Women have been actively involved the United States military for more than fifty years, but the ban on their participation in combat remains a hotly debated issue. In this provocative book Lorry M. Fenner, an active-duty Air Force intelligence officer, calls for opening all aspects of military service to women. Marie deYoung, a former Army chaplain, argues that keeping women out of combat is in the best interests of both sexes and crucial to the effectiveness of the military as a whole.
Fenner bases her argument for inclusion of women on the idea that democracies require all citizens to compete in public endeavor and share in civic obligation. She contends that, historically, reasons for banning women from combat have been culturally biased. She argues that membership in a combat force should be based on capability judged against appropriate standards. Moreover, she maintains that excluding women hampers the diversity and adaptability that by necessity will characterize the armed forces in the twenty-first century.
In contrast, deYoung declares that the different physical fitness standards for men and women would, in combat, lower morale for both sexes and put women at risk of casualty. Further, she contends that women have neither the physical or emotional strength to endure the overall brutality of the combat experience. She also asserts that calls for lifting the combat ban are politically motivated and are inconsistent with the principles of American democracy and the mission of national defense.
With each author responding to the views of the other, their exchange offers a valuable synthesis of the issues surrounding a longstanding debate among policymakers, military personnel, and scholars of both military history and women’s studies.
Since the mid-1980s, a dramatic opening in Mexico's political and electoral processes, combined with the growth of a new civic culture, has created unprecedented opportunities for women and other previously repressed or ignored groups to participate in the political life of the nation. In this book, Victoria Rodríguez offers the first comprehensive analysis of how Mexican women have taken advantage of new opportunities to participate in the political process through elected and appointed office, nongovernmental organizations, and grassroots activism.
Drawing on scores of interviews with politically active women conducted since 1994, Rodríguez looks at Mexican women's political participation from a variety of angles. She analyzes the factors that have increased women's political activity: from the women's movement, to the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s, to increasing democratization, to the victory of Vicente Fox in the 2000 presidential election. She maps out the pathways that women have used to gain access to public life and also the roadblocks that continue to limit women's participation in politics, especially at higher levels of government. And she offers hopeful, yet realistic predictions for women's future participation in the political life of Mexico.
Throughout Mexico's history, women have been subjected to a dual standard: exalted in myth, they remain subordinated in their social role by their biology. But this dualism is not so much a battle between the sexes as the product of a social system. The injustices of this system have led Mexican women to conclude that they deserve a better world, one worth struggling for.
Published originally in Spanish as Mujeres en México: Una historia olvidada, this work examines the role of Mexican women from pre-Cortés to the 1980s, addressing the interplay between myth and history and the gap between theory and practice. Pointing to such varied prototypes as the Virgin of Guadalupe, La Malinche, and Sor Juana, Tuñón contrasts what these women represent with more realistic but less-exalted counterparts such as Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, La Güera Rodríguez, and Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza. She also discusses the identity transformation by which indigenous women come to see themselves as Mexicanas, and analyzes such issues as women's economic dislocation in the labor force, education, and self-image.
In challenging the illusion that historians have created of women in Mexico's history, Tuñón hopes to recover feminism—with its strengths and weaknesses, its vision of the world that is both intellectual and full of feeling. By examining the social world of Mexico, she also hopes to determine those situations that cause oppression, exploitation, and marginalization of women.
Women in Missouri History is an exceptional collection of essays surveying the history of women in the state of Missouri from the period of colonial settlement through the mid-twentieth century. The women featured in these essays come from various ethnic, economic, and racial groups, from both urban and rural areas, and from all over the state. The authors effectively tell these women’s stories through biographies and through techniques of social history, allowing the reader to learn not only about the women’s lives individually, but also about how groups of “ordinary” women shaped the history of the state.
The essays in this collection address questions that are at the center of current developments in the field of women’s history but are written in a manner that makes them accessible to general readers. Providing an excellent general overview of the history of women in Missouri, this collection makes a valuable contribution to a better understanding of the state’s past.
Women readers, editors, librarians, authors, journalists, booksellers, and others are the subjects in this stimulating new collection on modern print culture. The essays feature women like Marie Mason Potts, editor of Smoke Signals, a mid-twentieth century periodical of the Federated Indians of California; Lois Waisbrooker, publisher of books and journals on female sexuality and women's rights in the decades after the Civil War; and Elizabeth Jordan, author of two novels and editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1900 to 1913. The volume presents a complex and engaging picture of print culture and of the forces that affected women's lives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Published in collaboration among the University of Wisconsin Press, the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America (a joint program of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society), and the University of Wisconsin–Madison General Library System Office of Scholarly Communication.
Why do so few women choose a career in science--even as they move into medicine and law in ever-greater numbers? In one of the most comprehensive studies of gender differences in science careers ever conducted, Women in Science provides a systematic account of how U.S. youth are selected into and out of science education in early life, and how social forces affect career outcomes later in the science labor market.
