Reconstructing Woman

Author : Dorothy Kelly
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271034963
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reconstructing Woman written by Dorothy Kelly and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructing Woman explores a scenario common to the works of four major French novelists of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Villiers. In the texts of each author, a “new Pygmalion” (as Balzac calls one of his characters) turns away from a real woman he has loved or desired and prefers instead his artificial re-creation of her. All four authors also portray the possibility that this simulacrum, which replaces the woman, could become real. The central chapters examine this plot and its meanings in multiple texts of each author (with the exception of the chapter on Villiers, in which only “L’Eve future” is considered). The premise is that this shared scenario stems from the discovery in the nineteenth century that humans are transformable. Because scientific innovations play a major part in this discovery, Dorothy Kelly reviews some of the contributing trends that attracted one or more of the authors: mesmerism, dissection, transformism, and evolution, new understandings of human reproduction, spontaneous generation, puericulture, the experimental method. These ideas and practices provided the novelists with a scientific context in which controlling, changing, and creating human bodies became imaginable. At the same time, these authors explore the ways in which not only bodies but also identity can be made. In close readings, Kelly shows how these narratives reveal that linguistic and coded social structures shape human identity. Furthermore, through the representation of the power of language to do that shaping, the authors envision that their own texts would perform that function. The symbol of the reconstruction of woman thus embodies the fantasy and desire that their novels could create or transform both reality and their readers in quite literal ways. Through literary analyses, we can deduce from the texts just why this artificial creation is a woman.

Author : Linda Kay Schott
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780804727464
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reconstructing Women’s Thoughts written by Linda Kay Schott and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the women who led the United States section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in the interwar years, this book argues that the ideas of these women--the importance of nurturing, nonviolence, feminism, and a careful balancing of people's differences with their common humanity--constitute an important addition to our understanding of the intellectual heritage of the United States. Most of these women were well educated and prominent in their chosen fields: they included Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch, the only two United States women to win Nobel Prizes for Peace; Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress; and Dorothy Detzer, the woman who prompted the investigation of the munitions industry in the 1930's. The ideas of these women were not usually expressed in forms conventionally studied by intellectual historians. On the whole, their ideas must be teased out of organizational records, statements of principle and policy, and personal correspondence. When combined with an understanding of the personal backgrounds of the WIL leaders and placed in the context of early-twentieth-century America, these documents tell us what these women thought was important and why. The ideas of the WIL leaders are also analyzed in the context of the intellectual themes of Victorianism and modernism. Our understanding of these themes has been based largely on the work of privileged European and American men, and the ideas of women often fit uncomfortably into these traditional categories. A reconstruction of the ideas of the WIL leaders suggests that historians have overlooked an important, alternative intellectual tradition in the United States. To understand and appreciate women's thoughts, we must dissolve the old constructs and let new, multifaceted ones replace them.

Author : Hazel V. Carby
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0195060717
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reconstructing Womanhood written by Hazel V. Carby and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1987 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist, published in 1987, is a book by Hazel Carby which centers on slave narratives by women. Carby received her Ph.D. in 1984 from Birmingham University. Her doctoral dissertation later became the foundation for the book."--Wikipedia viewed Jan. 7, 2022.

Author : Dorothy Kelly
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271073543
Total Pages : 175 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reconstructing Woman written by Dorothy Kelly and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructing Woman explores a scenario common to the works of four major French novelists of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Villiers. In the texts of each author, a “new Pygmalion” (as Balzac calls one of his characters) turns away from a real woman he has loved or desired and prefers instead his artificial re-creation of her. All four authors also portray the possibility that this simulacrum, which replaces the woman, could become real. The central chapters examine this plot and its meanings in multiple texts of each author (with the exception of the chapter on Villiers, in which only “L’Eve future” is considered). The premise is that this shared scenario stems from the discovery in the nineteenth century that humans are transformable. Because scientific innovations play a major part in this discovery, Dorothy Kelly reviews some of the contributing trends that attracted one or more of the authors: mesmerism, dissection, transformism, and evolution, new understandings of human reproduction, spontaneous generation, puericulture, the experimental method. These ideas and practices provided the novelists with a scientific context in which controlling, changing, and creating human bodies became imaginable. At the same time, these authors explore the ways in which not only bodies but also identity can be made. In close readings, Kelly shows how these narratives reveal that linguistic and coded social structures shape human identity. Furthermore, through the representation of the power of language to do that shaping, the authors envision that their own texts would perform that function. The symbol of the reconstruction of woman thus embodies the fantasy and desire that their novels could create or transform both reality and their readers in quite literal ways. Through literary analyses, we can deduce from the texts just why this artificial creation is a woman.

