Gender studies: women and girls Books

Most Western democracies established women's policy agencies to improve the status of women by the 1990s. However, the political context has changed drastically: developments such as welfare state reform, multilevel governance, regionalization and...

Heir to an earldom, and wife and widow of William de Valence (half-brother of King Henry III), Joan de Valence was an important actor in the volatile political world of thirteenth-century England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Yet, astonishingly, her...

Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis queries the intersection of cultural and psychical meanings of skin in the contemporary moment as skin responds to new (and old) pressures and articulations. A variety of topics are herein addressed including the...

This collection discusses British and Irish life writings by women in the period 1700-1850. It argues for the importance of women's life writing as part of the culture and practice of eighteenth-century and Romantic auto/biography, exploring the complex...

Women and Leadership in West Africaoffers an insightful exploration of the factors that give rise to different types of female leadership in West Africa. It does so through an in-depth look at the Mano River Union countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra...

Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Ali Smith share an ecological philosophy of the world as one highly interconnected entity comprised of multiple and equal, human and non-human participants. This study argues that these writers' ecocentric views...

In 1929, tens of thousands of south eastern Nigerian women rose up against British authority in whatis known as the Women's War. This bookbrings togther, for the first time, the multiple perspectives of the war's colonized and colonial participants and...

A repositioning of French women's struggle for suffrage within the distinct cultural landscape of the masculine honor system. Whether activists demanded admission to the popular ritual of the duel or publicly shamed men for their extramarital sexual...

The emergence of queer ideas has unsettled other forms of exploring gender and sexuality, in particular, feminism. In response, feminists have been significant critics of queer ideas. This book, through the contribution of important US and UK writers,...

This book explores the social and cultural impact of the Olympic Games, examining gender and sport, the inequalities between nations and people and what the Games offer and how they are changing, in relation to spectacles, spectatorship and culture,...

A revisionist study of Mansfield as a profoundly colonial yet daringly experimental writer, at the forefront of modernism. The essays in this volume draw on the complete journals, letters and stories, to reveal Mansfield as a modernist who transcended...

Film and Female Consciousness looks at a group of films which offer new and original representations of women's interiority and individuality: In the Cut (2003), Lost in Translation (2003), and Morvern Callar (2002). Lucy Bolton compares these films with...

An exploration of therepresentations of the women's movement, its members, and their goals between 1968 and 2008 in the British and American press. Examining over 1100 news articles, the book analyses the nuanced ways feminism has historically been...

This book provides a reassessment of the writings of Hartley Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth and presents them in a new poetics of relationship, re-evaluating their relationships with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to restore a more...

This book offers a ground-breaking analysis of how women's movements have been remaking citizenship in multicultural Europe. Presenting the findings of a large scale, multi-disciplinary, cross-national feminist research project, FEMCIT, it develops an...

Single Women in Popular Culture demonstrates how single women continue to be figures of profound cultural anxiety. Examining a wide range of popular media forms,this is atimely, insightful and politically engaged book, exploring the ways in which...

This book examines contemporary relations between ethnic majority and ethnic minority women's movements in Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, and women's movements' participation in and influence on public policy that focuses on violence against women.

This book articulates the first theoretical context for a 'cyborg theatre,' metaphorically integrating on-stage bodies with the technologized, digitized, or mediatized, to re-imagine subjectivity for a post-human age. It covers a variety of examples, to...

This volume focuses on women's literary history in Britain between 700 and 1500. It brings to the fore a wide range of women's literary activity undertaken in Latin, Welsh and Anglo-Norman alongside that of the English vernacular, demanding a rethinking...

Including topics as diverse as feminism and its relationship to the marketplace, plagiarism and copyright, silence and forgetting, and myth in a digital age, this book explores the role of rewriting within feminist literature from the 1970s onwards in...

Between 1885 and 1960, laws and policies designed to repress prostitution dramatically shaped London's commercial sex industry. This book examines how laws translated into street-level reality, explores how women who sold sex experienced criminalization,...

A timely intervention into debates on the representation of feminist and feminine identities in contemporary visual culture. The essays in this collection interrogate how and why certain formulations of feminism and femininity are currently prevalent in...

During the seventeenth century, in response to political and social upheavals such as the English Civil Wars, women produced writings in both manuscript and print. This volume represents recent scholarship that has uncovered new texts as well as...

Male rape is a feminist issue - but perhaps not in the way that you might think. This work is an experiment in Foucauldian thought that attempts to satisfy Foucault's imperative to 'think differently'. From this positioning, feminist constructions of...

A reassessment of the Third Republic as the first long-term successful French experiment with a democratic republic. Born of violent revolution against Church, monarchy, and aristocracy, it was fraught with contradictions between the universalism of...

Now available in paperback for the first time, this is the first reference book to concentrate on early twentieth-century women's writing. It includes detailed entries on 185 authors, ranging from the canonical (Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, Virginia...

This book is an innovative and creative critique of the theories and practices of feminism for the twenty first century. Written by a mother and daughter, the book presents a dialogue across generations and instates a politics of difference and the...

This innovative and adventurous work uses broadly feminist and postmodernist modes of analysis to explore what motivates damaging attitudes and practices towards disability. Margrit Shildrick argues for the significance of the psycho-social imaginary,...

Gendered Spaces in Argentine Women's Literature addresses the largely understudied issue of how gendered spatial relations impact the production of literary works. It addresses gender implications of spatial categories: the notions of home and away,...

A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium fosters a dialogue across islands and languages between established and lesser-known authors, bringing together archipelagic and diasporic voices from the Francophone and Hispanic Antilles...

Drawing on extensive research with a diverse group of seventy teen girls, Zaslow offers a critical account of the girl power moment in which feminism and femininity are shrink-wrapped together in one market-friendly package. With a focus on pop music and...

In recent years adult educators have been working to develop an important body of literature on neo-liberalism, capitalism, and imperialism. Many of these analyses draw on various strands of Marxist theorizing. With the exception of Jane Thompson's work...

Medieval Irish texts reveal distinctive and unexpected constructions of gender. Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland illuminates these ideas through its fresh and provocative re-readings of a wide range of texts, including saga, romance, legal texts,...

Medieval women's history is entering a new stage. In the last thirty years medievalists have recovered the sources about women, and have moved women to the foreground of narratives to view society from their vantage point. The historians in this...

Reading the Animal in the Literature of the British Raj explores representations of animals during British rule in India-the tigers, elephants, boars, furs, and feathers that sometimes all but obscured the human beneath and behind them, and that were...

Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary is the first comprehensive overview of the omnipresent phenomenon that was the nineteenth-century British diary. Examining manuscript diaries, diary publication, and diaries in fiction, the...

By focusing on various forms of "dialogue," these essays shift our interest away from speaking and toward listening in order to illuminate ways that early modern English women interacted with their natural surroundings. The emphasis on dialogue brings...

Housework and Housewives in American Advertising traces the surprisingly persistent depiction of housework as women's work in advertising from the late 1800s to today. Jessamyn Neuhaus shows advertising to be our most significant public discourse about...

When seriously ill, what contributes to a sense of being truly cared for and respected? This compelling book explores healthcare inequalities by listening closely to Black and Latina women with breast cancer. It puts their stories into conversation with...

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book analyzes Black women's involvement in American political life, focusing on what they did to gain political power between 1961 and the present, and why, in many cases, they did not succeed. Duchess Harris...

This volume explores African American historical fiction written by women in the last four decades of the twentieth century. Comprehensive in scope, this book refers to over thirty authors whose work has contributed to the tradition, from Margaret Walker...