Studying the science career trajectory in its entirety, the authors attend to the causal influences of prior experiences on career outcomes as well as the interactions of multiple life domains such as career and family. While attesting to the progress of women in science, the book also reveals continuing gender differences in mathematics and science education and in the progress and outcomes of scientists' careers. The authors explore the extent and causes of gender differences in undergraduate and graduate science education, in scientists' geographic mobility, in research productivity, in promotion rates and earnings, and in the experience of immigrant scientists. They conclude that the gender gap in parenting responsibilities is a critical barrier to the further advancement of women in science.
Women in television news have made great strides in the past twenty-five years. No longer limited to being the token pretty face on the nightly newscast, women have taken their places as working journalists in newsrooms, on the campaign trail, in war zones, and in the highest echelons of network news management. Barbara Walters and Connie Chung have even occupied the coveted network anchor's chair, if only briefly.
In this book, 70 of the foremost women in television news reflect on their professional successes, the personal and professional sacrifices that often bought those successes, and the barriers that still confront women in the news business. Weaving their interviews into a compelling text, Judith Marlane covers a wide range of issues, including looks versus ability and experience, sexual harassment, the resistance to women news anchors, the difficulties of balancing work and family life, women's and men's salaries, and the willingness of women to help other women in the business.
This book builds from Marlane's 1976 work, Women in Television News. Interviews with many of the same women highlight the gains that women have made in broadcast journalism. Simultaneously, Marlane has expanded her range of informants to include fifteen of America's most famous male anchors and correspondents to gather their assessments of the role of women in broadcasting today.
Across the state and across a wide variety of musical genres, women are making their mark on Texas music. Some have become international superstars, while others are just starting to make their voices heard. But every woman who goes out and plays her music proves that "baring one's heart and soul takes courage, and Texas women artists have a lot of courage," as Lloyd Maines observes in the opening interview of this book. To pay tribute to these dedicated musicians and to capture their unique perspectives on what it means to be a woman in the music business, Kathleen Hudson has spent many years interviewing Texas women musicians for the Texas Heritage Music Foundation.
In Women in Texas Music, Hudson lets us listen in on conversations with thirty-nine musical artists, including Emily Robison, Terri Hendrix, Lee Ann Womack, Rosie Flores, Betty Buckley, Marcia Ball, Lavelle White, and Bobbie Nelson. Hudson encourages and allows the women to tell their own stories as she delves into their life journeys, creative processes, and the importance of writing and performing music, be it blues, rock, country, folk, jazz, or pop. The interviews are warm and open, like good friends sharing the lessons that a life of playing music has taught them.
What emerges from this collection is a solid sense of the strength and integrity that women bring to and gain from Texas music. Everyone who cares about music and culture in Texas will want to join the conversation.
In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, Democrats and Republicans were locked in a fierce battle for the female vote. Democrats charged Republicans with waging a “war on women,” while Republicans countered that Democratic policies actually undermined women’s rights. The women of the Senate wielded particular power, planning press conferences, appearing on political programs, and taking to the Senate floor over gender-related issues such as workplace equality and reproductive rights.
The first book to examine the impact of gender differences in the Senate, Women in the Club is an eye-opening exploration of how women are influencing policy and politics in this erstwhile male bastion of power. Gender, Michele L. Swers shows, is a fundamental factor for women in the Senate, interacting with both party affiliation and individual ideology to shape priorities on policy. Women, for example, are more active proponents of social welfare and women’s rights. But the effects of gender extend beyond mere policy preferences. Senators also develop their priorities with an eye to managing voter expectations about their expertise and advancing their party’s position on a given issue. The election of women in increasing numbers has also coincided with the evolution of the Senate as a highly partisan institution. The stark differences between the parties on issues pertaining to gender have meant that Democratic and Republican senators often assume very different roles as they reconcile their policy views on gender issues with the desire to act as members of partisan teams championing or defending their party’s record in an effort to reach various groups of voters.
Wayang kulit, or shadow puppetry, connects a mythic past to the present through public ritual performance and is one of most important performance traditions in Bali. The dalang, or puppeteer, is revered in Balinese society as a teacher and spiritual leader. Recently, women have begun to study and perform in this traditionally male role, an innovation that has triggered resistance and controversy.
In Women in the Shadows, Jennifer Goodlander draws on her own experience training as a dalang as well as interviews with early women dalang and leading artists to upend the usual assessments of such gender role shifts. She argues that rather than assuming that women performers are necessarily mounting a challenge to tradition, “tradition” in Bali must be understood as a system of power that is inextricably linked to gender hierarchy.
She examines the very idea of “tradition” and how it forms both an ideological and social foundation in Balinese culture. Ultimately, Goodlander offers a richer, more complicated understanding of both tradition and gender in Balinese society. Following in the footsteps of other eminent reflexive ethnographies, Women in the Shadows will be of value to anyone interested in performance studies, Southeast Asian culture, or ethnographic methods.
In this first publication of six plays by the flamboyantly uninhibited author, poet, and playwright Mercedes de Acosta (1893–1968), theater historian Robert A. Schanke rescues these lost theatrical writings from the dusty margins of obscurity. Often autobiographical, always rife with gender struggle, and still decidedly stageworthy, Women in Turmoil: Six Plays by Mercedes de Acosta constitutes a significant find for the canon of gay and lesbian drama.
