In Women in the Modern World, noted feminist and sociologist Mirra Komarovsky begins with a consideration of biology. Reflecting on these now-familiar arguments that the natural biological differences between women and men dictate different social roles, Komarovsky demolishes these arguments by carefully reviewing studies that find sex differences in cognitive abilities, achievement, and psychological predispositions. In successive chapters, Komarovsky explores how differential socialization produces the differences that we think we observe between women and men, and how gender inequality disfigures the lives of women, men, and the relationships between them. One chapter examines how it plays out among college students at Barnard in the first college generation after the Second World War. Many of these bright and ambitious women feel trapped between their talents and the constraints of feminine domesticity mapped out for them by social expectations. Successive chapters examine the costs of choosing either alternative. Full-time homemakers feel, at best, overworked and undervalued, and at worst resentful and bitter. Many regret the "painful reorganization of life," and long, instead "for the relinquished occupation." It is this longing, she argues that leads so many women to "flit from one evanescent interest to another, arriving at late or middle age without anything that would given meaning or continuity to their lives."

The internationally bestselling author of Who Cooked the Last Supper? presents a wickedly witty and very current history of the extraordinary female rebels, reactionaries, and trailblazers who left their mark on history from the French Revolution up to the present day. Now is the time for a new women’s history—for the famous, infamous, and unsung women to get their due—from the Enlightenment to the #MeToo movement. Recording the important milestones in the birth of the modern feminist movement and the rise of women into greater social, economic, and political power, Miles takes us through through a colorful pageant of astonishing women, from heads of state like Empress Cixi, Eugenia Charles, Indira Gandhi, Jacinda Ardern, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to political rainmakers Kate Sheppard, Carrie Chapman Catt, Anna Stout, Dorothy Height, Shirley Chisholm, Winnie Mandela, STEM powerhouses Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Rosalind Franklin, Sophia Kovalevskaya, Marie Curie, and Ada Lovelace, revolutionaries Olympe de Gouges, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Patyegarang, and writer/intellectuals Mary Wollstonecraft, Simon de Beauvoir, Elaine Morgan, and Germaine Greer. Women in the arts, women in sports, women in business, women in religion, women in politics—this is a one-stop roundup of the tremendous progress women have made in the modern era. A testimony to how women have persisted—and excelled—this is a smart and stylish popular history for all readers.

This classic book provides a historical overview of feminist strands among the modern revolutionary movements of Russia, China and the Third World. Sheila Rowbotham shows how women rose against the dual challenges of an unjust state system and social-sexual prejudice. Women, Resistance and Revolution is an invaluable historical study, as well as a trove of anecdote and example fit to inspire today’s generation of feminist thinkers and activists.

This work includes 1000 entries covering the spectrum of defining women in the contemporary world.

"Women in Christianity in the Modern Age examines the role of women in Christianity in the 20th and early 21st Centuries. This edited volume includes eight important contributions from academics in the field. The modern era has been an age of social and religious upheaval, and the ravages of global warfare and changes to women's role in society have made the examination of the place of women in religion a key question in theology. From theological concerns - engagements with the biblical texts by feminist and anti-feminist theologians, the modern role of Mary and women saints - to political and social debates on women's ministry and place in society, and cultural shifts as expressed through theologically inspired artwork by women, Women in Christianity in the Modern Age provides an overview and in-depth studies of a tumultuous and changing era. This insightful text will be of key interest to students and scholars in Religion and Cultural Studies"--

Contrary to the declarations of some anthropologists, matriarchies do exist. Peggy Reeves Sanday first went to West Sumatra in 1981, intrigued by reports that the matrilineal Minangkabau--one of the largest ethnic groups in Indonesia--label their society a matriarchy. Numbering some four million in West Sumatra, the Minangkabau are known in Indonesia for their literary flair, business acumen, and egalitarian, democratic relationships between men and women. Sanday uses her repeated visits to West Sumatra in the closing decades of the twentieth century as the basis for a new definition of matriarchy. From the vantage point of daily life in villages, especially one where she developed close personal ties, Sanday's narrative is centered on how the Minangkabau conceive of their world and think humans should behave, along with the practices and rituals they claim uphold their matriarchate. Women at the Center leaves the reader with a solid sense of the respect for women that permeates Minangkabau culture, and gives new life to the concept of matriarchy.

Devout laywomen raise a number of provocative questions about gender and religion in the early modern world. How did some groups or individuals evade the Tridentine legislation that required third order women to take solemn vows and observe active and passive enclosure? How did their attempts to exercise a female apostolate (albeit with varying degrees of success and assertiveness) destabilize hierarchies of class and gender? To the extent that their beliefs and practices diverged from approved doctrine and rituals, what insights can they provide into the tensions between official religion and lay religiosity? Addressing these and many other questions, Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World reflects new directions in gender history, offering a more nuanced approach to the paradigm of woman as the prototypical "disciplined" subject of church-state power.

Women Mystics Confront the Modern World situates the female mystical tradition within the context of the epistemological shift which affected religious sentiments and the perception of the self at the dawn of the modern world. Anchored in a comprehensive knowledge of the religious history of seventeenth-century France, this book offers a vivid account of the fascinating lives and work of two exceptional women. Marie de l'Incarnation (1599-1672) and Madame Guyon (1648-1717) continue a literary and spiritual tradition that had begun in the thirteenth century. Yet, because they were at a crucial point in the history of Western mysticism, when this movement was at once at its apogee and in the first stages of decline, their writings show indications of a changing mentality. These transformations shed light on the social significance of female mysticism in the Western tradition. The opportunities the two women seized or shunned highlight their maneuvering for validation and autonomy. But their choices also highlight many contradictions, compromises, and limits imposed upon their self-expression. At the confluence of French and American scholarship on mysticism, this work joins these two schools of thought by introducing gender as a viable category of inquiry into the one and by tempering the overly-optimistic interpretation of female mysticism of the other.

This is the first essay collection to examine the relation between text and gender in Spain from a broad geographical, social and cultural perspective covering more than 300 years. The contributors examine women and the construction of gender thematically, dealing with the areas of politics, law, religion, sexuality, literature and economics, and in a variety of social categories, from Christians and Moriscas, queens and merchants, peasants and visionaries, heretics and madwomen. The essays cover different regions in the Spanish monarchy, including Andalusia, Aragon, Castile, Catalonia, Valencia and Spanish America, from the fifteenth century through to the eighteenth century. Women, Texts and Authority in Early Modern Spain focuses on two central themes: gender relations in the shaping of family and community life, and women's authority in spheres of power. The representation of women in a variety of texts such as poetry, court cases, or even account books illustrate the multifaceted world in which women lived, constantly choosing and negotiating their identities. The appeal of this collection is not limited to scholars of Spanish history and literature; it is deliberately designed to address the issue of how gender relations were constructed in the formation of modern society, and therefore will be of interest to scholars of women's and gender history generally. Because of the emphasis on how this construction occurs in texts, the collection will also be attractive to scholars interested in literary studies and/or print culture.