Gender studies: women and girls Books

At a time when women were barred from clerical roles, middle-class women made use of the informal power structures of Victorian and Edwardian associationalism in order to actively participate as citizens.This investigation of women's part in civic life...

A response to the prominent Methodist historian David Hempton's call to analyse women's experience within Methodism, this book is the first to deal with British Methodist women preachers over the entire nineteenth century.The author covers women...

Until recently, women featured in the historiography of the landed class in Ireland either as bearers of assets to advantageous matches or as potential drains on family estates. Drawing on a range of sources from the papers of landed families, this book...

This is a groundbreaking examination of the attempts to regulate female sexuality in twentieth-century Northern Ireland, which opens up new and exciting areas of a previously neglected history.A wide-ranging study, it explores the sexual experiences of...

I'm not a good mother - not what Dr. Spock calls a "slow mother" who leaves her chores to make sure junior gets the right treatment. (Dorothy Wright, 1961) I must admit that I am no longer the same person who was tied to the kitchen sink at home...

Many feminists have engaged with the man-made concepts and approaches of traditional political analysis to produce an increasingly sophisticated and wide-ranging body of thought. The starting point of this book is the belief that such work is not simply...

This pioneering study, described as 'a model of feminist criticism' (The Year's Work in English Studies) on first publication, revealed Gaskell as an important social analyst who deliberately challenged the Victorian disjunction between public and...

Louise Erdrich is one of the most critically and commercially successful Native American writers. This book is the first fully comprehensive treatment of Erdrich's writing, analysing the textual complexities and diverse contexts of her work to date...

This enlightening book aims to fill the gap in the literature on women's lives from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, a time in which Italian urban societies saw much debate on the nature of women and on their roles, education and...

This book is about the lives of refugee women in Britain and France. Who are they? Where do they come from? What happens to them when they arrive, while they wait for a decision on their claim for asylum, and after the decision, whether positive or...

How do people seek security in relation to their sense of 'who they are'? How can one make sense of insecurity at the intersection of competing identity claims? Based on the voices of Mayan women, Stern critically re-considers the connections between...

The only currently available anthology of early modern women's writing to focus exclusively on manuscript material. Recent scholarship has emphasised the importance of manuscript composition and circulation for women in the period Includes a carefully...

Elleke Boehmer's work on the crucial intersections between independence, nationalism and gender has already proved canonical in the field. 'Stories of women' combines her keynote essays on the mother figure and the postcolonial nation, with incisive new...

War Girls reveals the fascinating story of the British women who volunteered for service in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry during the Great. Examining their experiences on the Western Front with the Belgian, British and French Armies, this book shows how...

"Women, gender and fascism in Europe, 1919-45" investigates the role of women and gender in fascist and non-fascist movements of the extreme right. It re-examines the nature of the extreme right in the light of research in the field of women's and gender...

Shetland has a history unique in Europe, for over the past two centuries it was a place where women dominated the family, economy, and the cultural imagination. Women ran households and crofts without men. They maintained families and communities because...

Engendering whiteness represents a comparative analysis of the complex interweaving of race, gender, social class and sexuality in defining the contours of white women's lives in Barbados and North Carolina during the era of slavery. Despite their...

This groundbreaking book shows how female performers - one of the first groups of professional women - used and still use autobiography and performance as both a means of expression and control of their private and public selves, the 'face and the mask'...

Women have long been crucial to the provision of medical services, both in the treatment of sickness and in maintaining health. In this study, Susan Broomhall situates the practices and perceptions of women's medical work in France in the context of the...

This work reassesses women's relationship to performance in Early Modern England. It investigates the staging conditions, practices and gendering of Anna of Denmark's performances, bringing current critical theorisations of race, class, gender, space and...

Jane Garrity shows how four British women modernists - Dorothy Richardson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf - used experimental literary techniques in order to situate themselves as national subjects. Reading literary texts through...

The medieval landscape, as traditionally viewed through the eyes of scholars, was hardly populated by women - aside from the occasional dazzling queen or mistress, strong-willed abbess, or exotic mystic. This picture has been dramatically altered by the...