In her 1960 autobiography Here Lies the Heart, de Acosta notes that as she was contemplating marriage to a man in 1920, she was "in a strange turmoil about world affairs, my own writing, suffrage, sex, and my inner spiritual development." The voice in these plays is that of a lesbian in turmoil, marginalized and ignored. Her same-sex desires and struggles for acceptance fueled her writings, and nowhere is that more evident than in the plays contained herein. The women characters struggle with unfulfilling marriages, divorce, unrequited sexual desire, suppressed identity, and a longing for recognition.
Of the six plays, only the first two were ever produced. Jehanne d’Arc (1922) premiered in Paris with de Acosta’s lover at the time, Eva Le Gallienne, starring and Norman Bel Geddes designing the set and lights. In 1934, de Acosta adapted it into a screenplay for Greta Garbo, then her lover, but it was never filmed. Portraying rampant anti-Semitism in a small New England town, Jacob Slovak (1923) was performed both on Broadway and in London, with the London production starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.
The Mother of Christ (1924) is a long one-act play written for the internationally known actress Eleonora Duse. After Duse’s death, several other actresses including Eva Bartok, Jeanne Eagels, and Lillian Gish explored productions of the play. Igor Stravinsky wrote a score, Norman Bel Geddes designed a set, and Gladys Calthrop designed costumes. However, the play was never produced.
Her most autobiographical play, World Without End (1925), and her most sensational play, The Dark Light (1926), both unfold through plots of sibling rivalry, incest, and suicide. With overtones of Ibsen, Illusion (1928) continues the themes of de Acosta’s previous plays with her rough and seedy cast of characters, but here the playwright’s drama grows to incorporate a yearning for belonging as well as strong elements of class conflict.
What notoriety remains associated with de Acosta has less to do with her writing than with her infamous romances with the likes of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan, Alla Nazimova, Eva Le Gallienne, Tamara Karsavina, Pola Negri, and Ona Munson. Through this collection of six powerfully poignant dramas, editor Robert A. Schanke strives to correct myths about Mercedes de Acosta and to restore both her name and her literary achievements to their proper place in history.
Robert A. Schanke has authored the original biography, “That Furious Lesbian:” The Story of Mercedes de Acosta, also available from Southern Illinois University Press.
When the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyad dynasty in 750 CE, an important element in legitimizing their newly won authority involved defining themselves in the eyes of their Islamic subjects. Nadia Maria El Cheikh shows that ideas about women were central to the process by which the Abbasid caliphate, which ushered in Islam’s Golden Age, achieved self-definition.
In most medieval Islamic cultures, Arab Islam stood in opposition to jahl, or the state of impurity and corruption that existed prior to Islam’s founding. Over time, the concept of jahl evolved into a more general term describing a condition of ignorance and barbarism—as well as a condition specifically associated in Abbasid discourse with women. Concepts of womanhood and gender became a major organizing principle for articulating Muslim identity. Groups whose beliefs and behaviors were perceived by the Abbasids as a threat—not only the jahilis who lived before the prophet Muhammad but peoples living beyond the borders of their empire, such as the Byzantines, and heretics who defied the strictures of their rule, such as the Qaramita—were represented in Abbasid texts through gendered metaphors and concepts of sexual difference. These in turn influenced how women were viewed, and thus contributed to the historical construction of Muslim women’s identity.
Through its investigation of how gender and sexuality were used to articulate cultural differences and formulate identities in Abbasid systems of power and thought, Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity demonstrates the importance of women to the writing of early Islamic history.
Nourished by the cultural exuberance of second wave feminism, Helaine Victoria Press was a home-grown effort of two young women, Jocelyn Cohen and Nancy Poore, who learned how to print, established a printshop, and became the first publishers of women’s history postcards. The authors of Women Making History demonstrate that by creating postcards, Helaine Victoria Press aimed to do more than provide a convenient writing surface or even affect collective memory. Instead, they argue, the press generated feminist memory. The cards, each with the picture of a woman or group of women from history, were multimodal. Pictures were framed in colors and borders appropriate to the era and subject. Lengthy captions offered details about the lives of the women pictured. Unlike other memorials, the cards were mobile: they traveled through the postal system, viewed along the way by the purchasers, mail sorters, mail carriers, and recipients. Upon arriving at their destinations, cards were often posted on office bulletin boards or refrigerators at home, where surroundings shaped their meanings.
This is the first book to demonstrate the relationships between the feminist art movement, the women in print movement, and the scholars studying women’s history. Readers will be drawn to both the large quantity of illustrative materials and the theoretical framework of the book, as it provides an expanded understanding of rhetorical multimodality.
Vivid sources for reconstructing the lives of Assyrian women
In this collection Cécile Michel translates into English texts related to wives and daughters of merchants and to their activities in nineteenth-century BCE Aššur and Kaneš. Discovered in excavations of the Old Assyrian private archives at Kültepe (ancient Kaneš) in Central Anatolia, these letters sent from Aššur reflect the preeminent role of Assyrian women within the family and in the domestic economy, as well as their contribution to long-distance trade. Contracts and other legal texts excavated at Kültepe attest to Assyrian and Anatolian women as parties in marriage and divorce contracts, last wills, loans, and purchase contracts. These unique finds paint a vivid portrait of women who aspire to be socially respected and provide a rare opportunity to reconstruct their daily lives as both businesswomen and housewives.
