Εργαστήριο Σπουδών Φύλου και Ισότητας

The forty-two essays gathered here constitute some of the best and most significant recent English-language work in the field of lesbian/gay studies. They are derived from a wide variety of disciplines -- philosophy, classics, history, anthropology, sociology, African-American studies, ethnic studies, literary studies, and cultural studies. They produce and engage many different kinds of knowledge and meaning: they examine a range of topics and subjects for further inquiry demonstrating the cogency of different methods, theories, styles, and approaches: taken together, they transform our view of cultures and the world. As the essays collected here demonstrate, lesbian/gay studies is not limited to the study of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Nor do they refer simply to studies undertaken by, or in the name of, lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Not at all research into the lives of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men necessarily qualifies as lesbian/gay studies. Lesbian/gay studies does for sex and sexuality what women's studies does for gender, continuing to furnish the categories of sexuality and gender with significance for discussions in both women studies and lesbian/gay studies: hence, the interface of boundaries between the fields of lesbian/ gay studies is a matter of lively debate and ongoing negotiation. Lesbian/gay studies attempts to decipher the sexual meanings inscribed in many different forms of cultural expression while also attempting to decipher the cultural meanings inscribed in the discourses and practices of sex.

Qasmin Amin (1863-1908), an Egyptian lawyer, is best known for his advocacy of women's emancipation in Egypt, through a number of works including The Liberation of Women and The New Woman. In the first of these important books in 1899, he started from foreign domination, and used arguments based on Islam to call for an improvement in the status of women. In doing so, he promoted the debate on women in Egypt from a side issue to a major national concern, but he also subjected himself to severe criticism from the khedival palace, as well as from religious leaders, journalists, and writers. In response to these criticisms, he wrote The New Woman, Amin relies less on arguments based on the Quran and sayings of the Prophet, and more openly espouses a Western model of development. Although published a century ago, these two books continue to be a source of controversy and debate in the Arab feminist movement. The Liberation of Women and The New Woman appear here in English translation for the first time in one volume.

Why is bisexuality the object of such scepticism? Why do sexologists steer clear of it in their research? Why has bisexuality, in stark contrast to homosexuality, only recently emerged as a nascent political and cultural identity? Bisexuality has been rendered as mostly irrelevant to the history, theory, and politics of sexuality. With A History of Bisexuality, Steven Angelides explores the reasons why, and invites us to rethink our conceptions about sexual identity. Retracing the evolution of sexology, and revisiting modern epistemological categories of sexuality in psychoanalysis, gay liberation, social constructionism, queer theory. Biology, and human genetics, Angelides argues that bisexuality has functioned historically as the structural other to sexual identity itself, undermining assumptions about heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Desire and Domestic Fiction argues that far from being removed from historical events, novels by writers from Richardson to Woolf were themselves agents of the rise of the middle class. Drawing on texts that range from 18th-century female conduct books and contract theory to modern psychoanalytic case histories and theories of reading, Armstrong shows that the emergence of a particular form of female subjectivity capable of reigning over the household paved the way for the establishment of institutions which today are accepted centers of political power. Neither passive subjects nor embattled rebels, the middle-class women who were authors and subjects of the major tradition of British fiction were among the forgers of a new form of power that worked in, and through, their writing to replace prevailing notions of "identity" with a gender-determined subjectivity. Examining the works of such novelists as Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and the Bront?s, she reveals the ways in which these authors rewrite the domestic practices and sexual relations of the past to create the historical context through which modern institutional power would seem not only natural but also humane, and therefore to be desired.

Despite the recent publishing boom in queer studies, few texts cover a broad range of topics around sexual and gender identities. Most existing works are overly complex theoretical books, texts focused upon specific disciplines or topics, or practical guides aimed primarily at a heterosexual audience or people just beginning to come out. To date, there has been no general, accessible, and inclusive work suitable for use as an introduction to queer studies. Queer Studies is a wide-ranging anthology which discusses the nature and diversity of queer studies, its foundations, and some of the most pressing issues in the field today. Some contributors assess the conflict between postmodernism and theories of identity politics. Others address queer theory, looking specifically at how we define it, how we might use it to inform political activism, and how we can theorize such aspects of sexual performance/behaviors as s/m or butch/femme relationships. Other theories are also introduced and critiqued as contributors explain the value of feminist, cultural, and postmodern positions for queer theory.

The second edition of this highly successful anthology makes available to the feminist reader a collection of essays which does justice to the range and diversity, as well as to the eloquence and the challenge, of recent feminist critical theory and practice. The new, enlarged Feminist Reader includes Toni Morrison's brilliant discussion of a Hemingway short story, Line Pouchard's reading of Radclyfe Hall's lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness, Marjorie Garber on Elvis and cross-dressing, and Diane Elam on the relation between feminism and postmodernism, in addition to a selection of influential essays by prominent feminist critics and theorists.The book arose directly from the editor's experience of teaching feminist criticism, and their sense of the need for a fully annotated, representative selection of essays for discussion. They have included a summary of each essay, a glossary of unfamiliar terms, new suggestions for further reading and an updated introduction, mapping the field of feminist critical theory. The anthology begins at the point a great many feminist readers start from, a feeling of outrage at the patriarchal nature of the literary canon and the relative exclusion of women from literary history. It goes on to consider the implications of this. Is writing by women necessarily feminist? What kind of literary history would serve the needs of feminism? Is there a women's language? Has white, Western, heterosexual feminism inadvertently been guilty of another form of oppression? What do feminists want? The essays enter into a dialogue with each other on these issues, enlisting the reader in a developing debate.

In The Male Body, Susan Bordo offers a frank, sprightly, and, yes, educational look at the male nude as an index to attitudes about sexuality in the broth of media and pop culture in which, like it or not, we all stew. While the Greeks were unafraid to celebrate masculine beauty, men have been strangely sexless throughout most of Western history--until Hollywood rediscovered the male body when Marlon Brando first shed his T-shirt in "A Streetcar Named Desire". It's only been in the '90s, however, that the male image has gone so far as to reclaim its penis. From de facto censorship to near idolatry, never has ever an organ made such a journey in one brief decade? But it's not the penis alone that makes a man a man; perhaps, Bordo concludes, it's time for us to rethink our metaphors of manhood.

In his book Peter Brown addresses the practice of permanent sexual renunciation--continence, celibacy, and life-long virginity--that developed in Christian circles from the first to the fifth centuries A.D. Brown vividly describes the early Christians and their strange, disturbing preoccupations. He follows in detail the reflection and controversy these notions generated among Christian writers. Among the topics covered are marriage and sexuality in the Roman world, Judaism and the early church, Origen and the tradition of spiritual guidance, sexuality in the desert fathers and Augustine and sexuality. The Body and Society is a significant study on sexuality and the family in the ancient world by a renowned scholar. Besides being of great interest to readers in ancient history and early church history, and to classicists and medievalists, it will engage readers concerned with women's studies and the history of sexuality.

Interest in Jane Austen has never been greater, but it has been challenged and revitalized by the advent of feminist literary history. In a substantial new introduction Marylin Butler places this book, which was first published in 1975, within the larger tradition of post-war criticism, from the generation of Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and F.R Leavis to that of the new dominant feminist critics. The book argues that Austen herself lived in contentious times. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, she served her literary apprenticeship in the 1790s, the decade of the Terror and the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, an era in England of polemic and hysteria. Political partisanship shaped the novel of her youth, in content, form, and style. Professor Butler now examines the very different schools of writing about Austen, and finds in them some unexpected continuities, such as a willingness to recruit her to modern aims, but a reluctance to engage with her own history. When the book first came out, it attracted attention for its fresh, controversial approach to ideas of Austen. The new edition shows how the arrival of feminism has made the task of the literary historian more vital and challenging than ever.

Written on the Body surveys the history of the tattoo in Europe and North America from Antiquity to the present day. While the subject of tattooing has been approached from the viewpoints of anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, this is the first book to set the practice into a historical perspective. This is partly because there was no obvious context for writing a serious history of the tattoo prior to the recent emergence of scholarship on the cultural history of the body, and partly because of the ephemeral nature of the practice. Even given the current vogue for tattooing, most treatments of the subject have been superficial, relying on visual rather than textual analysis. This groundbreaking book demonstrates for the first time that there is in fact a rich and fascinating, if episodic, history to be discovered. The tattoo emerges as a haunting presence on Europe's margins, figuring repeatedly as something alien and uncanny, something that is not - or should not be - at home in Western culture. The Western tattoo seems to hover for much of its history in a space between the cosmetic and the punitive, frequently indicative of and complicated by the practice of penal violations of bodily integrity. It is this fluidity of the tattoo's meaning, rather than its marginality, that is the focus of Written on the Body.

This new volume from SEA illuminates the importance of gender as a frame of reference in the study of economic life. The contributors are economic anthropologists who consider the role of gender and work in a cross-cultural context, examining issues of historical change, the construction of globalization, household authority and entitlement, and entrepreneurship and autonomy. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers in anthropology and in the related fields of economics, the sociology of work, gender studies, women's studies, and economic development.

The role of gender in shaping social policy is now one of considerable interest and debate. Current controversies over the nature and funding of the welfare state have reopened historical issues. Gender, Health and Welfare deals primarily with the century before the creation of the classic welfare state in Britain. It provides a stimulating introduction to a historical era which saw a huge expansion in welfare services, both state and voluntary, and during which women emerged as significant "consumers" and "providers" of various welfare measures.

Refusing to accept the inevitability of war, Elshtain disputes theorists from the Greeks to Michael Walzer (Just and Unjust Wars, 1977). Using a range of literary, historical, and mythological examples, she examines the rhetoric and iconography of war. She classifies the assigned or adopted roles of women from Minerva to the Greenham Common women, from Spartan mother to warrior to victim. Finally, she proposes a leap of imagination, a search for new alternatives to the war/peace dichotomy. Elshtain does not argue that the world would be better if women ran it; she does insist upon the responsibility of women and men, as citizens, to reflect on history and experience, to find new forms of civic virtue, and not to leave everything to the experts.

Maneuvers takes readers on a global tour of the sprawling process called "militarization". With her incisive verve, the eminent feminist Cynthia Enloe shows that militarization affects not just the obvious people - executives and factory floor workers who make fighter planes, land mines, and intercontinental missiles - but also the employees of food companies, toy companies, clothing companies, film studios, stock brokerages, and advertising agencies. Enloe's inquiry ranges widely from Japan to Korea, Serbia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Britain, Israel, the United States, and many points in between. She covers a broad variety of subjects: gays in the military, the history of "camp followers", the politics of women who have sexually serviced male soldiers, married life in the military nurses, and the recruitment of women into the military. Films equating action with war, condoms produced with a camouflage design, fashions celebrating brass buttons and epaulettes, tomato soup containing pasta shaped like Star wars weapons - all of these contribute to militaristic values that mold our culture in both war and peace, for civilians as well as those in the military.

Faderman charts the evolution of the concept of the "lesbian" as a 20th-century social construct and shows how love between women, once known at the turn of the century by such terms as "romantic friendship" or "sentimental friendship," came to be called "lesbianism." What was once not a realistic alternative to marriage became possible as women became educated, demanded equal rights, and came out of the home and into the workforce. With increased opportunities for independence, women no longer needed men's financial support to survive and, as a result, love between women was no longer perceived as innocently as it had been in the past. This is a much-needed book and is highly recommended for all public libraries both for its information about the perception and treatment of this particular minority group in America, as well as for its historical and sociological contribution. Its scholarly approach and content also make it a necessity for women's studies collections.

"Sex class is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the labour force. But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child - 'That? Why you can't change that! You must be out of your mind!' - is the closest to the truth. We are talking about something every bit as deep as that. This gut reaction - the assumption that, even when they don't know it, feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological condition - is an honest one. That so profound a change cannot be easily fitted into traditional categories of thought, e.g., 'political', is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution - we would use it."

Women writers, many of them lesbian feminists, have begun to explore the relationships between humans and machines. Along the way, they are rethinking how race, class, and gender affect technological change, especially given the growing gap between those with access to equipment and those without it. The entries in Reload, 11 pieces of fiction and 17 critical essays, assess the ways technology has, or will, affect female life. Take, for example, the notion that cyberspace levels the playing field by allowing users to don whatever identity they choose. According to contributor Lisa Nakamura, "when users are free to choose their own race, all were presumed to be white. And many of those who adopted nonwhite personae turned out to be white male users masquerading as exotic samurai and horny geishas." Chilling as this is, cyberspace remains a positive "place" for many users; writer Sharon Cumberland reminds us that women's chat rooms are often valued precisely because of the anonymity offered. Reload is filled with provocative and often contradictory glimpses into cyberculture.

