Thirty discourses and treatises on the subject of women, by influential thinkers ranging from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine to Freud, Beauvoir, and Friedan, are accompanied by critical analyses
While men control knowledge, they are in a position to take women's ideas. If they like them, they use them; if they don't, they lose them. Every fifty years women are required to reinvent the wheel, for every generation of women is initiated into a world in which women's traditions have been denied and buried. The text exposes the inadequacies of much modern (male) scholarship, advocating that women's absence from the record as creative intellectual beings is not women's fault, but men's.
As a leading historian of women, Linda K. Kerber has played an instrumental role in the radical rethinking of American history over the past two decades. The maturation and increasing complexity of studies in women's history are widely recognized, and in this remarkable collection of essays, Kerber's essential contribution to the field is made clear. In this volume is gathered some of Kerber's finest work. Ten essays address the role of women in early American history, and more broadly in intellectual and cultural history, and explore the rhetoric of historiography. In the chronological arrangement of the pieces, she starts by including women in the history of the Revolutionary era, then makes the transforming discovery that gender is her central subject, the key to understanding the social relation of the sexes and the cultural discourse of an age. From that fundamental insight follows Kerber's sophisticated contributions to the intellectual history of women. Prefaced with an eloquent and personal introduction, an account of the formative and feminist influences in the author's ongoing education, these writings illustrate the evolution of a vital field of inquiry and trace the intellectual development of one of its leading scholars.
Thirty leading women philosophers draw on and advance the rich heritage of the philosophical tradition to explore topics of pressing interest for today. Women of Ideas is edited by Suki Finn, based upon interviews by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton, from Philosophy Bites, the world's foremost philosophy podcast. These conversations illuminate diverse aspects of being human: personal, social, ethical, and political. The contributors discuss the relations between humans and animals, between genders, between tastes, between cultures, and between nations. They look at some of the things that are wrong with our world, such as injustice, deprivation, and bias; they consider the role of civility, trust, and consent in our interactions. There are reflections on the history of philosophy from Plato to Beauvoir, comparisons between Western philosophy and Buddhist philosophy, and discussion of philosophy in Africa. The volume concludes by investigating how philosophy works, how it makes progress, and its role in public life. Anyone interested in philosophical reflection on themselves and our world will find much to stimulate them here.
The story of the fight to gain the vote for women is about much more than a skirmish around the introduction of universal suffrage. It is a story of social and sexual revolutionary upheaval, and one which has not yet ended. The movement for women's suffrage in the late-19th and early 20th centuries prefigured to a startling extent the controversies which rage today around the role of women.
Monograph on the history of ideology and philosophy concerning women and women's rights - presents selections from genesis, plato, augustine, hegel, darwin, marcuse and many others, and includes the text of the UN declaration. References.
In 1790 came that "extraordinary outburst of passionate intelligence," Mary Wollstonecraft's reply to Edmund Burke's attack on the principles of the French Revolution entitled a "Vindication of the Rights of Men." In this pamphlet she held up to scorn Burke's defence of monarch and nobility, his merciless sentimentality. "It is one of the most dashing political polemics in the language," Mr. Taylor writes enthusiastically, "and has not had the attention it deserves. . . . For sheer virility and grip of her verbal instruments it is probably the finest of her works. Some of her sentences have the quality of a sword-edge, and they flash with the rapidity of a practised duellist. It was written at a white heat of indignation; yet it is altogether typical of the writer that, in the midst of the work, quite suddenly, she had one of her fits of callousness and morbid temper, and declared she would not go on. With great skill Johnson persuaded her to take it up again; and with equal suddenness her eagerness returned, and the book was finished and published before any one else could answer Burke."
The "woman question", this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western contruction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.
Despite recent advances in the study of black thought, black women intellectuals remain often neglected. This collection of essays by fifteen scholars of history and literature establishes black women's places in intellectual history by engaging the work of writers, educators, activists, religious leaders, and social reformers in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. Dedicated to recovering the contributions of thinkers marginalized by both their race and their gender, these essays uncover the work of unconventional intellectuals, both formally educated and self-taught, and explore the broad community of ideas in which their work participated. The end result is a field-defining and innovative volume that addresses topics ranging from religion and slavery to the politicized and gendered reappraisal of the black female body in contemporary culture. Contributors are Mia E. Bay, Judith Byfield, Alexandra Cornelius, Thadious Davis, Corinne T. Field, Arlette Frund, Kaiama L. Glover, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Natasha Lightfoot, Sherie Randolph, Barbara D. Savage, Jon Sensbach, Maboula Soumahoro, and Cheryl Wall.