Title: Women without class: girls, race, and identity
Author: Bettie, Julie 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Gender Studies | Women's  Studies | Sociology | Chicano Studies | American Studies | Popular Culture | Education | Anthropology | Social Problems | Immigration
Publisher's Description: In this examination of white and Mexican-American girls coming of age in California's Central Valley, Julie Bettie turns class theory on its head and offers new tools for understanding the ways in which class identity is constructed and, at times, fails to be constructed in relationship to color, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Documenting the categories of subculture and style that high school students use to explain class and racial/ethnic differences among themselves, Bettie depicts the complex identity performances of contemporary girls. The title, Women Without Class, refers at once to young working-class women who have little cultural capital to enable class mobility, to the fact that class analysis and social theory has remained insufficiently transformed by feminist and ethnic studies, and to the fact that some feminist analysis has itself been complicit in the failure to theorize women as class subjects. Bettie's research and analysis make a case for analytical and political attention to class, but not at the expense of attention to other axes of identity and social formations.   [brief]
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Title: Flesh wounds: the culture of cosmetic surgery
Author: Blum, Virginia L 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: American Studies | Gender Studies | Film | Psychology | Literary Theory and Criticism | Sociology | Anthropology | Television and Radio | Women's  Studies
Publisher's Description: When did cosmetic surgery become a common practice, the stuff of everyday conversation? In a work that combines a provocative ethnography of plastic surgery and a penetrating analysis of beauty and feminism, Virginia L. Blum searches out the social conditions and imperatives that have made ours a culture of cosmetic surgery. From diverse viewpoints, ranging from cosmetic surgery patient to feminist cultural critic, she looks into the realities and fantasies that have made physical malleability an essential part of our modern-day identity. For a cultural practice to develop such a tenacious grip, Blum argues, it must be fed from multiple directions: some pragmatic, including the profit motive of surgeons and the increasing need to appear young on the job; some philosophical, such as the notion that a new body is something you can buy or that appearance changes your life. Flesh Wounds is an inquiry into the ideas and practices that have forged such a culture. Tying the boom in cosmetic surgery to a culture-wide trend toward celebrity, Blum explores our growing compulsion to emulate what remain for most of us two-dimensional icons. Moving between personal experiences and observations, interviews with patients and surgeons, and readings of literature and cultural moments, her book reveals the ways in which the practice of cosmetic surgery captures the condition of identity in contemporary culture.   [brief]
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Title: The king's midwife: a history and mystery of Madame du Coudray 
Author: Gelbart, Nina Rattner
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | European History | Women's  Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies | French Studies | History and Philosophy of Science | Medicine
Publisher's Description: This unorthodox biography explores the life of an extraordinary Enlightenment woman who, by sheer force of character, parlayed a skill in midwifery into a national institution. In 1759, in an effort to end infant mortality, Louis XV commissioned Madame Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray to travel throughout France teaching the art of childbirth to illiterate peasant women. For the next thirty years, this royal emissary taught in nearly forty cities and reached an estimated ten thousand students. She wrote a textbook and invented a life-sized obstetrical mannequin for her demonstrations. She contributed significantly to France's demographic upswing after 1760.Who was the woman, both the private self and the pseudonymous public celebrity? Nina Rattner Gelbart reconstructs Madame du Coudray's astonishing mission through extensive research in the hundreds of letters by, to, and about her in provincial archives throughout France. Tracing her subject's footsteps around the country, Gelbart chronicles du Coudray's battles with finance ministers, village matrons, local administrators, and recalcitrant physicians, her rises in power and falls from grace, and her death at the height of the Reign of Terror. At a deeper level, Gelbart recaptures du Coudray's interior journey as well, by questioning and dismantling the neat paper trail that the great midwife so carefully left behind. Delightfully written, this tale of a fascinating life at the end of the French Old Regime sheds new light on the histories of medicine, gender, society, politics, and culture.   [brief]
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Title: Lise Meitner: a life in physics
Author: Sime, Ruth Lewin 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Science | Physics | Autobiographies and Biographies | Women's  Studies | History | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was a pioneer of nuclear physics and co-discoverer, with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, of nuclear fission. Braving the sexism of the scientific world, she joined the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and became a prominent member of the international physics community. Of Jewish origin, Meitner fled Nazi Germany for Stockholm in 1938 and later moved to Cambridge, England. Her career was shattered when she fled Germany, and her scientific reputation was damaged when Hahn took full credit - and the 1944 Nobel Prize - for the work they had done together on nuclear fission. Ruth Sime's absorbing book is the definitive biography of Lise Meitner, the story of a brilliant woman whose extraordinary life illustrates not only the dramatic scientific progress but also the injustice and destruction that have marked the twentieth century.   [brief]
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Title: Mother without child: contemporary fiction and the crisis of motherhood 
Author: Hansen, Elaine Tuttle 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Literature | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Women's  Studies | American Literature | Ethnic Studies | American Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Revealing the maternal as not a core identity but a site of profound psychic and social division, Hansen illuminates recent decades of feminist thought and explores novels by Jane Rule, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, and Fay Weldon. Unlike traditional stories of abandoned children and bad mothers, these narratives refuse to sentimentalize motherhood's losses and impasses. Hansen embraces the larger cultural story of what it means to be a mother and illuminates how motherhood is being reimagined today.   [brief]
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Title: Tran sforming desire: erotic knowledge in Books III and IV of the Faerie queene 
Author: Silberman, Lauren
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Men and Masculinity | Women's  Studies | Poetry | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: The Faerie Queene anticipates postmodernist concerns with destabilizing language, and Lauren Silberman's stimulating study of Books III and IV of the poem proceeds from the assumption that Spenser has something important to say to us in the late twentieth century.In these books, Spenser exposes fictions of total control for what they are - fictions. The text affirms the value of risk and improvisation over the temptation to seek guarantees. The books examine the role of desire in moving us to function in an uncertain world and tempting us to foreclose that uncertainty by strategies that seek to frame knowledge through total mastery of it.   [brief]
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Title: Working families: the transformation of the American home
Author: Hertz, Rosanna
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Gender Studies | Women's  Studies | Sociology | Social Problems | Anthropology | Economics and Business | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | Politics | Politics
Publisher's Description: The dynamics of work and parenthood are in the midst of a revolutionary shift in the United States. Focused around a major factor in this shift - the rise of dual-income families - this groundbreaking volume provides a highly informative snapshot of the intricate fabric of work and family in the United States. With selections written by leading scholars both inside and outside academia, Working Families offers intimate stories of how families manage and how children respond to the rigors of their parents' lives, as well as broad overviews developed from survey and census data. Taken together, these essays present an updated and integral view of the revolutionary changes in patterns of work and family life occurring today. Using a broad range of methodologies, the contributors reach across gender, age, and class differences. They discuss working-class as well as affluent dual-career couples and work sites ranging from factories to offices. Straddling racial divides, the essays range from studies of white day care providers to a close look at a Mexican maid's daughter. The collection as a whole refutes the assumption that there is one normal type of family or workplace. These readable essays capture our attention as they build, cumulatively, to an absorbing picture of today's families and workplaces.   [brief]
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Title: Elizabeth Bishop: life and the memory of it
Author: Millier, Brett Candlish
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Autobiographies and Biographies | American Literature | American Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | United States History | Women's  Studies | Poetry
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Title: The tragedy of Mariam, the fair queen of Jewry
Author: Cary, Elizabeth, Lady 1585 or 6-1639
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Renaissance Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's  Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) is the first original play by a woman to be published in England, and its author is the first English woman writer to be memorialized in a biography, which is included with this edition of the play. Mariam is a distinctive example of Renaissance drama that serves the desire of today's readers and scholars to know not merely how women were represented in the early modern period but also how they themselves perceived their own condition.With this textually emended and fully annotated edition, the play will now be accessible to all readers. The accompanying biography of Cary further enriches our knowledge of both domestic and religious conflicts in the seventeenth century.   [brief]
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Title: Birthing the nation: strategies of Palestinian women in Israel
Author: Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Women's  Studies | Medical Anthropology | Sociology | Postcolonial Studies | Middle Eastern History | Sociology | Postcolonial Studies | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: In this rich, evocative study, Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh examines the changing notions of sexuality, family, and reproduction among Palestinians living in Israel. Distinguishing itself amid the media maelstrom that has homogenized Palestinians as "terrorists," this important new work offers a complex, nuanced, and humanized depiction of a group rendered invisible despite its substantial size, now accounting for nearly twenty percent of Israel's population. Groundbreaking and thought-provoking, Birthing the Nation contextualizes the politics of reproduction within contemporary issues affecting Palestinians, and places these issues against the backdrop of a dominant Israeli society.   [brief]
