When feminists argued for political rights in the context of liberal democracy they faced an impossible choice. On the one hand, they insisted that the differences between men and women were irrelevant for citizenship. On the other hand, by the fact that they acted on behalf of women, they introduced the very idea of difference they sought to eliminate. This paradox--the need both to accept and to refuse sexual difference in politics--was the constitutive condition of the long struggle by women to gain the right of citizenship. In this new book, remarkable in both its findings and its methodology, award-winning historian Joan Wallach Scott reads feminist history in terms of this paradox of sexual difference. Focusing on four French feminist activists--Olympe de Gouges, who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen during the French Revolution; Jeanne Deroin, a utopian socialist and candidate for legislative office in 1848; Hubertine Auclert, the suffragist of the Third Republic; and Madeleine Pelletier, a psychiatrist in the early twentieth century who argued that women must "virilize" themselves in order to gain equality--Scott charts the repetitions and variations in feminist history. Again and again, feminists tried to prove they were individuals, according to the standards of individuality of their day. Again and again, they confronted the assumption that individuals were men. But when sexual difference was taken to be a fundamental difference, when only men were regarded as individuals and thus as citizens, how could women also be citizens? The imaginative and courageous answers feminists offered to these questions are the subject of this engaging book.

Examines the role of women as leaders, activists, and members of the labor movement in New York and Chicago during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

There can be no doubt that feminism, and its influence on the academy, has wrought enormous changes on the social sciences in general and sociology in particular. This edited volume is an outgrowth of a discussion that began on the Sociologists for Women in Society Listserve, in which participants were asked to talk about key pieces in feminist scholarship that had particularly influenced their sociological thinking. Editors Kristen A. Myers, Cynthia D. Anderson, and Barbara J. Risman have chosen articles that fall into what they consider the intellectual genres that compose feminist sociology. This collection differs from others because the editors avoid organizing material by substantive specialty areas (i.e., family, race and ethnicity, criminology, or methods). Their vision instead sees sociology as an integrated discipline, where feminist contributions have systematically influenced the shape of the whole by similarly influencing the distinct parts. In addition to simply compiling a comprehensive list of important articles from the last two decades, the editors have invited major feminist scholars to comment and reflect on the articles in each section of the book. These reflections help provide the historical and social context in which feminist scholarship has taken place. This book will be of obvious appeal to feminist scholars and gender sociologists. Yet, as feminist thought rightfully takes its place away from the margins and toward the center of the discipline, this book stands as a rich and useful resource for any contemporary theory course.

"A rich collection that I will use in teaching graduates and undergraduates about the weave of ethnography, narrative, the women's movement, and feminism. Crafted by an impressive range of scholars, the essays are empirically rich and theoretically cogent. But most important, they engage the complexities of multicultural, feminist, and multinational ethnographies and the stories that matter to politics, scholarship, and lives. With an ear for the tones of race and gender, this book answers the political, generic, and theoretical challenge of Writing Culture with layered essays that rewrite an important range of cultural conversations."—Donna Haraway, author of Professor , History of Consciousness Board, UCSC "Since the advent of the 'post-modern' in ethnography, we have been much in need of a marvelous volume such as this, placing 'woman' at the center of the debate. Women Writing Culture will prove as stimulating for our time as its great predecessor, Women, Culture and Society was for the 1970s."—Jose E. Limon, University of Texas "A groundbreaking book—provocative, illuminating, imaginative—and it is a pleasure to read. A trenchant yet always generous feminist critique of the masculinist bias in the theoretical canon of anthropological texts, it expansively and imaginatively maps the future directions of a feminist anthropology. In moving and courageous acts of reconstruction, the writers in this volume boldly cross disciplinary and generic lines, reading fiction as anthropology, writing theater as ethnography, getting personal, radically reconceiving the relationship of self and other and, thereby, the field itself. Feminist scholars of all disciplines will find here enabling textual and conceptual strategies as well as memorable voices and powerful stories."—Marianne Hirsch, Dartmouth College, author of The Mother-Daughter Plot

Three decades after the remarkable resurgence of feminism, gender issues have become ubiquitous in public debate. For some, feminism is the favorite scapegoat for multiple social ills; for others, the greatest success story of the closing century. The Janus face of feminism in the media reflects the competing images of women´s lives today. Feminists themselves hold sharply opposing views on the success or failures of three decades of women´s activism. Why Feminism? looks at the shifts in feminist thinking from the brash emergence of Women´s Liberation at the close of the 1960s to the diverse and discordant feminisms of recent decades. Exploring feminism´s troubled relations with psychology and psychoanalysis, the rise of new evolutionary theory, the impact of queer theorizing on gender categories, controversies over memory and trauma, and increasing anxieties about men and masculinity, Why Feminism? illustrates the continuing provocation and significance of feminist inquiry, laying out potentialities and pitfalls for the century ahead.

Aims to bring clarity to the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate at the center of feminist theory and feminist cultural studies. This book deals with origins and contexts of the debate; relationships between essentialism, anti-essentialism, and the power of language; and the reasons for the demonization of essentialism within the academy.

What can reading for the gender of signature tell us about the act of reading as a poetics and politics? In Subject to Change Miller demonstrates the textual effects of female authorship in the production, reception, and circulation of women's writing. In the wake of Roland Barthes's famously Dead Author, Miller argues for the cultural vitality of feminist writing subjects.

Elana Sztokman arrived in Israel in 1993 as a young religious mother wearing a long skirt and a hat covering her hair. Today, nearly 30 years later, after spending years fighting for women's rights in Orthodoxy, writing books about gender in religion, and eventually leaving that world behind, she confronts the personal struggles behind the public persona, revealing the traumas from her past that affected her entire relationship with her body. From two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Council Award comes a refreshing and very personal exploration of cultures of the female body in Jewish life. This collection of essays - marking the 25-year anniversary of her feminist awakening and spanning a diverse career of research, writing, and advocacy around Jewish women's experiences - offers political and personal insights and retrospectives on some of the most burning issues today. Topics include: sexuality, relationships, body-image, body-cover, ritual immersion, fat-shaming, slut-shaming, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. Elana brings her characteristic honesty, courage, wit, and profound insight into her writing, and shares some of her own traumas that set her on a sometimes tortuous life path.

A provocative collection of essays by one of the foremost thinkers of second-wave feminism In a career spanning four decades, Alix Kates Shulman has written on issues ranging from marriage, sex, and divorce to religious identity, age, and family devotion. Throughout her diverse body of work runs a staunch advocacy of equal rights and social justice. Beginning with her provocative essay "A Marriage Agreement," written in 1969, and continuing through to the heartrending "Caring for an Ill Spouse, and Other Caregivers," written in 2011, this collection provides a window into the social movements that defined an era. Witty, stirring, and poignant, A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays illustrates how each generation, in Shulman's words, "can do no more than add its bit to the endless river of consciousness and change."