Women, Families, and Feminist Politics


Book Description

Women and their roles within families must be understood within the context of ethnic traditions, religion, and culture. Women, Families, and Feminist Politics: A Global Exploration combines all of these aspects to evaluate the similarities and differences of women around the world. Readers will learn about diverse theories relating to women and their familial roles, the different categories of feminism, and how cultures and ethnic traditions shape and sometimes restrict a woman’s identity. Using feminist and sociocultural theories to critically examine the role of adult women within their families, Women, Families, and Feminist Politics offers ideas and suggestions on what has to be done in order for all of women’s experiences and concerns to be valued and looked upon as important. In addition to providing you with an understanding of how customs and cultures contribute to societal standards set for women, Women, Families, and Feminist Politics discusses several factors that contribute to the formation of women’s roles and identity, including: the economic situation of the family and the country in which the woman lives (a developed or developing country) cultural diversity in monogamous heterosexual marriage relations and specific marriage traditions, such as dowries family structures, such as nonnuclear, extended, polygamous, mixed religion relationships, mixed race relationships, or same-sex relationships reproduction and sexual standards in relation to religion, government policies, and world population gender equity in the workplace and programs for women in global development the health care needs of women and how they vary depending on culture, political philosophies, and resources women and violence in societal and family contexts, from war rapes, female circumcision, and footbinding to battery and sexual harassment Women, Families, and Feminist Politics looks at the daily challenges and concerns of adult women within the context of family to help you understand the different needs of women in relation to their culture and ethnic background. Focusing on the importance of views concerning the meaning of women’s social status, power, and success, Women, Families, and Feminist Politics contains case studies and statistical data that identify critical issues pertaining to you personally and to all women throughout the world. By understanding how women’s families help shape their identities, you will be able to learn about the vast experiences of women and the inequalities we have yet to overcome.




Feminism and the Politics of Childhood


Book Description

Feminism and the Politics of Childhood offers an innovative and critical exploration of perceived commonalities and conflicts between women and children and, more broadly, between various forms of feminism and the politics of childhood. This unique collection of 18 chapters brings into dialogue authors from a range of geographical contexts, social science disciplines, activist organisations, and theoretical perspectives. The wide variety of subjects include refugee camps, care labour, domestic violence and childcare and education. Chapter authors focus on local contexts as well as their global interconnections, and draw on diverse theoretical traditions such as poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, posthumanism, postcolonialism, political economy, and the ethics of care. Together the contributions offer new ways to conceptualise relations between women and children, and to address injustices faced by both groups. Praise for Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes? ‘This book is genuinely ground-breaking.’ ‒ Val Gillies, University of Westminster ‘Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes? asks an impossible question, and then casts prismatic light on all corners of its impossibility.’ ‒ Cindi Katz, CUNY ‘This provocative and stimulating publication comes not a day too soon.’ ‒ Gerison Lansdown, Child to Child ‘A smart, innovative, and provocative book.’ ‒ Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University ‘This volume raises and addresses issues so pressing that it is surprising they are not already at the heart of scholarship.’ ‒ Ann Phoenix, UCL




The Rights of Women


Book Description

Erika Bachiochi offers an original look at the development of feminism in the United States, advancing a vision of rights that rests upon our responsibilities to others. In The Rights of Women, Erika Bachiochi explores the development of feminist thought in the United States. Inspired by the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Bachiochi presents the intellectual history of a lost vision of women’s rights, seamlessly weaving philosophical insight, biographical portraits, and constitutional law to showcase the once predominant view that our rights properly rest upon our concrete responsibilities to God, self, family, and community. Bachiochi proposes a philosophical and legal framework for rights that builds on the communitarian tradition of feminist thought as seen in the work of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Drawing on the insight of prominent figures such as Sarah Grimké, Frances Willard, Florence Kelley, Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Mary Ann Glendon, this book is unique in its treatment of the moral roots of women’s rights in America and its critique of the movement’s current trajectory. The Rights of Women provides a synthesis of ancient wisdom and modern political insight that locates the family’s vital work at the very center of personal and political self-government. Bachiochi demonstrates that when rights are properly understood as a civil and political apparatus born of the natural duties we owe to one another, they make more visible our personal responsibilities and more viable our common life together. This smart and sophisticated application of Wollstonecraft’s thought will serve as a guide for how we might better value the culturally essential work of the home and thereby promote authentic personal and political freedom. The Rights of Women will interest students and scholars of political theory, gender and women’s studies, constitutional law, and all readers interested in women’s rights.




