Women's History Month

Recovering the powerful and influential contributions of women from the nation's formative years The Political Thought of America's Founding Feminists traces the significance of Frances Wright, Harriet Martineau, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth in shaping American political thinking. These women understood the relationship between sexism, racism, and economic inequality; yet, they are virtually unknown in American political thought because they are considered activists, not theorists. Their efforts to expand the reach of America's founding ideals laid the groundwork not only for women's suffrage and the abolition of slavery, but for the broader expansion of civil, political, and human rights that would characterize much of the twentieth century and continues to unfold today. Drawing on a careful reading of speeches, letters and other archival sources, Lisa Pace Vetter shows the ways in which the early women's rights movement and abolitionism were central to the development of American political thought. The Political Thought of America's Founding Feminists demonstrates that early American political thought is incomplete without attention to these important female thinkers, and that an understanding of early American women's movements is incomplete without considering its profound impact on political thought. A complex and thoughtful guide to the indispensable role of women in shaping the American way of life, The Political Thought of America's Founding Feminists is essential for a comprehensive understanding of the history of American political thought.

Feminism has had, perhaps, the greatest impact of any relatively recent approach to literary theory. It has not only helped create or revive interest in many previously little-known or much-neglected authors but has also raised key issues about gender--issues that have influenced numerous other approaches, such as multiculturalism and LGBTQ studies. This title offers deliberately diverse approaches to women writers, women-centered texts, and feminist methods of interpretation.

Presently, our concern for the social, political and economic situation of women remains as valid as it was in the last century. Despite the progress made worldwide, we continue to witness a reality in which gender issues generate injustice, lack of freedom and violation of human rights. Researchers constantly strive to analyse women phenomena and denounce its consequences in the attempt to achieve an egalitarian world in which differences are understood and respected. This book is one of the fruits of such efforts. Scholars interested in womens issues have joined in this volume in order to register, through their work, a commitment to progress towards a better society. With this work, the authors attempt to promote the voice of women who, even in the twenty-first century, feel deprived of their well-deserved security. At the same time, they attempt not only to keep alive the awareness about womens situation, but also create an academic meeting point that shows the most current areas of research around womens issue. Through this collaboration, the authors hope to achieve a review of contemporary approaches to womens studies. It is for all the above that they have entitled this book Feminism: Past, Present, and Future Perspectives because the authors are going to address how humanity is coping with the proposals of the last century. The authors want to show the most current points of view on womens issues through researches that are taking place in different geographic places, thanks to a procedure based on the case studies and methods. Finally, they will attempt to clarify what the future holds for women and state their demands first-hand.

Feminism has been one of the most important and radical movements in ideas and in society over the last forty years. Yet the roots of modern feminist and post-feminist thought stretch back much further than the 1960s. This Pocket Essential looks at the important names in the history of feminism, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Germaine Greer, and at the most significant texts, from John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women to Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth. It explores the history of feminist thought and the wide range of debate and discussion in contemporary feminism. Is there such a thing as post-feminism and, if so, what is it? Has there been a backlash against feminism as Susan Faludi's book of that title argued? What is the future of feminism in the new century? Pocket Essentials is a new series for the MTV generation brought up in the three-minute culture. Short, snappy text. Easy to read. Riveting. Enthusiastic. Fresh. Critical. Packed with facts, backed up with opinion, crammed with information.

When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel. Taking to the road--by which I mean letting the road take you--changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories--in short, out of our heads and into our hearts. Gloria Steinem had an itinerant childhood. When she was a young girl, her father would pack the family in the car every fall and drive across country searching for adventure and trying to make a living. The seeds were planted: Gloria realized that growing up didn't have to mean settling down. And so began a lifetime of travel, of activism and leadership, of listening to people whose voices and ideas would inspire change and revolution. My Life on the Road is the moving, funny, and profound story of Gloria's growth and also the growth of a revolutionary movement for equality--and the story of how surprising encounters on the road shaped both. From her first experience of social activism among women in India to her work as a journalist in the 1960s; from the whirlwind of political campaigns to the founding of Ms. magazine; from the historic 1977 National Women's Conference to her travels through Indian Country--a lifetime spent on the road allowed Gloria to listen and connect deeply with people, to understand that context is everything, and to become part of a movement that would change the world. In prose that is revealing and rich, Gloria reminds us that living in an open, observant, and "on the road" state of mind can make a difference in how we learn, what we do, and how we understand each other.

This book contains 120 biographical sketches of women who changed the world, placing them in the context of their times, & taking the viewpoint that women's history has largely been ignored. The section on Mead's anthropological work also includes two lesser-known female anthropologists: Elsie Clews Parsons & Ruth Benedict. Introduction by Gloria Steinem, extensive bibliography, & three indexes: geographical, alphabetical, & occupational.

Hélène Cixous is a famous feminist and philosopher.

Studies of Simone de Beauvoir have mostly concentrated on her literature, her life, and her famous 1949 work, The Second Sex, and the continued emphasis has been on Beauvoir's views on gender. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir places her theory of women's 'otherness' in the context of a number of contemporary theories on a similar subject. While gender takes its place among these, Professor Deutscher counterbalances its grip on our memory of Beauvoir's ideas by situating it in the context of our relationship to ageing, to generational difference, and to race and cultural difference. By differentiating the many aspects of 'otherness', Beauvoir revisited some of the concepts of reciprocity, ambiguity, and ethics for which she is best remembered.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman offers the definitive account of this controversial writer and activist's long and eventful life. Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman (1860-1935) launched her career as a lecturer, author, and reformer with the story for which she is best-known today, "The Yellow Wallpaper." She was hailed as the "brains" of the US women's movement, whose focus she sought to broaden from suffrage to economics. Her most influential sociological work criticized the competitive individualism of capitalists and Social Darwinists, and touted altruistic service as the prerequisite to both social progress and human evolution. By 1900, Gilman had become an international celebrity, but had already faced a scandal over her divorce and "abandonment" of her child. As the years passed, her audience shrunk and grew more hostile, and she increasingly positioned herself in opposition to the society that in an earlier, more idealistic period she had seen as the better part of the self. In her final years, she unflinchingly faced breast cancer, her second husband's sudden death, and finally, her own carefully planned suicide-- she "preferred chloroform to cancer" and cared little for a single life when its usefulness was over.Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents new insights into the life of a remarkable woman whose public solutions often belied her private anxieties. It aims to recapture the drama and complexity of Gilman's life while presenting a comprehensive scholarly portrait.