This study examines how the myths of man as Just Warrior and woman as Beautiful Soul serve to recreate/secure women's social position as noncombatants and men's identity as warriors. It demonstrates how these myths are undermined by the reality of female bellicosity and sacrificial male love.

In this study, the author attempts to capture the complex ways that political bodies deal with one another through norms and rules and not simply by force by examining two dominant currents in international politics: sovereignty and nationalism.

Each chapter of this book treats a particular historical or contemporary topic of civic concern. Some are centered on current family crises and issues (the family wage, child abuse, the new eugenics) while others look to the wider national and international polity. Yet each, insistently, returns to common themes: the many faces and forms of power; struggles for autonomy; the need for human sociality and community. Elshtain's essays on controversial domestic subjects demonstrate her independence of mind, her understanding of politics as the art of the possible, and her openness to debate. In...

President George Bush said yes; some bishops said no; even Doonesbury touched on the question. But what does it mean, in any case, to say that a war is just? What are the yardsticks of justice that support President Bush's claim that it was just to reverse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait? And how does one evaluate the justness of stopping the war when the allies did? And what of our fierce bombing of the fleeing Iraqi troops on the road from Kuwait? The threat to Israel? The value of oil in weighing whether to fight or not? But Was It Just? is an ethical primer in which the leading thinkers of our...

Raise any number of public issues--health care, education, welfare--and religious beliefs inevitably shape Americans' viewpoints. On certain topics the introduction of religion can be explosive. This book discusses how we can and why we should hear religious voices in the public square. An American Assembly Book.

Jean Bethke Elshtain advocates "just war" in times of crisis and mounts a reasoned attack against the anti-war contingent in American intellectual life. Advocating an ethic of responsibility, Elshtain forces us to ask tough questions not only about the nature of terrorism, but about ourselves. This paperback edition features a new introduction by the author, addressing the Iraq war and other events in the Middle East.

In this eagerly anticipated interpretation of the life and work of quintessential "public intellectual" Jane Addams (1860-1935), Jean Bethke Elshtain explores Addams's legacy thematically and chronologically, recounting her embrace of "social feminism," her challenge to the usual cleavage between "conservative" and "liberal," and the growth of Chicago's famed Hull House into a thriving cultural and intellectual center. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy is a rich and revealing portrait of one of the most extraordinary figures in American history.

Jane Addams was a prolific and elegant writer. Her twelve books consist largely of published essays, but to appreciate her life work one must also read her previously uncollected speeches and editorials. This artfully compiled collection begins with Addams's youthful Junior Class Oration on women as "Breadgivers," features thoughtful examinations of topics as diverse as "Tolstoy and Gandhi" and "The Public School and the Immigrant Child," and even includes popular essays on "The Subtle Problems of Charity," from The Atlantic Monthly, and "Need a Woman Over Fifty Feel Old?" from Ladies' Home...

Focusing on the Western philosophical tradition and the work of contemporary feminists, Jean Elshtain explores the general tendency to assert the primacy of the public world--the political sphere dominated by men--and to denigrate the private world--the familial sphere dominated by women. She offers her own positive reconstruction of the public and the private in a feminist theory that reaffirms the importance of the family and envisions an "ethical polity."