Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings


Book Description

As a leading introductory women’s studies reader, Shaw and Lee’s Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions offers an excellent balance of classic, conceptual, and experiential selections including new contemporary readings. This student-friendly text provides short and accessible readings reflecting the diversity of women’s experiences. With each new edition, the authors keep the framework essays and selections of readings fresh and interesting for students.




Voices and Values


Book Description

Over the last several years, regular evaluation of development programs has become essential in measuring and understanding their true impact. Feminist and gender-sensitive evaluations have gradually emerged, drawing attention to existing inequities--gender, caste, class, location, and more--and the cumulative effect of these biases on daily life. Such evaluations are also deeply political; they explicitly acknowledge that gender-based inequalities exist, show how they remain embedded in society, and articulate ways to address them. Based on four years of research, Voices and Values offers critical insight into how gender, class, and nationality inflect and affect sociological research. It examines how feminist evaluations could make an effective contribution to new policy formulations oriented to gender and social equity. The essays here focus centrally on the structural roots of inequity: giving weight to all perspectives; adding value to marginalized groups and people under evaluation; and taking forward the findings of evaluation into advocacy for change. In doing so, each essay advances the understanding of feminist evaluation both conceptually and as practice.




The Feminist Memoir Project


Book Description

The women of The Feminist Memoir Project give voice to the spirit, the drive, and the claims of the Women's Liberation Movement they helped shape, beginning in the late 1960s. These thirty-two writers were among the thousands to jump-start feminism in the late twentieth century. Here, in pieces that are passionate, personal, critical, and witty, they describe what it felt like to make history, to live through and contribute to the massive social movement that transformed the nation. What made these particular women rebel? And what experiences, ideas, feelings, and beliefs shaped their activism? How did they maintain the will and energy to keep such a struggle going for so long, and continuing still? Memoirs and responses by Kate Millett, Vivian Gornick, Michele Wallace, Alix Kates Shulman, Joan Nestle, Jo Freeman, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Smith, Ellen Willis, Eve Ensler, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Roxanne Dunbar, Naomi Weisstein, Alice Wolfson and many more embody the excitement that fueled the movement and the conflicts that threatened it from within. Their stories trace the ways the world has changed.




Voices of Feminist Liberation


Book Description

'Voices of Feminist Liberation' brings together a wide range of scholars to explore the work of Rosemary Radford Ruether, one of the most influential feminist and liberation theologians of our time. Ruether's extraordinary and ground-breaking thinking has shaped debates across liberation theology, feminism and eco-feminism, queer theology, social justice and inter-religious dialogue. At the same time, her commitment to practice and agency has influenced sites of local resistance around the world as well as on globalised strategies for ecological sustainability and justice. 'Voices of Feminist Liberation' examines the potential of Ruether's thinking to mobilize critical theology, social theory and cultural practice. The scholars gathered here present their personal engagements with Ruether's thinking and teaching. The book will be invaluable to scholars, policy-makers, and activists seeking to understand how colonial and patriarchal oppression in the name of religion can be confronted and defeated.




Gendered Voices, Feminist Visions


Book Description

Gendered Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Seventh Edition, is a balanced collection of classic, conceptual, and experiential selections. Accessible and student-friendly, the readings reflect the great diversity of women's experiences. Framework essays provide context and connections for students, while features like learning activities, ideas for activism, and questions for discussion provide a strong pedagogical structure for the readings.




Waking Sleeping Beauty


Book Description

The Sleeping Beauty in Roberta Seelinger Trites' intriguing text is no silent snoozer passively waiting for Prince Charming to energize her life. Instead she wakes up all by herself and sets out to redefine the meaning of “happily ever after.” Trites investigates the many ways that Sleeping Beauty's newfound voice has joined other strong female voices in feminist children's novels to generate equal potentials for all children. Waking Sleeping Beauty explores issues of voice in a wide range of children's novels, including books by Virginia Hamilton, Patricia MacLachlan, and Cynthia Voight as well as many multicultural and international books. Far from being a limiting genre that praises females at the expense of males, the feminist children's novel seeks to communicate an inclusive vision of politics, gender, age, race, and class. By revising former stereotypes of children's literature and replacing them with more complete images of females in children's books, Trites encourages those involved with children's literature—teachers, students, writers, publishers, critics, librarian, booksellers, and parents—to be aware of the myriad possibilities of feminist expression. Roberta Trites focuses on the positive aspects of feminism: on the ways females interact through family and community relationships, on the ways females have revised patriarchal images, and on the ways female writers use fictional constructs to transmit their ideologies to readers. She thus provides a framework that allows everyone who enters a classroom with a children's book in hand to recognize and communicate—with an optimistic, reality-based sense of “happily ever after”—the politics and the potential of that book.