A study of the rape-revenge film, in which Jacinda Read suggests that the rape-revenge cycle can be read as one of the primary ways in which Hollywood has attempted to make sense of feminism and the changing shape of heterosexual femininity in the...

This book offers a new approach to fin-de-siecle and New Woman criticism, focusing on three key exponents of New Woman fiction: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird. Heilmann pays close attention to the gaps, shifts, inconsistencies and...

This insightful book offers a timely assessment of the complex relationship between women and leisure in England, drawing upon recent feminist theory. Departing from approaches which focus on particular activities or institutions, it places everyday...

This volume brings together the varied artistic, critical and cultural productions by women scholars, critics and artists between 1790-1900, many of whom are little known in the canonical histories of the period. It looks at women working outside...

Julia Kavanagh was a popular and internationally published writer of the mid-nineteenth century whose collective body of work included fiction, biography, critical studies of French and English women writers, and travel writing. In this critically...

This is a study of the powers of Gothic in late 20th-century fiction and film. Susanne Becker argues that the Gothic, 200 years after it emerged, exhibits unchanged vitality in our media age and its obsession with incessant stimulation and excitement...

This text explores written representations of First World War experience, produced by a variety of different women and investigates the interface between such writing and the development of literary modernisms, focusing on an engagement with issues of...

Given recent media coverage of women's drinking habits, it is surprising that a topic of such interest has not produced a comprehensive examination. This book provides not just a survey spanning a century of momentous change, but integrates diverse...

This anthology aims to challenge stereotypes of women travellers by presenting writings by women who travelled bravely around the world disregarding social convention and danger. As well as the "eccentric" woman traveller, the anthology includes writings...

"Women reading Shakespeare, 1660-1900" comprehensively rediscovers a lost tradition of women's writing on Shakespeare. Since Margaret Cavendish published the first critical essay on Shakespeare in 1664, women have written as scholars, critics, editors,...

This feminist literary study discusses postmodern ideas about the self, particularly about the way in which selves are constructed by biography and autobiography. The author particularly examines the manner in which women write about themselves. -- .

"A wide ranging, challenging and constantly surprising collection ... focusing on the divisions the war created between men and women."Pat BarkerThis is an anthology of short stories of World War I from 25 classic writers. Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf...

Examines the effects of the Second World War on women's sense of themselves. Using oral history it explores the interaction between cultural representations of men and women in the war, and women's own narratives of their wartime lives. -- .

Sexually transgressive, politically astute and determined to claim educational and employment rights equal to those enjoyed by men, the new woman took centre stage in the cultural landscape of late-Victorian Britain. By comparing the fictional...

This collection of sources demonstrates the variety of evidence that survives of English women in all walks of life from the time of Edward I to the eve of the Reformation. The sources are introduced by a substantial overview of current thinking about...

Celebratory news features about India's thriving middle class tell only part of the story of the country's recent economic rise, frequently glossing over the 300 million Indians who live on the margins and struggle to survive under economic...

Throughout her history, the ballerina has been perceived as the embodiment of beauty and perfection - she is the feminine ideal. But the reality is another story. Beginning with the earliest ballerinas, who often led double lives as concubines, Deirdre...

ENG:Sex, Love, and Migration complicates a narrative of women's exploitation as a feature of migration in the twenty-first century, to argue that women's mobility is marked not only by risks but also by personal and social transformation. Drawing on...

ENG: The Great East Japan Disaster a compound catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that began on March 11, 2011 has ushered in a new era of cultural production dominated by discussions on safety and security, risk and vulnerability,...

Readers and mistresses: Kept women in Victorian literature identifies kept mistresses in British Victorian narrative and offers ways to understand their experiences. The author discusses kept women characters in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, Elizabeth...

In Women Artists in Midcentury America, readers embark on a journey spanning two decades, delving into the evolving social and artistic landscapes through the lens of all-women exhibitions. These groundbreaking projects courageously confronted issues of...

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the ordinations of "The Philadelphia Eleven," this expanded and revised edition serves as the definitive account of the courageous women who shattered stained glass ceilings and sparked a global movement to...

From bestselling Brazilian crime novelist Patrcia Melo comes a masterful thriller that is by turns poetic, inspiring, humorous and harrowing.To escape an overprotective family and an abusive partner, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian...