Inventing Womanhood

Download or read book Inventing Womanhood written by Tara Williams and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Inventing Womanhood, Tara Williamsinvestigates new ideas about womanhood that arose in fourteenth-century Britain and evolved throughout the fifteenth century. In the aftermath of the plague and the substantial cultural shifts of the late 1300s, female roles expanded temporarily. As a result, the dominant models of maiden, wife, and widow could no longer adequately describe women's roles and lives. Middle English writers responded by experimenting with new ways of representing women across a variety of genres, from courtly poetry to devotional texts and from royal correspondence to cycle plays. In particular, writers coined new terms, including "womanhood" and "femininity," and refashioned others, such as "motherhood." These experiments allowed writers to develop and define a larger idea of womanhood underlying more specific identities like wife or mother and to re-imagine women's relationships to different kinds of authority--generally masculine and frequently religious. By exploring the medieval origins of some of our most important gender vocabulary, Inventing Womanhood defamiliarizes our modern usage, which often treats those terms as etymologically transparent and almost limitlessly capacious. It also restores a necessary historical and linguistic dimension to gender studies, providing the groundwork for reconsidering how that language and the categories it creates have determined the ways in which gender has been imagined since the Middle Ages.

Download or read book The Invention of Women written by Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1997-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Inventing Herself written by Elaine Showalter and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001-03-20 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sure to take its place alongside the literary landmarks of modern feminism, Elaine Showalter's brilliant, provocative work chronicles the roles of feminist intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the present. With sources as diverse as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Scream 2, Inventing Herself is an expansive and timely exploration of women who possess a boundless determination to alter the world by boldly experiencing love, achievement, and fame on a grand scale. These women tried to work, travel, think, love, and even die in ways that were ahead of their time. In doing so, they forged an epic history that each generation of adventurous women has rediscovered. Focusing on paradigmatic figures ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller to Germaine Greer and Susan Sontag, preeminent scholar Elaine Showalter uncovers common themes and patterns of these women's lives across the centuries and discovers the feminist intellectual tradition they embodied. The author brilliantly illuminates the contributions of Eleanor Marx, Zora Neale Hurston, Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mead, and many more. Showalter, a highly regarded critic known for her provocative and strongly held opinions, has here established a compelling new Who's Who of women's thought. Certain to spark controversy, the omission of such feminist perennials as Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Virginia Woolf will surprise and shock the conventional wisdom. This is not a history of perfect women, but rather of real women, whose mistakes and even tragedies are instructive and inspiring for women today who are still trying to invent themselves.

Download or read book Inventing Women written by Gill Kirkup and published by Polity. This book was released on 1992-04-08 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inventing Women explores important and controversial debates about the gendering of science and technology and their relationship to women. This book discusses how such gendering occurs, the scientific basis for claims of sex difference, the medicalization of women's bodies and the political issues raised by reproductive technology. The book also examines women as producers of science and technology, both as professional scientists and as unskilled workers. It concludes by looking at women as consumers of technology and science - domestic technology and computers - and at their relationship with Nature. Inventing Women raises the question of whether feminism can produce not only a critique of science and technology, but a new feminist science and technology, and the systems and artefacts that go with it. This volume includes contributions which represent some of the best feminist scholarship in their fields. It can be used as a textbook and it will appeal to a wide audience in feminism and women's studies, sociology, education, science and technology, and medicine and health.

Download or read book Mothers of Invention written by Drew Gilpin Faust and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring privileged Confederate women's wartime experiences, this book chronicles the clash of the old and the new within a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South.

Download or read book Inventing Black Women written by Ajuan Maria Mance and published by Univ Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Inventing black women fills important gaps in our understanding of how African American women poets have resisted those conventional notions of gender and race that limit the visibility of Black female subjects. The first historical and thematic survey of African American women's poetry, this book examines the key developments that have shaped the growing body of poems by and about Black women since the end of slavery and Reconstruction, as it offers incisive readings of individual works by important poets such as Alice B. Neal, Maggie Pogue Johnson, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, and Audre Lorde, as well as many others."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution written by Adrienne Rich and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.