The notion of identification, especially in the discourse of feminist theory, has come sharply and dramatically into focus with the recent interest in such topics as queer performativity, cross-dressing, and racial passing. Identification Papers is the first book to track the evolution of identification's emergence in psychoanalytic theory. Diana Fuss seeks to understand where this notion of identification has come from, and why it has emerged as one of the most difficult problems in contemporary theory and politics. Identification Papers situates the recent critical interest in identification in the intellectual tradition that first gave the idea its theoretical relevance: psychoanalysis. Fuss begins from the assumption that identification has a history, and that the term carries with it a host of theoretical problems, conceptual difficulties, and ideological complications. By tracking the evolution of identification in Freud's work over a forty year period, Fuss demonstrates how the concept of identification is neither a theoretically neutral notion nor a politically innocent one. Identification Papers closely examines the three principal figures -- gravity, ingestion, and infection -- that psychoanalysis invokes to theorize identification. Fuss then deconstructs the psychoanalytic theory of identification in order to open up the possibility of more innovative rethinkings of the political. Drawing on literature, film, and Freud's own case histories, and engaging with a wide range of disciplines -- including critical theory, philosophy, film theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and feminism -- Identification Papers will be a necessary starting point in any future theoretical project that seeks to mobilize the concept of identification for a feminist politics.

The final third of this feminist literary study maintains the quality of volumes I (The War of the Words, 1987) and II (Sexchanges, 1989) as it looks at women writers' exploration of our century's complex and ever-shifting cultural scene, particularly the thorny question of gender. Gilbert and Gubar take a generally chronological approach, beginning with the modernists. In their analysis, Virginia Woolf sketched scenarios challenging traditional sex roles, as well as the historical settings and the social hierarchies in which they functioned. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Marianne Moore were "female female impersonators'' who exploited femininity's artificiality in an imaginative but uncertainly empowering way. The authors then move on to the Harlem Renaissance, arguing that such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Faucet, and Nella Larsen worked to reveal the "authentic (black) feminine'' behind racial stereotypes and criticized (white) feminism. Intertwining the poet and her work, a chapter on HD maintains that she produced her long poems by consciously manipulating images of herself. Moving forward to WW II, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the period's "blitz on women'': Cheesecake pinups on tanks and VD posters conflated sex and death, while even positive images of the women left behind were tinged with resentment. They contend that metaphors from the war, transformed into images of sexual battle, haunted the poems of Sylvia Plath, who fought toward a way of being a woman beyond the old patriarchal traditions. At once playful and thoughtful, the final chapter considers the multiplicity of women's stories via the authors' several rewrites of Snow White--e.g., the no-longer-evil queen challenges gender roles by advising Snow White to "marry the Prince but sleep with me too,'' while in another version a critically savvy queen realizes they're all "merely signifiers, signifying nothing.''

An intriguing inquiry into how aesthetic surgery has evolved into a major area of modern medicine, this book combines cultural perspectives on the body beautiful with a medical chronology. Gilman focuses extensively on the nose as the original site of aesthetic procedures. He simultaneously explores "the basic motivation for aesthetic surgery as the desire to 'pass,'" starting with 16th-century surgery to rebuild the noses of syphilitics "so they would be less visible in their society" and discusses its cultural implications. Early debate centered on whether surgery restored function or merely catered to human vanity. The "hierarchy of races" created by some scientists in the 18th century inspired procedures to create "American noses out of Irish pug noses," while "the origin of the 'correction' of the black nose is masked within medical literature [because] no reputable surgeon wanted to be seen as facilitating crossing the color bar." Gilman discusses political uses of aesthetic surgery, such as that of the Nazis to achieve the Aryan ideal, the transformation of former Klan Grand Wizard David Duke into what one commentator called "a blond, blow-dried replica of a young Robert Redford," transsexual surgery to permit "restoration of the relationship between the inner and outer selves" and aesthetic surgery as a fountain of youth.

Gender roles are nowhere more prominent than in war. Yet contentious debates, and the scattering of scholarship across academic disciplines, have obscured understanding of how gender affects war and vice versa. In this authoritative and lively review of our state of knowledge, Joshua Goldstein assesses the possible explanations for the near-total exclusion of women from combat forces, through history and across cultures. Topics covered include the history of women who did fight and fought well, the complex role of testosterone in men's social behaviors, and the construction of masculinity and femininity in the shadow of war. Goldstein concludes that killing in war does not come naturally for either gender, and that gender norms often shape men, women, and children to the needs of the war system. lllustrated with photographs, drawings, and graphics, and drawing from scholarship spanning six academic disciplines, this book provides a unique study of a fascinating issue.

Women, the State, and Welfare is the first collection of essays specifically about women and welfare in the United States. As an introduction to the effects of welfare programs, it is intended for general readers as well as specialists in sociology, history, political science, social work, and women's studies. The book begins with a review essay by Linda Gordon that outlines current scholarship about women and welfare. The chapters that follow explore discrimination against women inherent in many welfare programs; the ways in which welfare programs reinforce basic gender programs in society; the contribution of organized, activist women to the development of welfare programs; and differences of race and class in the welfare system. By giving readers access to a number of perspectives about women and welfare, this book helps position gender at the center of welfare scholarship and policy making and places welfare issues at the forefront of feminist thinking and action.

There are few moments in history when the division between the sexes seems as "natural" as during wartime: men go off to the "war front," while women stay behind on the "home front." But the very notion of the home front was an invention of the First World War, when, for the first time, "home" and "domestic" became adjectives that modified the military term "front." Such an innovation acknowledged the significant and presumably new contributions of civilians, especially women, to the war effort. Yet, as Susan Grayzel argues, throughout the war, traditional notions of masculinity and femininity survived, primarily through the maintenance of--and indeed reemphasis on--soldiering and mothering as the core of gender and national identities. Drawing on sources that range from popular fiction and war memorials to newspapers and legislative debates, Grayzel analyzes the effects of World War I on ideas about civic participation, national service, morality, sexuality, and identity in wartime Britain and France. Despite the appearance of enormous challenges to gender roles due to the upheavals of war, the forces of stability prevailed, she says, demonstrating the Western European gender system's remarkable resilience.

