Cajun Women and Mardi Gras is the first book to explore the importance of women’s contributions to the country Cajun Mardi Gras tradition, or Mardi Gras “run.” Most Mardi Gras runs--masked begging processions through the countryside, led by unmasked capitaines--have customarily excluded women. Male organizers explain that this rule protects not only the tradition’s integrity but also women themselves from the event’s rowdy, often drunken, play.
Throughout the past twentieth century, and especially in the past fifty years, women in some prairie communities have insisted on taking more active and public roles in the festivities. Carolyn E. Ware traces the history of women’s participation as it has expanded from supportive roles as cooks and costume makers to increasingly public performances as Mardi Gras clowns and (in at least one community) capitaines. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork interviews and observation in Mardi Gras communities, Ware focuses on the festive actions in Tee Mamou and Basile to reveal how women are reshaping the celebration as creative artists and innovative performers.
Honorable Mention of the 1999 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards
Two collections by an important Asian American writer -- Camp Notes and Other Poeems and Desert Run: Poems and Stories -- return to print in one volume.
Mitsuye Yamada was born in Kyushu, Japan, and raised in Seattle, Washington, until the outbreak of World War II when her family was removed to a concentration camp in Idaho. Camp Notes and Other Writings recounts this experience.
Yamada's poetry yields a terse blend of emotions and imagery. Her twist of words creates a twist of vision that make her poetry come alive. The weight of her cultural experience-the pain of being perceived as an outsider all of her life-permeates her work.
Yamada's strength as a poet stems from the fact that she has managed to integrate both individual and collective aspects of her background, giving her poems a double impact. Her strong portrayal of individual and collective life experience stands out as a distinct thread in the fabric of contemporary literature by women.
"The core poems of Camp Notes and the title come from the notes I had taken when I was in camp, and it wasn’t published until thirty years after most of it was written. I was simply describing what was happening to me, and my thoughts. But, in retrospect, the collection takes on a kind of expanded meaning about that period in our history. As invariably happens, because Japanese American internment became such an issue in American history, I suppose I will be forever identified as the author of Camp Notes. Of course, I try to show that it’s not the only thing I ever did in my whole life; I did other things besides go to an internment camp during World War II. So, in some ways I keep producing to counteract that one image that gets set in the public mind. At the time that I was writing it, I wasn’t necessarily a political person. Now, when I reread it, even to myself, I think it probably has a greater warning about the dangers of being not aware, not aware of one’s own rights, not aware of helping other people who may be in trouble. I think that it does speak to our present age very acutely." -- Mitsuye Yamada, "You should not be invisible”: An Interview with Mitsuye Yamada, Contemporary Women's Writing, March 2014, Vol. 8 Issue 1
Read the whole interview at: https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/8/1/1/414906/You-should-not-be-invisible-An-Interview-with
When Joan Mandle accepted the position of Director of Women's Studies at Colgate University, she had specific goals in mind—to make the program stronger, more academically rigorous, and publicly open. The program would resist becoming the captive of identity politics and would refuse to allow itself to become marginalized on the campus. It would reach beyond the negative stereotypes of feminism on campus by appealing to and challenging all students and faculty interested in gender issues and social change.
Just as Mandle anticipated, she faced obstacles during the transformation. Among her critics were feminist students and faculty whose views of a successful program directly contradicted Mandle's. While the new director called for outreach, they insisted on isolation. While she set forth a policy of inclusiveness, they sought to maintain an exclusive community. These individuals preferred the former model of the women's studies program, despite its tendency toward separatism.
Can We Wear Our Pearls and Still Be Feminists? explores women's studies from Mandle's perspective as a program director, feminist activist, and scholar. She offers a vivid account of being forced to grapple with fundamental issues of what women's studies is and should be. Her strong commitment to feminism and women's studies does not prevent her from voicing her concerns; instead, it compells her to share the story of her directorship in hopes of shedding light on the strengths and weaknesses, pitfalls and triumphs of women's studies as an academic discipline.
