front cover of Objectivity and Diversity
Objectivity and Diversity
Another Logic of Scientific Research
Sandra Harding
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Worries about scientific objectivity seem never-ending. Social critics and philosophers of science have argued that invocations of objectivity are often little more than attempts to boost the status of a claim, while calls for value neutrality may be used to suppress otherwise valid dissenting positions. Objectivity is used sometimes to advance democratic agendas, at other times to block them; sometimes for increasing the growth of knowledge, at others to resist it.

Sandra Harding is not ready to throw out objectivity quite yet. For all of its problems, she contends that objectivity is too powerful a concept simply to abandon. In Objectivity and Diversity, Harding calls for a science that is both more epistemically adequate and socially just, a science that would ask: How are the lives of the most economically and politically vulnerable groups affected by a particular piece of research? Do they have a say in whether and how the research is done? Should empirically reliable systems of indigenous knowledge count as "real science"? Ultimately, Harding argues for a shift from the ideal of a neutral, disinterested science to one that prizes fairness and responsibility.
[more]

front cover of Obsessed
Obsessed
The Cultural Critic’s Life in the Kitchen
Elisabeth Bronfen
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Winner of the 2020 Gourmand Awards, Translation Section, USA

Even the most brilliant minds have to eat. And for some scholars, food preparation is more than just a chore; it’s a passion. In this unique culinary memoir and cookbook, renowned cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen tells of her lifelong love affair with cooking and demonstrates what she has learned about creating delicious home meals. She recounts her cherished food memories, from meals eaten at the family table in postwar Germany to dinner parties with friends. Yet, in a thoughtful reflection on the pleasures of cooking for one, she also reveals that some of her favorite meals have been consumed alone.
 
Though it contains more than 250 mouth-watering recipes, Obsessed is anything but a conventional cookbook. As she shares a lifetime of knowledge acquired in the kitchen, Bronfen hopes to empower both novice and experienced home chefs to improvise, giving them hints on how to tweak her recipes to their own tastes. And unlike cookbooks that assume readers have access to an unlimited pantry, this book is grounded in reality, offering practical advice about food storage and reusing leftovers. As Bronfen serves up her personal stories and her culinary wisdom, reading Obsessed is like sitting down to a home-cooked meal with a clever friend.
[more]

front cover of Oceans at Home
Oceans at Home
Maritime and Domestic Fictions in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing
Melissa Gniadek
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
The maritime world was central to nineteenth-century America, and ideas about the ocean, seafaring, and encounters with distant peoples and places suffused the cultural imagination. Women writers who were not mariners themselves incorporated oceanic representations and concerns into their work, often through genres that were generally not associated with the sea, such as children's fiction, diaries, and female coming-of-age stories.

Melissa Gniadek explores the role of the ocean, with particular attention to the Pacific, in a diverse range of literary texts spanning the late 1820s through the mid-1860s from Lydia Maria Child, Caroline Kirkland, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. Oceans at Home shows that authors employed maritime plots and stories from distant locations to probe contemporary concerns facing the continental United States, ranging from issues of gender restrictions in the domestic sphere to the racial prejudices against indigenous peoples that lay at the heart of settler colonialism.
[more]

front cover of Off Limits
Off Limits
New Writings on Fear and Sin
Nawal El Saadawi
Gingko, 2018
Nawal El Saadawi is a significant and broadly influential feminist writer, activist, physician, and psychiatrist. Born in 1931 in Egypt, her writings focus on women in Islam. Well beyond the Arab world, from Woman at Point Zero to The Fall of the Imam and her prison memoirs, El Saadawi’s fiction and nonfiction works have earned her a reputation as an author who has provided a powerful voice in feminist debates centering on the Middle East.

Off Limits presents a selection of El Saadawi’s most recent recollections and reflections in which she considers the role of women in Egyptian and wider Islamic society, the inextricability of imperialism from patriarchy, and the meeting points of East and West. These thoughtful and wide-reaching pieces leave no stone unturned and no view unchallenged, and the essays collected here offer further insight into this profound author’s ideas about women, society, religion, and national identity.
[more]

front cover of Oglala Women
Oglala Women
Myth, Ritual, and Reality
Marla N. Powers
University of Chicago Press, 1986
Based on interviews and life histories collected over more than twenty-five years of study on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, Marla N. Powers conveys what it means to be an Oglala woman. Despite the myth of the Euramerican that sees Oglala women as inferior to men, and the Lakota myth that seems them as superior, in reality, Powers argues, the roles of male and female emerge as complementary. In fact, she claims, Oglala women have been better able to adapt to the dominant white culture and provide much of the stability and continuity of modern tribal life. This rich ethnographic portrait considers the complete context of Oglala life—religion, economics, medicine, politics, old age—and is enhanced by numerous modern and historical photographs.