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Title: MeXicana encounters: the making of social identities on the borderlands
Author: Fregoso, Rosa Linda
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Chicano Studies | California and the West | Film | Women's  Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Latin American Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: meXicana Encounters charts the dynamic and contradictory representation of Mexicanas and Chicanas in culture. Rosa Linda Fregoso's deft analysis of the cultural practices and symbolic forms that shape social identities takes her across a wide and varied terrain. Among the subjects she considers are the recent murders and disappearances of women in Ciudad Juárez; transborder feminist texts that deal with private, domestic forms of violence; how films like John Sayles's Lone Star re-center white masculinity; and the significance of la familia to the identity of Chicanas/os and how it can subordinate gender and sexuality to masculinity and heterosexual roles. Fregoso's self-reflexive approach to cultural politics embraces the movement for social justice and offers new insights into the ways that racial and gender differences are inscribed in cultural practices.   [brief]
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Title: Unbound voices: a documentary history of Chinese women in San Francisco
Author: Yung, Judy
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Asian American Studies | Women's  Studies | California and the West | Californian and Western History | Social Science
Publisher's Description: Unbound Voices brings together the voices of Chinese American women in a fascinating, intimate collection of documents - letters, essays, poems, autobiographies, speeches, testimonials, and oral histories - detailing half a century of their lives in America. Together, these sources provide a captivating mosaic of Chinese women's experiences in their own words, as they tell of making a home for themselves and their families in San Francisco from the Gold Rush years through World War II.The personal nature of these documents makes for compelling reading. We hear the voices of prostitutes and domestic slavegirls, immigrant wives of merchants, Christians and pagans, homemakers, and social activists alike. We read the stories of daughters who confronted cultural conflicts and racial discrimination; the myriad ways women coped with the Great Depression; and personal contributions to the causes of women's emancipation, Chinese nationalism, workers' rights, and World War II. The symphony of voices presented here lends immediacy and authenticity to our understanding of the Chinese American women's lives.This rich collection of women's stories also serves to demonstrate collective change over time as well as to highlight individual struggles for survival and advancement in both private and public spheres. An educational tool on researching and reclaiming women's history, Unbound Voices offers us a valuable lesson on how one group of women overcame the legacy of bound feet and bound lives in America. The selections are accompanied by photographs, with extensive introductions and annotation by Judy Yung, a noted authority on primary resources relating to the history of Chinese American women.   [brief]
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Title: Encarnación's kitchen: Mexican recipes from nineteenth-century California: selections from Encarnación Pinedo's El cocinero español
Author: Pinedo, Encarnación b. 1848
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Food and Cooking | California and the West | Californian and Western History | Ethnic Studies | Women's  Studies
Publisher's Description: In 1991 Ruth Reichl, then a Los Angeles Times food writer, observed that much of the style now identified with California cuisine, and with nouvelle cuisine du Mexique, was practiced by Encarnación Pinedo a century earlier. A landmark of American cuisine first published in 1898 as El cocinero español (The Spanish Cook), Encarnación's Kitchen is the first cookbook written by a Hispanic in the United States, as well as the first recording of Californio food - Mexican cuisine prepared by the Spanish-speaking peoples born in California. Pinedo's cookbook offers a fascinating look into the kitchens of a long-ago culture that continues to exert its influence today. Of some three hundred of Pinedo's recipes included here - a mixture of Basque, Spanish, and Mexican - many are variations on traditional dishes, such as chilaquiles, chiles rellenos, and salsa (for which the cook provides fifteen versions). Whether describing how to prepare cod or ham and eggs (a typical Anglo dish labeled "huevos hipócritas" ), Pinedo was imparting invaluable lessons in culinary history and Latino culture along with her piquant directions. In addition to his lively, clear translation, Dan Strehl offers a remarkable view of Pinedo's family history and of the material and literary culture of early California cooking. Prize-winning journalist Victor Valle puts Pinedo's work into the context of Hispanic women's testimonios of the nineteenth century, explaining how the book is a deliberate act of cultural transmission from a traditionally voiceless group.   [brief]
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Title: Dearest beloved: the Hawthornes and the making of the middle-class family 
Author: Herbert, T. Walter (Thomas Walter) 1938-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Literature | American Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's  Studies | Men and Masculinity | Autobiographies and Biographies | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne - for their contemporaries a model of true love and married happiness - was also a scene of revulsion and combat. T. Walter Herbert reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment and shows how their marriage reflected the tensions within nineteenth-century society. In so doing, he sheds new light on Hawthorne's fiction, with its obsessive themes of guilt and grief, balked feminism and homosexual seduction, adultery, patricide, and incest.   [brief]
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