Through her examination of the battles involved in creating an academically significant and ideologically open program, Mandle provides insight into a possible avenue of change for feminism. By showing how the program at Colgate University was able to encourage campuswide discussions on feminism, Mandle demonstrates that women's studies can succeed as an inclusive and rigorous field. This enlightening memoir provides readers with a window on important debates concerning feminism and women in academia.
One of Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2023
Carceral liberalism emerges from the confluence of neoliberalism, carcerality, and patriarchy to construct a powerful ruse disguised as freedom. It waves the feminist flag while keeping most women still at the margins. It speaks of a post-race society while one in three Black men remain incarcerated. It sings the praises of capital while the dispossessed remain mired in debt.
Shreerekha Pillai edits essays on carceral liberalism that continue the trajectory of the Combahee River Collective and the many people inspired by its vision of feminist solidarity and radical liberation. Academics, activists, writers, and a formerly incarcerated social worker look at feminist resurgence and resistance within, at the threshold of, and outside state violence; observe and record direct and indirect forms of carcerality sponsored by the state and shaped by state structures, traditions, and actors; and critique carcerality. Acclaimed poets like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Solmaz Sharif amplify the volume’s themes in works that bookend each section.
Cutting-edge yet historically grounded, Carceral Liberalism examines an American ideological creation that advances imperialism, anti-blackness, capitalism, and patriarchy.
Contributors: Maria F. Curtis, Joanna Eleftheriou, Autumn Elizabeth and Zarinah Agnew and D Coulombe, Jeremy Eugene, Demita Frazier, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Alka Kurian, Cassandra D. Little, Beth Matusoff Merfish, Francisco Argüelles Paz y Puente, Shreerekha Pillai, Marta Romero-Delgado, Ravi Shankar, Solmaz Sharif, Shailza Sharma, Tria Blu Wakpa and Jennifer Musial, Javier Zamora
Castle Nowhere is Constance Woolson's collection of stories set for the most part in the Great Lakes, in particular northern Lake Michigan and Lake Huron near Detroit.
Several themes inhabit Woolson's writing: an environmental consciousness and concern with landscapes; an awareness of the complexities of race; and an abidingly careful eye for the shallowness that sometimes accompanies wealth or social pretensions. She also had a unique perspective as a woman who pioneered the use of controversial subjects---such as unrequited or misplaced passion---and methods in fiction during a time that valorized domesticity.
As Margot Livesey notes in her introduction, reading about thwarted love is only one of the pleasures to be found in Castle Nowhere. "The majority of these stories are set in remote areas on the shores of Lake Michigan, which Woolson evokes with great vividness and beauty while always remaining keenly aware that beauty in no way mitigates hardship. As a writer, she was nearly always looking over her shoulder, and many, if not all, of these stories were written at a time when she no longer visited the Lake and her beloved Mackinac Island."
Contemporary readers will find a curiously modern atmosphere in Woolson's stories, as well as a distinct regional flavor in her careful renderings of the Great Lakes landscape. As such, Castle Nowhere represents a rare woman's voice in literature of its period and setting.
Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) was born in New Hampshire and moved to Cleveland shortly thereafter. She spent time on Mackinac Island, Michigan, then traveled to Florida before moving to Europe. Much of her time there was spent in Italy. She died in Venice in 1894. Novelist Margot Livesey is the author of Eva Moves the Furniture and Homework.
FINALIST FOR THE GREGORY BATESON PRIZE FROM THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
Dispelling stereotypes about garment workers in the global apparel industry
Castoffs of Capital examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention onto the lives of older women aged out of factory work, heretofore largely ignored, thereby introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh.
Bringing a feminist labor studies lens, Castoffs of Capital foregrounds these women not only as workers but as mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, and political agents. Focusing on relations among work, gender, and global capital’s targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, Karim shows how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations. She locates these women’s aspirations for the “good life” not only in material comforts but also in their longings for love and sexual fulfillment that help them momentarily forget the precarity of their existence under the shadow of capital.
