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5 books match the query 'Women's rights in literature'

cover of A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era

A Stage of Their Own

Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era

Sheila Stowell

University of Michigan Press, 1994

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cover of In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature

In Contempt

Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature

Kristin Kalsem

The Ohio State University Press, 2012

 In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature, by Kristin Kalsem, explores the legal advocacy performed by nineteenth-century women writers in publications of nonfiction and fiction, as well as in real-life courtrooms and in the legal forum provided by the novel form.

 
The nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented reform in laws affecting married women’s property, child support and custody, lunacy, divorce, birth control, domestic violence, and women in the legal profession. Women’s contributions to these changes in the law, however, have been largely ignored because their work, stories, and perspectives are not recorded in authoritative legal texts; rather, evidence of their arguments and views are recorded in writings of a different kind. This book examines lesser-known works of nonfiction and fiction by legal reformers such as Annie Besant and Georgina Weldon and novelists such as Frances Trollope, Jane Hume Clapperton, George Paston, and Florence Dixie.
 
In Contempt brings to light new connections between Victorian law and literature, not only with its analysis of many “lost” novels but also with its new legal readings of old ones such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Rider Haggard’s She (1887), and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). This study reexamines the cultural and political roles of the novel in light of “new evidence” that many nineteenth-century novels were “lawless”—showing contempt for, rather than policing, the law.
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cover of Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel

Married, Middlebrow, and Militant

Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel

Teresa Mangum

University of Michigan Press, 1998

Between 1880 and 1920, the New Woman novel outraged "ladies," rallied women's rights activists, and inspired women readers and writers to harness an emerging popular literary market to their own political purposes. British author and activist Sarah Grand (1854-1943) took center stage, popularizing the term "New Woman," marching for suffrage, lecturing from platforms in Britain and America, and publishing fiction and essays that challenged the most powerful obstacle to middle-class militancy-marriage. Married, Middlebrow, and Militant indicates that Grand's dedication to reforming rather than abandoning marriage was based on the belief that changing the institution would lead to the legal, social, and personal transformation of both men and women. Writing across a range of sub-genres, she sought to loosen the hold of the marriage plot in fiction that called for New Women, New Men, and new social and literary plots. For her, and those like her, the middle-brow novel held militant potential to inspire immediate, intimate, and electric change. Teresa Mangum has examined a range of primary materials, including Grand's correspondence and the cartoons and periodical literature of the day, and further illuminates Grand's work by considering how it relates to women's history and feminist theories of narrative and desire. Deftly combining biography and criticism, the book also documents the antagonism of conventional critics to both the New Woman and new and popular forms of fiction that are still denigrated as middlebrow.
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cover of Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips

Typical Girls

The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips

Susan E. Kirtley

The Ohio State University Press, 2021

Winner, 2022 Charles Hatfield Award from the Comics Studies Society

In the years following 1975, a group of female-created comic strips came to national attention in a traditionally male-dominated medium. Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips uncovers the understudied and developing history of these strips, defining and exploring the ramifications of this expression of women’s roles at a time of great change in history and in comic art. This impressive, engaging, and timely study illustrates how these comics express the complexities of women’s experiences, especially as such experiences were shaped by shifting and often competing notions of womanhood and feminism. Including the comics of Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy), Nicole Hollander (Sylvia), Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek), Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From), Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), and Jan Eliot (Stone Soup), Typical Girls is an important history of the representation of womanhood and women’s rights in popular comic strips.
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cover of Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Women Reformers

Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Women Reformers

Sherry Ceniza

University of Alabama Press, 1999

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Examining Whitman’s poetic development through the documented influence of nineteenth‑century women reformers.

Walt Whitman and 19th-Century Women Reformers documents Whitman's friendships with women during the 1850s, the decade of Whitman's most creative period. The book reveals startling connections between the first three editions of Leaves of Grass and the texts generated by the women he knew during this period, many of whom were radical activists in the women's rights movement.

Sherry Ceniza argues that Whitman's editions of Leaves became progressively more radically 'feminist' as he followed the women's rights movement during the 1850s and that he was influenced by what he called the 'true woman of the new aggressive type . . . woman under the new dispensation.' Ceniza documents the progression of the National Woman's Rights movement through the lives and writings of three of its leaders- Abby Hills Price, Paulina Wright Davis, and Ernestine L. Rose. By juxtaposing the texts written by these women with Leaves, Ceniza shows that Whitman used many of the same arguments and rhetorical gestures as his female activist friends.

The book also discusses the influence of women engaged in women's rights outside the National Woman's Rights organization. And Ceniza's opening chapter is devoted to a fresh interpretation of the life and thought of another strong-minded woman who influenced the poet's writing-Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, Walt Whitman's mother.



 

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