A study of the women who led the United States section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in the interwar years, this book argues that the ideas of these women--the importance of nurturing, nonviolence, feminism, and a careful balancing of people's differences with their common humanity--constitute an important addition to our understanding of the intellectual heritage of the United States. Most of these women were well educated and prominent in their chosen fields: they included Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch, the only two United States women to win Nobel Prizes for Peace; Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress; and Dorothy Detzer, the woman who prompted the investigation of the munitions industry in the 1930's. The ideas of these women were not usually expressed in forms conventionally studied by intellectual historians. On the whole, their ideas must be teased out of organizational records, statements of principle and policy, and personal correspondence. When combined with an understanding of the personal backgrounds of the WIL leaders and placed in the context of early-twentieth-century America, these documents tell us what these women thought was important and why. The ideas of the WIL leaders are also analyzed in the context of the intellectual themes of Victorianism and modernism. Our understanding of these themes has been based largely on the work of privileged European and American men, and the ideas of women often fit uncomfortably into these traditional categories. A reconstruction of the ideas of the WIL leaders suggests that historians have overlooked an important, alternative intellectual tradition in the United States. To understand and appreciate women's thoughts, we must dissolve the old constructs and let new, multifaceted ones replace them.

Reconstructing Woman explores a scenario common to the works of four major French novelists of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Villiers. In the texts of each author, a &“new Pygmalion&” (as Balzac calls one of his characters) turns away from a real woman he has loved or desired and prefers instead his artificial re-creation of her. All four authors also portray the possibility that this simulacrum, which replaces the woman, could become real. The central chapters examine this plot and its meanings in multiple texts of each author (with the exception of the chapter on Villiers, in which only &“L&’Eve future&” is considered). The premise is that this shared scenario stems from the discovery in the nineteenth century that humans are transformable. Because scientific innovations play a major part in this discovery, Dorothy Kelly reviews some of the contributing trends that attracted one or more of the authors: mesmerism, dissection, transformism, and evolution, new understandings of human reproduction, spontaneous generation, puericulture, the experimental method. These ideas and practices provided the novelists with a scientific context in which controlling, changing, and creating human bodies became imaginable. At the same time, these authors explore the ways in which not only bodies but also identity can be made. In close readings, Kelly shows how these narratives reveal that linguistic and coded social structures shape human identity. Furthermore, through the representation of the power of language to do that shaping, the authors envision that their own texts would perform that function. The symbol of the reconstruction of woman thus embodies the fantasy and desire that their novels could create or transform both reality and their readers in quite literal ways. Through literary analyses, we can deduce from the texts just why this artificial creation is a woman.

Examines concepts of womanhood and feminism within the context of `race' and ethnicity, and highlights the ways in which constructions of womanhood have traditionally excluded black women's experience.

Challenging some of our most deeply held assumptions about mental health care, Women in Context explores the ways psychotherapy services for women are influenced by the larger therapy system and the sociopolitical context in which we live. The volume provides a comprehensive and insightful examination of factors that affect women's mental health, demonstrates the inadequacy of traditional psychotherapeutic assumptions, and offers new approaches for addressing women's experiences. Drawn from the work of noted therapists from both individual and family disciplines, the book begins with an overview of the themes that define its scope, namely, women within the larger context of the service delivery system, and the weaving together of gender, race, class, and sexual life style. The second section examines psychotherapy given a sociopolitical understanding of women's life cycle issues. Chapters discuss the influence of societal norms and stereotypes on the ways girls experience adolescence, as well as on marginalized and silenced women including lesbians, single heterosexuals, bisexual women, stepmothers, and older women. Enlightening chapters on women's medical concerns show that many women enter therapy in response to the dual-edged emotional consequences of dealing with illness and with the health care system itself. The book discusses psychotherapeutic approaches to women's health concerns, the pathologizing of normal female life cycle events, and the personal and familial impact of some feared illnesses. Chapters also examine whether new reproductive technologies are truly in the service of women, ways to break the silence surrounding the spread of AIDS among women, and reasons for the lack of research on menopause. The final section of the book illuminates the impact of governmental policies and of deeply imbued belief systems on women's mental health concerns. Violence, poverty, homelessness, teenage pregnancy, and women in the workplace are among the issues explored from a societal perspective. Here, chapters illustrate the application of ideas presented in the text by offering therapeutic insights and describing established programs that are dealing with some of these problems. Difficulties women encounter in the workplace and in traditionally male-dominated institutions are also covered. Concluding with a probing look at one therapist's work with a female client, the book lays the groundwork for the creation of a new model of psychotherapy--a model that will be more compatible with the actual experiences of women's lives. Written in a straightforward, personal style and eschewing technical jargon, this major new work is enlightening reading for all mental health professionals who work with women. Adroitly addressing a range of timely and critical topics, the book will be valued by those who specialize in women's studies and students from a broad range of academic disciplines.