Through richly detailed ethnographic studies, this innovative and beautifully written book examines the making and unmaking of these women’s wants and desires, loves and tribulations, hopes and despairs, and triumphs and struggles.
Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories spans four generations of a peasant family in the brutal poverty of post-Unification southern Italy and in an immigrant’s United States. The women in these tales dare to cross boundaries by discovering magical leaps inherent in the landscape, in themselves, and in the stories they tell and retell of family tragedy at a time of political unrest. Through an oral tradition embedded in the stone of memory and the flow of its reinvention, their passionate tale of resistance and transformation courses forward into new generations in a new world.
A woman threatens to join the land reform struggle in her Calabrian hill town, against her husband’s will, during a call for revolution in 1919. A brother and sister turn to the village sorceress in Fascist Italy to bring rain to their father’s drought-stricken farm. In Pittsburgh, new immigrants witness a miraculous rescue during the Great Flood of 1936. A young girl courageously dives into the Allegheny River to save her grandfather’s only memento of the old country. With only broken English to guide her, a widow hops a bus in search of live chickens to cook for Easter dinner in her husband’s memory. An aging woman in the title story is on a quest to cut the ankle-length hair as hard as the rocky soil of Calabria in a drought. A lonely woman who survived World War II bombings in her close-knit village, struggles to find community as a recent immigrant. A daughter visits her mother’s hill town to try and fulfill a wish for her to see the Fata Morgana. These haunting images permeate Corso’s linked stories of loss, hope, struggle, and freedom.
An official selection of The Sons of Italy® Book Club
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association
In Centaurs and Amazons, Page duBois offers a prehistory of hierarchy. Using structural anthropology, symbolic analysis, and recent literary theory, she demonstrates a shift in Greek thought from the fifth to the fourth century B.C. that had a profound influence upon subsequent Western culture and politics.
Through an analysis of mythology, drama, sculpture, architecture, and Greek vase painting, duBois documents the transition from a system of thought that organized the experience of difference in terms of polarity and analogy to one based upon a relatively rigid hierarchical scheme. This was the beginning of "the great chain of being," the philosophical construct that all life was organized in minute gradations of superiority and inferiority. This scheme, in various guises, has continued to influence philosophical and political thought.
The author's intelligent and discriminating use of scholarship from various fields makes Centaurs and Amazons an impressive interdisciplinary study of interest to classicists, feminist scholars, historians, art historians, anthropologists, and political scientists.
Century of Struggle tells the story of one of the great social movements in American history. The struggle for women’s voting rights was one of the longest, most successful, and in some respects most radical challenges ever posed to the American system of electoral politics.
“The book you are about to read tells the story of one of the great social movements in American history. The struggle for women’s voting rights was one of the longest, most successful, and in some respects most radical challenges ever posed to the American system of electoral politics… It is difficult to imagine now a time when women were largely removed by custom, practice, and law from the formal political rights and responsibilities that supported and sustained the nation’s young democracy… For sheer drama the suffrage movement has few equals in modern American political history.”—From the Preface by Ellen Fitzpatrick
Originally published in 1981 as En breve cárcel,Certificate of Absence is the first novel of the Argentinian scholar-critic Sylvia Molloy. Innovative in its treatment of women's relationships and in its assertion of woman's right to author her own text, the novel has won wide approval in Latin America and the United States.
The novel centers around a woman writing in a small room. As she writes, remembering a past relationship and anticipating a future one, the room becomes a repository for nostalgia, violence, and desire, a space in which writing and remembering become life-sustaining ceremonies. The narrator reflects on the power of love to both shelter and destroy. She meditates on the act of writing, specifically on writing as a woman, in a voice that goes against the grain of established, canonical voices.
Latin American male writers are prone to self-portrayal in their texts. Certifcate of Absence is one of the few novels by Latin American women that successfully use this technique to open new windows on women's experiences.
This path-breaking anthology illuminates the lives of ten influential twentieth-century American women and looks at the challenges experienced by the women who have written about them. Exploring the frequently complicated dialogue between writer and subject, the contributors discuss tools appropriate to writing women's biography while their riveting accounts reveal how feminist scholarship led them to approach the study of women's lives in unconventional ways.