Poser la question de la difference des sexes dan les sciences sociales et inviter a la reflexion sur le travail dans le champ des recherches sur le genre, decrypter, a partir de hierarchies, des divisions det des segmentations qui parcourent le mond du travail, le statut des hommes de des femmes dan la societe et poser anisi la question de la difference des sexes: telle est l'hypothese foundatrice de Travail, genre et societies.

During the 1990s, Greece had a very high rate of abortion at the same time that its low birth rate was considered a national crisis. The Empty Cradle of Democracy explores this paradox. Alexandra Halkias shows that despite Greek Orthodox beliefs that abortion is murder, many Greek women view it as "natural" and consider birth control methods invasive. The formal public-sphere view is that women destroy the body of the nation by aborting future citizens. Scrutiny of these conflicting cultural beliefs enables Halkias's incisive critique of the cornerstones of modern liberal democracy, including the autonomous "individual" subject and a polity external to the private sphere. The Empty Cradle of Democracy examines the complex relationship between nationalism and gender and re-theorizes late modernity and violence by exploring Greek representations of human agency, the fetus, national identity, eroticism, and the divine. Halkias's analysis combines telling fragments of contemporary Athenian culture, Greek history, media coverage of abortion and the declining birth rate, and fieldwork in Athens at an obstetrics/gynecology clinic and a family-planning center. Halkias conducted in-depth interviews with one hundred and twenty women who had had two or more abortions and observed more than four hundred gynecological exams at a state family-planning center. She reveals how intimate decisions and the public preoccupation with the low birth rate connect to nationalist ideas of race, religion, freedom, resistance, and the fraught encounter between modernity and tradition. The Empty Cradle of Democracy is a startling examination of how assumptions underlying liberal democracy are betrayed while the nation permeates the body and understandings of gender and sexuality complicate the nation-building projects of late modernity.

In Primate Visions, Haraway explicates the metaphors and narratives that direct the science of primatology. She demonstrates that there is a tendency to masculinize the stories about reproductive competition and sex between aggressive males and receptive females that facilitate some and preclude other types of conclusions. She contends that female primatologists focus on different observations that require more communication and basic survival activities, offering very different perspectives of the origins of nature and culture than the currently accepted ones. Drawing on examples of Western narratives and ideologies of gender, race and class, Haraway questions the most fundamental constructions of scientific human nature stories based on primates.

Donna Haraway's work has transformed the fields of cyberculture, feminist studies, and the history of science and technology. Her subjects range from animal dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History to research in transgenic mice, from gender in the laboratory to the nature of the cyborg. Trained as a historian of science, she has produced a series of books and essays that have become essential reading in cultural studies, gender studies, and the history of science. The Haraway Reader brings together a generous selection of Donna Haraway's work. Included is her "Manifesto for Cyborgs," in which she famously wrote that she "would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." Other selections are taken from her three major works, Primate Visions, Modest Witness , and Simians, Cyborgs and Women , as well as some of her more recent writing on animals. For readers in cultural studies, feminist theory, science studies, and cyberculture, Donna Haraway is one of our keenest observers of nature, science, and the social world. This volume is the best introduction to her thought.

This book takes shape through cascading accounts of humans, nonhumans, technoscience, nation, feminism, democracy, property, race, history, and kinship. Beginning in a mythic time called the Scientific Revolution, the titular modest witness indulges in narratives about the imaginary configurations called the New World Order, Inc, and the Second Christian Millennium. As Harraway argues, the imaginary and the real figure each other in concrete fact, and so she takes the actual and the figural seriously as constitutive of lived material-semiotic worlds. Taught to read and write inside the stories of Christian salvation history and technoscientific progress, Harraway is neither heretic, infidel, nor Jew, but, as she says, a marked woman informed by those literacies as well as by those given to her by birth and education. Shaped as an insider and an outsider to the hegemonic powers and discourses of my European and North American legacies, Harraway remembers that Anti-Semitism and misogyny intensified in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution of early modern Europe, that racism and colonialism flourished in the traveling habits of the cosmopolitan Enlightenment, and that the intensified misery of billions of men and women seems organically rooted in the freedom of transnational capitalism and technoscience. But she also remembers the dreams and achievements of contingent freedoms, situated knowledges, and the relief of suffering that are inextricable from this contaminated triple historical heritage. She remains a child of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and technoscience.

Socialist feminist theorizing is flourishing today. This collection is intended to show its strengths and resources and convey a sense of it as an ongoing project. Not every contribution to that project bears the same theoretical label, but the writings collected here share a broad aim of understanding women's subordination in a way which integrates class and gender - as well as aspects of women's identity such as race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation - with the aim of liberating women. The Socialist Feminist Project: A Contemporary Reader in Theory and Politics brings together the most important recent socialist feminist writings on a wide range of topics: sex and reproduction, the family, wage labor, social welfare and public policy, the place of sex and gender in politics, and the philosophical foundations of socialist feminism. Although focusing on recent writings, the collection shows how these build on a history of struggle. These writings demonstrate the range, depth, and vitality of contemporary socialist feminist debates. They also testify to the distinctive capacity of this project to address issues in a way that embraces collective experience and action while at the same time enabling each person to speak in their own personal voice.

Sex/Machine is maping the intersection between gender and technology. Crossing multiple academic disciplines--from philosophy of technology, to medical ethics, to womens studies, gender theory and cultural studies, to law (among others), Patrick Hopkins has assembled a collection of provocative writing concerning the interactions between technologies and genders. The essays in this edited volume explore the history of technologies and gender, and how technology can shore up traditional and problematic gender roles (e.g., pectoral implants to make men appear more "macho", and technologies that make it possible for parents to know, and potentially select, the sex of their children before they are born). Another important aspect of the book is the exploration of the ways technologies undermine traditional ideas of gender.