Features
Cécile Michel is Senior Researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, France) and Professor at Hamburg University (Germany). She is a member of the international group of scholars in charge of the decipherment of the 23,000 tablets found at Kültepe (ancient Kaneš) and of the Kültepe archaeological team. She is the coeditor of and contributor to The Role of Women in Work and Society in the Ancient Near East (2016), Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD (2017), and Mathematics, Administrative and Economic Activities in Ancient Worlds (2020).
This engaging ethnography is set in the remote district of Toledo in Belize, Central America, where three women weave personal stories about the events in their lives. Each describes her experiences of motherhood, marriage, family illness, emigration, separation, work, or domestic violence that led her to recognize gender inequality and then to do something about it. All three challenge the culture of gender at home and in the larger community.
Zola, an East Indian woman without primary school education, invents her own escape from a life of subordination by securing land, then marries the man she's lived with since the age of fourteen--but on her terms. Once she needed permission to buy a dress, now she advocates against domestic violence. Evelyn, a thirty-nine-year old Creole woman, has raised eight children virtually alone, yet she remains married "out of habit." A keen entrepreneur, she has run a restaurant, a store, and a sewing business, and she now owns a mini-mart attached to her home. Rose, a Garifuna woman, is a mother of two whose husband left when she would not accept his extra-marital affairs. While she ekes out a survival in the informal economy by making tamales, she gets spiritual comfort from her religious beliefs, love of music, and two children.
The voices of these ordinary Belizean women fill the pages of this book. Irma McClaurin reveals the historical circumstances, cultural beliefs, and institutional structures that have rendered women in Belize politically and socially disenfranchised and economically dependent upon men. She shows how some ordinary women, through their participation in women's grassroots groups, have found the courage to change their lives. Drawing upon her own experiences as a black woman in the United States, and relying upon cross-cultural data about the Caribbean and Latin America, she explains the specific way gender is constructed in Belize.
The theme of race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression unites these original essays about the experience of women of color—African Americans, Latinas, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. The contributing scholars discuss the social conditions that simultaneously oppress women of color and provide sites for opposition.
Though diverse in their focus, the essays uncover similar experiences in the classroom, workplace, family, prison, and other settings. Working-class women, poor women, and professional women alike experience subordination, restricted participation in social institutions, and structural placement in roles with limited opportunities.
How do women survive, resist, and cope with these oppressive structures? Many articles tell how women of color draw upon resources from their culture, family, kin, and community. Others document defenses against cultural assaults by the dominant society—Native American mothers instilling tribal heritage in their children; African American women engaging in community work; and Asian American women opposing the patriarchy of their own communities and the stereotypes imposed by society at large.
These essays challenge some of our basic assumptions about society, revealing that experiences of inequality are not only diverse but relational.
Interest in the mother-daughter relationship has never been greater, yet there are few books specifically devoted to the relationships between daughters and mothers of color. To fill that gap, this collection of original essays explores the mother-daughter relationship as it appears in the works of African, African American, Asian American, Mexican American, Native American, Indian, and Australian Aboriginal women writers.
Prominent among the writers considered here are Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cherrie Moraga, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Amy Tan. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory and the other essayists examine the myths and reality surrounding the mother-daughter relationship in these writers' works. They show how women writers of color often portray the mother-daughter dyad as a love/hate relationship, in which the mother painstakingly tries to convey knowledge of how to survive in a racist, sexist, and classist world while the daughter rejects her mother's experiences as invalid in changing social times.
This book represents a further opening of the literary canon to twentieth-century women of color. Like the writings it surveys, it celebrates the joys of breaking silence and moving toward reconciliation and growth.
Houston was a terrible place to divorce or seek child custody in the 1980s and early 1990s. Family court judges routinely rendered verdicts that damaged the interests of women and children. In some especially shocking cases, they even granted custody to fathers who had been accused of molesting their own children. Yet despite persistent allegations of cronyism, incompetence, sexism, racism, bribery, and fraud, the judges wielded such political power and influence that removing them seemed all but impossible. The family court system was clearly broken, but there appeared to be no way to fix it.
This book recounts the inspiring and courageous story of women activists who came together to oppose Houston's family court judges and whose political action committee, CourtWatch, played a crucial role in defeating five of the judges in the 1994 judicial election. Carole Bell Ford draws on extensive interviews with Florence Kusnetz, the attorney who led the reform effort, and other CourtWatch veterans, as well as news accounts, to provide a full history of the formation, struggles, and successes of a women's grassroots organization that overcame powerful political interests to improve Houston's family courts. More than just a local story, however, this history of CourtWatch provides a model that can be used by activists in other communities in which legal and social institutions have gone astray. It also honors the heroism of Florence Kusnetz, whose commitment to the Jewish concept of tikkun olam ("repairing and improving the world") brought her out of a comfortable retirement to fight for justice for women and children.
