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Victorian scientists' delineation of the mental and physical differences between men and women was directed to show how and why women were inferior to men. Russett (history, Yale U.) gives thorough treatment to this provocative topic. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
“Able, patient and often witty . . . provides a critically useful case study of a period when the level of distortion reached dramatic new heights.” (New York Times Book Review) One scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry. The spectacle presented, in Cynthia Russett's splendid book, of nineteenth-century white male scientists and thinkers earnestly trying to prove women inferior to men—thereby providing, along with "savages" and "idiots," an evolutionary buffer between men and animals—is by turns appalling, amusing, and saddening. Surveying the work of real scientists as well as the products of more dubious minds, Russett has produced a learned yet immensely enjoyable chapter in the annals of human folly. At the turn of the century science was successfully challenging the social authority of religion; scientists wielded a power no other group commanded. Unfortunately, as Russett demonstrates, in Victorian sexual science, empiricism tangled with prior belief, and scientists' delineation of the mental and physical differences between men and women was directed to show how and why women were inferior to men. No other work has treated this provocative topic so completely, nor have the various scientific theories used to marshal evidence of women's inferiority been so thoroughly delineated and debunked. Erudite enough for scholars in the history of science, intellectual history, and the history of women, this book with its stylish presentation will also attract a larger mainstream audience. Winner of the Berkeley Conference of Women Historians Book Award
This elegant essay on the justice of work focuses on the fit between who we are and the kind of work we do. Russell Muirhead shows how the common hope for work that fulfills us involves more than personal interest; it also points to larger understandings of a just society. We are defined in part by the jobs we hold, and Muirhead has something important to say about the partial satisfactions of the working life, and the increasingly urgent need to balance the claims of work against those of family and community. Against the tendency to think of work exclusively in contractual terms, Muirhead focuses on the importance of work to our sense of a life well lived. Our notions of freedom and fairness are incomplete, he argues, without due consideration of how we fit the work we do. Muirhead weaves his argument out of sociological, economic, and philosophical analysis. He shows, among other things, how modern feminism's effort to reform domestic work and extend the promise of careers has contributed to more democratic understandings of what it means to have work that fits. His account of individual and social fit as twin standards of assessment is original and convincing--it points both to the unavoidable problem of distributing bad work in society and to the personal importance of finding fulfilling work. These themes are pursued through a wide-ranging discussion that engages thinkers from Plato to John Stuart Mill to Betty Friedan. Just Work shows what it would mean for work to make good on the high promise so often invested in it and suggests what we--both as a society and as individuals--might do when it falls short.
Fifteen essays address subjects ranging from the history of feminist ethics to the logic of pluralist feminism and present feminist perspectives on such topics as terrorism, bitterness, women trusting other women, and survival and ethics. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Spanning two decades of research and writing, this volume presents the influential and insightful work of Sally Alexander, one of Britain's most reputed feminist historians. Whether analyzing women's factory work, the emergence of the Victorian women's movement, or women's voices during the Spanish civil war, or charting the lives of women in the inter-war years, Alexander's accounts are original and thoughtful. Moving from a discussion of class and sexual difference to a reading of subjectivity informed by psychoanalysis, Alexander exposes the relationship between memory, history, and the unconscious. Her focus ranges from a descriptive rendering of the 1970's Nightcleaners campaign to a more exploratory account of becoming a woman in 1920's and 30's London. Becoming A Woman offers up a fascinating exploration of important historical moments and of the process of writing feminist history.
Julia Kavanagh was a popular and internationally published writer of the mid-nineteenth century whose collective body of work included fiction, biography, critical studies of French and English women writers, and travel writing. In this critically engaged study Eileen Fauset sees Kavanagh as a significant but neglected writer and returns her to her proper place in the history of women's writing. With few known primary sources to go on, the author manages, through her skilful selection of letters, official documents and historical commentary, to piece together some of the jigsaw of Kavanagh's life. Throughout this study, the biographical element informs and directs discussion of Kavanagh's writing itself. What emerges is a succinct and telling portrait of a woman who, through a desire to write, acquired both economic independence and a means through which she could voice her sexual politics. Eileen Fauset challenges the historical attitudes to 'popular romance', a genre read mainly by women and generally discounted as simple entertainment. She argues that in Kavanagh's novels romance is often the pivot around which issues of cultural and sexual difference are examined, a perspective that, invariably, also informed Kavanagh's non-fiction. It will appeal to academics, students and enthusiasts of Victorian literature and women's writing.
Family Experiments explores the forms and undertakings of ‘family’ that prevailed among British professionals who migrated to Australia and New Zealand in the late nineteenth century. Their attempts to establish and define ‘family’ in Australasian, suburban environments reveal how the Victorian theory of ‘separate spheres’ could take a variety of forms in the new world setting. The attitudes and assumptions that shaped these family experiments may be placed on a continuum that extends from John Ruskin’s concept of evangelical motherhood to John Stuart Mill’s rational secularism. Central to their thinking was a belief in the power of education to produce civilised and humane individuals who, as useful citizens, would individually and in concert nurture a better society. Such ideas pushed them to the forefront of colonial liberalism. The pursuit of higher education for their daughters merged with and, in some respects, influenced first-wave colonial feminism. They became the first generation of colonial, middle-class parents to grapple not only with the problem of shaping careers for their sons but also, and more frustratingly, what graduate daughters might do next.
Rethinking Progress provides a challenging reevaluation of one of the crucial ideas of Western civilization; the notion of progress. Progress often seems to have become self-defeating, producing ecological deserts, overpopulated cities, exhausted resources, decaying cultures, and widespread feelings of alienation. The contributors, from all over the world, present their diversified perspectives on the fate of progress.
The book's ten chapters are organized topically beginning with metaphysics, moving to epistemology and then to axiology. At the same time, they are organized chronologically and each balances discussion of Western, indigenous, Asian, and African views with those of women philosophers.
This new edition reviews and updates the scholarship on slave women and the slave family, exploring new ways of understanding the intersection of race and gender and comparing the myths that stereotyped female slaves with the realities of their lives.