"It is a happy event when a fine scholarly work is rendered accessible to the general reader, especially so when none of the complexity of the subject matter is sacrificed. Oglala Women is a long overdue revisionary ethnography of Native American culture."—Penny Skillman, San Francisco Chronicle Review

"Marla N. Powers's fine study introduced me to Oglala women 'portrayed from the perspectives of Indians,' to women who did not pity themselves and want no pity from others. . . . A brave, thorough, and stimulating book."—Melody Graulich, Women's Review of Books

"Powers's new book is an intricate weaving . . . and her synthesis brings all of these pieces into a well-integrated and insightful whole, one which sheds new light on the importance of women and how they have adapted to the circumstances of the last century."—Elizabeth S. Grobsmith, Nebraska History
[more]

front cover of On Being Included
On Being Included
Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life
Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press, 2012
What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the "brick wall." On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox. It explores the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of those who embody diversity. Commitments to diversity are understood as "non-performatives" that do not bring about what they name. The book provides an account of institutional whiteness and shows how racism can be obscured by the institutionalization of diversity. Diversity is used as evidence that institutions do not have a problem with racism. On Being Included offers a critique of what happens when diversity is offered as a solution. It also shows how diversity workers generate knowledge of institutions in attempting to transform them.
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
On Chantal Akerman
Patricia White, special issue editor
Duke University Press
The milestone 100th issue of Camera Obscura recognizes the work and legacy of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (1950–2015). Arguably the most important figure in feminist film culture, Akerman is central to Camera Obscura's own legacy, and her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was covered in one of the first issues of the journal. The contributors to this special issue return to Akerman's work, illuminating her films, writings, and installations through new criticism and discussion. The issue includes a rich collection of newly published photographs, scholarly essays by leading Akerman scholars, a filmography and installation list, and rare interviews with Akerman's close collaborators.

Contributors. Claire Atherton, Janet Bergstrom, Kelley Conway, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Ute Holl, Heike Klippel, Eva Kuhn, Matias Lavin, Alisa Lebow, Brenda Longfellow, Babette Mangolte, Ivone Margulies, Michael Mazière, Eva Meyer, Sandra Percival, Jane Stein, Cécile Tourneur, Maureen Turim, Sonia Wieder-Atherton, Patricia White
[more]

front cover of On Duty
On Duty
Power, Politics, and the History of Nursing in New Jersey
Ward, Frances
Rutgers University Press, 2009
In 1886, Newark City Hospital opened a training school for nurses in New Jersey. With the dawn of a new century women began to demand rights that had been denied them, and nurses too demanded changes in health care and higher education. For the first time, On Duty offers a highly readable account of the struggle for professional autonomy by New Jersey nurses and reveals how their political and legislative battles mirrored the struggle of women throughout the country to redefine their roles in society.
[more]

front cover of On Intellectual Activism
On Intellectual Activism
Patricia Hill Collins
Temple University Press, 2012

Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has been called in Contemporary Sociology “one of the defining voices of contemporary feminist and race scholarship.” Well known for her contributions to sociology, social theory, and cultural studies, her numerous publications indicate why she has been a tireless voice for social justice causes such as the dynamics of race, social class, gender, and sexual equality, and also black feminist politics.
In On Intellectual Activism, Collins asks scholars and public intellectuals to assess the meaning of their work. She challenges readers to rethink the potential of speaking truth to power, and examines both the role of the intellectual in public life and how well questions of contemporary social issues are communicated to the public at large.

The contents of this volume—public lectures, previously published pieces, interviews, and new essays—illustrate the important conceptual anchors of Collins’ work and reflect on the major themes of her illustrious career. These timely and thought-provoking essays include topics ranging from black feminist thought, critical education, public sociology, and resisting racism to new visions for activist intellectuals.

[more]

front cover of ON INTIMATE TERMS
ON INTIMATE TERMS
The Psychology of Difference in Lesbian Relationships
Beverly Burch
University of Illinois Press, 1993
  On Intimate Terms looks at the internal logic of lesbian relationships, arguing that they are not patterned after heterosexual ones but rely on the interplay of psychosexual differences between women. The book suggests that everyone seeks psychic complementarity with an Other in intimate relationships as a way of supporting personal growth and development. A complementary partner is one who is different in some individually meaningful way, not necessarily in terms of gender.
 
"A very thoughtful and thought-provoking piece of work. . . . It will be a strong contribution to the fields of lesbian studies, gender relations, and feminist psychoanalysis." - Diane Ehrensaft, author of Parenting Together: Men and Women Sharing the Care of Their Children 
 
[more]

front cover of On Monique Wittig
On Monique Wittig
Theoretical, Political, and Literary Essays
Edited by Namascar Shaktini
University of Illinois Press, 2004
Monique Wittig, who died in January 2003, was a leading French feminist, social theorist, prose poet, and novelist--and an activist who helped start the lesbian and women's liberation movements in France. This collection of essays by Wittig and on her work is the first sustained examination in English of her broad-ranging political, literary, and theoretical viewpoints.
 