Author : Carol Faulkner
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812203917
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Women's Radical Reconstruction written by Carol Faulkner and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-04-19 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first critical study of female abolitionists and feminists in the freedmen's aid movement, Carol Faulkner describes these women's radical view of former slaves and the nation's responsibility to them. Moving beyond the image of the Yankee schoolmarm, Women's Radical Reconstruction demonstrates fully the complex and dynamic part played by Northern women in the design, implementation, and administration of Reconstruction policy. This absorbing account illustrates how these activists approached women's rights, the treatment of freed slaves, and the federal government's role in reorganizing Southern life. Like Radical Republicans, black and white women studied here advocated land reform, political and civil rights, and an activist federal government. They worked closely with the military, the Freedmen's Bureau, and Northern aid societies to provide food, clothes, housing, education, and employment to former slaves. These abolitionist-feminists embraced the Freedmen's Bureau, seeing it as both a shield for freedpeople and a vehicle for women's rights. But Faulkner rebuts historians who depict a community united by faith in free labor ideology, describing a movement torn by internal tensions. The author explores how gender conventions undermined women's efforts, as military personnel and many male reformers saw female reformers as encroaching on their territory, threatening their vision of a wage labor economy, and impeding the economic independence of former slaves. She notes the opportunities afforded to some middle-class black women, while also acknowledging the difficult ground they occupied between freed slaves and whites. Through compelling individual examples, she traces how female reformers found their commitment to gender solidarity across racial lines tested in the face of disagreements regarding the benefits of charity and the merits of paid employment.

Author : Patricia Yaeger
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226944921
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dirt and Desire written by Patricia Yaeger and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-02-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of southern writing—the Dixie Limited, if you will—runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture. For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt—who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it. Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies. The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

Author : Delia Jarrett-Macauley
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134818769
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reconstructing Womanhood, Reconstructing Feminism written by Delia Jarrett-Macauley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-04 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines concepts of womanhood and feminism within the context of `race' and ethnicity, and highlights the ways in which constructions of womanhood have traditionally excluded black women's experience.

Author : Penny Summerfield
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780719044618
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives written by Penny Summerfield and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The effects of World War II on women's sense of themselves forms the basis of this exploration of the interaction between cultural representations of men and women in World War II, and women's own narratives of their wartime lives.

Author : Karen Berger
Publisher : St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN 13 : 146685796X
Total Pages : 629 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Woman's Decision written by Karen Berger and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 629 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Woman's Decision is an extraordinarily sensitive and authoritative book that will help women assess their options, familiarize themselves with the techniques used in treating breast cancer, and prepare themselves for what to expect medically and emotionally from reconstructive surgery. It combines complete and fully updated medical information with a detailed look at the emotional issues a woman must face when confronting breast cancer. Especially reassuring are the interviews conducted with women and their loved ones, discussion feelings and reactions at every stage, including the decision to seek reconstructive surgery. In easy-to-understand language, this new edition features the newest therapies available for breast cancer treatment including: Genetic and hormonal therapy Endoscopic (minimally invasive) surgery Image-guided biopsy and sentinel node biopsy Lumpectomy versus mastectomy Skin-sparing mastectomy and immediate reconstruction Partial reconstruction after lumpectomy

Author : Marsha Pravder Mirkin
Publisher : Guilford Press
ISBN 13 : 9780898620955
Total Pages : 502 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Women in Context written by Marsha Pravder Mirkin and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 1994-06-24 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging some of our most deeply held assumptions about mental health care, Women in Context explores the ways psychotherapy services for women are influenced by the larger therapy system and the sociopolitical context in which we live. The volume provides a comprehensive and insightful examination of factors that affect women's mental health, demonstrates the inadequacy of traditional psychotherapeutic assumptions, and offers new approaches for addressing women's experiences. Drawn from the work of noted therapists from both individual and family disciplines, the book begins with an overview of the themes that define its scope, namely, women within the larger context of the service delivery system, and the weaving together of gender, race, class, and sexual life style. The second section examines psychotherapy given a sociopolitical understanding of women's life cycle issues. Chapters discuss the influence of societal norms and stereotypes on the ways girls experience adolescence, as well as on marginalized and silenced women including lesbians, single heterosexuals, bisexual women, stepmothers, and older women. Enlightening chapters on women's medical concerns show that many women enter therapy in response to the dual-edged emotional consequences of dealing with illness and with the health care system itself. The book discusses psychotherapeutic approaches to women's health concerns, the pathologizing of normal female life cycle events, and the personal and familial impact of some feared illnesses. Chapters also examine whether new reproductive technologies are truly in the service of women, ways to break the silence surrounding the spread of AIDS among women, and reasons for the lack of research on menopause. The final section of the book illuminates the impact of governmental policies and of deeply imbued belief systems on women's mental health concerns. Violence, poverty, homelessness, teenage pregnancy, and women in the workplace are among the issues explored from a societal perspective. Here, chapters illustrate the application of ideas presented in the text by offering therapeutic insights and describing established programs that are dealing with some of these problems. Difficulties women encounter in the workplace and in traditionally male-dominated institutions are also covered. Concluding with a probing look at one therapist's work with a female client, the book lays the groundwork for the creation of a new model of psychotherapy--a model that will be more compatible with the actual experiences of women's lives. Written in a straightforward, personal style and eschewing technical jargon, this major new work is enlightening reading for all mental health professionals who work with women. Adroitly addressing a range of timely and critical topics, the book will be valued by those who specialize in women's studies and students from a broad range of academic disciplines.