by Carina Hart Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China by Leta Hong Fincher (Zed Books, 2014). “It’s merely cultural”. Leta Hong Fincher warns us against this easy interpretation of questionable practices, and then goes on to explain just how pernicious cultural traditions have been in undoing China’s twentieth-century strides towards gender…
by Carina Hart Pickering and Chatto We might be forgiven for thinking that a pretty thorough job has now been done to put women back into history, that enough stories have been reclaimed to make clear that women have not been the sidekicks of the human race. This volume of essays, however, addresses a startling…
This post was originally published here That Vera Brittain chose to name her autobiography aTestament, at first seems like an assertion of her intellectual inclinations, particularly in light of the decision she made to pause her hi-brow Oxford University studies when the First World War began as her closest friends, her fiancé Roland and brother…
by Alicia Izharuddin Feminist Identity Development and Activism in Revolutionary Movements by Theresa O’Keefe (2013, Palgrave MacMillan) Theresa O’Keefe’s 2013 monograph ‘Feminist Identity Development and Activism in Revolutionary Movements’ offers fascinating and thought-provoking anthropological findings on the conundrum of armed female combatants in violent nationalist conflicts. Feminist literature on nationalist struggles has found plenty of evidence…
By Christianne F. Collantes “Teaching Gender with Libraries and Archives” (Edited by Sara de Jong and Sanne Koevoets) This book is available free for download from the Atgender website. Please follow this link As a former student of Women and Gender Studies (now embarking on the doctoral path and transitioning into becoming an educator…
by Claudia Austin The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf discusses the current form of female repression. After the powers gained by women entering the workforce in the second wave, the beauty myth was rigorously introduced to society through a variety of ways. This new aesthetic-centred suppression once again curtailed the enormous progress made, by subjecting…
Nanny Knows Best: The History of the British Nanny by Katherine Holden (The History Press, 2013) As a historian who has previously worked as a nanny, Katherine Holden does indeed know best when it comes to the history of the nanny profession in Britain. Neither a servant nor a member of the family, both more and…
by Helen Snaith Ed. Jolly, S. Cornwell, A. and Hawkins, K. (2013) Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure. London and New York: Zed Books. Women, Sexuality, and the Political Power of Pleasure forms a collection of essays that seek to reanalyse the various forms in which female pleasure comes in, assessing how…
by Chiara Bernardi Robin Lee Riley, Depicting The Veil. Transnational Sexism and the War on Terror London: Zed Publications, 2013 In his new book, Robiln Lee Riley’s once again delves into how Muslim women are portrayed and represented by the western media. Articulated in five interesting chapters, the book seeks to disentangle the very complex question…
by Charlotte Mathieson University of Warwick Mahn, Churnjeet British Women's Travel to Greece, 1840–1914 Ashgate, 2012 In the second of two recent studies on women’s travel writing in the nineteenth century, Churnjeet Mahn provides a valuable and much-needed exploration of women’s travel to Greece in the period 1840-1914. Despite a wealth of studies on Victorian women’s travel…
