The Feminist Promise

The Feminist Promise
Author: Christine Stansell
Publisher: Modern Library
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2010-05-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1588369161

In this definitive volume, respected historian Christine Stansell tells the story of one of the great democratic movements of our times. She paints richly detailed portraits of well-known leaders—Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Betty Friedan—but others, too, appear in a new light, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Toni Morrison. Accounting for the failures of feminism as well as the successes, Stansell notes the emergence in the early 1900s of the dashing “New Woman”; the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote; the post–World War II collapse of suburban neo-Victorianism; the radical feminism of the 1960s; and the fight for women’s rights in developing countries in the era of international feminist movements. A soaring work, The Feminist Promise is bound to become an authoritative source on this essential subject for decades to come.

The Feminist Promise

The Feminist Promise
Author: Christine Stansell
Publisher: Modern Library
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2011-05-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812972023

“A unique, elegant, learned sweep through more than two centuries of women’s efforts to overcome the most fundamental way that human beings have been wrongly divided into the leaders and the led. It’s full of surprises from the past and guiding lights for the future.”—Gloria Steinem For more than two centuries, the ranks of feminists have included dreamy idealists and conscientious reformers, erotic rebels and angry housewives, dazzling writers, shrewd political strategists, and thwarted workingwomen. Well-known leaders are sketched from new angles by Stansell, with her bracing eye for character: Mary Wollstonecraft, the passionate English writer who in 1792 published the first full-scale argument for the rights of women; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, brilliant and fearless; the imperious, quarrelsome Betty Friedan. But figures from other contexts, too, appear in an unforgettable new light, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who in the 1970s led a revolution in the constitutional interpretations of women’s rights, and Toni Morrison, whose bittersweet prose gave voice to the modern black female experience. Stansell accounts for the failures of feminism as well as the successes. She notes significant moments in the struggle for gender equality, such as the emergence in the early 1900s of the dashing “New Woman”; the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote; the post–World War II collapse of suburban neo-Victorianism; and the radical feminism of the 1960s—all of which led to vast changes in American culture and society. The Feminist Promise dramatically updates our understanding of feminism, taking the story through the age of Reagan and into the era of international feminist movements that have swept the globe. Stansell provocatively insists that the fight for women’s rights in developing countries “cannot be separated from democracy’s survival.” A soaring work unprecedented in scope, historical depth, and literary appeal, The Feminist Promise is bound to become an authoritative source on this essential subject for decades to come on. At once a work of scholarship, political observation, and personal reflection, it is a book that speaks to the demands and challenges—individual, national, and international—of the twenty-first century.

CITY OF WOMEN

CITY OF WOMEN
Author: Christine Stansell
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2012-12-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307826503

In this brilliant and vivid study of life in New York City during the years between the creation of the republic and the Civil War, a distinguished historian explores the position of men and women in both the poor and middle classes, the conflict between women of the laboring poor and those of the genteel classes who tried to help them and the ways in which laboring women traced out unforeseen possibilities for themselves in work and in politics. Christine Stansell shows how a new concept of womanhood took shape in America as middle-class women constituted themselves the moral guardians of their families and of the nation, while poor workingwomen, cut adrift from the family ties that both sustained and oppressed them, were subverting—through their sudden entry into the working and political worlds outside the home—the strict notions of female domesticity and propriety, of “woman’s place” and “woman’s nature,” that were central to the flowering and the image of bourgeois life in America. Here we have a passionate and enlightening portrait of New York during the years in which it was becoming a center of world capitalist development, years in which it was evolving in dramatic ways, becoming the city it fundamentally is. And we have, as well, a radically illuminating depiction of a class conflict in which the dialectic of female vice and virtue was a central issue. City of Women is a prime work of scholarship, the first full-scale work by a major new voice in the fields of American and urban history.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Author: Barnes & Noble
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Publishing
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2004
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780760754948

Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and the call for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner. Mary Wollstonecrafts work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrageWalpole called her a hyena in petticoatsyet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.

The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia

The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia
Author: Zsófia Lóránd
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2018-09-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319782231

This book tells the story of new Yugoslav feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, reassessing the effects of state socialism on women’s emancipation through the lens of the feminist critique. This volume explores the history of the ideas defining a social movement, analysing the major debates and arguments this milieu engaged in from the perspective of the history of political thought, intellectual history and cultural history. Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, societies in and scholars of East Central Europe still struggle to sort out the effects of state socialism on gender relations in the region. What could tell us more about the subject than the ideas set out by the only organised and explicitly feminist opposition in the region, who, as academics, artists, writers and activists, criticised the regime and demanded change?

Philosophical Interventions

Philosophical Interventions
Author: Martha C. Nussbaum
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2012-01-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199912688

This volume collects the notable published book reviews of Martha C. Nussbaum, an acclaimed philosopher who is also a professor of law and a public intellectual. Her academic work focuses on questions of moral and political philosophy and on the nature of the emotions. But over the past 25 years she has also written many book reviews for a general public, in periodicals such as The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. Dating from 1986 to the present, these essays engage, constructively and also critically, with authors like Roger Scruton, Allan Bloom, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, Richard Posner, Catharine MacKinnon, Susan Moller Okin, and other prominent intellectuals of our time. Throughout, her views defy ideological predictability, heralding valuable work from little-known sources, deftly criticizing where criticism is due, and generally providing a compelling picture of how philosophy in the Socratic tradition can engage with broad social concerns. For this volume, Nussbaum provides an intriguing introduction that explains her selection and provides her view of the role of the public philosopher.

Remapping Second-Wave Feminism

Remapping Second-Wave Feminism
Author: Janet Allured
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820350044

Scholars of second-wave feminism often center their research on northern thought and political activity and usually overlook the vibrant pockets of activism that existed elsewhere. In Remapping Second-Wave Feminism, Janet Allured attempts to reshape the national narrative by focusing on the grassroots women’s movement in the South, particularly in Louisiana. This book delves into unexplored origins of the feminist movement. While acknowledging the ways that the fight for African American civil rights produced the women’s liberation movement in the South—and subsequently in the North—Allured also locates other wellsprings of the movement that were particularly important to southern change-seekers, especially preexisting women’s organizations such as the League of Women Voters and the YWCA. Also, for many southern feminists, being part of a faith tradition that emphasized social justice reform is what ultimately propelled them into working for gender equality. Allured highlights key figures in Louisiana; divisions based on regional, sexual, and ideological differences; access to abortion; lawsuits that had national implications that emanated from southern women; and the fight against sexual assault and domestic violence. Through detailed archival and oral history research, she has forged a new path, making this a foundational work for the field. Remapping Second-Wave Feminism will amend how we reflexively view feminism as a northern phenomenon, giving proper due to the southern contribution.

The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism

The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism
Author: Catherine Rottenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2018-08-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190901241

From Hillary Clinton to Ivanka Trump and from Emma Watson all the way to Beyoncé, more and more high-powered women are unabashedly identifying as feminists in the mainstream media. In the past few years feminism has indeed gained increasing visibility and even urgency. Yet, in her analysis of recent bestselling feminist manifestos, well-trafficked mommy blogs, and television series such as The Good Wife, Catherine Rottenberg reveals that a particular variant of feminism-which she calls neoliberal feminism-has come to dominate the cultural landscape, one that is not interested in a mass women's movement or struggles for social justice. Rather, this feminism has introduced the notion of a happy work-family balance into the popular imagination, while transforming balance into a feminist ideal. So-called "aspirational women" are now exhorted to focus on cultivating a felicitous equilibrium between their child-rearing responsibilities and their professional goals, and thus to abandon key goals that have historically informed feminism, including equal rights and liberation. Rottenberg maintains that because neoliberalism reduces everything to market calculations it actually needs feminism in order to "solve" thorny issues related to reproduction and care. She goes on to show how women of color and poor and immigrant women most often serve as the unacknowledged care-workers who enable professional women to strive toward balance, arguing that neoliberal feminism legitimates the exploitation of the vast majority of women while disarticulating any kind of structural critique. It is not surprising, then, that this new feminist discourse has increasingly dovetailedwith conservative forces. In Europe, gender parity has been used by Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders to further racist, anti-immigrant agendas, while in the United States, women's rights has been invoked to justify interventions in countries with majority Muslim populations. And though campaigns such as the #MeToo and #TimesUp appear to be shifting the discussion, given our frightening neoliberal reality, these movements are currently insufficient. Rottenberg therefore concludes by raising urgent questions about how we can successfully reorient and reclaim feminism as a social justice movement.

The Feminism of Uncertainty

The Feminism of Uncertainty
Author: Ann Snitow
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2015-08-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822375672

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.