Commemorating the Battle of Karbala, in which the Prophet Mohammad's grandson Hosayn and seventy-two of his family members and supporters were martyred in 680 CE, is the central religious observance of Shi'i Islam. Though much has been written about the rituals that reenact and venerate Karbala, until now no one has studied women's participation in these observances. This collection of original essays by a multidisciplinary team of scholars analyzes the diverse roles that women have played in the Karbala rituals, as well as the varied ways in which gender-coded symbols have been used within religious and political discourses.
The contributors to this volume consider women as participants in and observers of the Karbala rituals in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, India, Pakistan, and the United States. They find that women's experiences in the Shi'i rituals vary considerably from one community to another, based on regional customs, personal preferences, religious interpretations, popular culture, and socioeconomic background. The authors also examine the gender symbolism within the rituals, showing how it reinforces distinctions between the genders while it also highlights the centrality of women to the symbolic repertory of Shi'ism. Overall, the authors conclude that while Shi'i rituals and symbols have in some ways been used to restrict women's social roles, in other ways they have served to provide women with a sense of independence and empowerment.
Pilar is a capable, energetic merchant in the small, Peruvian highland settlement of Chiuchin. Genovena, an unmarried day laborer in the same town, faces an impoverished old age without children to support her. Carmen is the wife of a prosperous farmer in the agricultural community of Mayobamba, eleven thousand feet above Chiuchin in the Andean sierra. Mariana, a madre soltera—single mother—without a husband or communal land of her own, also resides in Mayobamba.
These lives form part of an interlocking network that the authors carefully examine in Women of the Andes. In doing so, they explore the riddle of women’s structural subordination by analyzing the social, political, and economic realities of life in Peru. They examine theoretical explanations of sexual hierarchies against the backdrop of life histories. The result is a study that pinpoints the mechanisms perpetuating sexual repression and traces the impact of social change and national policy on women’s lives.
Stockel sheds light on some of the mysteries surrounding traditional and contemporary Chiricahua Apache culture. Each of the women interviewed emphasizes the importance of storytelling and ritual in preserving Apache heritage. Many ceremonies are still practiced today. In this book, the voices of the Chiricahua women are heard, individually and collectively, describing their history, its effects on them today, and their lives and their hopes for the future.
Now available in a durable paperback edition, Shari Benstock's critically acclaimed, best-selling Women of the Left Bank is a fascinating exploration of the lives and works of some two dozen American, English, and French women whose talent shaped the Paris expatriate experience in the century's early years.
This ambitious historical, biographical, and critical study has taken its place among the foremost works of literary criticism. Maurice Beebe calls it "a distinguished contribution to modern literary history." Jane Marcus hails it as "the first serious literary history of the period and its women writers, making along the way no small contribution to our understanding of the relationships between women artists and their male counterparts, from Henry James to Hemingway, Joyce, Picasso, and Pound."
Scholars of southern Appalachia have largely focused their research on men, particularly white men. While there have been a few important studies of Appalachian women, no one book has offered a broad overview across time and place. With this collection, editors Connie Park Rice and Marie Tedesco redress this imbalance, telling the stories of these women and calling attention to the varied backgrounds of those who call the mountains home.
The essays of Women of the Mountain South debunk the entrenched stereotype of Appalachian women as poor and white, and shine a long-overdue spotlight on women too often neglected in the history of the region. Each author focuses on a particular individual or group, but together they illustrate the diversity of women who live in the region and the depth of their life experiences. The Mountain South has been home to Native American, African American, Latina, and white women, both rich and poor. Civil rights and gay rights advocates, environmental and labor activists, prostitutes, and coal miners—all have lived in the place called the Mountain South and enriched its history and culture.
Although an array of commentary and analyses focus on the New Right, little has been done to tell us who the women are on this side of the political spectrum. Are they social conservatives who call for the reassertion of traditional family values as promulgated by the federal government? Or do they align themselves with laissez-faire conservatives who abhor government intervention yet, like social conservatives, favor increased defense spending, and condemn communism and secular humanism. Rebecca E. Klatch provides the first coherent picture of who joins such movements and how they think.
This book draws upon a rich data source which includes in-depth interviews and field research at right-wing conferences and meetings. Rather than the image of right-wing women as a monolithic group of angry housewives who oppose feminism, the author finds a fundamental division among women of the New Right, with one constituency of women actually supporting part of the feminist vision. Analyzing varying perceptions of women of the New Right, the book examines their beliefs and values, their vision of America, their interpretations of Communism, big government, and feminism, as well as their view of themselves as women and as political actors.
In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.
Women of the Washington Press argues that for nearly two centuries women journalists have persisted in their efforts to cover politics in the nation’s capital in spite of blatant prejudice and restrictive societal attitudes. They have been held back by the difficulties of combining two competing roles – those of women and journalists. As a group they have not agreed among themselves on feminist goals, while declaring that they aspire to be seen as professional journalists, not as advocates of a particular ideology. Still, they have brought a different perspective to the news, as they have fought hard to prove that they are capable of covering political issues just like male journalists. Over the years women have networked with each other and carved out areas of expertise – such as reporting of politically-oriented social events and coverage of first ladies – that men disdained, while they pressed to gain entrance to sex-segregated institutions like the National Press Club. Attempting to merge the personal and the political, they have raised issues like sexual harassment that men journalists left untouched. At a point today where they represent about half of accredited correspondents, women still face shifting barriers that make it difficult to combine the roles of both women and journalists in Washington, but they are continuing to broaden the definition of political journalism.
The 2017 volume in the Manifest West series, Women of the West, delves into the rich mixing pot created in the West, derived from assorted cultures and ethnicities and from a variety of beliefs and traditions across the world, all manifested in today’s Western culture.
There is no one type of Western woman. They are beautifully diverse in race, religion, and sexual orientation, yet they are bonded through the shared experiences and approaches to life that identify them as distinctly Western. Like individual squares of a quilt, women’s interactions with the culture, landscape, and geography of the West, as well as with their families and one another, offer us a unified variety.
In this collection of poems, short stories, and creative nonfiction, twenty-five writers and poets present a broad understanding of the Western woman, sometimes defying and sometimes reinforcing expectations and stereotypes. Perspectives vary from daughters grieving the loss of fathers whose rugged ways resonated with them to mothers striving to share an adoration for the delicacy of nature with their sons. For every woman seeking to conquer the wilderness, another yearns to be tamed by it. These are the stories of natives and Natives, of immigrants from around the world, spanning from eastern states of America to Vietnam in the East. From historical figures toting guns and whips to those who must overcome today’s manifestations of violence against women, these ladies, and so many more, are the Women of the West.
Manifest West is Western Press Books’ literary anthology series. The press, affiliated with Western State Colorado University, produces one anthology annually and focuses on Western regional writing.
Legends and rising stars of feminist film and video tell their stories.
Alexandra Juhasz asked twenty-one women to tell their stories-women whose names make up a who is (and who will be) who of independent and experimental film and video. What emerged in the resulting conversations is a compelling (and previously underdocumented) history of feminism and feminist film and video, from its origins in the fifties and sixties to its apex in the seventies, to today.
Women of Vision is a companion piece to Juhasz’s 1998 documentary of the same name. The book presents the complete interviews, allowing readers to hear directly the voices of these articulate, passionate women in an interactive remembering of feminist media history. Juhasz’s introduction provides a historical, theoretical, and aesthetic context for the interviews. These subjects have all shaped late twentieth-century film and video in fundamental ways, either as artists, producers, distributors, critics, or scholars, and they all believe that media are the most powerful tools for effecting change. Yet they are a very diverse group, with widely varying personal and professional backgrounds. By presenting their interviews together, Juhasz shows the differences among those involved in feminist media, but also the connections among them, and the way in which the field has been enriched by their sharing of knowledge and power. In the end, Juhasz not only records these women’s careers, she broadens our understanding of feminism and shows how feminist history and documentary are made.Interviewees: Pearl Bowser; Margaret Caples; Michelle Citron; Megan Cunningham; Cheryl Dunye; Vanalyne Green; Barbara Hammer; Kate Horsfield; Carol Leigh; Susan Mogul; Juanita Mohammed; Frances Negrón-Muntaner; Eve Oishi; Constance Penley; Wendy Quinn; Julia Reichert; Carolee Schneemann; Valerie Soe; Victoria Vesna; and Yvonne Welbon.Exiled, displaced, tortured, and grieving—each of the five Iraqi women whose lives and losses come to us through Haifa Zangana's skillfully wrought novel is searching in her own way for peace with a past that continually threatens to swallow up the present.
Majda, the widow of a former Ba'ath party official who was killed by the government he served. Adiba, a political dissident tortured under Saddam Hussein's regime. Um Mohammed, a Kurdish refugee who fled her home for political asylum. Iqbal, a divorced mother whose family in Iraq is suffering the effects of Western economic sanctions. And Sahira, the wife of a Communist politician, struggling with his disillusionment and her own isolation. Bound to one another by a common Iraqi identity and a common location in 1990s London, these women come together across differences in politics, ethnic and class background, age, and even language. In narrating the friendship that develops among them, Zangana captures their warmth and humor as well as their sadness, their feelings of despair along with their search for hope, their sense of uprootedness, and their yearnings for home.
Weaving between the women's memories of Iraq—nostalgic and nightmarish—and their lives as exiles in London, Zangana's novel gives voice to the richness and complexity of Iraqi women's experiences. Through their stories, the novel represents a powerful critique of the violence done to ordinary people by those who hold power both in Iraq and in the West.
2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Methamphetamine (ice, speed, crystal, shard) has been called epidemic in the United States. Yet few communities were ready for increased use of methamphetamine by suburban women. Women on Ice is the first book to study exclusively the lives of women who use the drug and its effects on their families.
In-depth interviews with women in the suburban counties of one of the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. chronicle the details of their initiation into methamphetamine, the turning points into problematic drug use, and for a few, their escape from lives veering out of control. Their life course and drug careers are analyzed in relation to the intersecting influences of social roles, relationships, social/political structures, and political trends. Examining the effects of punitive drug policy, inadequate social services, and looming public health risks, including HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C, the book gives voice to women silenced by shame.
