Accused of transvestism and trickery, indicted for bigamy and hanged for robbery, Mary Carleton, the German Princess, was the most notorious female rogue of her time. Mary Frith, alias Mal Cutpurse, was a similarly spectacular transgressor: a resident of London's infamous Alsatia district, a criminal sanctuary between Fleet Street and the Thames, she was renowned for strolling the streets of seventeenth-century London in men's clothes.

The Case of Mary Carleton and The Life and Death of Mary Frith, are reprinted here for the first time, since their original publication...

In these spirited and powerfully written essays, a new generation of intellectuals makes its mark, challenging conservatives and liberals alike to chart a new course for a responsible politics in contemporary society. A new intellectual movement on the left emerges here. No longer trapped by the old polarizing antagonism between Marxism and feminism, these authors demonstrate as never before the need for an awaremess of gender as it affects every aspect of our society. At the same time, these paradigmatic essays map out a new terrain for feminist thinking, one that fully recognizes the...

What do narratives by British suffragettes of being forcibly fed have in common with the representation of indigenous women in Canadian police archives? How are literary representations of domestic violence related to the use of silence as a strategy of resistance in African American women's writing? How are modernist fictions of gay male desire connected with ambiguous sexual performances in rock music or with images of Vietnam veterans in American horror movies? What does a narrative of women's participation in Bengali national resistance movements share with an ethnographic study of...