Title: Sonia's daughters: prostitutes and their regulation in imperial Russia 
Author: Bernstein, Laurie
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | European History | European Studies | Women's  Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: Prostitution in Imperial Russia was so tenacious that it survived not only the tsarist regime's most tumultuous years but the Bolshevik revolution itself. Laurie Bernstein's comprehensive study is the first to look at how the state and society responded to the issue of prostitution - the attitudes of prostitutes themselves, state regulation, societal reactions, and attempts at reform. She finds that prostitution and its regulation were integral to Russia's structures of gender, class, and politics.The first historian from outside the former Soviet Union to be granted access to these archival materials on prostitution, Bernstein takes the reader to the streets of Russia's cities, to the state-licensed brothels, medical clinics, hospital wards, halfway houses for "fallen women," and to the highest circles of the tsarist administration.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: A life's mosaic: the autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala 
Author: Ntantala, Phyllis
Published: University of California Press,  1986
Subjects: Literature | Gender Studies | Latin American Studies | Women's  Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies
Similar Items

Title: The master and Minerva: disputing women in French medieval culture 
Author: Solterer, Helen
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | European Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Medieval Studies | Women's  Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Can words do damage? For medieval culture, the answer was unambiguously yes. And as Helen Solterer contends, in French medieval culture the representation of women exemplified the use of injurious language.Solterer investigates the debates over women between masters and their disciples. Across a broad range of Old French literature to the early modern Querelle des femmes , she shows how the figure of the female respondent became an instrument for disputing the dominant models of representing women. The female respondent exploited the criterion of injurious language that so preoccupied medieval masters, and she charged master poets ethically and legally with libel. Solterer's work thus illuminates an early, decisive chapter in the history of defamation.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Still a man's world: men who do "women's" work
Author: Williams, Christine L 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | Gender Studies | Women's  Studies | Economics and Business | Men and Masculinity
Publisher's Description: Men who do "women's work" have consistently been the butt of jokes, derided for their lack of drive and masculinity. In this eye-opening study, Christine Williams provides a wholly new look at men who work in predominantly female jobs. Having conducted extensive interviews in four cities, Williams uncovers how men in four occupations - nursing, elementary school teaching, librarianship, and social work - think about themselves and experience their work.Contrary to popular imagery, men in traditionally female occupations do not define themselves differently from men in more traditional occupations. Williams finds that most embrace conventional, masculine values. Her findings about how these men fare in their jobs are also counterintuitive. Rather than being surpassed by the larger number of women around them, these men experience the "glass escalator effect," rising in disproportionate numbers to administrative jobs at the top of their professions. Williams finds that a complex interplay between gendered expectations embedded in organizations, and the socially determined ideas workers bring to their jobs, contribute to mens' advantages in these occupations.Using a feminist psychoanalytic perspective, Williams calls for more men not only to cross over to women's occupations, but also to develop alternative masculinities that find common ground with traditionally female norms of cooperation and caring. Until the workplace is sexually integrated and masculine and feminine norms equally valued, it will unfortunately remain "still a man's world."   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The elusive embryo: how women and men approach new reproductive technologies
Author: Becker, Gaylene
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Sociology | Gender Studies | Medical Anthropology | Medicine | Women's  Studies | Science
Publisher's Description: In the first book to examine the industry of reproductive technology from the perspective of the consumer, Gay Becker scrutinizes the staggering array of medical options available to women and men with fertility problems and assesses the toll - both financial and emotional - that the quest for a biological child often exacts from would-be parents. Becker interviewed hundreds of people over a period of years; their stories are presented here in their own words. Absorbing, informative, and in many cases moving, these stories address deep-seated notions about gender, self-worth, and the cultural ideal of biological parenthood. Becker moves beyond people's personal experiences to examine contemporary meanings of technology and the role of consumption in modern life. What emerges is a clear view of technology as culture, with technology the template on which issues such as gender, nature, and the body are being rewritten and continuously altered. The Elusive Embryo chronicles the history and development of reproductive technology, and shows how global forces in consumer culture have contributed to the industry's growth. Becker examines how increasing use of reproductive technology has changed ideas about "natural" pregnancy and birth. Discussing topics such as in vitro fertilization, how men and women "naturalize" the use of a donor, and what happens when new reproductive technologies don't work, Becker shows how the experience of infertility has become increasingly politicized as potential parents confront the powerful forces that shape this industry. The Elusive Embryo is accessible, well written, and well documented. It will be an invaluable resource for people using or considering new reproductive technologies as well as for social scientists and health professionals.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Reproducing empire: race, sex, science, and U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico
Author: Briggs, Laura 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Ethnic Studies | Medicine | United States History | Women's  Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization. Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine colonialism and globalization because for the past century it has been where the United States has expressed and fine-tuned its attitudes toward its own expansionism. Puerto Rico's history holds no simple lessons for present-day debate over globalization but does unearth some of its history. Reproducing Empire suggests that interventionist discourses of rescue, family, and sexuality fueled U.S. imperial projects and organized American colonialism. Through the politics, biology, and medicine of eugenics, prostitution, and birth control, the United States has justified its presence in the territory's politics and society. Briggs makes an innovative contribution to Puerto Rican and U.S. history, effectively arguing that gender has been crucial to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and more broadly, to U.S. expansion elsewhere.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Countering colonization: Native American women and Great Lakes missions, 1630-1900 
Author: Devens, Carol
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Native American Studies | American Studies | Native American Ethnicity | Women's  Studies | Religion
Publisher's Description: With Countering Colonization , Carol Devens offers a well-documented, revisionary history of Native American women. From the time of early Jesuit missionaries to the late nineteenth century, Devens brings Ojibwa, Cree, and Montagnais-Naskapi women of the Upper Great Lakes region to the fore. Far from being passive observers without regard for status and autonomy, these women were pivotal in their own communities and active in shaping the encounter between Native American and white civilizations.While women's voices have been silenced in most accounts, their actions preserved in missionary letters and reports indicate the vital part women played during centuries of conflict. In contrast to some Indian men who accepted the missionaries' religious and secular teachings as useful tools for dealing with whites, many Indian women felt a strong threat to their ways of life and beliefs. Women endured torture and hardship, and even torched missionaries' homes in an attempt to reassert control over their lives. Devens demonstrates that gender conflicts in Native American communities, which anthropologists considered to be "aboriginal," resulted in large part from women's and men's divergence over the acceptance of missionaries and their message.This book's perspective is unique in its focus on Native American women who acted to preserve their culture. In acknowledging these women as historically significant actors, Devens has written a work for every scholar and student seeking a more inclusive understanding of the North American past.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Nobody's story: the vanishing acts of women writers in the marketplace, 1670-1820 
Author: Gallagher, Catherine
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's  Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: Exploring the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century, Catherine Gallagher reveals the connections between the increasing prestige of female authorship, the economy of credit and debt, and the rise of the novel. The "nobodies" of her title are not ignored, silenced, or anonymous women. Instead, they are literal nobodies: the abstractions of authorial personae, printed books, intellectual property rights, literary reputations, debts and obligations, and fictional characters. These are the exchangeable tokens of modern authorship that lent new cultural power to the increasing number of women writers through the eighteenth century. Women writers, Gallagher discovers, invented and popularized numerous ingenious similarities between their gender and their occupation. The terms "woman," "author," "marketplace," and "fiction" come to define each other reciprocally.Gallagher analyzes the provocative plays of Aphra Behn, the scandalous court chronicles of Delarivier Manley, the properly fictional nobodies of Charlotte Lennox and Frances Burney, and finally Maria Edgeworth's attempts in the late eighteenth century to reform the unruly genre of the novel.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Ana Pauker: the rise and fall of a Jewish Communist
Author: Levy, Robert 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | Jewish Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Politics | European History | Women's  Studies
Publisher's Description: In her own day, Ana Pauker was named "The Most Powerful Woman in the World" by Time magazine. Today, when she is remembered at all, she is thought of as the puppet of Soviet communism in Romania, blindly enforcing the most brutal and repressive Stalinist regime. Robert Levy's new biography changes the picture dramatically, revealing a woman of remarkable strength, dominated by conflict and contradiction far more than by dogmatism. Telling the story of Pauker's youth in an increasingly anti-Semitic environment, her commitment to a revolutionary career, and her rise in the Romanian Communist movement, Levy makes no attempt to whitewash Pauker's life and actions, but rather explores every contour of the complicated persona he found expressed in masses of newly accessible archival documents.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Take my word: autobiographical innovations of ethnic American working women 
