"The Domestication of Women is a feminist critique of international development agencies and programs. A researcher in development studies with past experience as a United Nations consultant, Barbara Rogers writes with a note of outrage about the pervasive biases against women that lead to wasteful and destructive bungling on the part of Western and Westernized men who dominate the field of development planning." - Amy Burce (Stanford University), Signs

While doing fieldwork in the modernizing Javanese city of Solo during the late 1980s, Suzanne Brenner came upon a neighborhood that seemed like a museum of a bygone era: Laweyan, a once-thriving production center of batik textiles, had embraced modernity under Dutch colonial rule, only to fend off the modernizing forces of the Indonesian state during the late twentieth century. Focusing on this community, Brenner examines what she calls the making of the "unmodern." She portrays a merchant enclave clinging to its distinctive forms of social life and highlights the unique power of women in the marketplace and the home--two domains closely linked to each other through local economies of production and exchange. Against the social, political, and economic developments of late-colonial and postcolonial Java, Brenner describes how an innovative, commercially successful lifestyle became an anachronism in Indonesian society, thereby challenging the idea that tradition invariably gives way to modernity in an evolutionary progression. Brenner's analysis centers on the importance of gender to processes of social transformation. In Laweyan, the base of economic and social power has shifted from families, in which women were the main producers of wealth and cultural value, to the Indonesian state, which has worked to reorient families toward national political agendas. How such attempts affect women's lives and the meaning of the family itself are key considerations as Brenner questions long-held assumptions about the division between "domestic" and "public" spheres in modern society.

Taking its cue from the advances made by recent work on manuscript culture and book history, this volume also includes studies of material evidence, looking at women's participation in the making of books, and the traces they left when they encountered actual volumes. Finally, studies of women's roles in relation to apparently ephemeral texts, such as letters, pamphlets and almanacs, challenge traditional divisions between public and private spheres as well as between manuscript and print --Book Jacket.

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"Eleanor Roosevelt never wanted her husband to run for president. When he won, she . . . went on a national tour to crusade on behalf of women. She wrote a regular newspaper column. She became a champion of women's rights and of civil rights. And she decided to write a book." -- Jill Lepore, from the Introduction "Women, whether subtly or vociferously, have always been a tremendous power in the destiny of the world," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in It's Up to the Women, her book of advice to women of all ages on every aspect of life. Written at the height of the Great Depression, she called on women particularly to do their part -- cutting costs where needed, spending reasonably, and taking personal responsibility for keeping the economy going. Whether it's the recommendation that working women take time for themselves in order to fully enjoy time spent with their families, recipes for cheap but wholesome home-cooked meals, or America's obligation to women as they take a leading role in the new social order, many of the opinions expressed here are as fresh as if they were written today.

A collection of essays about women and welfare in America, this book discusses how welfare programmes affect women and how gender relations have influenced the structure of such programmes. Issues such as race and class are also discussed.

The pathbreaking investigation into motherhood and womanhood from an influential and enduring feminist voice, now for a new generation. In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all women everywhere. A “powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection” (Sandra M. Gilbert, Paris Review), Of Woman Born revolutionized how women thought about motherhood and their own liberation. With a stirring new foreword from National Book Critics Circle Award–winning writer Eula Biss, the book resounds with as much wisdom and insight today as when it was first written.

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title The period of prohibition, from 1919 to 1933, marks the fault line between the cultures of Victorian and modern America. In Domesticating Drink, Murdock argues that the debates surrounding alcohol also marked a divide along gender lines. For much of early American history, men generally did the drinking, and women and children were frequently the victims of alcohol-associated violence and abuse. As a result, women stood at the fore of the temperance and prohibition movements and, as Murdock explains, effectively used the fight against drunkenness as a route toward political empowerment and participation. At the same time, respectable women drank at home, in a pattern of moderation at odds with contemporaneous male alcohol abuse. During the 1920s, with federal prohibition a reality, many women began to assert their hard-won sense of freedom by becoming social drinkers in places other than the home. Murdock's study of how this development took place broadens our understanding of the social and cultural history of alcohol and the various issues that surround it. As alcohol continues to spark debate about behaviors, attitudes, and gender roles, Domesticating Drink provides valuable historical context and important lessons for understanding and responding to the evolving use, and abuse, of drink.

Alexandra Finley adds crucial new dimensions to the boisterous debate over the relationship between slavery and capitalism by placing women's labor at the center of the antebellum slave trade, focusing particularly on slave traders' ability to profit from enslaved women's domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor. The slave market infiltrated every aspect of southern society, including the most personal spaces of the household, the body, and the self. Finley shows how women's work was necessary to the functioning of the slave trade, and thus to the spread of slavery to the Lower South, the expansion of cotton production, and the profits accompanying both of these markets. Through the personal histories of four enslaved women, Finley explores the intangible costs of the slave market, moving beyond ledgers, bills of sales, and statements of profit and loss to consider the often incalculable but nevertheless invaluable place of women's emotional, sexual, and domestic labor in the economy. The details of these women's lives reveal the complex intersections of economy, race, and family at the heart of antebellum society.