Rachel Watson longs for a different life. Her only escape is the perfect couple she watches through the train window every day, happy and in love. Or so it appears. When Rachel learns that the woman she's been secretly watching has suddenly disappeared, she finds herself as a witness and even a suspect in a thrilling mystery which she will face bigger revelations than she could ever have anticipated.

All women's magazines are not the same: content, outlook, and format combine to shape publications quite distinctively. While magazines in general have long been understood as a significant force in women's lives, many critiques have limited themselves to discussions of mainstream printed publications that engage with narrowly stereotypical representations of femininity. Looking at a range of women's magazines ("Cooperative Correspondence Club "and "Housewife) "and magazine programmes ("Woman's Hour" and "Houseparty"), "Magazine Movements" not only extends our definition of a magazine, but most importantly, unearths the connections between women's cultures, specific magazines and the implied reader. The author first outlines the existing field of magazine studies, and analyzes the methodologies employed in accessing and assessing the cultural competence of magazines. Each chapter then provides a case study of a different kind of magazine: different in media form or style of presentation or audience connection, or all three. Forster not only extends our definition of a magazine, but most importantly, unearths the connections between women's cultures, specific magazines and the implied reader. In this way, fresh insights are provided into the long-standing importance of the magazine to the variety of feminisms on offer in Britain, from the mid twentieth century to the present day.

This book explores how women of the poorer and middling sorts in early modern England sought to make the best of their lives in a society that excluded or marginalized them in almost every sphere. It argues that networks of close friends ('gossips') provided invaluable moral and practical support, helping them to shape their own lives and to play an active role in the affairs of the local community.

"My Roots, My Love, My Destiny"is the story of two strong women, told across an epic and rich canvas painted by two wars and two unique destinies. In her ninety-six years, Ogeri, author Beatrice Akpu Inyang Eleje's mother, experienced danger, heartbreak, and great love. Her journey spanned most of the twentieth century and was dictated by the societal norms, values, and traditions of the Nigeria of her time. Lovingly reconstructed, these are a few of Eleje's most beloved and revered memories of her mother. For the daughter, her journey was spent attempting to navigate rapidly changing waters. Caught between two colliding civilizations-the Western civilization and African culture and Nigeria-two cultures, and two world views, her path was less certain. While one world encouraged independence, the other demanded absolute filial obedience.

Rebellion was inevitable.

As Eleje listened to her mother speak of her life, the similarities emerged. Both women survived their husbands, and both knew the heartache of illness, loss, and uncertainty-as well as the joys of love in the most unexpected places. But through it all rings a life-sustaining truth worth celebrating: no matter how dark the tunnel, there is always light just around the corner ... if you can just lift your head to look.

Designed to inspire younger women to persevere in the face of seemingly in-surmountable odds, the story of these two women proves that no matter what, you just need to take the next step-to-ward hope.

This book offers a practical guide to the everyday actions and decisions that anyone can take to promote gender equality and social justice in their own life and the world around them. Beyond Burning Bras: Feminist Activism for Everyone is an antidote to the poison of shock jocks who caricature the women's movement as a radical fringe of man-haters and paint activists as spoiled hooligans. Two real-life feminist activists, Laura Finley and Emily Stringer focus on the mainstream of everyday feminism, explaining what feminism is really all about and fanning out a spectrum of simple, imaginative, user-friendly ways in which ordinary readers can promote gender equality and social equity in their own lives and in the world around them. Beyond Burning Bras taps the life stories and first-person accounts of 50 ordinary individuals of every age, sex, sexuality, class, nationality, race, ethnicity, and learning style. All of them tell how they found within themselves the courage to take a stand on the front lines of feminist activism, whether in subtle private ways or in life-changing public ways. After a survey of the history of feminism in the United States, the authors and contributors show in successive chapters how feminism today meshes with other forms of activism relating to the workplace, sexual violence, the environment, politics, human bodies, the arts, youth, empowerment, and mothering. Comprises over 50 entries arranged topically to show the broad reach of contemporary feminism Presents more than 40 contributors, including scholars, activists, professionals, students, and more Offers a timeline of key events in feminist activism provided at beginning of volume Includes an annotated appendix of recommended resources for feminist activists, including books, websites, and periodicals