Few readers of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind remained unmoved by how the strong-willed Scarlett O'Hara tried to rebuild Tara after the Civil War ended. This book examines the problems that Southern women faced during the Reconstruction Era, in Part I as mothers, wives, daughters or sisters of men burdened with financial difficulties and the radical Republican regime, and in Part II with specific illustrations of their tribulations through the letters and diaries of five different women. A lonely widow with young children, Sally Randle Perry is struggling to get her life back together, following the death of her husband in the war. Virginia Caroline Smith Aiken, a wife and mother, born into affluence and security, struggles to emerge from the financial and psychological problems of the postwar world. Susan Darden, also a wife and mother, details the uncertainties and frustrations of her life in Fayette, Mississippi. Jo Gillis tells the sad tale of a young mother straining to cope with the depressed circumstances enveloping most ministers in the aftermath of the war. As the wife of a Methodist Episcopal minister in the Alabama Conference she sacrifices herself into an early grave in an attempt to further her husband's career. Inability to collect a debt three times that of the $10,000 debt her father owed brought Anna Clayton Logan, her eleven brothers and sisters, and her parents face-to-face with starvation.

The effects of World War II on women's sense of themselves forms the basis of this exploration of the interaction between cultural representations of men and women in World War II, and women's own narratives of their wartime lives.

Female anthropologists scan patterns and changes in women's roles in various social systems

Over 15 years ago, Kim Anderson set out to explore how Indigenous womanhood had been constructed and reconstructed in Canada, weaving her own journey as a Cree/Métis woman with the insights, knowledge, and stories of the forty Indigenous women she interviewed. The result was A Recognition of Being, a powerful work that identified both the painful legacy of colonialism and the vital potential of self-definition. In this second edition, Anderson revisits her groundbreaking text to include recent literature on Indigenous feminism and two-spirited theory and to document the efforts of Indigenous women to resist heteropatriarchy. Beginning with a look at the positions of women in traditional Indigenous societies and their status after colonization, this text shows how Indigenous women have since resisted imposed roles, reclaimed their traditions, and reconstructed a powerful Native womanhood. Featuring a new foreword by Maria Campbell and an updated closing dialogue with Bonita Lawrence, this revised edition will be a vital text for courses in women and gender studies and Indigenous studies as well as an important resource for anyone committed to the process of decolonization.

Exploring the gendered dimension of political conflicts, Laura Edwards links transformations in private and public life in the era following the Civil War. Ideas about men's and women's roles within households shaped the ways groups of southerners--elite and poor, whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans--envisioned the public arena and their own places in it. By using those on the margins to define the center, Edwards demonstrates that Reconstruction was a complicated process of conflict and negotiation that lasted long beyond 1877 and involved all southerners and every aspect of life.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, identified all legitimate voters as "male." In so doing, it added gender-specific language to the U.S. Constitution for the first time. Suffrage Reconstructed considers how and why the amendment's authors made this decision. Vividly detailing congressional floor bickering and activist campaigning, Laura E. Free takes readers into the pre- and postwar fights over precisely who should have the right to vote. Free demonstrates that all men, black and white, were the ultimate victors of these fights, as gender became the single most important marker of voting rights during Reconstruction. Free argues that the Fourteenth Amendment's language was shaped by three key groups: African American activists who used ideas about manhood to claim black men's right to the ballot, postwar congressmen who sought to justify enfranchising southern black men, and women's rights advocates who began to petition Congress for the ballot for the first time as the Amendment was being drafted. To prevent women's inadvertent enfranchisement, and to incorporate formerly disfranchised black men into the voting polity, the Fourteenth Amendment's congressional authors turned to gender to define the new American voter. Faced with this exclusion some woman suffragists, most notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton, turned to rhetorical racism in order to mount a campaign against sex as a determinant of one's capacity to vote. Stanton's actions caused a rift with Frederick Douglass and a schism in the fledgling woman suffrage movement. By integrating gender analysis and political history, Suffrage Reconstructed offers a new interpretation of the Civil War–era remaking of American democracy, placing African American activists and women's rights advocates at the heart of nineteenth-century American conversations about public policy, civil rights, and the franchise.