Author: Goldman, Anne E 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Ethnic Studies | Women's  Studies | United States History | American Studies
Publisher's Description: In an innovative critique of traditional approaches to autobiography, Anne E. Goldman convincingly demonstrates that ethnic women can and do speak for themselves, even in the most unlikely contexts. Citing a wide variety of nontraditional texts - including the cookbooks of Nuevo Mexicanas, African American memoirs of midwifery and healing, and Jewish women's histories of the garment industry - Goldman illustrates how American women have asserted their ethnic identities and made their voices heard over and sometimes against the interests of publishers, editors, and readers. While the dominant culture has interpreted works of ethnic literature as representative of a people rather than an individual, the working women of this study insist upon their own agency in narrating rich and complicated self-portraits.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Taking back the streets: women, youth, and direct democracy
Author: Kaplan, Temma 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | Politics | Anthropology | Latin American Studies | European Studies | Women's  Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Toward the end of the twentieth century in places ranging from Latin America and the Caribbean to Europe, the United States, South Africa, Nigeria, Iran, Japan, China, and South Asia, women and young people took to the streets to fight injustices they believed they could not confront in any other way. In the hope of changing the way politics is done, they called officials to account for atrocities they had committed and unjust laws they had upheld. They attempted to drive authoritarian governments from power by publicizing the activities these officials tried to hide. This powerful book takes us into the midst of these movements to give us a close-up look at how a new generation bore witness to human rights violations, resisted the efforts of regimes to shame and silence young idealists, and created a vibrant public life that remains a vital part of ongoing struggles for democracy and justice today. Through personal interviews, newspaper accounts, family letters, and research in the archives of human rights groups, this book portrays women and young people from Argentina, Chile, and Spain as emblematic of others around the world in their public appeals for direct democracy. An activist herself, author Temma Kaplan gives readers a deep and immediate sense of the sacrifices and accomplishments, the suffering and the power of these uncommon common people. By showing that mobilizations, sometimes accompanied by shaming rituals, were more than episodic - more than ways for societies to protect themselves against government abuses and even state terrorism - her book envisions a creative political sphere, a fifth estate in which ordinary citizens can reorient the political practices of democracy in our time.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Listen to the heron's words: reimagining gender and kinship in North India 
Author: Raheja, Gloria Goodwin 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Women's  Studies | South Asia
Publisher's Description: In many South Asian oral traditions, herons are viewed as duplicitous and conniving. These traditions tend also to view women as fragmented identities, dangerously split between virtue and virtuosity, between loyalties to their own families and those of their husbands. In women's songs, however, symbolic herons speak, telling of alternative moral perspectives shaped by women. The heron's words - and women's expressive genres more generally - criticize pervasive North Indian ideologies of gender and kinship that place women in subordinate positions. By inviting readers to "listen to the heron's words," the authors convey this shift in moral perspective and suggest that these spoken truths are compelling and consequential for the women in North India.The songs and narratives bear witness to a provocative cultural dissonance embedded in women's speech. This book reveals the power of these critical commentaries and the fluid and permeable boundaries between spoken words and the lives of ordinary village women.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Touching liberty: abolition, feminism, and the politics of the body 
Author: Sánchez-Eppler, Karen
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's  Studies | United States History | American Studies
Publisher's Description: In this striking study of the pre-Civil War literary imagination, Karen Sánchez-Eppler charts how bodily difference came to be recognized as a central problem for both political and literary expression. Her readings of sentimental anti-slavery fiction, slave narratives, and the lyric poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson demonstrate how these texts participated in producing a new model of personhood, one in which the racially distinct and physically constrained slave body converged with the sexually distinct and domestically circumscribed female body.Moving from the public domain of abolitionist politics to the privacy of lyric poetry, Sánchez-Eppler argues that attention to the physical body blurs the boundaries between public and private. Drawing analogies between black and female bodies, feminist-abolitionists use the public sphere of anti-slavery politics to write about sexual desires and anxieties they cannot voice directly.Sánchez-Eppler warns against exaggerating the positive links between literature and politics, however. She finds that the relationships between feminism and abolitionism reveal patterns of exploitation, appropriation, and displacement of the black body that acknowledge the difficulties in embracing "difference," in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth. Her insightful examination of issues that continue to be relevant today will make a distinctive mark on American literary and cultural studies.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: On her own terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the rise of science in the American West