Herself an Author addresses the critical question of how to approach the study of women's writing. It explores various methods of engaging in a meaningful way with a rich corpus of poetry and prose written by women of the late Ming and Qing periods, much of it rediscovered by the author in rare book collections in China and the United States. The volume treats different genres of writing and includes translations of texts that are made available for the first time in English. Among the works considered are the life-long poetic record of Gan Lirou, the lyrical travel journal kept by Wang Fengxian, and the erotic poetry of the concubine Shen Cai.Taking the view that gentry women's varied textual production was a form of cultural practice, Grace Fong examines women's autobiographical poetry collections, travel writings, and critical discourse on the subject of women's poetry, offering fresh insights on women's intervention into the dominant male literary tradition. The wealth of texts translated and discussed here include fascinating documents written by concubines - women who occupied a subordinate position in the family and social system.Fong adopts the notion of agency as a theoretical focus to investigate forms of subjectivity and enactments of subject positions in the intersection between textual practice and social inscription. Her reading of the life and work of women writers reveals surprising instances and modes of self-empowerment within the gender constraints of Confucian orthodoxy. Fong argues that literate women in late imperial China used writing and reading to create literary and social communities, transcend temporal-spatial and social limitations, and represent themselves as the authors of their own life histories.

Born in a dysfunctional lower middle class family in the middle of the "big" depression, no one could have predicted that Jinx Beers would be a pioneer for the lesbian/gay rights movement in Southern California and the founder of the world's longest running lesbian nespaper. Jinx, who acquired the first name from an older sister and eventually made it legal, joined the U.S. Air Force when she was eighteen to get away from her home life-and never looked back. She used her G.I. Bill to get a college degree and spent the next eighteen years on the UCLA campus in research in traffic safety. Meanwhile, the action on Christopher Street raised the conscience of many lesbians and gays who began to join the agitation for lesbian/gay rights. Ferment in the Losa Angeles community lead to Jinx's founding of The Lesbian News in 1976. Although she is no longer associated with the newspaper, it has been published continuously for more than thirty years. Now seventy-five years old, Jinx has written her autobiography. This is the inside informtion on what makes this "Feminist Who Changed America" tick. For those who are interested in understanding one lesbian activist's life, read on.

American Hybrid Poetics explores the ways in which hybrid poetics-a playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies-have been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order. Amy Moorman Robbins examines the ways in which five poets-Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine-use hybridity as an implicitly political strategy to interrupt mainstream American language, literary genres, and visual culture, and expose the ways in which mass culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has had a powerfully standardizing impact on the collective American imagination. By forcing encounters between incompatible traditions-consumer culture with the avant-garde, low culture forms with experimental poetics, prose poetry with linguistic subversiveness-these poets bring together radically competing ideologies and highlight their implications for lived experience. Robbins argues that it is precisely because these poets have mixed forms that their work has gone largely unnoticed by leading members and critics in experimental poetry circles. Robbins shows that while these poets employ widely varying linguistic strategies and topical range, they share a common and deeply critical vision of American popular culture as it promulgates bourgeois capitalist and imperialist values and forecloses possibilities for independent thought and creative resistance. They also share the view that contemporary history can be reimagined in intellectually liberating ways through hybrid poetics.

Women in Power profiles 22 world leaders who have held the top positions of political power since 1960. Each chapter is devoted to a region of the world. In addition to providing an overview of the political careers of the women who emerged as leaders in these regions, the authors examine the political systems of each region in terms of the involvement of women in politics. Biographies of these political leaders are embedded within regional analyses that reveal not only the personal circumstances that each woman faced in her quest for power but also the political milieu from which she emerged. We learn about the obstacles as well as the advantages these women faced, and we derive insights into the structures that exist in our own societies regarding the power relations between men and women. Women in Power also devotes a chapter to differing theories of women's leadership and various theories of feminism around the world. Finally, in an effort to understand how the United States can appear to be the bastion of women's liberation around the world and yet have only 15 percent representation of women in power and no female president to date, the authors explore prospects for the upcoming 2008 U.S. presidential election and discuss potential candidates.

Hair, Headwear, and Orthodox Jewish Women comments on hair covering based on an ethnographic study of the lives of Orthodox Jewish women in a small non-metropolitan synagogue. It brings the often overlooked stories of these women to the forefront and probes questions as to how their location in a small community affects their behavioral choices, particularly regarding the folk practice of hair covering. A kallah, or bride, makes the decision as to whether or not she will cover her hair after marriage. In doing so, she externally announces her religious affiliation, in particular her commitment to maintaining an Orthodox Jewish home. Hair covering practices are also unique to women's traditions and point out the importance of examining the women, especially because their cultural roles may be marginalized in studies as a result of their lack of a central role in worship. This study questions their contribution to Orthodoxy as well as their concept of Jewish identity and the ways in which they negotiate this identity with ritualized and traditional behavior, ultimately bringing into question the meaning of tradition in a modern world.