On Monique Wittig contains twelve essays, representing French, Francophone, and U.S. critics, including three previously unpublished pieces by Wittig herself. Among the essays is Diane Griffin Crowder's discussion of the U.S. feminist movement, Linda Zerilli's consideration of gender and will, and Teresa de Lauretis's examination of the development of lesbian theory. Together, these essays situate Wittig's work in terms of the cultural contexts of its production and reception. This volume also contains the first authenticated chronology of Wittig's life and features the first translation of "For a Movement of Women's Liberation," which Wittig published with other "militantes" in May 1970.
 
As the first book to appear on Wittig following her death, On Monique Wittig is an indispensable tool for feminist scholars.
 
[more]

front cover of On Religious Liberty
On Religious Liberty
Selections from the Works of Roger Williams
Roger Williams
Harvard University Press, 2012

Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven in Rhode Island for those persecuted in the name of the religious establishment. He conducted a lifelong debate over religious freedom with distinguished figures of the seventeenth century, including Puritan minister John Cotton, Massachusetts governor John Endicott, and the English Parliament.

James Calvin Davis gathers together important selections from Williams’s public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state. For Williams, the enforcement of religious uniformity violated the basic values of Calvinist Christianity and presumed upon God’s authority to speak to the individual conscience. He argued that state coercion was rarely effective, often causing more harm to the church and strife to the social order than did religious pluralism.

This is the first collection of Williams’s writings in forty years reaching beyond his major work, The Bloody Tenent, to include other selections from his public and private writings. This carefully annotated book introduces Williams to a new generation of readers.

[more]

front cover of On Second Thought
On Second Thought
Learned Women Reflect on Profession, Community, and Purpose
Luisa Del Giudice
University of Utah Press, 2017

In these dynamic essays, thirteen wise women review their lives for meaning and purpose, striving to integrate both head and heart. They consider how their spiritual paradigms have shaped their vocations as teachers, scholars, guides, mentors, and advocates and how these roles have been integral to their life’s work, not merely to their work life. With courageous and insightful testimonies they narrate the intersecting relationships of work, family, students, patients, and colleagues, weaving them together rather than compartmentalizing them. Challenges inside and outside the academy and other professional settings are revealed, to tell of suffering and transformation, to tally hard-earned life lessons and to share wisdom achieved. 

Lives and words are gathered and generously shared, allowing these women to make sense of their own lives while mentoring a wider circle of younger and older readers alike. These “travel tales” of journeys through knowledge and self-knowledge will inform, challenge, surprise, entertain, and inspire. 

[more]

front cover of On the Picket Line
On the Picket Line
Strategies of Working-Class Women during the Depression
Mary Triece
University of Illinois Press, 2006

On the Picket Line uncovers the voices of working-class women, particularly those active in the Communist Party, U.S.A., in order to examine how these individuals confronted the tensions between their roles as workers, wives, mothers, and consumers. Combining critical analysis, Marxist and feminist theory, and labor history, Mary E. Triece analyzes the protest tactics employed by working class women to challenge dominant ideologies surrounding domesticity. 

She details the rhetorical strategies used by women to argue for their rights as workers in the paid labor force and as caregivers in the home. Their overtly coercive tactics included numerous sit-ins, strikes, and boycotts that won tangible gains for working poor and unemployed women. The book also gives voice to influential figures in the 1930s labor movement (many of whom were members of the Communist Party, U.S.A.), such as Ella Reeve Bloor, Margaret Cowl, Anna Damon, Ann Burlak, and Grace Hutchins. Triece ultimately argues that these confrontational protest tactics of the 1930s remain relevant in today’s fights for more humane workplaces and better living conditions. 

[more]

front cover of Once a Cigar Maker
Once a Cigar Maker
Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919
Patricia A. Cooper
University of Illinois Press, 1987
Patricia A. Cooper charts the course of competition, conflict, and camaraderie among American cigar makers during the two decades that preceded mechanization of their work. In the process, she reconstructs the work culture, traditions, and daily lives of the male cigar makers who were members of the Cigar Makers' International Union of America (CMIU) and of the nonunion women who made cigars under a division of labor called the "team system." But Cooper not only examines the work lives of these men and women, she also analyzes their relationship to each other and to their employers during these critical years of the industry's transition from handcraft to mass production.
[more]

front cover of Once I Too Had Wings
Once I Too Had Wings
The Journals of Emma Bell Miles, 1908–1918
Emma Bell Miles
Ohio University Press, 2014

Emma Bell Miles (1879–1919) was a gifted writer, poet, naturalist, and artist with a keen perspective on Appalachian life and culture. She and her husband Frank lived on Walden’s Ridge in southeast Tennessee, where they struggled to raise a family in the difficult mountain environment. Between 1908 and 1918, Miles kept a series of journals in which she recorded in beautiful and haunting prose the natural wonders and local customs of Walden’s Ridge. Jobs were scarce, however, and as the family’s financial situation deteriorated, Miles began to sell literary works and paintings to make ends meet. Her short stories appeared in national magazines such as Harper’s Monthly and Lippincott’s, and in 1905 she published Spirit of the Mountains, a nonfiction book about southern Appalachia. After the death of her three-year-old son from scarlet fever in 1913, the journals took a more somber turn as Miles documented the difficulties of mountain life, the plight of women in rural communities, the effect of disparities of class and wealth, and her own struggle with tuberculosis.

