In 1500, as many as 99 out of 100 English women may have been illiterate, and girls of all social backgrounds were the objects of purposeful efforts to restrict their access to full literacy. Three centuries later, more than half of all English and Anglo-American women could read, and the female reader was emerging as a cultural ideal and a market force. While scholars have written extensively about women's reading in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and about women's writing in the early modern period, they have not attended sufficiently to the critical transformation that took place as female readers and their reading assumed significant cultural and economic power. Reading Women brings into conversation the latest scholarship by early modernists and early Americanists on the role of gender in the production and consumption of texts during this expansion of female readership. Drawing together historians and literary scholars, the essays share a concern with local specificity and material culture. Removing women from the historically inaccurate frame of exclusively solitary, silent reading, the authors collectively return their subjects to the activities that so often coincided with reading: shopping, sewing, talking, writing, performing, and collecting. With chapters on samplers, storytelling, testimony, and translation, the volume expands notions of reading and literacy, and it insists upon a rich and varied narrative that crosses disciplinary boundaries and national borders.

When Stephanie Staal first read The Feminine Mystique in college, she found it "a mildly interesting relic from another era." But more than a decade later, as a married stay-at-home mom in the suburbs, Staal rediscovered Betty Friedan's classic work -- and was surprised how much she identified with the laments and misgivings of 1950s housewives. She set out on a quest: to reenroll at Barnard and re-read the great books she had first encountered as an undergrad. From the banishment of Eve to Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, Staal explores the significance of each of these classic tales by and of women, highlighting the relevance these ideas still have today. This process leads Staal to find the self she thought she had lost -- curious and ambitious, zany and critical -- and inspires new understandings of her relationships with her husband, her mother, and her daughter.

Examining an impressive length of Irish cultural history, from 1700–1960, Reading the Irishwoman explores the dynamisms of cultural encounter and exchange in Irish women's lives. Analyzing the popular and consumer cultures of a variety of eras, it traces how the circulation of ideas, fantasies, and aspirations shaped women's lives both in actuality and in imagination. The authors uncover a huge array of different representations that Irish women have been able to identify with, including heroine, patriot, philanthropist, actress, singer, model, and missionary. By studying this diversity of viable roles in the Irish woman's cultural world, the authors point to evidence of women's agency and aspiration that reached far beyond the domestic sphere.

Ian McEwan once said, 'When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.' This book explains how precious fiction is to contemporary women readers, and how they draw on it to tell the stories of their lives. Female readers are key to the future of fiction and—as parents, teachers, and librarians—the glue for a literate society. Women treasure the chance to read alone, but have also gregariously shared reading experiences and memories with mothers, daughters, grandchildren, and female friends. For so many, reading novels and short stories enables them to escape and to spread their wings intellectually and emotionally. This book, written by an experienced teacher, scholar of women's writing, and literature festival director, draws on over 500 interviews with and questionnaires from women readers and writers. It describes how, where, and when British women read fiction, and examines why stories and writers influence the way female readers understand and shape their own life stories. Taylor explores why women are the main buyers and readers of fiction, members of book clubs, attendees at literary festivals, and organisers of days out to fictional sites and writers' homes. The book analyses the special appeal and changing readership of the genres of romance, erotica, and crime. It also illuminates the reasons for British women's abiding love of two favourite novels, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Taylor offers a cornucopia of witty and wise women's voices, of both readers themselves and also writers such as Hilary Mantel, Helen Dunmore, Katie Fforde, and Sarah Dunant. The book helps us understand why—in Jackie Kay's words—'our lives are mapped by books.'

First published earlier in 1990 by Mansell Publishing, London. Sourcebook contains some 1,000 entries covering a range of topics relevant to women's studies. The coverage is worldwide, with all major women-centered English-language reference works, both monographic and serial, included. The material covers the decade from 1978 to 1988, with a small number of entries from 1989. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Provides citations to books, journal articles, manuscripts, oral histories, dissertations, and theses on Texas women's history.

"This book brings together a selection of paintings, drawings, prints and photographs for women reading by a diverse range of artists from the Middle Ages to the present day. Each image is accompanied by a commentary explaining the context in which it was created - who the reader is, her relationship with the artist, and what she was reading. This book will appeal to book lovers and anyone interested in the depiction of women in art."--BOOK JACKET.

Originally launched in 1928, by the 1950s and 1960s nearly two million readers every month sampled "Chatelaine" magazine's eclectic mixture of traditional and surprisingly unconventional articles and editorials. At a time when the American women's magazine market began to flounder thanks to the advent of television, "Chatelaine's" subscriptions expanded, as did the lively debate between its pages. Why? In this exhilarating study of Canada's foremost women's publication in the 50s and 60s, Valerie Korinek shows that while the magazine was certainly filled with advertisements that promoted domestic perfection through the endless expansion of consumer spending, a number of its sections – including fiction, features, letters, and the editor's column – began to contain material that subversively complicated the simple consumer recipes for affluent domesticity. Articles on abortion, spousal abuse, and poverty proliferated alongside explicitly feminist editorials. It was a potent mixture and the mail poured in – both praising and criticizing the new directions at the magazine. It was "Chatelaine's" highly interactive and participatory nature that encouraged what Korinek calls "a community of readers" – readers that in their very response to the magazine led to its success. "Chatelaine" did not cling to the stereotypical images of the era, instead it forged ahead providing women with a variety of images, ideas, and critiques of women's role in society. Chatelaine's dissemination of feminist ideas laid the foundation for feminism in Canada in the 1970s and after. Comprehensive, fascinating, and full of lively debate and history, "Roughing it in the Suburbs" provides a cultural study that weaves together a history of "Chatelaine's" producer's, consumers, and text. It illustrates how the structure of the magazine's production, and the composition of its editorial and business offices allowed for feminist material to infiltrate a mass-market women's monthly. In doing so it offers a detailed analysis of the times, the issues, and the national cross section of the women and, sometimes, men, who participated in the success of a Canadian cultural landmark. Winner of the Laura Jamieson Prize, awarded by the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women

Conference report on the contribution of women to family income in South East Asia and the East Asia - discusses the social status and employment opportunities of women, the working conditions, wages and employment security of the woman worker, relevant ILO Conventions, etc., and includes recommendations. Bibliography pp. 298 to 321, illustrations, references and statistical tables. ILO sponsored. Conference held in Bangkok 1976 jul 19 to 23.

The history of Branching Out, Canada’s first national second-wave feminist magazine, is the story of an upstart publication from the prairies that was read from coast to coast. It is also a story of political activism and community building. When it ceased publication in 1980, Branching Out had reached more readers than any similar periodical. Feminist Acts is an in-depth examination of feminist publishing, written to bring more Canadian voices into conversations about women’s cultural production. A vital text of recuperation, the book draws on first-hand accounts from women who were there. It is a must-read for anyone interested in feminist activism, gender studies, Canadian cultural history, or publishing history.