Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Women's Studies

Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635 1848

Bernard Moitt

Examines the reaction of black women to slavery.

In Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635 1848, Bernard Moitt argues that gender had a profound effect on the slave plantation system in the French Antilles. He details and analyzes the social condition of enslaved black women in the plantation societies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), and French Guiana from 1635 to the abolition of slavery in the French colonial empire in 1848. Moitt examines the lives of black women in...

"How extraordinary it is that compassion and tenderness may flourish in the cruellest conditions; how stubbornly and bravely people survive them. This is not a depressing book but an inspiriting and encouraging one." --Doris Lessing

"The sixteen life stories are riveting.... testimony to the complexity of the human spirit , ] to miracles of survival and endurance in the most hellish of conditions.... Till My Tale Is Told remind s] us of the importance of remembrance and testimony about this particularly brutal chapter of human history."
--The Women's Review of Books

Arrest,...

" When Hens Crow] looks in an original way at the ideas of the first feminists... a pioneering work, written in a clear style and firmly grounded in recent scholarship...." Journal of American History

In 1852 the New York Daily Herald described leaders of the woman s rights movement as "hens that crow." Using speeches, pamphlets, newspaper reports, editorials, and personal papers, Sylvia Hoffert discusses how ideology, language, and strategies of early woman s rights advocates influenced a new political culture grudgingly inclusive of women. She shows the impact of philosophies of...

How did African women negotiate the complex political, economic, and social forces of colonialism in their daily lives? How did they make meaningful lives for themselves in a world that challenged fundamental notions of work, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and family? By considering the lives of ordinary African women farmers, queen mothers, midwives, urban dwellers, migrants, and political leaders in the context of particular colonial conditions at specific places and times, Women in African Colonial Histories challenges the notion of a homogeneous "African women s experience." While...

"This collection offers a treasure trove of primary sources of interest to students of women's history. Carefully introduced and annotated, these documents illustrate the diversity of Russian women's lives." --Barbara Alpern Engel

"There is no other work that offers such a wide variety of documents and such a successful combination of literary and historical materials." --Ann Hibner Koblitz

This rich anthology of source materials makes available for the first time in any language a multitude of primary sources on the lives of Russian women from the reign of Peter the Great...

In The Spectacular Modern Woman, Liz Conor illustrates how technological advances in image reproduction transformed Western industrial societies into visual or "ocularcentric" cultures with significant and complex consequences for women s lives. With the rise of mass media, photography, and movies, a woman s visibility became a mark of her modernity, and the result was at once liberating and confining, given the many narrow conceptions of what it meant to be a modern woman. Focusing on the city girl in the metropolitan scene, the "Screen Struck Girl" in the cinematic scene, the mannequin...

Praise for the first edition:

"An impressive collection of more than 50 pieces essays, poems, folktales, short stories, memoirs, film scripts, lectures/speeches by Arab women challenging the widely accepted view of Middle Eastern women as submissive non-thinkers to whom feminism is a foreign concept." Booklist

"Anyone interested in good writing should read Opening the Gates]. Here are first-class stories with the energy and freshness we expect from a beginning." Doris Lessing, The Independent

"This collection of stories, speeches, essays, poems and memoirs bears fierce...

Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills offers a comparative history of European girlhood from 1750 to 1960, with a focus on Britain, France, and Germany. It covers diverse issues in the lives of girls, from sexuality and leisure to social roles in the family and the economy. A corrective to historians traditionally male orientation toward youth, the volume brings girls to the center of European history, emphasizing their importance in European economics and culture. It also identifies cultural and temporal differences within the European experience, particularly with regard to the spaces girls...

Julie Hemment's engrossing study traces the development encounter through interactions between international foundations and Russian women's groups during a decade of national collapse. Prohibited from organizing independently under state socialism, women's groups became a focus of attention in the mid-1990s for foundations eager to promote participatory democracy, but the version of civil society that has emerged (the "third sector") is far from what Russian activists envisioned and what donor agencies promised. Drawing on ethnographic methods and Participatory Action Research, Hemment...

"When historians take women's movements and gender differences in organizations... seriously, this book will become part of the canon.... a forthright effort to view women's participation in politics in exciting new ways."--American Historical Review

"The work not only fills a gap in knowledge of women's radical politics, but also addresses current concerns of feminist scholars." --Choice

"The book brings us something of the excitement of the revolutionary possibility lived by these women--and the frustration of their encounter with male resistance to including women's...

"Taking into account their multiple loyalties, this book explores how these Jewish women created their own space and how we interpret their achievements. With a comprehensive bibliography, notes, and an index, this work is essential for scholars, women's and Jewish studies departments, and literary and historical studies." --Library Journal

..". Lichtenstein has served the fields of American women's and Jewish history well... " --American Historical Review

"This is a fascinating, well-researched book." --Na'amat Woman

"A significant record of the relationship of gender...

Women activists paid considerable attention to how they structured their organizations in the early years of the contemporary women s movement in the United States. As the movement has matured over time, what has happened to this preoccupation with organizational structure? What do women s nonprofit organizations look like structurally? What explains their particular form?
Rebecca Bordt explores these questions in the context of a wide variety of women s nonprofit organizations in contemporary New York City. She conducted surveys of over one hundred organizations and supplemented these...

"Frankel's scholarship in this carefully researched and clearly written study is impressive.... The study is thoroughly documented with 70 pages of footnotes and a 14-page bibliography, refleccting Frankel's grasp of the secondary literature as well as extensive work in primary documents." Choice

Freedom s Women examines African American women s experiences during the Civil War and early Reconstruction years in Mississippi. Exploring issues of family and work, the author shows how African American women s attempts to achieve more control over their lives shaped their attitudes toward...

Kennedy's unique study explores the arrests, trials, and defenses of women charged under the Wartime Emergency Laws passed soon after the U.S. entered WWI. These trials became important arenas in which women's relationships and obligations to national security were contested and defined.

"This collection offers a treasure trove of primary sources of interest to students of women's history. Carefully introduced and annotated, these documents illustrate the diversity of Russian women's lives." --Barbara Alpern Engel

"There is no other work that offers such a wide variety of documents and such a successful combination of literary and historical materials." --Ann Hibner Koblitz

This rich anthology of source materials makes available for the first time in any language a multitude of primary sources on the lives of Russian women from the reign of Peter the Great...

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...