This global, multicultural anthology shows how women from some thirty countries, across twenty-six centuries, have found ways to resist oppression and gain power over their lives. Organized around themes of concern to contemporary readers, Women Imagine Change explores: relationships between women's sexuality and spirituality; women's interlinked struggles to control their labor and education; their work reshaping representations of gender; and their varied translations of knowledge into power. Extensive introductions combine a broad theoretical perspective on gender and resistance with vivid biographical context.
Not only do the writings show women's resistance from an historical perspective; they also offer crucial insight into questions women are posing today about the relationships between their own power, the power of the various groups to which they belong, and the larger systems of power they confront in the world around them.

Women Imagine Change shows how women all over the world, across a span of 2,600 years, have found ways to resist oppression and gain power over their lives. Organized around themes of concern to contemporary readers, this genuinely global, multicultural anthology presents women from some thirty countries, speaking from their vivid, diverse life experiences.
Historical selections are chosen for relevance to current women's issues, and include writings by: Florence Nightingale, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hildegard of Bingen, Paula Gunn Allen, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Angela Davis, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Audre Lorde, Fatima Mernissi, Cherrie Moraga, Hiratsuka Raicho, Margaret Sanger, Mab Segrest and Ruby Thompson.

<div>Focusing on medieval women with a wide range of occupations and life-styles, the interdisciplinary essays in this collection examine women's activities within the patriarchal structures of the time. Individual essays explore women's challenges to a sexual ideology that confined them strictly to the roles of wives, mothers, and servants. Also included are sections on women and work, cultural production and literacy, and religious life. <br><br>These essays provide a greater understanding of the ways in which gender has played a part in determining relations of power in Western cultures. This volume makes a vital contribution to the current scholarship about women in the Middle Ages.</div>