"This wonderful collection demonstrates the significance of women's biography as a central part of feminist scholarship. The feminist biographer inserts a second life into a biography, her own, giving us yet another layer of depth and insight."--Ann J. Lane, author of To "Herland" and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Changing the Boundaries explores gender relations with respect to education, reproductive health services, and agricultural resources -- three factors that are widely recognized as being central to the struggle for gender equity, population control, and environmental sustainability. As well as defining the role of women in the population-environment quandary, author Janice Jiggins explains how that role is the key to understanding issues of population and environment.
Throughout the volume, she makes extensive use of research, experience, and documentation that draws on the views and publications of women in the global South, much of which is available to development practitioners but is rarely found in academic libraries. Data, arguments, concepts, and analysis from a wide and varied range of sources are woven together to link the experience of women's daily lives with population policies and global environmental politics.
How water enables Caribbean and Latinx writers to reconnect to their pasts, presents, and futures.
Water is often tasked with upholding division through the imposition of geopolitical borders. We see this in the construction of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo on the US-Mexico border, as well as in how the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean are used to delineate the limits of US territory. In stark contrast to this divisive view, Afro-diasporic religions conceive of water as a place of connection; it is where spiritual entities and ancestors reside, and where knowledge awaits.
Departing from the premise that water encourages confluence through the sustainment of contradiction, Channeling Knowledges fathoms water’s depth and breadth in the work of Latinx and Caribbean creators such as Mayra Santos-Febres, Rita Indiana, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, and the Border of Lights collective. Combining methodologies from literary studies, anthropology, history, and religious studies, Rebeca L. Hey-Colón’s interdisciplinary study traces how Latinx and Caribbean cultural production draws on systems of Afro-diasporic worship—Haitian Vodou, La 21 División (Dominican Vodou), and Santería/Regla de Ocha—to channel the power of water, both salty and sweet, in sustaining connections between past, present, and not-yet-imagined futures.
Works of Distinction, LDEI M.F.K. Fisher Prize for Excellence in Culinary Media Content, 2022
A rare woman’s-eye-view of working in the professional French kitchen
Though women enter France’s culinary professions at higher rates than ever, men still receive the lion’s share of the major awards and Michelin stars. Rachel E. Black looks at the experiences of women in Lyon to examine issues of gender inequality in France’s culinary industry. Known for its female-led kitchens, Lyon provides a unique setting for understanding the gender divide, as Lyonnais women have played a major role in maintaining the city’s culinary heritage and its status as a center for innovation. Voices from history combine with present-day interviews and participant observation to reveal the strategies women use to navigate male-dominated workplaces or, in many cases, avoid men in kitchens altogether. Black also charts how constraints imposed by French culture minimize the impact of #MeToo and other reform-minded movements.
Evocative and original, Cheffes de Cuisine celebrates the successes of women inside the professional French kitchen and reveals the obstacles women face in the culinary industry and other male-dominated professions.
The book examines various groups of black female activists, including writers and actresses, social workers, artists, school teachers, and women's club members to document the impact of social class, gender, nativity, educational attainment, and professional affiliations on their activism. Together, these women worked to sponsor black history and literature, to protest overcrowded schools, and to act as a force for improved South Side housing and employment opportunities. Knupfer also reveals the crucial role these women played in founding and sustaining black cultural institutions, such as the first African American art museum in the country; the first African American library in Chicago; and various African American literary journals and newspapers. As a point of contrast, Knupfer also examines the overlooked activism of working-class and poor women in the Ida B. Wells and Altgeld Gardens housing projects.
Blake looks at how the Chicana professional intellectuals and the U.S. Mexicana women refigure confining and demeaning constructions of female gender roles and racial, ethnic, and sexual identities. She organizes her analysis around re-imaginings of La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, indigenous Mexica goddesses, and La Malinche, the indigenous interpreter for Hernán Cortés during the Spanish conquest. In doing so, Blake reveals how the professional intellectuals and the working-class and semiprofessional women rework or invoke the female icons to confront the repression of female sexuality, limiting gender roles, inequality in male and female relationships, and violence against women. While the representational strategies of the two groups of women are significantly different and the U.S. Mexicanas would not necessarily call themselves feminists, Blake nonetheless illuminates a continuum of Chicana feminist thinking, showing how both groups of women expand lifestyle choices and promote the health and well-being of women of Mexican origin or descent.
Recently, childfree people have been foregrounded in mainstream media. More than seven percent of Western women choose to remain childfree and this figure is increasing. Being childfree challenges the ‘procreation imperative’ residing at the center of our hetero-normative understandings, occupying an uneasy position in relation to—simultaneously—traditional academic ideologies and prevalent social norms. After all, as Adi Avivi recognizes, "if a woman is not a mother, the patriarchal social order is in danger." This collection engages with these (mis)perceptions about childfree people: in media representations, demographics, historical documents, and both psychological and philosophical models. Foundational pieces from established experts on the childfree choice--Rhonny Dam, Laurie Lisle, Christopher Clausen, and Berenice Fisher--appear alongside both activist manifestos and original scholarly work, comprehensively brought together. Academics and activists in various disciplines and movements also riff on the childfree life: its implications, its challenges, its conversations, and its agency—all in relation to its inevitability in the 21st century. Childfree across the Disciplines unequivocally takes a stance supporting the subversive potential of the childfree choice, allowing readers to understand childfreedom as a sense of continuing potential in who—or what—a person can become.
Original and rich, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck is an essential and entertaining reexamination of an enduring Hollywood star.
Stacey examines the body-horror movies Alien: Resurrection and Species in light of Jean Baudrillard’s apocalyptic proclamations about cloning and “the hell of the same,” and she considers the art-house thrillers Gattaca and Code 46 in relation to ideas about imitation, including feminist theories of masquerade, postcolonial conceptualizations of mimicry, and queer notions of impersonation. Turning to Teknolust and Genetic Admiration, independent films by feminist directors, she extends Walter Benjamin’s theory of aura to draw an analogy between the replication of biological information and the reproducibility of the art object. Stacey suggests new ways to think about those who are not what they appear to be, the problem of determining identity in a world of artificiality, and the loss of singularity amid unchecked replication.
The May 1926 coup d’état in Poland inaugurated what has become known as the period of sanacja or “cleansing.” The event has been explored in terms of the impact that it had on state structures and political styles. But for both supporters and opponents of the post-May regime, the sanacja was a catalyst for debate about Polish national identity, about citizenship and responsibility to the nation, and about postwar sexual morality and modern gender identities.
The Clash of Moral Nations is a study of the political culture of interwar Poland, as reflected in and by the coup. Eva Plach shifts the focus from strictly political contexts and examines instead the sanacja’s open-ended and malleable language of purification, rebirth, and moral regeneration.
In tracking the diverse appropriations and manipulations of the sanacja concept, Plach relies on a wide variety of texts, including the press of the period, the personal and professional papers of notable interwar women activists, and the official records of pro-sanacja organizations, such as the Women’s Union for Citizenship Work.
The Clash of Moral Nations introduces an important cultural and gendered dimension to understandings of national and political identity in interwar Poland.
Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West returns to familiar cultural forces—the West, anticommunism, and manliness—to show how they combined to suppress dissent and dominate the unruliness of literature in the name of a national identity after World War II. Few realize how much the domination of a “white male” American literary canon was a product not of long history, but of the Cold War. Suzanne Clark describes here how the Cold War excluded women writers on several levels, together with others—African American, Native American, poor, men as well as women—who were ignored in the struggle over white male identity.
Clark first shows how defining national/individual/American identity in the Cold War involved a brand new configuration of cultural history. At the same time, it called upon the nostalgia for the old discourses of the West (the national manliness asserted by Theodore Roosevelt) to claim that there was and always had been only one real American identity.
By subverting the claims of a national identity, Clark finds, many male writers risked falling outside the boundaries not only of public rhetoric but also of the literary world: men as different from one another as the determinedly masculine Ernest Hemingway and the antiheroic storyteller of the everyday, Bernard Malamud. Equally vocal and contentious, Cold War women writers were unwilling to be silenced, as Clark demonstrates in her discussion of the work of Mari Sandoz and Ursula Le Guin.
The book concludes with a discussion of how the silencing of gender, race, and class in Cold War writing maintained its discipline until the eruptions of the sixties. By questioning the identity politics of manliness in the Cold War context of persecution and trial, Clark finds that the involvement of men in identity politics set the stage for our subsequent cultural history.
In the popular imagination, American women during the time between the end of World War II and the 1960s—the era of the so-called “feminine mystique”—were ultraconservative and passive. College Women in the Nuclear Age takes a fresh look at these women, showing them actively searching for their place in the world while engaging with the larger intellectual and political movements of the times.
Drawing from the letters and diaries of young women in the Cold War era, Babette Faehmel seeks to restore their unique voices and to chronicle their collective ambitions. She also explores the shifting roles that higher education played in establishing these hopes and dreams, making the case that the GI Bill served to diminish the ambitions of many American women even as it opened opportunities for many American men. A treasure-trove of original research, the book should stimulate scholarly discussion and captivate any reader interested in the thoughts and lives of American women.
Drawing on memoirs, fiction, reportage, and film adaptations, Colonial Strangers explores the critical perspectives of writers who correct prevailing stereotypes of British women as agents of imperialism. They also question their own participation in British claims of moral righteousness and British politics of cultural exploitation. These authors take center stage in debates about connections between the racist ideologies of the Third Reich and the British Empire.
Colonial Strangers reveals how the literary responses of key artists represent not only compelling reading, but also a necessary intervention in colonial and postcolonial debates and the canons of modern British fiction.
Gross draws on prison records, trial transcripts, news accounts, and rare mug shot photographs. Providing an overview of Philadelphia’s black women criminals, she describes the women’s work, housing, and leisure activities and their social position in relation to the city’s native-born whites, European immigrants, and elite and middle-class African Americans. She relates how news accounts exaggerated black female crime, trading in sensationalistic portraits of threatening “colored Amazons,” and she considers criminologists’ interpretations of the women’s criminal acts, interpretations largely based on notions of hereditary criminality. Ultimately, Gross contends that the history of black female criminals is in many ways a history of the rift between the political rhetoric of democracy and the legal and social realities of those marginalized by its shortcomings.
In 1858, Cyprian Clamorgan wrote a brief but immensely readable book entitled The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. The grandson of a white voyageur and a mulatto woman, he was himself a member of the "colored aristocracy." In a setting where the vast majority of African Americans were slaves, and where those who were free generally lived in abject poverty, Clamorgan's "aristocrats" were exceptional people. Wealthy, educated, and articulate, these men and women occupied a "middle ground." Their material advantages removed them from the mass of African Americans, but their race barred them from membership in white society.
The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis is both a serious analysis of the social and legal disabilities under which African Americans of all classes labored and a settling of old scores. Somewhat malicious, Clamorgan enjoyed pointing out the foibles of his friends and enemies, but his book had a serious message as well. "He endeavored to convince white Americans that race was not an absolute, that the black community was not a monolith, that class, education, and especially wealth, should count for something."
Despite its fascinating insights into antebellum St. Louis, Clamorgan's book has been virtually ignored since its initial publication. Using deeds, church records, court cases, and other primary sources, Winch reacquaints readers with this important book and establishes its place in the context of African American history. This annotated edition of The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis includes an introductory essay on African Americans in St. Louis before the Civil War, as well as an account of the lives of the author and the members of his remarkable family—a family that was truly at the heart of the city's "colored aristocracy" for four generations.
A witty and perceptive commentary on race and class, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis is a remarkable story about a largely forgotten segment of nineteenth-century society. Scholars and general readers alike will appreciate Clamorgan's insights into one of antebellum America's most important communities.
From the 1860s through the early twentieth century, Great Britain saw the rise of the department store and the institutionalization of a gendered sphere of consumption. Come Buy, Come Buy considers representations of the female shopper in British women’s writing and demonstrates how women’s shopping practices are materialized as forms of narrative, poetic, and cultural inscription, showing how women writers emphasize consumerism as productive of pleasure rather than the condition of seduction or loss. Krista Lysack examines works by Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Michael Field, as well as the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, in order to challenge the dominant construction of Victorian femininity as characterized by self-renunciation and the regulation of appetite.
Come Buy, Come Buy considers not only literary works, but also a variety of archival sources (shopping guides, women’s fashion magazines, household management guides, newspapers, and advertisements) and cultural practices (department store shopping, shoplifting and kleptomania, domestic economy, and suffragette shopkeeping). With this wealth of sources, Lysack traces a genealogy of the woman shopper from dissident domestic spender to aesthetic connoisseur, from curious shop-gazer to political radical.
Contributors. Chungmoo Choi, Chin Sung Chung, Norma Field, Yuki Fujime, Tok-kyong Kang, Chi-ha Kim, Hyun Sook Kim, Daisil Kim-Gibson, Jin Kyung Lee, Sasha Y. Lee, Yong Soon Min, Kenzaburo Oe, Kerry Ross, Yoshiko Shimada, Youn Ok Song, Won Soon Park, Kyung sik Suh, Taeko Tomiyama, Melissa Wender, Hyanah Yang
In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women—mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army—endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative.
Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women—a double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factors— from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the international women’s human rights movement—that have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.
The wrenching decision facing successful women choosing between demanding careers and intensive family lives has been the subject of many articles and books, most of which propose strategies for resolving the dilemma. Competing Devotions focuses on broader social and cultural forces that create women's identities and shape their understanding of what makes life worth living.
Mary Blair-Loy examines the career paths of women financial executives who have tried various approaches to balancing career and family. The professional level these women have attained requires a huge commitment of time, energy, and emotion that seems natural to employers and clients, who assume that a career deserves single-minded allegiance. Meanwhile, these women must confront the cultural model of family that defines marriage and motherhood as a woman's primary vocation. This ideal promises women creativity, intimacy, and financial stability in caring for a family. It defines children as fragile and assumes that men lack the selflessness and patience that children's primary caregivers need. This ideal is taken for granted in much of contemporary society.
The power of these assumptions is enormous but not absolute. Competing Devotions identifies women executives who try to reshape these ideas. These mavericks, who face great resistance but are aided by new ideological and material resources that come with historical change, may eventually redefine both the nuclear family and the capitalist firm in ways that reduce work-family conflict.
An international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, the contributors bring under-utilized evidence from U.S. and non-U.S. sources to bear on the study of American women missionaries abroad and at home. Focusing on women from several denominations, they build on the insights of postcolonial scholarship to incorporate the agency of the people among whom missionaries lived. They explore how people in China, the Congo Free State, Egypt, India, Japan, Ndebeleland (colonial Rhodesia), Ottoman Bulgaria, and the Philippines perceived, experienced, and negotiated American cultural expansion. They also consider missionary work among people within the United States who were constructed as foreign, including African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants. By presenting multiple cultural perspectives, this important collection challenges simplistic notions about missionary cultural imperialism, revealing the complexity of American missionary attitudes toward race and the ways that ideas of domesticity were reworked and appropriated in various settings. It expands the field of U.S. women’s history into the international arena, increases understanding of the global spread of American culture, and offers new concepts for analyzing the history of American empire.