In Centaurs and Amazons, Page duBois offers a prehistory of hierarchy. Using structural anthropology, symbolic analysis, and recent literary theory, she demonstrates a shift in Greek thought from the fifth to the fourth century B.C. that had a profound influence upon subsequent Western culture and politics. Through an analysis of mythology, drama, sculpture, architecture, and Greek vase painting, duBois documents the transition from a system of thought that organized the experience of difference in terms of polarity and analogy to one based upon a relatively rigid hierarchical scheme. This was the beginning of "the great chain of being," the philosophical construct that all life was organized in minute gradations of superiority and inferiority. This scheme, in various guises, has continued to influence philosophical and political thought. The author's intelligent and discriminating use of scholarship from various fields makes Centaurs and Amazons an impressive interdisciplinary study of interest to classicists, feminist scholars, historians, art historians, anthropologists, and political scientists.

Given the extensive body of Holocaust literature, it may be surprising to note that there is a distinct gap of reflection, analysis, and qualification in the area of sexual violence. The subject of sexual violence during the Holocaust, in particular, the sexual violation of Jewish women, is a subject that has been largely repressed and silenced. Thus, this thesis is an attempt to not only rectify the omission of sexual violence from Holocaust history, but to bring a level of analysis to this under-examined aspect of National Socialism to a point commensurate with that devoted to other aspects of Holocaust studies. During the Holocaust, sexual violence against Jewish women was both unique and typical. It was typical in the forms that sexual violence manifested-sexual humiliation, rape, gang rape, sexual slavery-but unique in the patterns it followed and the functions it served for the Nazi regime. Unlike other genocides, sexual violence was not a state sanctioned policy of the "Final Solution;" it was employed in a haphazardly manner, that was horrific, multi-faceted, and deadly. Perpetrators were motivated by a diversity of factors, including, a desire for power, camaraderie, sexual pleasure and masculine ego-gratification. Moreover, sexual violence was multi-functional for the Nazi regime, operating as a powerful tool of humiliation and dehumanization. As the Nazi regime moved into full-scale genocide, sexual violence became an increasingly integral component to the process of annihilation. By dehumanizing Jewish women through varied forms of sexual violence, German perpetrators increasingly saw their victims as less than human, thereby further removing them from the realm of moral and ethical obligation. Sexual violence was clearly an essential component to the continued functioning of genocide, because through the process of Jewish women's dehumanization, perpetrators were able to more easily continue fulfilling their murderous tasks

Religion and Sexuality in Zimbabwe highlights the complex interplay between religion and sexuality in Zimbabwe. It shows how religion both facilitates and complicates the expression of sexuality in Zimbabwe. Approaching religion from a broader perspective, this volume reviews the impact of African Indigenous Religions and Christianity in its varied forms on the construction and expression of sexuality in Zimbabwe. These contributors examine the role of indigenous beliefs, as well as interpretations of sacred texts, in the understanding of sexuality in Zimbabwe. They also address themes relating to sexual diversity and sexual and gender-based violence. Overall, this book sheds light on the ongoing relevance and strategic role of religion to contemporary discourses on human sexuality.

In writing letters to her children, Catherine has, with rawness and honesty, imparted the tale of a mother and a woman as she journeys through a difficult part of being a single mom striving to raise her children with integrity and hope. The telling of this part of her life is intended to bring to the foreground the importance of understanding the past, the importance of forgiving, and the importance of continuing to learn about self. It is a tale told with depth and with love.

Myths and misconceptions surrounding sexual violence are thought to be implicated in the prevalence of rape and in the lack of justice for women who have been subjected to rape. Rape Myths comprehensively examines the theoretical background, prevalence, assessment, and functions of these beliefs. Outlining the meaning and feminist foundations of rape myths, this book also considers their conceptualisation as the measurable construct of Rape Myth Acceptance (RMA). Drawing on the authors' research, the book details the prevalence of RMA among different public and professional groups, as well as the societal consequences of these pervasive beliefs, particularly in terms of treatment within the criminal justice system. RMA is considered in the crucial context of its scaffolding within wider sexism in society and its perpetuation in the media. Looking ahead, Persson and Dhingra question how well rape myth prevention works. Can society reduce the prevalence of these beliefs? If so, how? Including a detailed overview of the psychometric properties of tools used to measure RMA, and a methodological manual for designing and executing research in this area, Rape Myths is a practical guide for those seeking to research rape myths and other attributions in rape cases.