Introducing Feminist Theology responds to the questions "What is feminist theology?" and "Why is it important?" by considering the perspectives of women from around the globe who have very diverse life experience and relationships to God, Church and creation. Clifford introduces the major forms of feminist theology: "radical, " "reformist, " and "reconstructionist, " and highlights some of their specific characteristics.

The sensational tale of the first mixed-race girl introduced to high-society England and raised as a lady...

The illegitimate daughter of a captain in the Royal Navy and an enslaved African woman, Dido Belle was raised by her great-uncle, the Earl of Mansfield, one of the most powerful men of the time and a leading opponent of slavery. When the portrait he commissioned of his two wards, Dido and her white cousin, Elizabeth, was unveiled, eighteenth-century England was shocked to see a black woman and white woman depicted as equals. Inspired by the painting, Belle vividly brings to life this extraordinary woman caught between two worlds, and illuminates the great civil rights question of her age: the fight to end slavery.

The feature film Belle is produced by Damian Jones (The Iron Lady, The History Boys, Welcome to Sarajevo), written by Misan Sagay, and directed by Amma Asante, and stars the extraordinary Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido Belle, Tom Wilkinson, Sam Reid, Miranda Richardson, Penelope Wilton, Tom Felton, Matthew Goode, and Emily Watson.

Best known by her stage name, La Goulue (the Glutton), Louise Weber was one of the biggest stars of fin de siecle Paris, renowned as a cancan dancer at the Moulin Rouge. The subject of numerous paintings and photographs, she became an iconic figure of modern art. Her life, however, has consistently been misrepresented and reduced to a footnote in the stories of men such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Where most accounts dismiss her rise and fall as brief and rapid, the truth is that her career as a performer spanned five decades, during which La Goulue constantly reinvented herself-as a dancer, animal tamer, sideshow performer, and muse of photographers, painters, sculptors, and filmmakers. With Beyond the Moulin Rouge, the first substantive English-language study of La Goulue's career and posthumous influence, Will Visconti corrects persistent myths. Despite a tumultuous personal life, La Goulue overcame loss, abusive relationships, and poverty to become the very embodiment of nineteenth-century Paris, feted by royalty and followed as closely as any politician or monarch. Visconti draws on previously overlooked materials, including medical records, media reports across Europe and the United States, and surviving pages from Louise Weber's diary, to trace the life and impact of a woman whose cultural significance has been ignored in favor of the men around her, and who spent her life upending assumptions about gender, morality, and domesticity in France during the fin de siecle and early twentieth century.

In original essays drawn from a myriad of archival materials, Society Women and Enlightened Charity in Spain reveals how the members of the Junta de Damas de Honor y Merito, founded in 1787 to administer charities and schools for impoverished women and children, claimed a role in the public sphere through their self-representation as civic mothers and created an enlightened legacy for modern feminism in Spain.

Overworked and Undervalued: Black Women and Successin America is a collection of essays written by Black female scholars, educators, and students as well as public policy, behavioral, and mental health professionals. The contributors' share their experiences and frustrations with White America which continues to demand excessive labor and one-sided relationships of Black women while it simultaneously diminishes them. The book describes the ongoing struggle for women of color in general, but Black women in particular, which derives from the experience that only certain parts of our identities are deemed acceptable. The essays reflect on the events of the last few years and the toll the related stress has taken on each author. As a whole, the book offers its readers an opportunity to gain insight into these women's experiences and to find their place in supporting the Black women in their lives.

In this groundbreaking book, based on in-depth ethnographic research spanning ten years, Antoinette Elizabeth DeNapoli brings to light the little known, and often marginalized, lives of female Hindu ascetics (sadhus) in the North Indian state of Rajasthan. Her book offers a new perspective on the practice of asceticism in India today, exploring a phenomenon she terms vernacular asceticism. Examining the everyday religious worlds and practices of primarily "unlettered" female sadhus who come from a variety of castes, Real Sadhus Sing to God illustrates that the female sadhus whom DeNapoli knew experience asceticism in relational and celebratory ways and construct their lives as paths of singing to God. While the sadhus have combined ritual initiation with institutionalized and orthodox orders of asceticism, they also draw on the non-orthodox traditions of the medieval devotional poet-saints of North India to create a form of asceticism that synthesizes multiple and competing world views. DeNapoli suggests that in the vernacular asceticism of the sadhus, singing to God serves as the female way of being an ascetic. As women who have escaped the dominant societal expectations of marriage and housework, female sadhus are unusual because they devote themselves to a way of life traditionally reserved for men in Indian society. Female sadhus are simultaneously respected and distrusted for transgressing normative gender roles in order to dedicate themselves to a life of singing to the divine. Real Sadhus Sing to God is the first book-length study to explore the ways in which female sadhus perform and, thus, create gendered views of asceticism through their singing, storytelling, and sacred text practices, which DeNapoli characterizes as the sadhus' "rhetoric of renunciation." The book also examines the relationship between asceticism (sannyas) and devotion (bhakti) in contemporary contexts. It brings together two disparate fields of study in religious scholarship-yoga/asceticism and bhakti-through use of the orienting metaphor of singing bhajans (devotional songs) to understand vernacular asceticism in contemporary India.

The ideals of the French Revolution inflamed a longing for liberty and equality within courageous, freethinking women of the era--women who played vital roles in the momentous events that reshaped their nation and the world. In "Liberty," Lucy Moore paints a vivid portrait of six extraordinary Frenchwomen from vastly different social and economic backgrounds who helped stoke the fervor and idealism of those years, and who risked everything to make their mark on history.

Germaine de Stael was a wealthy, passionate Parisian intellectual--as consumed by love affairs as she was by politics--who helped write the 1791 Constitution. Theroigne de Mericourt was an unhappy courtesan who fell in love with revolutionary ideals. Exuberant, decadent Theresia Tallien was a ruthless manipulator instrumental in engineering Robespierre's downfall. Their stories and others provide a fascinating new perspective on one of history's most turbulent epochs.