Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Women's Studies

Expanded and updated for this English-language translation, this book offers the first history of women in ancient Greece and Rome to be written from a legal perspective. Cantarella demonstrates how literary, anecdotal. and judicial sources can and cannot be used to discover that Greek and Roman men thought about women.

Women and Democracy offers a unique look at the political experiences of women in two regions of the world--Latin America and Eastern and Central Europe--which have moved from authoritarian to democratic regimes. At first glance, the roles and attitudes of these women appear to be similar. This book makes the case that the differences are notable. In Latin America, the women are much more politicized and well-organized in their efforts to obtain rights, recognition, and equity. In contrast, the women of former communist societies in Eastern and Central Europe, as if disenchanted by...

Ana Domenge, who later founded the Dominican convent in Perpignan, composed a written account of her spiritual intimacies with God while being held in terrible conditions in a secret prison in Barcelona. Ines of Herrera del Duque, a leather tanner's twelve-year-old daughter whose messianic prophesies captivated both children and adults, was burned at the stake along with many of her followers. Nine years after the death of Catarina de San Juan, the Inquisition banned copies of her image and biography, fearing that a cult was forming around this popular holy woman in Puebla, New Spain....

Between 1900 and 1940 American family farming gave way to what came to be called agribusiness. Government policies, consumer goods aimed at rural markets, and the increasing consolidation of agricultural industries all combined to bring about changes in farming strategies that had been in use since the frontier era. Because the Midwestern farm economy played an important part in the relations of family and community, new approaches to farm production meant new patterns in interpersonal relations as well. In Preserving the Family Farm Mary Neth focuses on these relations--of gender...

From the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s, massaging female patients to orgasm was a staple of medical practice among Western physicians in the treatment of -hysteria, - an ailment once considered both common and chronic in women. Doctors loathed this time-consuming procedure and for centuries relied on midwives. Later, they substituted the efficiency of mechanical devices, including the electric vibrator, invented in the 1880s. In The Technology of Orgasm, Rachel Maines offers readers a stimulating, surprising, and often humorous account of hysteria and its treatment throughout...

In When Women Ask the Questions, Marilyn Boxer traces the successes and failures of women's studies, examines the field's enduring impact on the world of higher education, and concludes that the rise of women's studies has challenged the university in the same way that feminism has challenged society at large.

Drawing on her experiences as a historian, feminist, academic administrator, and former chair of a women's studies program, Boxer observes that by working for justice--and for changes necessary to make the attainment of justice a practical possibility--women's studies...

The practice of female genital cutting, sometimes referred to as female circumcision and common in a number of African states, has attracted increasing attention in recent years and mobilized strong international opposition. While it typically produces a visceral response of horror and revulsion in Westerners, the practice is widely regarded in some cultures as essential for proper development into womanhood and is defended by women who have themselves experienced it and who have had the procedure performed on their own daughters. It is also perceived in many Islamic communities as...

It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that many countries began granting women the right to participate in public institutions as individuals. Until then, women were incorporated into various domains of life mainly through their relational roles as mothers. In From Motherhood to Citizenship, Nitza Berkovitch argues that this trend is not confined to specific countries, but represents a worldwide phenomenon. Moreover, the forces that shape this transformation are embedded in the global cultural and political system.

Berkovitch offers the first detailed...

-Breast cancer may very well be history's oldest malaise, known as well to the ancients as it is to us. The women who have endured it share a unique sisterhood. Queen Atossa and Dr. Jerri Nielsen--separated by era and geography, by culture, religion, politics, economics, and world view--could hardly have been more different. Born 2,500 years apart, they stand as opposite bookends on the shelf of human history. One was the most powerful woman in the ancient world, the daughter of an emperor, the mother of a god; the other is a twenty-first-century physician with a streak of adventure...

The practice of female genital cutting, sometimes referred to as female circumcision and common in a number of African states, has attracted increasing attention in recent years and mobilized strong international opposition. While it typically produces a visceral response of horror and revulsion in Westerners, the practice is widely regarded in some cultures as essential for proper development into womanhood and is defended by women who have themselves experienced it and who have had the procedure performed on their own daughters. It is also perceived in many Islamic communities as...

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as young women began entering college in greater numbers than ever before, physicians and social critics charged that campus life posed grave hazards to the female constitution and women's reproductive health. -A girl could study and learn, - Dr. Edward Clarke warned in his widely read 1873 book Sex in Education, -but she could not do all this and retain uninjured health, and a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system.- For half a century, ideas such as Dr. Clarke's framed the...

Radio -shock jocks, - Super Bowl entertainment, music videos, and internet spam--all of these topics inspire passionate disagreements about whether and how to regulate sexually explicit material. But even in the midst of heated debate, most people agree that children should be shielded from exposure to pornographic images. Why are children the focal point of debates over sexually explicit material? And how did a culture rooted in Puritanism and Victorianism become saturated with sex?

In Against Obscenity, Leigh Ann Wheeler offers new answers to these questions through a study...

Until this century, married women had no legal right to hold, use, or dispose of property. Since the ownership of property is a critical measure of social status, the married women's property acts of the nineteenth century were important landmarks in the legal emancipation of women. Reform campaigns represented the first organized attempts by women in Upper Canada to challenge their status in society. Ironically, emancipation was not the first goal of reformers: their demands reflected a concern with protection from economic instability. The laws granting women new rights and privileges...

A Woman's Words is the first in-depth analysis of Middle Irish literature from a feminist standpoint, and the first formal critical discussion of the representation of female speech in medieval Irish literature. Joanne Findon analyses the representation of Emer, the wife of the great Irish hero Cu Chulainn, in four linked medieval Irish tales, and discusses Emer's ability to use powerful, effective words to change her fictional world and the audience's reading of that fictional world.

A Woman's Words considers Emer as a literary figure rather than a mythic...

Wenona Giles takes a new look at migration in this innovative study of Portuguese women by examining the gender, class, and race relations of the immigrant Portuguese population from the micro level of personal experience to the macro level of the long-lasting societal repercussions of immigrant status and welfare on their children. Comparing across two generations of Portuguese Canadian women, the book delves into issues such as cultural heterogeneity among Portuguese immigrants, the ambiguity of work and gender politics, the concept of 'home' versus nationalism, and raises concerns about...

Thirty-nine women and their strategies of survival are the central focus of Aysan Sev'er's newest study on women who have left abusive situations. Through a mainly feminist orientation, Sev'er analyzes abuse, its many definitions, and existing theories surrounding violence against women, and incorporates an extensive literature review of Canadian and American sources that investigates feminist, non-feminist, and social-psychological theories of abuse. She then proceeds to relate the intimate stories of women who survived.

These interviews, from women outside institutional settings,...

Historically, the contributions of women architects to their profession have been minimized or overlooked. 'Designing Women' explores the tension that has existed between the architectural profession and its women members. It demonstrates the influence that these women have had on architecture in Canada, and links their so-called marginalization to the profession's restrictive and sometimes discriminatory practices.

Co-written by an architectural historian and a sociologist, this book provides a welcome blend of disciplinary approaches. The product of much original...

Marlene Epp, who has written extensively on Mennonite history, presents here the story of thousands of Soviet Mennonite women who, having lost their husbands and fathers to Stalinist work camps and the Second World War, made an arduous journey through war-torn Europe. Housed in displaced persons camps after the war, many eventually emigrated to Paraguay and Canada.

More than a mere description of the events that led these women from their native homes, this work encompasses the culture of women refugees and, in particular, how they 'remembered' the events that marked their lives. The...