Previously examined only by a handful of scholars, the journals contain both poignant and incisive accounts of nature and a woman’s perspective on love and marriage, death customs, child raising, medical care, and subsistence on the land in southern Appalachia in the early twentieth century. With a foreword by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, this edited selection of Emma Bell Miles’s journals is illustrated with examples of her painting.

[more]

front cover of One Colonial Woman's World
One Colonial Woman's World
The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit
Michelle Marchetti Coughlin
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
This book reconstructs the life of Mehetabel Chandler Coit (1673–1758), the author of what may be the earliest surviving diary by an American woman. A native of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who later moved to Connecticut, she began her diary at the age of fifteen and kept it intermittently until she was well into her seventies. A previously overlooked resource, the diary contains entries on a broad range of topics as well as poems, recipes, folk and herbal medical remedies, religious meditations, and financial accounts. An extensive collection of letters by Coit and her female relatives has also survived, shedding further light on her experiences.

Michelle Marchetti Coughlin combs through these writings to create a vivid portrait of a colonial American woman and the world she inhabited. Coughlin documents the activities of daily life as well as dramas occasioned by war, epidemics, and political upheaval. Though Coit's opportunities were circumscribed by gender norms of the day, she led a rich and varied life, not only running a household and raising a family, but reading, writing, traveling, transacting business, and maintaining a widespread network of social and commercial connections. She also took a lively interest in the world around her and played an active role in her community.

Coit's long life covered an eventful period in American history, and this book explores the numerous—and sometimes surprising—ways in which her personal history was linked to broader social and political developments. It also provides insight into the lives of countless other colonial American women whose history remains largely untold.
[more]

front cover of One Hour in Paris
One Hour in Paris
A True Story of Rape and Recovery
Karyn L. Freedman
University of Chicago Press, 2014
In this powerful memoir, philosopher Karyn L. Freedman travels back to a Paris night in 1990 when she was twenty-two and, in one violent hour, her life was changed forever by a brutal rape. One Hour in Paris takes the reader on a harrowing yet inspirational journey through suffering and recovery both personal and global. We follow Freedman from an apartment in Paris to a French courtroom, then from a trauma center in Toronto to a rape clinic in Africa. At a time when as many as one in three women in the world have been victims of sexual assault and when many women are still ashamed to come forward, Freedman’s book is a moving and essential look at how survivors cope and persevere.

At once deeply intimate and terrifyingly universal, One Hour in Paris weaves together Freedman’s personal experience with the latest philosophical, neuroscientific, and psychological insights on what it means to live in a body that has been traumatized. Using her background as a philosopher, she looks at the history of psychological trauma and draws on recent theories of posttraumatic stress disorder and neuroplasticity to show how recovery from horrific experiences is possible. Through frank discussions of sex and intimacy, she explores the consequences of sexual violence for love and relationships, and she illustrates the steep personal cost of sexual violence and the obstacles faced by individual survivors in its aftermath. Freedman’s book is an urgent call to face this fundamental social problem head-on, arguing that we cannot continue to ignore the fact that sexual violence against women is rooted in gender inequalities that exist worldwide—and must be addressed.

One Hour in Paris is essential reading for survivors of sexual violence as well as an invaluable resource for therapists, mental health professionals, and family members and friends of victims.
[more]

front cover of Onions Are My Husband
Onions Are My Husband
Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women
Gracia Clark
University of Chicago Press, 1994
In the most comprehensive analysis to date of the world of open air marketplaces of West Africa, Gracia Clark studies the market women of Kumasi, Ghana, in order to understand the key social forces that generate, maintain, and continually reshape the shifting market dynamics.

Probably the largest of its kind in West Africa, the Kumasi Central Market houses women whose positions vary from hawkers of meals and cheap manufactured goods to powerful wholesalers, who control the flow of important staples. Drawing on more than four years of field research, during which she worked alongside several influential market "Queens", Clark explains the economic, political, gender, and ethnic complexities involved in the operation of the marketplace and examines the resourcefulness of the market women in surviving the various hazards they routinely encounter, from coups d'etat to persistent sabotage of their positions from within.
[more]

front cover of The Only Woman in the Room
The Only Woman in the Room
A Memoir of Japan, Human Rights, and the Arts
Beate Sirota Gordon
University of Chicago Press, 2014
In 1946, at age twenty-two, Beate Sirota Gordon helped to draft the new postwar Japanese Constitution. The Only Woman in the Room chronicles how a daughter of Russian Jews became the youngest woman to aid in the rushed, secret drafting of a constitution; how she almost single-handedly ensured that it would establish the rights of Japanese women; and how, as a fluent speaker of Japanese and the only woman in the room, she assisted the American negotiators as they worked to persuade the Japanese to accept the new charter.