Boeri introduces new and developing concepts in the field of addiction studies and proposes policy changes to more broadly implement initiatives that address the problems these women face. She asserts that if we are concerned that the war on drugs is a war on drug users, this book will alert us that it is also a war on suburban families.
As she did in The Return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis here retrieves individual lives from historical obscurity to give us a window onto the early modern world. As women living in the seventeenth century, Glikl bas Judah Leib, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Maria Sibylla Merian, equally remarkable though very different, were not queens or noblewomen, their every move publicly noted. Rather, they were living “on the margins” in seventeenth-century Europe, North America, and South America. Yet these women—one Jewish, one Catholic, one Protestant—left behind memoirs and writings that make for a spellbinding tale and that, in Davis’ deft narrative, tell us more about the life of early modern Europe than many an official history.
All these women were originally city folk. Glikl bas Judah Leib was a merchant of Hamburg and Metz whose Yiddish autobiography blends folktales with anecdotes about her two marriages, her twelve children, and her business. Marie de l’Incarnation, widowed young, became a mystic visionary among the Ursuline sisters and cofounder of the first Christian school for Amerindian women in North America. Her letters are a rich source of information about the Huron, Algonquin, Montagnais, and Iroquois peoples of Quebec. Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname. Along the way she abandoned her husband to join a radical Protestant sect in the Netherlands.
Drawing on Glikl’s memoirs, Marie’s autobiography and correspondence, and Maria’s writings on entomology and botany, Davis brings these women to vibrant life. She reconstructs the divergent paths their stories took, and at the same time shows us each amid the common challenges and influences of the time—childrearing, religion, an outpouring of vernacular literature—and in relation to men. The resulting triptych suggests the range of experience, self-consciousness, and expression possible in seventeenth-century Europe and its outposts. It also shows how persons removed from the centers of power and learning ventured in novel directions, modifying in their own way Europe’s troubled and ambivalent relations with other “marginal” peoples.
Women Remember the War, 1941-1945 offers a brief introduction to the experiences of Wisconsin women in World War II through selections from oral history interviews in which women addressed issues concerning their wartime lives.
In this volume, more than 30 women describe how they balanced their more traditional roles in the home with new demands placed on them by the biggest global conflict in history. This book provides a rich mix of insights, incorporating the perspectives of workers in factories, in offices, and on farms as well as those of wives and mothers who found their work in the home. In addition, the volume contains accounts by women who served overseas in the military and the Red Cross. These accounts provide readers with a vivid picture of how women coped with the stresses created by their daily lives and by the additional burden of worrying about loved ones fighting overseas.
This collection of original essays discusses the increasingly rapid spread of AIDS among women, considering the varying experiences and responses of women of color, lesbians, and economically impoverished women. The essays range widely from policy assessments to case studies, focusing on women as sufferers, caretakers, policy activists, community organizers, and educators.
How do women strategically make their mark on state legislatures? Anna Mitchell Mahoney’s book traces the development of women’s state legislative caucuses and the influence both gender and party have on women’s ability to organize collectively. She provides a comprehensive analysis of how and why women organize around their gender identity in state legislatures—or why they do not.
Women Take Their Place in State Legislatures includes a quantitative analysis of institutional-level variables and caucus existence in all 50 states. Case studies of caucus attempts in New Jersey, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Iowa between 2006 and 2010 examine attempts at creating women’s caucuses that succeeded or failed, and why. Mahoney’s interviews with 180 state legislators and their staff explore the motivations of caucus creators and participants. Ultimately, she finds that women’s organizing is contextual; it demonstrates the dynamic nature of gender.
Mahoney also provides insights into broad questions regarding gendered institutions, collective action, and political party governance. Women Take Their Place in State Legislatures fills a lacuna in the evaluation of women in government.
Women Warriors in Romantic Drama examines a recurring figure that appears in French, British, and German drama between 1789 and 1830: the woman warrior. The term itself, “woman warrior,” refers to quasi-historical female soldiers or assassins. Women have long contributed to military campaigns as canteen women. Camp followers ranged from local citizenry to spouses and prostitutes, and on occasion, women assisted men in combat. However, the woman warrior is a romantic figure, meaning a fanciful ideal, despite the reality of women’s participation in select scenes of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The central claim of this book is the woman warrior is a way for some women writers (Olympe de Gouges, Christine Westphalen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Mary Robinson) to explore the case for extending citizenship to women. This project focuses primarily on theater for the reason that the stage simulates the public world that female dramatists and their warriors seek to inhabit. Novels and poetry clearly belong to the realm of fiction, but when audiences see women fighting onstage, they confront concrete visions of impossible women. I examine dramas in the context of their performance and production histories in order to answer why so many serious dramas featuring women warriors fail to find applause, or fail to be staged at all. Dramas about women warriors seem to sometimes contribute to the argument for female citizenship when they take the form of tragedy, because the deaths of female protagonists in such plays often provoke consideration about women’s place in society.