Contributors: Beth Baron, Betty Bergland, Mary Kupiec Cayton, Derek Chang, Sue Gronewold, Jane Hunter, Sylvia Jacobs, Susan Haskell Khan, Rui Kohiyama, Laura Prieto, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Mary Renda, Connie A. Shemo, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Ian Tyrrell, Wendy Urban-Mead
Kimberly A. Scott explores this question and others as she details the National Science Foundation-funded enrichment project COMPUGIRLS. This groundbreaking initiative teaches tech skills to adolescent girls of color but, as importantly, offers a setting that emphasizes empowerment, community advancement, and self-discovery. Scott draws on her experience as an architect of COMPUGIRLS to detail the difficulties of translating participants' lives into a digital context while tracing how the program evolved. The dramatic stories of the participants show them blending newly developed technical and communication skills in ways designed to spark effective action and bring about important change.
A compelling merger of theory and storytelling, COMPUGIRLS provides a much-needed roadmap for understanding how girls of color can find and define their selves in today's digital age.
Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War explores gender, age, and Confederate identity by examining the lives of teenage daughters of Southern slaveholding, secessionist families. These young women clung tenaciously to the gender ideals that upheld marriage and motherhood as the fulfillment of female duty and to the racial order of the slaveholding South, an institution that defined their status and afforded them material privileges. Author Victoria E. Ott discusses how the loyalty of young Southern women to the fledgling nation, born out of a conservative movement to preserve the status quo, brought them into new areas of work, new types of civic activism, and new rituals of courtship during the Civil War.
Social norms for daughters of the elite, their preparation for their roles as Southern women, and their material and emotional connections to the slaveholding class changed drastically during the Civil War. When differences between the North and South proved irreconcilable, Southern daughters demonstrated extraordinary agency in seeking to protect their futures as wives, mothers, and slaveholders.
From a position of young womanhood and privilege, they threw their support behind the movement to create a Confederate identity, which was in turn shaped by their participation in the secession movement and the war effort. Their political engagement is evident from their knowledge of military battles, and was expressed through their clothing, social activities, relationships with peers, and interactions with Union soldiers.
Confederate Daughters also reveals how these young women, in an effort to sustain their families throughout the war, adjusted to new domestic duties, confronting the loss of slaves and other financial hardships by seeking paid work outside their homes.
Drawing on their personal and published recollections of the war, slavery, and the Old South, Ott argues that young women created a unique female identity different from that of older Southern women, the Confederate bellehood. This transformative female identity was an important aspect of the Lost Cause mythology—the version of the conflict that focused on Southern nationalism—and bridged the cultural gap between the antebellum and postbellum periods.
Augmented by twelve illustrations, this book offers a generational understanding of the transitional nature of wartime and its effects on women’s self-perceptions. Confederate Daughters identifies the experiences of these teenage daughters as making a significant contribution to the new woman in the New South.
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize
Winner of the Merle Curti Award
“McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read.”
—Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic
“McCurry challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass not simply government but the entire public sphere. The struggle for Southern independence, she shows, opened the door for the mobilization of two groups previously outside the political nation—white women of the nonslaveholding class and slaves…Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front.”
—Eric Foner, The Nation
“Perhaps the highest praise one can offer McCurry’s work is to say that once we look through her eyes, it will become almost impossible to believe that we ever saw or thought otherwise…At the outset of the book, McCurry insists that she is not going to ask or answer the timeworn question of why the South lost the Civil War. Yet in her vivid and richly textured portrait of what she calls the Confederacy’s ‘undoing,’ she has in fact accomplished exactly that.”
—Drew Gilpin Faust, New Republic
“A brilliant, eye-opening account of how Southern white women and black slaves fatally undermined the Confederacy from within.”
—Edward Bonekemper, Civil War News
The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners’ national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people—white women and slaves—and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise.
Wartime scarcity of food, labor, and soldiers tested the Confederate vision at every point and created domestic crises to match those found on the battlefields. Women and slaves became critical political actors as they contested government enlistment and tax and welfare policies, and struggled for their freedom. The attempt to repress a majority of its own population backfired on the Confederate States of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. That Confederate struggle played out in a highly charged international arena.
The political project of the Confederacy was tried by its own people and failed. The government was forced to become accountable to women and slaves, provoking an astounding transformation of the slaveholders’ state. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.
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