Until recently, women have been noticeably absent from historical and sociological accounts of modernity. As a step toward remedying this situation, the essays gathered here challenge the continuing separation of sociological from textual analysis in cultural (and feminist) theory and inquiry. They address critically the question of women's writing, exploring the idea that women may begin to define their own lives and construct their own identities in a patriarchal culture through the very process of writing. They also present a cogent defense of a feminist cultural politics, including a politics of the body. Integrating material drawn from a variety of sources--feminist theory, cultural and literary analysis, sociology, and art history-- Feminine Sentences is an original discussion of women's relationship to modern and postmodern culture. Janet Wolff's book represents a major statement of her distinctive position, and will be of interest to everyone working in the areas of cultural and literary theory, women's studies, and sociology. FROM THE BOOK: "Women . . . are sentenced to containment and silence. . . . This collection is intended as a contribution to the overthrow of that 'sentence,' and to the process whereby women find ways to intervene in an excluding culture, and to articulate their own experience. Feminine sentences are those formulations and expressions, in a variety of cultural forms and media, of women's own voice." "The literature of modernity describes the experience of men. It is essentially a literature about transformations in the public world and its associated consciousness. . . . In so far as the experience of 'the modern' occurred mainly in the public sphere, it was primarily men's experience." "I want to argue that a feminist cultural politics of the body is a possibility. . . . There is every reason . . . to propose the body as a privileged site of political intervention, precisely because it is the site of repression and possession."

"Austerity Baby might best be described as an "oblique memoir". Janet Wolff's fascinating volume is a family history - but one that is digressive and consistently surprising. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s); the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word."--Publisher's description.