Author: Stein, Barbara R 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Autobiographies and Biographies | History of Science | Paleontology | California and the West | Women's  Studies
Publisher's Description: At a time when women could not vote and very few were involved in the world outside the home, Annie Montague Alexander (1867-1950) was an intrepid explorer, amateur naturalist, skilled markswoman, philanthropist, farmer, and founder and patron of two natural history museums at the University of California, Berkeley. Barbara R. Stein presents a luminous portrait of this remarkable woman, a pioneer who helped shape the world of science in California, yet whose name has been little known until now. Alexander's father founded a Hawaiian sugar empire, and his great wealth afforded his adventurous daughter the opportunity to pursue her many interests. Stein portrays Alexander as a complex, intelligent, woman who--despite her frail appearance--was determined to achieve something with her life. Along with Louise Kellogg, her partner of forty years, Alexander collected thousands of animal, plant, and fossil specimens throughout western North America. Their collections serve as an invaluable record of the flora and fauna that were beginning to disappear as the West succumbed to spiraling population growth, urbanization, and agricultural development. Today at least seventeen taxa are named for Alexander, and several others honor Kellogg, who continued to make field trips after Alexander's death. Alexander's dealings with scientists and her encouragement--and funding--of women to do field research earned her much admiration, even from those with whom she clashed. Stein's extensive use of archival material, including excerpts from correspondence and diaries, allows us to see Annie Alexander as a keen observer of human nature who loved women and believed in their capabilities. Her legacy endures in the fields of zoology and paleontology and also in the lives of women who seek to follow their own star to the fullest degree possible.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Migrant daughter: coming of age as a Mexican American woman
Author: Tywoniak, Frances Esquibel 1931-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | Women's  Studies | Chicano Studies | California and the West | Californian and Western History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Taking us from the open spaces of rural New Mexico and the fields of California's Great Central Valley to the intellectual milieu of student life in Berkeley during the 1950s, this memoir, based on an oral history by Mario T. García, is the powerful and moving testimonio of a young Mexican American woman's struggle to rise out of poverty. Migrant Daughter is the coming-of-age story of Frances Esquibel Tywoniak, who was born in Spanish-speaking New Mexico, moved with her family to California during the Depression to attend school and work as a farm laborer, and subsequently won a university scholarship, becoming one of the few Mexican Americans to attend the University of California, Berkeley, at that time. Giving a personal perspective on the conflicts of living in and between cultures, this eloquent story provides a rare glimpse into the life of a young Mexican American woman who achieved her dreams of obtaining a university education. In addition to the many fascinating details of everyday life the narrative provides, Mario T. García's introduction contextualizes the place and importance of Tywoniak's life. Both introduction and narrative illustrate the process by which Tywoniak negotiated her relation to ethnic identity and cultural allegiances, the ways in which she came to find education as a channel for breaking with fieldwork patterns of life, and the effect of migration on family and culture. This deeply personal memoir portrays a courageous Mexican American woman moving between many cultural worlds, a life story that at times parallels, and at times diverges from, the real life experiences of thousands of other, unnamed women.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Nerves and narratives: a cultural history of hysteria in nineteenth-century British prose 
Author: Logan, Peter Melville 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Literary Theory and Criticism | Victorian History | English Literature | Women's  Studies