Trans/forming Feminisms


Book Description

In this groundbreaking anthology, feminist scholar and trans ally Krista Scott-Dixon takes on the challenge of moving us towards more inclusive transfeminist politics. The 30 essays reflect academic, personal and political perspectives of contributors from Canada, the US and Europe. These include well-known activists and scholars in the field -- Bobby Noble, Barbara Findlay, Miqqi Alicia/Michael Gilbert, Kyle Scanlon, Talia Bettcher, Joshua Goldberg and Caroline White -- as well as fresh new voices. The book is divided into four sections to highlight the intersections between trans and feminist ideas. "Narratives and Voices" builds on the feminist idea of consciousness-raising, speaking from individual experiences and questions of how to represent oneself in language. "Identities and Alliances" takes up questions of how identities are produced, maintained and reproduced, and how diverse identities can work collectively. "Inclusion and Exclusion" examines the notion of "safe spaces" and "women-only spaces" in the context of trans challenges such as the Kimberly Nixon v. Vancouver Rape Relief Society case and the entrance policies of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. "Shelter and Violence" explores the service-provision policies of shelters, as well as the sex-gender system that supports transphobic abuse. The section introductions contextualize the discussion and identify key issues. The collection concludes with suggestions for future research and activism.




Woman's Work


Book Description

Betty Friedan's seminal work, The Feminine Mystique, is often credited with launching the women's rights movement. The book was published in 1963 and was informed by Betty's difficult relationship with her own mother, her training in psychology (she graduated summa cum laude from Smith College), and her experience raising three children in an unhappy marriage. Betty's unwillingness to accept the status quo led her to challenge traditional notions about women's roles and she became an outspoken leader in the feminist movement, co-founding the National Organization for Women along the way. Yet Friedan also became a lightning rod for controversy, eventually leaving NOW to pursue other interests that included helping women from other countries achieve equality and advocating for the rights of the elderly. Woman's Work: The Story of Betty Friedan presents the multi-faceted life and work of this complicated, fascinating woman, offering insight into the determination and dedication that shaped her into an icon to those who have followed in her wake. Book jacket.




Philosophy in a Feminist Voice


Book Description

In this book, Janet Kourany offers an antidote to the pervasive and pernicious strains in Western philosophy that discount women. Most areas of Western philosophy tend not only to ignore women, but also to perpetuate long-standing antifeminine biases of the society as a whole. It does not have to be this way. Rather than be part of the problem, philosophy can be a powerful force for much needed social change. In this collection of essays by some of the most noted feminist philosophers, Kourany showcases ideas on the newest work of Western philosophy that is benefiting women as well as men. Included here are articles by Eileen O'Neill, Louise Antony, Virginia Held, Susan Okin, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Nancy Frankenberry, Lorraine Code, Janet Kourany, Andrea Nye, and Susan Bordo, all of whom show further directions in which philosophy ought to proceed. This book demonstrates that feminist philosophy is not a separate area of philosophy that can safely be ignored by philosophers not "in" it. Rather, it relates to at least most of the major areas of philosophy, and its gains will stand to benefit all philosophers, no matter what their field.




Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism


Book Description

Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism offers a comprehensive survey of the rich and varied contributions feminist scholars have made to film studies over the past two decades. Individual chapters present a range of perspectives, from psychoanalytic, linguistic, and historical, to Marxist, textualist, and postcolonial discourses, thus highlighting accounts (with filmographies and reading lists) of how six professors conceive of and teach their feminist film courses.