Consequently, where we find women playing soldiers in various entertainment venues, farce and satire often seem to dominate, although this book points to some exceptions. Censorship and audience demand for comedies made producing tragedies difficult for female playwrights, who battled additional obstacles to fashioning their careers. I compare male (Edmund Eyre, Heinrich von Kleist) and female writers’ dramatizations of the woman warrior. This analysis shows that the difficult project of getting audiences to take women warriors seriously resembles women writers’ struggles to enter the ostensibly male domains of tragedy and the public sphere.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Women Who Live Evil Lives documents the lives and practices of mixed-race, Black, Spanish, and Maya women sorcerers, spell-casters, magical healers, and midwives in the social relations of power in Santiago de Guatemala, the capital of colonial Central America. Men and women from all sectors of society consulted them to intervene in sexual and familial relations and disputes between neighbors and rival shop owners; to counter abusive colonial officials, employers, or husbands; and in cases of inexplicable illness.
Applying historical, anthropological, and gender studies analysis, Martha Few argues that women's local practices of magic, curing, and religion revealed opportunities for women's cultural authority and power in colonial Guatemala. Few draws on archival research conducted in Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain to shed new light on women's critical public roles in Santiago, the cultural and social connections between the capital city and the countryside, and the gender dynamics of power in the ethnic and cultural contestation of Spanish colonial rule in daily life.
Winner, 2014 AWSS Best Book in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Women's Studies
In Russian culture, the archetypal mother is noble and self-sacrificing. In Women with a Thirst for Destruction, however, Jenny Kaminer shows how this image is destabilized during periods of dramatic rupture in Russian society, examining in detail the aftermath of three key moments in the country’s history: the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the fall of the Communist regime in 1991. She explores works both familiar and relatively unexamined: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlev Family, Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s The Time: Night, as well as a late Soviet film (Vyacheslav Krishtofovich’s Adam’s Rib, 1990) and media coverage of the Chechen conflict. Kaminer’s book speaks broadly to the mutability of seemingly established cultural norms in the face of political and social upheaval.
Women with disabilities are women first, sharing the dreams and disappointments common to women in a male-dominated society. But because society persists in viewing disability as an emblem of passivity and incompetence, disabled women occupy a devalued status in the social hierarchy. This book represents the intersection of the feminist and disability rights perspectives; it analyzes the forces that push disabled women towards the margins of social life, and it considers the resources that enable these women to resist the stereotype.
Drawing on law, social science, folklore, literature, psychoanalytic theory, and political activism, this book describes the experience of women with disabilities. The essays consider the impact of social class, race, the age at which disability occurs, and sexual orientation on the disabled woman's self esteem as well as on her life options. The contributors focus their inquiry on the self perceptions of disabled women and ask: From what sources do these women draw positive self images? How do they resist the culture's power to label them as deviant? The essays describe the ways in which disabled women face discrimination in the workplace and the failure of the mainstream women's movement to address their concerns.
In Victorian England, virtually all women were taught to sew; needlework was allied with images of domestic economy and with traditional female roles of wife and mother- with home rather than factory. The professional seamstress, however, labored long hours for very small wages creating gowns for the upper and middle classes. In her isolation and helplessness, she provided social reformers with a powerful image of working-class suffering that appealed to the sensibilities of the upper classes and helped galvanize public opinion around the need for reform.
Women, Work, and Representation addresses the use of that image in the reform movement, underscoring the shock to the Victorian public when reports revealed that the profession of needlework was extremely hazardous, even deadly.
Author Lynn M. Alexander traces the development of the symbol of the seamstress through a variety of presentations, drawing from the writings of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and George W. M. Reynolds, and on visual representations by Richard Redgrave, Thomas Benjamin Kennington, John Everett Millais, John Leech, John Tenniel, and Hubert von Herkomer.
Written to appeal to Victorian scholars, women's studies scholars, and those interested in semiotics and aestheticism, Women, Work, and Representation includes twenty illustrations, most from periodicals of the day, providing new insights into the lives of working women throughout the Victorian era.
Women Writing the Academy is based on an extensive interview study by Gesa E. Kirsch that investigates how women in different academic disciplines perceive and describe their experiences as writers in the university.
Kirsch’s study focuses on the writing strategies of successful women writers, their ways of establishing authority, and the kinds of audiences they address in different disciplinary settings. Based on multiple interviews with thirty-five women from five different disciplines (anthropology, education, history, nursing, and psychology) and four academic ranks (seniors, graduate students, and faculty before and after tenure), this is the first book to systematically explore the academic context in which women write and publish.
While there are many studies in literary criticism on women as writers of fiction, there has not been parallel scholarship on women as writers of professional discourse, be it inside or outside the academy. Through her research, for example, Kirsch found that women were less likely than their male counterparts to think of their work as sufficiently significant to write up and submit for publication, tended to hold on to their work longer than men before sending it out, and were less likely than men to revise and resubmit manuscripts that had been initially rejected.
This book is significant in that it investigates a new area of research— gender and writing—and in doing so brings together findings on audience, authority, and gender.
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