Publisher's Description: The British middle class of the early nineteenth century was defined by its nervous complaints - hysteria, hypochondria, vapours, melancholia, and other maladies. Peter Melville Logan explores the link between medical theories of nervous physiology and narrative issues central to the literary writing of the period. He examines the assumption, implicit in medical thinking at the time, that the nervous body - unlike its non-nervous counterpart - has a narrative inscribed on its nerve fibers. It becomes "the body with a story to tell."Logan takes up several literary works whose nervous narrators connect their present disorder with an unnatural, unhealthy social order. Concentrating on novels by Godwin, Hays, and Edgeworth, and on De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater , Logan weaves cultural phenomena such as crowd psychology and attitudes toward opium addiction into the basic paradigm of the nervous narrative. He explains why these social critiques always tended to promote the same distempered civilization that brought them into being. He then looks at the emergence of the working-class body in the 1840s, changing medical theories, and George Eliot's treatment of medicine in Middlemarch .Logan's book is especially valuable for its rethinking of disciplinary categories that separate medicine from literature and for bringing to light lesser-known literary texts. With a foreword by Roy Porter, it will be a welcome addition to literary, gender, and cultural studies.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The trauma of gender: a feminist theory of the English novel
Author: Moglen, Helene 1936-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Literature | Gender Studies | Women's  Studies | European Studies | European History | Literary Theory and Criticism | English Literature
Publisher's Description: Helene Moglen offers a revisionary feminist argument about the origins, cultural function, and formal structure of the English novel. While most critics and historians have associated the novel's emergence and development with the burgeoning of capitalism and the rise of the middle classes, Moglen contends that the novel princi- pally came into being in order to manage the social and psychological strains of the modern sex-gender system. Rejecting the familiar claim that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition, she shows that, from its inception in the eighteenth century, the English novel has contained both realistic and fantastic narratives, which compete for primacy within individual texts.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: What is sexual harassment?: from Capitol Hill to the Sorbonne
Author: Saguy, Abigail Cope 1970-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Gender Studies | American Studies | Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | European Studies | Men and Masculinity | Women's  Studies | Law | Sociology
Publisher's Description: In France, a common notion is that the shared interests of graduate students and their professors could lead to intimate sexual relations, and that regulations curtailing those relationships would be both futile and counterproductive. By contrast, many universities and corporations in the United States prohibit sexual relationships across hierarchical lines and sometimes among coworkers, arguing that these liaisons should have no place in the workplace. In this age of globalization, how do cultural and legal nuances translate? And when they differ, how are their subtleties and complexities understood? In comparing how sexual harassment - a concept that first emerged in 1975 - has been defined differently in France and the United States, Abigail Saguy explores not only the social problem of sexual harassment but also the broader cultural concerns of cross-national differences and similarities.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Selected letters of Alessandra Strozzi
Author: Macinghi Strozzi, Alessandra 1407-1471
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Renaissance History | Women's  Studies | European Studies | Literature in Translation | Autobiography | European History | Letters
Publisher's Description: The letters of Alessandra Strozzi provide a vivid and spirited portrayal of life in fifteenth-century Florence. Among the richest autobiographical materials to survive from the Italian Renaissance, the letters reveal a woman who fought stubbornly to preserve her family's property and position in adverse circumstances, and who was an acute observer of Medicean society. Her letters speak of political and social status, of the concept of honor, and of the harshness of life, including the plague and the loss of children. They are also a guide to Alessandra's inner life over a period of twenty-three years, revealing the pain and sorrow, and, more rarely, the joy and triumph, with which she responded to the events unfolding around her.This edition includes translations, in full or in part, of 35 of the 73 extant letters. The selections carry forward the story of Alessandra's life and illustrate the range of attitudes, concerns, and activities which were characteristic of their author.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: At the heart of the Empire: Indians and the colonial encounter in late-Victorian Britain 
Author: Burton, Antoinette M 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Women's  Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies | South Asia | Victorian History | Travel | European History | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Antoinette Burton focuses on the experiences of three Victorian travelers in Britain to illustrate how "Englishness" was made and remade in relation to imperialism. The accounts left by these three sojourners - all prominent, educated Indians - represent complex, critical ethnographies of "native" metropolitan society and offer revealing glimpses of what it was like to be a colonial subject in fin-de-siècle Britain. Burton's innovative interpretation of the travelers' testimonies shatters the myth of Britain's insularity from its own construction of empire and shows that it was instead a terrain open to continual contest and refiguration.Burton's three subjects felt the influence of imperial power keenly during even the most everyday encounters in Britain. Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected London to colonial scrutiny in the process. Their experiences form the basis of this wide-ranging, clearly written, and imaginative investigation of diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis.   [brief]
Similar Items