Meatloaf, fried chicken, Jell-O, cake--because foods are so very common, we rarely think about them much in depth. The authors of Cooking Lessons however, believe that food is deserving of our critical scrutiny and that such analysis yields many important lessons about American society and its values. This book explores the relationship between food and gender. Contributors draw from diverse sources, both contemporary and historical, and look at women from various cultural backgrounds, including Hispanic, traditional southern White, and African American. Each chapter focuses on a certain food, teasing out its cultural meanings and showing its effect on women's identities and lives.

Christine Delphy is a major architect of materialist feminism, a radical feminist perspective which she developed in the context of the French women's movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She has always been controversial and continues to make original and challenging contributions to current feminist debates. This informative volume profiles Delphy and discusses topics including her opposition to the idea that femininity and masculinity are natural phenomena. Her insistence that women and men are social categories, defined by the hierarchical relationship between them rather than by biology, typifies the materialist school within French feminism. In this lucid introduction to Delphy's work, Stevi Jackson recounts the events in Delphy's life as a feminist activist and the social and political context of her work. This text is essential reading for anyone with an interest in feminism or cultural history, this is a readable and accessible introduction to a key thinker in the modern women's movement.

The seventeen essays in Women and Power in the Middle East analyze the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that shape gender systems in the Middle East and North Africa. Published at different times in Middle East Report, the journal of the Middle East Research and Information Project, the essays document empirically the similarities and differences in the gendering of relations of power in twelve countries - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran. Together they seek to build a framework for understanding broad patterns of gender in the Arab-Islamic world. Challenging questions are addressed throughout. What roles have women played in politics in this region? When and why are women politically mobilized, and which women? Does the nature and impact of their mobilization differ if it is initiated by the state, nationalist movements, revolutionary parties, or spontaneous revolt? And what happens to women when those agents of mobilization win or lose? In investigating these and other issues, the essays take a look at the impact of rapid social change in the Arab-Islamic world. They also analyze Arab disillusionment with the radical nationalisms of the 1950s and 1960s and with leftist ideologies, as well as the rise of political Islamist movements. Indeed the essays present rich new approaches to assessing what political participation has meant for women in this region and how emerging national states there have dealt with organized efforts by women to influence the institutions that govern their lives.

This is a book about the making and unmaking of sex over the centuries. It tells the astonishing story of sex in the West from the ancients to the moderns in a precise account of developments in reproductive anatomy and physiology. We cannot fail to recognize the players in Thomas Laqueur's story--the human sexual organs and pleasures, food, blood, semen, egg, sperm--but we will be amazed at the plots into which they have been woven by scientists, political activists, literary figures, and theorists of every stripe. Laqueur begins with the question of why, in the late eighteenth century, woman's orgasm came to be regarded as irrelevant to conception, and he then proceeds to retrace the dramatic changes in Western views of sexual characteristics over two millennia. Along the way, two "masterplots" emerge. In the one-sex story, woman is an imperfect version of man, and her anatomy and physiology are construed accordingly: the vagina is seen as an interior penis, the womb as a scrotum, the ovaries as testicles. The body is thus a representation, not the foundation, of social gender. The second plot tends to dominate post-Enlightenment thinking while the one-sex model is firmly rooted in classical learning. The two-sex story says that the body determines gender differences, that woman is the opposite of man with incommensurably different organs, functions, and feelings. The two plots overlap; neither ever holds a monopoly. Science may establish many new facts, but even so, Laqueur argues, science was only providing a new way of speaking, a rhetoric and not a key to female liberation or to social progress. Making Sex ends with Freud, who denied the neurological evidence to insist that, as a girl becomes a woman, the locus of her sexual pleasure shifts from the clitoris to the vagina; she becomes what culture demands despite, not because of, the body. Turning Freud's famous dictum around, Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an artifice.

History books tend to favor individual narratives and it is comparatively rare to find one written jointly by four people. But it is also perhaps fitting that a book which insists that a family should not be treated as an undifferentiated unit, acting or speaking with a single voice, should be produced by a "family" of authors.This was not a pre-planned team project, nor was it meant to conform to any traditional academic hierarchy. Rather this work grew organically as the authors realized that in their individual researches on fatherhood, singleness, illegitimacy, and domestic services they had common concerns and interests which could be linked in order to tell a wider family story. As the authors themselves state, rather than submitting an edited collection of chapters they decided to work together,despite their geographical distances and share the writing and editing of each chapter as they generated ideas during their frequent meetings.

Since 1981, AIDS has had an enormous impact upon the popular imagination. Few other diseases this century have been greeted with quite the same fear, loathing, and prejudice against those who develop it. The mass media, and in particular, the news media, have played a vital part in "making sense" of AIDS. This volume takes an interdisciplinary perspective, combining cultural studies, history of medicine, and contemporary social theory to examine AIDS reporting. There have been three major themes dominating coverage: the "gay-plague" dominant in the early 1980s, panic-stricken visions of the end of the world as AIDS was said to pose a threat to everyone, in the late 1980s; and a growing routinising of coverage in the 1990s. This book lays bare the sub-textual ideologies giving meaning to AIDS news reports, including anxieties about pollution and contagion, deviance, bodily control, the moral meanings of risk, the valorisation of drugs and medical science. Drawing together the work of cultural and political theorists, sociologists and historians who have written about medicine, disease and the body, as well as that of theorists in Europe and the USA who have focused their attention specificaiiy on AIDS, this book explores the wide theoretical debate about the importance of language in the social construction of illness and disease. This text offers insights into the sociocultural context in which attitudes towards people with HIV or AIDS and people's perceptions of risk from HIV infection are developed as the responses of governments to the AIDS epidemic are formulated.

This book reassesses how women are talked about and constructed visually across a range of popular media. Arguing for the importance of a historical approach, this book examines continuities and changes in dominant myths of femininity, especially in the transition from the modern to the postmodern period. The influences of feminism and consumerism on these developments are given particular attention. The book starts with an orientating chapter on the contributions of a variety of disciplines to our understanding of gender in relation to the media. Psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, art history and cultural studies are each critically reviewed, enabling students to compare perspectives and to locate the variety of approaches they may encounter in other readings. A chapter on gender and consumerism and a detailed analysis of myths of femininity are also included. Outlining key theoretical debates in an accessible manner this book offers a wide range of examples from advertising, women's magazines, popular television programmes and mainstream film.

McClintock interprets 19th-century British imperialism as the focal point for that era's major "disclosures," including feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. She describes Victorian urban space, including advertising, as being oriented to exhibit imperial spectacles based on racism and sexism. In turn, the colonies become stages for exhibiting a reinvented patriarchy, with Westerners symbolizing power and indigenous peoples a subdued domesticity. The text is an exercise in demonstrating preconceptions. While some of McClintock's evidence is original, the argument as a whole is conventional bien-pensant wisdom unlikely to convince anyone not already committed to the thesis. The presentation is further burdened by its reliance on the cliches and jargon of feminism, deconstructionism, and other currently fashionable academic ideologies. Imperialism was at once a simpler and a more complex phenomenon than McClintock's perspective allows. For large academic collections only.

A sumptuously mounted and photographed celebration of artful wickedness, betrayal and sexual intrigue among depraved 18th-century French aristocrats, Dangerous Liaisons (based on Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses) is seductively decadent fun. The villainous heroes are the Marquise De Merteuil (Glenn Close) and the Vicomte De Valmont (John Malkovich), who have cultivated their mutual cynicism into a highly developed and exquisitely mannered form of (in-)human expression. Former lovers, they now fancy themselves rather like demigods whose mutual desires have evolved beyond the crudeness of sex or emotion. They ritualistically act out their twisted affections by engaging in elaborate conspiracies to destroy the lives of their less calculating acquaintances, daring each other to ever-more-dastardly acts of manipulation and betrayal. Why? Just because they can; it's their perverted way of getting their kicks in a dead-end, pre-Revolutionary culture. Among their voluptuous and virtuous prey are fair-haired angels played by Michelle Pfeiffer and Uma Thurman, who have never looked more ripe for ravishing. When the Vicomte finds himself beset by bewilderingly genuine emotions for one of his victims, the Marquise considers it the ultimate betrayal and plots her heartless revenge. Dangerous Liaisons is a high-mannered revel for the actors, who also include Swoosie Kurtz, Mildred Natwick, and Keanu Reeves.

The women's Olympics are one of the best kept secrets of ancient Greek history! Dozens or maybe even hundreds of books have been published about the male games, but this is the only one examining the female ones. Harita Meenee, a classical studies expert specializing in women's studies, sheds abundant light on the young women's games which took place every four years in Olympia. They were called Heraia, as they were held in honor of Hera, and they may have been older than the male ones. The author emphasizes the female cults which existed in this area from age-old times honoring the Great Mother Gaia and other goddesses. She also expands on the theory of professor F. M. Cornford, who suggested that the purpose of the two games was to select the young man and woman who would incarnate Zeus and Hera, or the Sun God and the Moon Goddess, in the ritual of the Sacred Marriage. Her research draws upon ancient texts and archeological finds, as well as on the rich material provided by mythology, religion, symbols and language. Additionally, she utilizes the power of fiction in order to initiate the reader into the spirit of Olympia, starting the book with a fascinating love story.

By splitting 20th-century American women into three broad generations, then funneling their commentary into musings on growing up, family, and work, this oral history by a mother-daughter team achieves rare focus and illustrates the arc of social change. Thankfully, the kaleidoscope of female experience presented is not homogenized. Within the first generation--when the sanctity of marriage was legally and morally enforced--Rebecca Rodin's radical parents never married, nor did most of their circle. Yet "when push came to shove," she remembers, "men were in control of the households." Not surprising, perhaps, is the number of second-generation women who greeted the women's movement with huge relief. In-depth life stories frame each section of short and long anecdotes.

This book traces the social origins of the sexual division of labor. It gives a history of the related processes of colonization and "housewifization" and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labor and the role that women have to play as the cheapest producers and consumers. First published in 1986, it was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory. Eleven years on, Maria Mies' theory of capitalist patriarchy has become even more relevant; this new edition includes a substantial new introduction in which she both applies her theory to the new globalized world and answers her critics.

This worthy successor to Juliet Mitchell's pathbreaking Psychoanalysis and Feminism is both a defense of the long-dismissed diagnosis of hysteria as a centerpiece of the human condition and a plea for a new understanding of the influence of sibling and peer relationships. In Mad Men and Medusas Mitchell traces the history of hysteria, arguing that we need to reclaim hysteria to understand how distress and trauma express themselves in different societies and different times. Mitchell convincingly demonstrates that although hysteria may have disappeared as a disease, it is still a critical factor in understanding psychological development through the life cycle.

Dangerous Sexualities takes a look at how our ideas of health and disease are linked to moral and immoral notions of sex. Beginning in the 1830s, Frank Mort relates his social historical narratives to the sexual choices and possibilities facing us now. This long-awaited second edition has been thoroughly updated to include new discussions of eugenics, race hygiene and social imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With a new and extended bibliography, introduction and illustrations, this second edition brings a classic into the 21st Century.

Νέες φιλολογικές πηγές, καινούριο επιγραφικό υλικό, αλλά και νέα ερμηνεία του παλαιού κάνουν ώστε το βιβλίο αυτό της Κας Mosse να αποτελεί σταθμό για την έρευνα της ελληνικής ιστορίας των κλασικών χρόνων. Χρησιμοποιώντας μια καινούρια μέθοδο αναλύσεως, με την αντιπαράθεση των κειμένων, των γεγονότων, των θεσμών και των ιδεολογιών, αξιοποιώντας με ευστοχία ποσοτικές μετρήσεις, εντάσσοντας με ερευνητική δεξιοτεχνία και επινοητικότητα τη λεπτομέρεια στο θεσμό ή τη διαδικασία , η διαπρεπής Καθηγήτρια της Σορβόννης, κατορθώνει να συνθέσει έναν απαράμιλλο πίνακα της Αθηναϊκής Δημοκρατίας κατά την περισσότερο κρίσιμη αλλά και γόνιμη σε ιδέες περίοδο της διαδρομής της. Και δεν είναι μόνο τα γεγονότα και οι θεσμοί που προβάλλονται τώρα κάτω από ένα νέο, περισσότερο ακριβή και αντικειμενικό φωτισμό, όπως λ.χ. το μεγάλο θέμα της δουλείας και της δουλικής εργασίας. Καμιά ιστορική ή πολιτική έρευνα πάνω στην αρχαία Αθήνα δεν είναι πια δυνατή χωρίς να σταματήσει μπροστά στο επιβλητικό αυτό μνημείο της Επιστήμης

