Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Women's Studies

Religious conflicts had a pronounced effect on women and their families in early modern England, but our understanding of that impact is limited by the restrictions that prevented the open expression of religious beliefs in the post-Reformation years. More can be gleaned by shifting our focus to the New World, where gender relations and family formations were largely unhampered by the unsettling political and religious climate of England. In Maryland, English Arminian Catholics, Particular Baptists, Presbyterians, Puritans, Quakers, and Roman Catholics lived and worked together for most of...

" A] stunning, deeply researched, and gracefully written social history." --Leslie Schwalm, University of Iowa

This study of women in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, looks at the roles of women in an urban slave society. Cynthia M. Kennedy takes up issues of gender, race, condition (slave or free), and class and examines the ways each contributed to conveying and replicating power. She analyses what it meant to be a woman in a world where historically specific social classifications determined personal destiny and where at the same time people of color and white people mingled...

Long before Betty Friedan wrote about "the problem that had no name" in The Feminine Mystique, a group of American feminists whose leaders included Melusina Fay Peirce, Mary Livermore, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman campaigned against women's isolation in the home and confinement to domestic life as the basic cause of their unequal position in society.The Grand Domestic Revolution reveals the innovative plans and visionary strategies of these persistent women, who developed the theory and practice of what Hayden calls "material feminism" in pursuit of economic independence and social...

Throughout South and Southeast Asia, groups battle over definitions of identity in direction and character for their state, a struggle complicated by the legacy of colonialism. The contributors to this volume explore the intricate, dynamic relationships that pertain between women's agency and the state-making institutions and armed forces of Kashmir, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Burma (Myanmar). They also address the complex roles of Islam, Hinduism, and Theravada Buddhism in these postcolonial dynamics.In particular, the contributors examine religion as a way of understanding how...

The establishment of juvenile courts in cities across the United States was one of the earliest social welfare reforms of the Progressive Era. The first juvenile court law was passed in Illinois in 1899. Within a decade twenty-two other states had passed similar laws, based on the Illinois example. Mothers of All Children examines this movement, focusing especially on the role of women reformers and the importance of gender consciousness in influencing the shape of reform. Until recently historians have assumed that male reformers dominated many of the Progressive Era social...

This analysis of Venezuelan women's organizing traces a sixty-year struggle to democratize political practice and represent women's interests. It also helps to explain some of the "unfinished business" of Latin American democratization: why women have had difficulty participating in regimes they fought to restore, and how they seek inclusion. Friedman's innovative theoretical approach uses gender analysis to explain the impact of the "political opportunity structure"--the institutions, actors, and discourses--of democratization on women's participation.

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its "free market" strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country's poor, including women's groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women's participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature.

Drawing on...

Milcah Martha Moore (1740-1829) lived and flourished in the Philadelphia area during its peak, when it was the center of commerce, politics, social life, and culture in the young republic. A well-educated woman, disowned by her Quaker Meeting for an unauthorized marriage, Moore knew and corresponded with many of the leading lights of her day. From her network of acquaintances, she created a commonplace book, which is published here for the first time.

Moore compiled her commonplace book during the American Revolution, carefully selecting works of poetry and prose that she and her...

As one reads the classic works of political philosophy one is limited to books written by male authors. When reading interpretations of these authors it seems that the male philosophers were only concerned with the male citizen. Arlene Saxonhouse argues that these classic authors, from Plato to Machiavelli, while they praised the world of male public action, also recognized that the public world was not the totality of human existence. These authors, Saxonhouse says, saw that a private sphere which included women existed, and that that sphere set limits upon and defined the possibilities...

Here is a landmark publication in women's studies. "Hidden Aspects of Women's Work" is the culmination of years of research by the prestigious Women and Work Research Group. The book offers an unusually comprehensive discussion of women in the work force, covering both unpaid domestic work and paid labor the experiences of blue collar workers and professionals, and the ways the institutions affect them all. In addition to offering broad coverage of how women and men differ in work experience and job satisfaction, the book addresses the intersection between work and family life and the...

Much of the material unearthed by this book is ugly, states historiographer Patricia Morton who exposes profoundly dehumanizing constructions of reality embedded in American scholarship as it has attempted to render the history of the Afro-American woman. Focusing on the scholarly literature of fact rather than on fictional or popular portrayals, Disfigured Images explores the telling--and frequent mis-telling--of the story of black women during a century of American historiography beginning in the late nineteenth century and extending to the present. Morton finds that during this period,...

This unique social history spans the last half century, when developments in birth control and the education of women have increased opportunities for women to have successful careers. This book investigates how the first generation of modern women faced the challenge of combining marriage and family with professional responsibilities. Olivia Cox-Fill, an Irish journalist and professional filmmaker, interviewed hundreds of prominent women from 10 different countries on three continents before presenting this group portrait of 30 interviews of women leaders, diplomats, award-winning...

This book employs a sociological perspective to examine the situation of the African American female in light of changing global economic, political, and educational events. The legal forum is utilized along with social statistics to describe the worsening plight of women and minorities in the face of intensified ethnic competition and decreased world resources. A multiplicity of methods are used to clarify and detail the negative influence of global forces in the forums of the courts upon the Black woman. In addition, the negative impact upon the working classes is implied in describing...

When Verschuur-Basse, a French sociologist specializing in the family, was invited by the Academy of Social Sciences to Beijing in 1985, she interviewed women from three generations and a variety of professions about their lives as women, wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law. Over a five-year period she conducted in-depth, non-directed interviews with educated women who were able to analyze and interpret their lives in the context of important formative factors such as the Cultural Revolution, the one-child policy, and other social reforms. The difference between urban and rural...

Little attention has been paid to the lives led by families of prisoners. Using a feminist approach, the author explores how the lives of 25 wives of prisoners at Soledad prison are affected by the incarceration of their husbands. Relationships, stigma, coping, finances, children, the prison system, and rehabilitation are explored through in-depth interviews. This study describes the experiences of the wives and seeks to connect their experiences to a conceptual framework that explores the context of sex, race, and class inequalities. The author discusses prison policy recommendations to...

Using her observations of the United Nation's Fourth World Women's Conference held in China in 1995 as a foundation, the author examines the history and current situation of Latinas and attempts to place them in a global context. After examining the goals, objectives, and atmosphere of the Conference, she analyzes the Chicana feminist movement and its legacy and how Chicanas have struggled to relate to the Conference and its human rights platform. She then profiles U.S. Latinas and presents data on their reality in today's world. The response to U.S. expansionist policies and the...

Using a historical framework, this book offers not only the penal history of the death penalty in the states that have given women the death penalty, but it also retells the stories of the women who have been executed and those currently awaiting their fate on death row.

This work takes a historical look at women and the death penalty in the United States from 1900 to 1998. It gives the reader a look at the penal codes in the various states regarding the death penalty and the personal stories of women who have been executed or who are currently on death row. As Americans continue to...