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183 books match the query 'Feminist' and 5 start with i

cover of In the Company of Radical Women Writers

In the Company of Radical Women Writers

Rosemary Hennessy

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Recovering the bold voices and audacious lives of women who confronted capitalist society’s failures and injustices in the 1930s—a decade unnervingly similar to our own
 

In the Company of Radical Women Writers rediscovers the political commitments and passionate advocacy of seven writers—Black, Jewish, and white—who as young women turned to communism around the Great Depression and, over decades of national crisis, spoke to issues of labor, land, and love in ways that provide urgent, thought-provoking guidance for today. Rosemary Hennessy spotlights the courageous lives of women who confronted similar challenges to those we still face: exhausting and unfair labor practices, unrelenting racial injustice, and environmental devastation.

As Hennessy brilliantly shows, the documentary journalism and creative and biographical writings of Marvel Cooke, Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, Alice Childress, Josephine Herbst, Meridel Le Sueur, and Muriel Rukeyser recognized that life is sustained across a web of dependencies that we each have a duty to maintain. Their work brought into sharp focus the value and dignity of Black women’s domestic work, confronted the destructive myths of land exploitation and white supremacy, and explored ways of knowing attuned to a life-giving erotic energy that spans bodies and relations. In doing so, they also expanded the scope of American communism.

By tracing the attention these seven women pay to “life-making” as the relations supporting survival and wellbeing—from Harlem to the American South and Midwest—In the Company of Radical Women Writers reveals their groundbreaking reconceptions of the political and provides bracing inspiration in the ongoing fight for justice.

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cover of Intelligent Souls?: Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

Intelligent Souls?

Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

Samara Anne Cahill

Bucknell University Press, 2019

Intelligent Souls? offers a new understanding of Islam in eighteenth-century Britain. Cahill explores two overlapping strands of thinking about women and Islam, which produce the phenomenon of “feminist orientalism.” One strand describes seventeenth-century ideas about the nature of the soul used to denigrate religio-political opponents. A second tracks the transference of these ideas to Islam during the Glorious Revolution and the Trinitarian controversy of the 1690s. The confluence of these discourses compounded if not wholly produced the stereotype that Islam denied women intelligent souls. Surprisingly, women writers of the period accepted the stereotype, but used it for their own purposes. Rowe, Carter, Lennox, More, and Wollstonecraft, Cahill argues, established common ground with men by leveraging the “otherness” identified with Islam to dispute British culture’s assumption that British women were lacking in intelligence, selfhood, or professional abilities. When Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she accepted that view as true—and “feminist orientalism” was born, introducing a fallacy about Islam to the West that persists to this day.  

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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cover of Interiority in German Women's Writing

Interiority in German Women's Writing

Beate Allert

University of Delaware Press, 2026

Interiority in German Women’s Writing for the first time systematically gathers and engages with contributions of German women authors to the discourse on interiority (Innerlichkeit) from 1750 to 1850. This volume shifts the recent focus on abstract theoretical and medical discourses on inwardness to the origins of interiority in literature and philosophy as written and experienced by women from the Age of Sensibility (Empfindsamkeit) to the Romantic era. At the same time, it makes a claim for and explores the ramifications of understanding interiority as a feminine discourse. Contributors investigate the works of women authors who searched to find rescue from their cultural and personal entrapment via creative spaces and various modes of interiority in theatrical performances, poetic writings, letters, biographical narratives, prose, and fairy tales. From the case studies and literary analyses in the volume, interiority emerges as a spectrum of approaches to defining, resisting, and transforming the innermost self. 

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cover of Intimate Scholarship: Ways of Knowing Through Black Feminist Forms

Intimate Scholarship

Ways of Knowing Through Black Feminist Forms

Adena Rivera-Dundas

The Ohio State University Press, 2026

Refocuses critical attention on how Black feminist scholars experiment with form and embodiment to connect with readers and critique structures of power.

In recent years, scholars have turned to experimentations with form to imbue critiques of power with critiques of genre, discipline, and public accessibility. Yet these forays remain undertheorized. In Intimate Scholarship, Adena Rivera-Dundas proposes that experimental scholarship can perform a kind of intimacy that is enacted through the written form. Drawing on writing that brings together embodied epistemologies and experiential knowledge, she constructs an archive of intimate texts—a kaleidoscopic array of Black feminist output that blends scholarship and creative writing. Writers such as Saidiya Hartman, Claudia Rankine, and Jesmyn Ward articulate political and ethical relationships to privacy and intimacy, thinking through the role their bodies play in making sense of the world and connecting with readers in ways that are both intimate and resistive. Intimacy, defined here as a construction of connection made through the exchange of ideas, is necessary for envisioning a world that centers and celebrates Black life. Inviting readers to reflect and engage in pedagogical exercises throughout, Intimate Scholarship provides a sweeping historical framework for rethinking and reembracing contemporary scholarship.
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cover of Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing

Inventing Womanhood

Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing

Tara Williams

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

In Inventing Womanhood, Tara Williamsinvestigates new ideas about womanhood that arose in fourteenth-century Britain and evolved throughout the fifteenth century. In the aftermath of the plague and the substantial cultural shifts of the late 1300s, female roles expanded temporarily. As a result, the dominant models of maiden, wife, and widow could no longer adequately describe women’s roles and lives.
 
Middle English writers responded by experimenting with new ways of representing women across a variety of genres, from courtly poetry to devotional texts and from royal correspondence to cycle plays. In particular, writers coined new terms, including “womanhood” and “femininity,” and refashioned others, such as “motherhood.” These experiments allowed writers to develop and define a larger idea of womanhood underlying more specific identities like wife or mother and to re-imagine women’s relationships to different kinds of authority—generally masculine and frequently religious.
           
By exploring the medieval origins of some of our most important gender vocabulary, Inventing Womanhood defamiliarizes our modern usage, which often treats those terms as etymologically transparent and almost limitlessly capacious. It also restores a necessary historical and linguistic dimension to gender studies, providing the groundwork for reconsidering how that language and the categories it creates have determined the ways in which gender has been imagined since the Middle Ages.
 
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