Κατά την παραδοσιακή αντίληψη, η ιστορία της αρχαίας Ελλάδας αρχίζει με την άφιξη ελληνόφωνων πληθυσμών στη Βαλκανική χερσόνησο και κλείνει με την υποταγή των ελληνιστικών μοναρχιών στη Ρώμη. Το βιβλίο υπογραμμίζει τα προβλήματα που θέτουν οι ουσιώδεις φάσεις της ιστορίας αυτής. Εξετάζονται πρώτα οι συζητήσεις που γίνονται σήμερα σχετικά με τη πρωτο- ιστορία των Ελλήνων, πριν από την εμφάνιση της πόλης που είναι το παλλόμενο κέντρο της ιστορίας τους. Η θέσπιση πολιτικών συστημάτων μέσα σ' έναν ελληνικό κόσμο που εξαπλώνεται σ' ολόκληρη τη λεκάνη της Μεσογείου, η σύγκρουση με την περσική αυτοκρατορία που οδηγεί στην ηγεμονία της Αθήνας, και η φύση της ηγεμονίας αυτής σε συνάρτηση με την πρωτόφαντη εμπειρία που είναι η εφεύρεση της δημοκρατίας, ο μακροχρόνιος Πελοποννησιακός πόλεμος που καταστρέφει την προηγούμενη ισορροπία του 5ου αιώνα και η δύσκολη αναδιοργάνωση του ελληνικού κόσμου στον 4ο αιώνα πριν την αναμέτρηση με τον Φίλιππο το Β' της Μακεδονίας αποτελούν τα κύρια θέματα της μελέτης

This book (is) extremely useful in discovering the other, less known and silenced women's' suffering during the Yugoslav War... a timely contribution, I would certainly purchase this book for myself and my students." Professor Svetlana Slapsack, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1999 "This book powerfully reveals, from the concrete experiences of women victims, that evil and aggression could be awakened almost anywhere, anytime." Professor Marina Blagojevic, Women's Study Centre, Belgrade, 1999

Offering a unique look at this controversial subject, Sexuality is the only reader of its kind that organizes material chronologically and covers such a long time period. Part I forms a chronological narrative of the development of thinking about sexuality from the ancient Greeks to the present. Part II discusses nineteenth-century investigation of phenomena such as hysteria, prostitution, and fetishism. Part III brings together contemporary conceptions of the sexual body, and Part IV addresses the issue of whether the sexual revolution of the late sixties and seventies has brought about a profound and permanent change in the sexual landscape of western civilization.

When one thinks of Edith Wharton, the grandeur of upper-class life in turn-of-the-century New York City is immediately conjured. Hanson cabs wait curbside in front of Washington Square townhouses. Chandeliers glow above the heads of waltzing couples. What does not come to mind immediately is the tough-mindedness of Wharton herself and the efforts she put forth on behalf of others. Alan Price illuminates this side of Wharton in The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Whartonand the First World War. During World War I, Wharton saved the lives of thousands of Belgian and French refugees. When the war began, the expatriated Wharton and Henry James saw any possible German victory as "the crash of civilisation", thus prompting their early involvement in the allied cause. In the opening weeks of the conflict, Wharton wrote war reportage at the front and organized relief efforts in Paris. Before the first year of the war was over, she had created organizations and raised funds for three major war charities that bore her name. As the war sank into a stalemate of trench warfare, Wharton continued to write magazine and newspaper articles, organize fundraising schemes, and rally the world's best painters, composers, and writers to raise money for her refugees and to sway American popular opinion. The End of the Age of Innocence tells the dramatic story of Wharton's heroic crusade to save the lives of displaced Belgians as well as the suffering citizens of her adopted France. It is a book that everyone who has ever read and loved Wharton's work will want to own.

Emmeline Pankhurst was perhaps the most influential woman of the twentieth century. Today her name is synonymous with the "votes for women" campaign and she is remembered as the bravest and most inspirational suffrage leader in history. In this absorbing account of her life both before and after suffrage, June Purvis documents her early political work, her active role within the suffrage movement and her role as a wife and mother within her family.

This collection of classic essays in feminist body studies investigates the history of the image of the female body; from the medical 'discovery' of the clitoris, to the 'body politic' of Queen Elizabeth I, to women deprecated as 'Hottentot Venuses' in the nineteenth century. The text looks at the ways in which coverings bear cultural meaning: clothing reform during the French Revolution, Islamic veiling, and the invention of the top hat; as well as the embodiment of cherished cultural values in social icons such as the Statue of Liberty or the Barbie doll. By considering culture as it defines not only women but also men, this volume offers both the student and the general reader an insight into the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study involved in feminist body studies.

Se demande-to-on depuis quand les hommes travaillent? Non, bein sur. Se demande-t-on pourquoi ils travaillent? Pas plus. les interroge-t-on pour savoir si le travail a temps partiel leur conviendrait, s'ils aimeraient se consacrer seulement a l'entretien de la maison et a l'education des enfants? Guere. Pour les femmes, i en va tout autrement. Leur travail est toujours presente comme fortuit et recent. On feint d'ignorer que les femmes ont aussi ete paysannes, commercantes, ouvrieres, employees, infirmieres, institutrices. Depuis toujours.

Women and farming: Property and Power looks at women on family farms. It argues that farming culture affords more power to men than to women. This is because men and women on family farms have different relationships to property. Traditions and customary practices sanction the transfer of land from father to son, thus restricting women's access to property. Economic power follows from property ownership and this in turn leads to political, ideological and organizational power. Access to property is regulated by farming culture, and discriminates against women. Using comparative examples, different chapters consider the transfer of land between men, the changed role of women in the dairy industry in the nineteenth century, women in farming organizations, women in agricultural education programmes, and the role of the state in shaping the lives of farm women. The common themes of power and property underpin all the chapters.

Feminisms and Internationalism addresses the theme of the history of internationalism in feminist theory and praxis. It engages some of the following topics: the ways in which 'internationalism' has been conceived historically within feminism and women's movements; the nature of and historical shifts within 'imperial' feminisms; changes in the meaning of feminist internationalism both preceding and following the end of most formal empires in the twentieth-century; the challenges to, and the reformulations of, internationalism within feminism by women of color and by women from colonized or formerly colonized countries; the fragmentation of internationalism in response to a growing emphasis on local over global contexts of struggle as well as on a variety of different feminism instead of a singular feminism; and the context for the re-emergence of internationalism within feminisms and women's movements as a result of the new modes of globalization in the late twentieth-century.

"This leftist academic examination of our collective fascination with dieting depicts it as a manifestation of capitalist consumer culture duking it out with the secular remnants of puritanism. Stearns, founding editor of the Journal of Social History and a historian at Carnegie Mellon University (Millennium III, Century XXI, 1996, etc.) approaches our concern over personal poundage as a construct that, exceeding the demands of fashion or good health, can be understood only in larger cultural terms. We Americans relish the consumer goods with which we surround ourselves but feel a mite guilty about indulging in them. So we have contrived a way to--literally and figuratively--have our cake and eat it too: We diet. Focusing intensely on limiting caloric intake lets us feel virtuous and self-controlled even as we ignore our profligacy as consumers. We are not all equally affected; notably, from the 1920s to the 1960s "weight morality bore disproportionately on women precisely because of their growing independence, or seeming independence, from other standards.'' In France, the other society considered, Stearns does not detect a view of weight loss as a moral crusade or fat as an outward sign of guilt. For Americans, rewards (a better job or social life) will come when they become thin and healthy; for the French, being thin and healthy is the reward. Interesting as the cross-cultural comparison is, one senses that its neat findings slight some untidy questions. For example, why does Stearns focus on the gender of the target of antifat comments but not on that of their source? To what extent are unattainable standards of slenderness invaluable in allowing people to devote a portion of each crowded day to self- absorption? Does that count as an expression of guilt? Those who agree with Stearns's premise from the first page will readily accept his illustrations as proof. Others may see this as an interesting study that suggests the complexity of a phenomenon more convincingly than it accounts for it." -- ©1997, Kirkus Associate

In Race and the Education of Desire, ann Laura Stoler offers a colonial reading of Foucault's History of Sexuality and challenges the marginalization of empire in his genealogy of the nineteenth-century bourgeois self. Drawing on Foucault's little-known 'College de France lectures on 'racisms of the state' as well as her own extensive colonial archival research, Stoler argues that a history of nineteenth-century European sexuality must also be a history of race. This book will change the way we think about Foucault and address how racial thinking in the past has shaped racial discourse today.

"In this persuasively argued social history, Terry, an associate professor of comparative studies at Ohio State University, contends that homosexuality "has acquired a symbolic centrality in American culture" as a dominant marker between the "normal" and the "abnormal" across a diverse range of disciplines and milieus. Drawing upon a wide range of materials from personal memoirs to legal cases, yellow journalism, pulp fiction, religious writings, psychology texts and "scientific" studies (which prove to be not all that scientific. Terry demonstrates how, over the past 100 years, theories about the causes, nature and possible "cure" for homosexuality have focused far more on notions of sexuality, sin, gender and "social good" than on homosexuality itself. Analyzing the work of such 19th-century sexologists as Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis, she illustrates how their naive, often contradictory theories became so influential that they still inform contemporary thought, including "gay gene" studies and the religious beliefs and rhetoric of the Christian right. While her broad survey is vital to the book, Terry's real strength is her detailed explorations of individual groups such as the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, a multidisciplinary group of physicians and scientists who, in 1935, attempted to understand the "problem" of homosexuality on a scientific basis and events, such as the harsh religious, psychoanalytic and cultural backlash against Kinsey's work in the early 1950s. Her exhaustively researched, astute synthesis is not only an original and important contribution to lesbian and gay studies, but sheds new light on the sociology of American life and the history of science." From Publishers Weekly. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Τι αντιπροσώπευε για τους ανθρώπους του παρελθόντος η οικογένεια, αυτή η θεμελιώδης μονάδα του κοινωνικού ιστού; Ποιες μορφές προσελάμβανε η οργάνωση των μονάδων της "οικογένειας" και της "οικιακής ομάδας"; Ποιοι παράγοντες επιδρούσαν κατά καιρούς και περιοχές στη σύνθεση και το μέγεθος αυτών των ομάδων, στις αντιλήψεις και τις πρακτικές των μελών τους; Τι δυνατότητες, εντέλει, έχει ο σημερινός ερευνητής να προσεγγίσει την καθημερινή πραγματικότητα αυτών των ανθρώπων και να συνδέσει τις πολλαπλές εκδοχές της οικιακής και συγγενειακής οργάνωσης με άλλες όψεις της κοινωνικής ζωής; Διακεκριμένοι ιστορικοί και ανθρωπολόγοι, οι συγγραφείς του τόμου επιχειρούν να απαντήσουν σ' αυτά τα ερωτήματα, με τη βοήθεια των εργαλείων και των μεθόδων που έχει αναπτύξει η "ιστορία της οικογένειας", πεδίο ερευνών που διευρύνεται διαρκώς εδώ και τρεις δεκαετίες. Η αξιοποίηση ποικίλων πηγών φωτίζει πλευρές της οικιακής ζωής σε τόπους και χρόνους που απέχουν πολύ μεταξύ τους; Από την Πολωνία, την Αυστρία, τη Μακεδονία και την Τοσκάνη μέχρι την Προύσα και την Κωνσταντινούπολη κι από τον 140 αιώνα μέχρι τις αρχές του 20ου.

Τα κείμενά αυτά δεν είναι μόνο για τους ειδικούς. Στηρίζονται πάνω σε ιστορικές πηγές δίχως παραπομπές μέσα στο κείμενο, που, σύμφωνα με τη συγγραφέα, κουράζουν τον αναγνώστη, ακόμη και τον ειδικό. Όπως μας πληροφορεί, θέλησε να δώσει τα πορτραίτα μερικών σπουδαίων γυναικών η προσφορά των οποίων θάφτηκε και μερικών συκοφαντήθηκε, μεσ' απ, τη σκέψη και την ψυχολογία μιας γυναίκας. Όπως ισχυρίζεται και η ίδια "Έκαναν πράγματα πολύ σπουδαία, αλλά πολύ λίγο τους το αναγνώρισαν."