The Feminism of Uncertainty


Book Description

The Feminism of Uncertainty brings together Ann Snitow’s passionate, provocative dispatches from forty years on the front lines of feminist activism and thought. In such celebrated pieces as "A Gender Diary"—which confronts feminism’s need to embrace, while dismantling, the category of "woman"—Snitow is a virtuoso of paradox. Freely mixing genres in vibrant prose, she considers Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and Dorothy Dinnerstein and offers self-reflexive accounts of her own organizing, writing, and teaching. Her pieces on international activism, sexuality, motherhood, and the waywardness of political memory all engage feminism’s impossible contradictions—and its utopian hopes.




Making Feminist Politics


Book Description

In this timely and detailed examination of the intersections of feminism, labor politics, and global studies, Suzanne Franzway and Mary Margaret Fonow reveal the ways in which women across the world are transforming labor unions in the contemporary era. Situating specific case studies within broad feminist topics, Franzway and Fonow concentrate on union feminists mobilizing at multiple sites, issues of wages and equity, child care campaigns, work-life balance, and queer organizing, demonstrating how unions around the world are broadening their focuses from contractual details to empowerment and family and feminist issues. By connecting the diversity of women's experiences around the world both inside and outside the home and highlighting the innovative ways women workers attain their common goals, Making Feminist Politics lays the groundwork for recognition of the total individual in the future of feminist politics within global union movements. --Publisher description.




Feminist Perspectives on Family Care


Book Description

Today women find themselves playing an ever-increasing role in caring for older family members who are frail, developmentally disabled, or suffering from serious mental illness. While this has role of women as caregivers has been documented, the actual impact on the lives of women has remained largely unstudied. In this volume, the authors examine caregiving as a central feminist issue, looking at its impact on women socially, personally, and economically. The authors review how changing family structures, the changing economy and workforce, and the changing health care demands of needy adults have impacted on women′s lives. They critique existing public and private policies, demonstrating a need for fundamental structural changes in social institutions and attitudes to improve the lives of women. Finally, they propose a social model of care that is oriented toward gender justice--recognition of the work of caring and its impact upon women socially, personally, and economically. For students, scholars and practitioners in the field of gerontology, gender studies, and social work, this book is a must.




Feminist Family Therapy


Book Description

Annotation Written by and for practicing therapists, this text focuses on feminist issues in family therapy. In the first two chapters, the editors place feminist family therapy within its historical context and discuss some of its classic texts. Other topics include, for example, loyalty to family of origin, gender in stepfamilies, the assessment of domestic violence, and feminism in the treatment of AIDS. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).




Handbook of Feminist Family Studies


Book Description

The Handbook of Feminist Family Studies presents the important theories, methodologies, and practices in feminist family studies. The editors showcase feminist family scholarship, providing both a retrospective and a prospective overview of the field and creating a scholarly forum for interpretation and dissemination of feminist work.




Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law


Book Description

Thomas Byers Memorial Outstanding Publication Award from the University of Akron Law Alumni Association Much has been written about women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Historians have written her biography, detailed her campaign for woman’s suffrage, documented her partnership with Susan B. Anthony, and compiled all of her extensive writings and papers. Stanton herself was a prolific author; her autobiography, History of Woman Suffrage, and Woman’s Bible are classics. Despite this body of work, scholars and feminists continue to find new and insightful ways to re-examine Stanton and her impact on women’s rights and history. Law scholar Tracy A. Thomas extends this discussion of Stanton’s impact on modern-day feminism by analyzing her intellectual contributions to—and personal experiences with—family law. Stanton’s work on family issues has been overshadowed by her work (especially with Susan B. Anthony) on woman’s suffrage. But throughout her fifty-year career, Stanton emphasized reform of the private sphere of the family as central to achieving women’s equality. By weaving together law, feminist theory, and history, Thomas explores Stanton’s little-examined philosophies on and proposals for women’s equality in marriage, divorce, and family, and reveals that the campaigns for equal gender roles in the family that came to the fore in the 1960s and ’70s had nineteenth-century roots. Using feminist legal theory as a lens to interpret Stanton’s political, legal, and personal work on the family, Thomas argues that Stanton’s positions on divorce, working mothers, domestic violence, childcare, and many other topics were strikingly progressive for her time, providing significant parallels from which to gauge the social and legal policy issues confronting women in marriage and the family today.




The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides a rich overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts that feminist theorists have developed to analyze the known world. Featuring leading feminist theorists from diverse regions of the globe, this collection delves into forty-nine subject areas, demonstrating the complexity of feminist challenges to established knowledge, while also engaging areas of contestation within feminist theory. Demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of feminist theory, the chapters offer innovative analyses of topics central to social and political science, cultural studies and humanities, discourses associated with medicine and science, and issues in contemporary critical theory that have been transformed through feminist theorization. The handbook identifies limitations of key epistemic assumptions that inform traditional scholarship and shows how theorizing from women's and men's lives has profound effects on the conceptualization of central categories, whether the field of analysis is aesthetics, biology, cultural studies, development, economics, film studies, health, history, literature, politics, religion, science studies, sexualities, violence, or war.