews and case studies from a wide range of sites-from Silicon Valley foundation headquarters to youth advocacy trainings, the halls of Congress and an international climate change conference-Sasser demonstrates how population growth has been reframed as an urgent source of climate crisis and a unique opportunity to support women's sexual and reproductive health and rights. Although well-intentioned-promoting positive action, women's empowerment, and moral accountability to a global community-these groups also perpetuate the same myths about the sexuality and lack of virtue and control of women and the people of global south that have been debunked for decades. Unless the development community recognizes the pervasive repackaging of failed narratives, Sasser argues, true change and development progress will not be possible. On Infertile Ground presents a unique critique of international development that blends the study of feminism, environmentalism, and activism in a groundbreaking way. It will make any development professional take a second look at the ideals driving their work.