Feminist Moments: Reading Feminist Texts

Description

The challenges presented by feminism to traditional understandings of representation, normative values, power relations and the political are not simply the product of late-20th century thinking. Feminist Moments, in examining some of the pivotal texts in the history of feminist thought, demonstrates that these challenges emerge from a long and varied history of feminist writing. The volume brings together texts from literary and analytical works written by women and men, and from inside and outside the Western tradition, including Mary Wortley Montagu, Anna Wheeler and William Thompson, Nazira Zeineddine, Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin and Luisa Valenzuela. The volume is unique in offering close readings of key passages from the selected texts, making it ideal for classroom use; its original essays, all authored by specialists, will also be of interest to more advanced scholars. In juxtaposing and analysing a wide range of texts which despite their significance are rarely discussed together, Feminist Moments provides a fascinating historical narrative of feminist thought which will be highly valuable to students and scholars of the history of political thought, political philosophy and gender and literary studies. Cover Half-title Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Contributors Series Editors’ Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction Susan Bruce and Katherine Smits 1 A Feminist-Historical Citadel: Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies Nadia Margolis 2 Anne Bradstreet and the Seventeenth-Century Articulation of ‘the female voice’ Susan Bruce 3 Mary Astell’s Critique of Marriage Practices Patricia Springborg 4 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Women’s Coffee House Vicki A. Spencer 5 Justice and Gender in Revolution: Olympe de Gouges Speaks for Women Joseph Zizek 6 Radical Spirituality and Reason in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Kari Lokke 7 Giving Voice to Feminist Political Theory: The Radical Discourse of Anna Doyle Wheeler and William Thompson Jim Jose 8 ‘Supposed to be very calm generally’: Anger, Narrative and Unaccountable Sounds in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre Alexandra Lewis 9 ‘Something Akin to Freedom’: Harriet Jacobs and the Feminist Tradition Susan Hays Bussey 10 On the Enslavement of Women’s Minds: John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women Katherine Smits 11 German Maternalist Socialism: Clara Zetkin and the 1896 Social Democratic Party Congress Catherine Dollard 12 How Turn of the Century Feminism Finds Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” Shirley Samuels 13 Ecology and Virtue in Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, Sultana’s Dream Maitrayee Chaudhuri 14 Nazira Zeineddine: Pioneer of Islamic Feminism miriam cooke 15 Virginia Woolf, Genre-Bending and Feminist Life-Writing: A Room of One’s Own Amber K. Regis 16 ‘Your sister in the ’gator and the ’gator in your sister’: Judgement in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
Glenda R. Carpio 17 ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’: The Sex-Gender Distinction and Simone de Beauvoir’s Account of Woman: The Second Sex Céline Leboeuf 18 Betty Friedan’s Feminist Critique of Suburban Domesticity Rebecca Jo Plant 19 ‘Writing as Re-Vision’: Female Creative Agency in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich Claire Hurley 20 Complicity and Resistance: Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse Helen Pringle 21 Before Her Eyes: On Luisa Valenzuela’s Bedside Manners Valeria Wagner Postscript: Feminist Revisions of Political Thought Susan Bruce and Katherine Smits Notes Feminist Moments: Further Reading Index