Sirota was born in Vienna, but in 1929 her family moved to Japan so that her father, a noted pianist, could teach, and she grew up speaking German, English, and Japanese. Russian, French, Italian, Latin, and Hebrew followed, and at fifteen Sirota was sent to complete her education at Mills College in California. The formal declaration of World War II cut Gordon off from her parents, and she supported herself by working for a CBS listening post in San Francisco that would eventually become part of the FCC. Translating was one of Sirota’s many talents, and when the war ended, she was sent to Japan as a language expert to help the American occupation forces. When General MacArthur suddenly created a team that included Sirota to draft the new Japanese Constitution, he gave them just eight days to accomplish the task. Colonel Roest said to Beate Sirota, “You’re a woman, why don’t you write the women’s rights section?”; and she seized the opportunity to write into law guarantees of equality unparalleled in the US Constitution to this day.

But this was only one episode in an extraordinary life, and when Gordon died in December 2012, words of grief and praise poured from artists, humanitarians, and thinkers the world over. Illustrated with forty-seven photographs, The Only Woman in the Room captures two cultures at a critical moment in history and recounts, after a fifty-year silence, a life lived with purpose and courage. This edition contains a new afterword by Nicole A. Gordon and an elegy by Geoffrey Paul Gordon.
[more]

front cover of Ono Ono Girl's Hula
Ono Ono Girl's Hula
Carolyn Lei-lanilau
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

Both playful and serious, this audacious riff on ethnic and sexual identity by Hawaiian-Hakka Chinese-American writer Carolyn Lei-lanilau revolves around the persona she calls “Ono Ono Girl,” an icon that interweaves and transcends Lucille Ball, Little Lulu, Tina Turner, and Spottie Dottie. Challenging assumptions about genre and gender, and acting out the notion that language is a function of the body, these essays are transforming soundbytes of Ono Ono Girl inventing herself.

“Just when you thought American literature was canonized and commodified beyond saving, Carolyn Lei-lanilau’s intertextual, irreverent work, Ono Ono Girl’s Hula, brings language and philosophy back to the table. Her book is a miracle delivery: a rebirth of poetry, Third World Spam, and love wrapped around the hybrid vigor of Hawaiian, Hakka, French, Latin, and English. Soulful, powerful, and wise.”—Russell Leong, editor of Amerasia Journal

“A book enjoyable equally for its fun as for its profundity, Carolyn Lei-lanilau’s Ono Ono Girl’s Hula is irresistible must reading for feminists, anthropologists, contemporary culture buffs, and anyone who wants a refreshing take on some of our more vexing current disputes. Down-to-earth and poetic, serious and hilarious at once, her unconventional voice invites the reader to understand the paradoxes of identity—sexual and ethnic—in new ways.”—Robin Lakoff, author of Talking Power

[more]

front cover of Opera
Opera
The Undoing of Women
Catherine Clement
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

front cover of Opportunity Denied
Opportunity Denied
Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work
Branch, Enobong
Rutgers University Press, 2011

Blacks and Whites. Men and Women. Historically, each group has held very different types of jobs. The divide between these jobs was stark—clean or dirty, steady or inconsistent, skilled or unskilled. In such a rigidly segregated occupational landscape, race and gender radically limited labor opportunities, relegating Black women to the least desirable jobs. Opportunity Denied is the first comprehensive look at changes in race, gender, and women’s work across time, comparing the labor force experiences of Black women to White women, Black men and White men. Enobong Hannah Branch merges empirical data with rich historical detail, offering an original overview of the evolution of Black women’s work.

From free Black women in 1860 to Black women in 2008, the experience of discrimination in seeking and keeping a job has been determinedly constant. Branch focuses on occupational segregation before 1970 and situates the findings of contemporary studies in a broad historical context, illustrating how inequality can grow and become entrenched over time through the institution of work.

[more]

front cover of Opposing Currents
Opposing Currents
The Politics of Water and Gender in Latin America
Vivienne Bennett
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004

This volume focuses on women in Latin America as stakeholders in water resources management. It makes their contributions to grassroots efforts more visible, explains why doing so is essential for effective public policy and planning in the water sector, and provides guidelines for future planning and project implementation.

After an in-depth review of gender and water management policies and issues in relation to domestic usage, irrigation, and sustainable development, the book provides a series of case studies prepared by an interdisciplinary group of scholars and activists. Covering countries throughout the hemisphere, and moving freely from impoverished neighborhoods to the conference rooms of international agencies, the book explores the various ways in which women are-and are not-involved in local water initiatives across Latin America. Insightful analyses reveal what these case studies imply for the success or failure of various regional efforts to improve water accessibility and usability, and suggest new ways of thinking about gender and the environment in the context of specific policies and practices.

[more]

front cover of Opting Out
Opting Out
Women Messing with Marriage around the World
Joanna Davidson
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Women around the world are opting out of marriage. Through nuanced ethnographic accounts of the ways that women are moving the needle on marital norms and practices, Opting Out reveals the conditions that make this widespread phenomenon possible in places where marriage has long been obligatory. Each chapter invites readers into the lives of particular women and the changing circumstances in which these lives unfold - sometimes painfully, sometimes humorously, and always unexpectedly. Taken together, the essays in this volume prompt the following questions: Why is marriage so consistently disappointing for women? When the rewards of economic stability and the social status that marriage confers are troubled, does marriage offer women anything compelling at all? Across diverse geographic contexts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this book offers sensitive and powerful portrayals of women as they escape or reshape marriage into a more rewarding arrangement.
[more]

logo for Rutgers University Press
An Ordinary Landscape of Violence
Women Loving Women in Guyana
Preity R. Kumar
Rutgers University Press, 2024
An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana tells a new history of queer women in postcolonial Guyana. While the country has experienced a rise in queer activism, especially toward human rights efforts, members of the Guyanese queer community have also been victims of extreme violence. This book asks how a hetero-patriarchal state shapes queer and "women-lovin’ women’s" experiences, and how such women navigate racialized, sexualized, and homophobic violence. With a unique focus on the lives of queer women in Guyana, it reveals their manifold experiences of violence, explores regional differences, and shows their complicated understanding of what exactly constitutes “rights” and the limitations of those rights in their lives. While activism against violence is crucial, this book addresses not only the violence against women, but theorizes the intimate partner violence between women, and demonstrates the ways that violence is both racialized and sexualized. 
[more]

front cover of The Origin of the World
The Origin of the World
Science and Fiction of the Vagina
Jelto Drenth
Reaktion Books, 2004
The Origin of the World is a revealing, intimate, and ultimately liberating study of female sexuality at its heart: the vagina. Working from the assumption that sex is pleasurable and fulfilling insofar as its participants fully understand how it works, sexologist Jelto Drenth gives readers a guided tour of the complex, challenging, and often misunderstood "origin of the world."

Drenth describes the workings of the vagina in simple language, enriching his description throughout the book with the imagery, mythology, lore, and history that has surrounded the vagina since the Middle Ages. The Origin of the World moves from basic physiognomic facts to the realms of anthropology, art history, science fiction, and feminist literature-all in the service of mapping the dark continent. Drenth's journey takes him from Renaissance woodcuts to vibrators, clitoridectomies to "virginity checks," fears of the vagina (the vagina dentata) to its celebration. Part medical exposition covering the function of female genitalia from orgasm to pregnancy and part cultural history discussing contemporary and historical views of such aspects of the feminine as pubic hair, Freud's theories of coitus, and slang terms for the vagina, The Origin of the World is encyclopedic in its breadth, fascinating in its content, and familiar in its subject.

This lightly written exploration can be seen as both an owner's manual and a guide for the perplexed. Women and men alike will benefit from its entertaining erudition and from its fundamental mission of demystifying sex and sexuality in the service of greater understanding and, from that understanding, greater pleasure.
[more]

front cover of The Origins of the Welfare State
The Origins of the Welfare State
Women, Work, and the French Revolution
Lisa DiCaprio
University of Illinois Press, 2005

Women workers and the revolutionary origins of the modern welfare state

In May 1790, the French National Assembly created spinning workshops (ateliers de filature) for thousands of unemployed women in Paris. These ateliers disclose new aspects of the process which transformed Old Regime charity into revolutionary welfare initiatives characterized by secularization, centralization, and entitlements based on citizenship. This study is the first to examine women and the welfare state in its formative period at a time when modern concepts of human rights were elaborated.

In The Origins of the Welfare State, Lisa DiCaprio reveals how the women working in the ateliers, municipal welfare officials, and the national government vied to define the meaning of revolutionary welfare throughout the Revolution. Presenting demands for improved wages and working conditions to a wide array of revolutionary officials, the women workers exercised their rights as "passive citizens" capaciously and shaped the meanings of work, welfare, and citizenship. Looking backward to the Old Regime and forward to the nineteenth century, this study explores the interventionist spirit that characterized liberalism in the eighteenth century and serves as a bridge to the history of entitlements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

[more]

front cover of Other Germans
Other Germans
Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich
Tina M. Campt
University of Michigan Press, 2005
It's hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity.
Tina Campt's Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-semitism. She also provides oral history as background for her study, interviewing two Black Germans for the book.
In the end, the author comes face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship between the history of Black Germans and those of other black communities?
The answers to Campt's questions make Other Germans essential reading in the emerging study of what it meant to be black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone with non-German blood as racially impure at best.
[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
Other Sisterhoods
LITERARY THEORY AND U.S. WOMEN OF COLOR
Edited by Sandra Kumamoto Stanley
University of Illinois Press, 1998
      Where are the women writers of color? Where are their theoretical voices?
        The fifteen contributors to Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and
        U.S. Women of Color examine the ways that women writers of color have
        contributed to the discourse of literary and cultural theory. They focus
        on the impact of key issues, such as social construction and identity
        politics, on the works of women writers of color, as well as on the ways
        these women deal with differences relating to gender, class, race/ethnicity,
        and sexuality. The book also explores the ways women writers of color
        have created their own ethnopoetics within the arena of literary and cultural
        theory, helping to redefine the nature of theory itself.
      "A sophisticated resource that will do much to carry us through
        to the next century. Great work!" -- Alvina E. Quintana, author of
        Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices
      CONTRIBUTORS:Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, AnaLouise Keating, Dionne
        Espinoza, Kimberly N. Brown, Marilyn Edelstein, Tomo Hattori, Robin Riley
        Fast, King-Kok Cheung, Timothy Libretti, Renae Moore Bredin, Jennifer
        Browdy de Hernandez, Kimberly M. Blaeser, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Eun Kyung
        Min, Cecilia Rodriguez Milanes
 
[more]

front cover of Others' Milk
Others' Milk
The Potential of Exceptional Breastfeeding
Wilson, Kristin J.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Breastfeeding rarely conforms to the idealized Madonna-and-baby image seen in old artwork, now re-cast in celebrity breastfeeding photo spreads and pro-breastfeeding ad campaigns. The personal accounts in Others’ Milk illustrate just how messy and challenging and unpredictable it can be—an uncomfortable reality in the contemporary context of high-stakes motherhood in which “successful” breastfeeding proves one’s maternal mettle. 

Exceptional breastfeeders find creative ways to feed and care for their children—such as by inducing lactation, sharing milk, or exclusively pumping. They want to adhere to the societal ideal of giving them “the best” but sometimes have to face off with dogmatic authorities in order to do so. Kristin J. Wilson argues that while breastfeeding is never going to be the feasible choice for everyone, it should be accessible to anyone.  
[more]

front cover of Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed
Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed
Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice
Shannon Elizabeth Bell
University of Illinois Press, 2013

Motivated by a deeply rooted sense of place and community, Appalachian women have long fought against the damaging effects of industrialization. In this collection of interviews, sociologist Shannon Elizabeth Bell presents the voices of twelve Central Appalachian women, environmental justice activists fighting against mountaintop removal mining and its devastating effects on public health, regional ecology, and community well-being.

 Each woman narrates her own personal story of injustice and tells how that experience led her to activism. The interviews--many of them illustrated by the women's "photostories"--describe obstacles, losses, and tragedies. But they also tell of new communities and personal transformations catalyzed through activism. Bell supplements each narrative with careful notes that aid the reader while amplifying the power and flow of the activists' stories. Bell's analysis outlines the relationship between Appalachian women's activism and the gendered responsibilities they feel within their families and communities. Ultimately, Bell argues that these women draw upon a broader "protector identity" that both encompasses and extends the identity of motherhood that has often been associated with grassroots women's activism. As protectors, the women challenge dominant Appalachian gender expectations and guard not only their families but also their homeplaces, their communities, their heritage, and the endangered mountains that surround them.

30% of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to organizations fighting for environmental justice in Central Appalachia.

[more]

logo for University of Massachusetts Press
Our Science, Ourselves
How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science
Christa Kuljian
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

When Christa Kuljian arrived on the Harvard College campus as a first-year student in the fall of 1980 with copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and Ms. magazine, she was concerned that the women’s movement had peaked in the previous decade. She soon learned, however, that there was a long way to go in terms of achieving equality for women and that social movements would continue to be a critical force in society. She began researching the history of science and gender biases in science, and how they intersect with race, class, and sexuality.

In Our Science, Ourselves, Kuljian tells the origin story of feminist science studies by focusing on the life histories of six key figures—Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Evelyn Fox Keller, Evelynn Hammonds, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Banu Subramaniam. These women were part of a trailblazing network of female scientists in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s who were drawn to the Boston area—to Harvard, MIT, and other universities—to study science, to network with other scientists, or to take a job. Inspired by the social and political activism of the women’s movement and organizations such as Science for the People, the Genes and Gender Collective, and the Combahee River Collective, they began to write and teach about women in science, gender and science, and sexist and racist bias and exclusion. They would lead the critiques of E. O. Wilson’s sociobiology in 1975 and Larry Summers’ comments about women in science thirty years later.

Drawing on a rich array of sources that combines published journal articles and books with archival materials and interviews with major luminaries of feminist science studies, Kuljian chronicles and celebrates the contributions that these women have made to our collective scientific knowledge and view of the world.

[more]

front cover of Our Sisters' Keepers
Our Sisters' Keepers
Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women
Edited by Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Essays on the roles played by women in forming American attitudes about benevolence and poverty relief

American culture has long had a conflicted relationship with assistance to the poor. Cotton Mather and John Winthrop were staunch proponents of Christian charity as fundamental to colonial American society, while transcendentalists harbored deep skepticism towards benevolence in favor of Emersonian self-reliance and Thoreau’s insistence on an ascetic life. Women in the 19th century, as these essays show, approached issues of benevolence far differently than their male counterparts, consistently promoting assistance to the impoverished, in both their acts and their writings. 
 
These essays address a wide range of subjects: images of the sentimental seamstress figure in women’s fiction; Rebecca Harding Davis’s rewriting of the “industrial” novel; Sarah Orne Jewett’s place in the transcendental tradition of skepticism toward charity, and her subversion of it; the genre of the poorhouse narrative; and the philanthropic work and writings of Hull House founder Jane Addams. 
 
As the editors of Our Sisters’ Keepers argue, the vulnerable and marginal positions occupied by many women in the 19th century fostered an empathetic sensitivity in them to the plight of the poor, and their ability to act and write in advocacy of the impoverished offered a form of empowerment not otherwise available to them. The result was the reformulation of the concept of the American individual.
[more]

front cover of Our Sisters' Promised Land
Our Sisters' Promised Land
Women, Politics, and Israeli-Palestinian Coexistence
Ayala Emmett
University of Michigan Press, 2003
In this powerful and timely book, Ayala H. Emmett examines the political roles of women in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Emmett's insights come from numerous trips to the region that included in-depth interviews with many of the participants. Excerpts from the interviews give voice to the women who played vitally important yet often overlooked roles in the political transformations of the contemporary Middle East. Emmett's observations on women's actions in political venues have global implications, transcending the specific political and social contexts of the region and shedding light on both the strengths of female activism and the resistances of male political institutions.
Emmett investigates the successes and failures of women in the Israeli political landscape, particularly the harassment experienced during the leadership of Right and ultra-Right groups before the ascension to office of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Her account of women's activism in Israel provides a rich backdrop for viewing the compelling events that have taken place in the Middle East throughout the 1990s and offer insights into the future of women's political activism, both in the ever-changing Israeli political climate and in the broader world of women in politics.
"Brilliant in conception and theory, based on superb fieldwork, and clearly written for both specialist and non-specialist reader." --Maurie Sacks, Montclair State University
"A groundbreaking study. . . .Ayala Emmett brings an unusual voice of clarity into the muddled politics of the Middle East. Where most studies ignore or marginalize women's role in the peace process, Emmett highlights women as political actors and shows their capacity to bridge the chasm between two hostile peoples." --Cynthia Saltzman, Rutgers University, Camden
Ayala Emmett is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Rochester.
[more]

front cover of Our Women Are Free
Our Women Are Free
Gender and Ethnicity in the Hindukush
Wynne Maggi
University of Michigan Press, 2001
The Kalasha are a dynamic community of about three thousand people living in three tiny finger valleys near Chitral, Pakistan. A tumultuous history has left them the only remaining practitioners of cultural and religious traditions that once extended across the Hindukush into Afghanistan. The Kalasha differ in many ways from the conservative Muslim communities now surrounding them.
Yet despite their obvious religious differences with nearby communities, when asked what makes the Kalasha unique, both men and women often reply, "Our women are free" (homa istrizia azat asan). The concept that Kalasha women are "free" (azat), that they have "choice" (chit), is a topic of spirited conversation among the Kalasha. It touches at the heart of both individual women's identities and the collective identity of the community.
Our Women are Free introduces the historical and cultural landscape of the Kalasha and describes the role that "women's freedom" plays as an ethnic marker for the entire community. Throughout the narrative, Wynne Maggi stays close to conversations and events that illustrate the daily life of the community, focusing particularly on the Kalasha people's sense of humor; on the pleasure they take in work, children, ritual, and relationships; as well as on the complexity and seriousness of their social lives.
Accessible and thought-provoking, Our Women are Free will be of interest to professional anthropologists, area scholars, and other social scientists.
Wynne Maggi teaches anthropology and women's studies at the University of Colorado.
[more]

front cover of Over There
Over There
Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present
Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds.
Duke University Press, 2010
Over There explores the social impact of America’s global network of more than 700 military bases. It does so by examining interactions between U.S. soldiers and members of host communities in the three locations—South Korea, Japan and Okinawa, and West Germany—where more than-two thirds of American overseas bases and troops have been concentrated for the past six decades. The essays in this collection highlight the role of cultural and racial assumptions in the maintenance of the American military base system, and the ways that civil-military relations play out locally. Describing how political, spatial, and social arrangements shape relations between American garrisons and surrounding communities, they emphasize such factors as whether military bases are located in democratic nations or in authoritarian countries where cooperation with dictatorial regimes fuels resentment; whether bases are integrated into neighboring communities or isolated and surrounded by “camp towns” wholly dependent on their business; and whether the United States sends single soldiers without families on one-year tours of duty or soldiers who bring their families and serve longer tours. Analyzing the implications of these and other situations, the contributors address U.S. military–regulated relations between GIs and local women; the roles of American women, including military wives, abroad; local resistance to the U.S. military presence; and racism, sexism, and homophobia within the U.S. military. Over There is an essential examination of the American military as a global and transnational phenomenon.

Contributors
Donna Alvah
Chris Ames
Jeff Bennett
Maria Höhn
Seungsook Moon
Christopher Nelson
Robin Riley
Michiko Takeuchi

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter