Spinsters And Lesbians

Author : Trisha Franzen
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814726410
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spinsters and Lesbians written by Trisha Franzen and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have long held fast to a rigid definition of womanhood, revolving around husband, home, and children. Women who rebelled against this definition and carved out independent lives for themselves have often been rendered invisible in U.S. history.In this unusual comparative study, Trisha Franzen brings to light the remarkable lives of two generations of autonomous women: Progressive Era spinsters and mid-twentieth century lesbians. While both groups of women followed similar paths to independence--separating from their families, pursuing education, finding work, and creating woman-centered communities--they faced different material and cultural challenge and came to claim very different identities. Many of the turn-of-the-century women were prominent during their time, from internationally recognized classicist Edith Hamilton through two early Directors of the Women's Bureau, Mary Anderson and Freida Miller. Maturing during the time of a broad and powerful women's movement, they were among that era's new women, the often-single women who were viewed as in the vanguard of women's struggle for equality. In contrast, never-married women after World War II, especially lesbians, were considered beyond the pale of real womanhood. Before the women's and gay/lesbian liberation movements, they had no positive contemporary images of alternative lives for women. Highlighting the similarities and differences between women-oriented women confronting changing gender and sexuality systems, Spinsters and Lesbians thus traces a continuum among women who constructed lives outside institutionalized heterosexuality.

Author : Trisha Franzen
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814728111
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spinsters and Lesbians written by Trisha Franzen and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have long held fast to a rigid definition of womanhood, revolving around husband, home, and children. Women who rebelled against this definition and carved out independent lives for themselves have often been rendered invisible in U.S. history.In this unusual comparative study, Trisha Franzen brings to light the remarkable lives of two generations of autonomous women: Progressive Era spinsters and mid-twentieth century lesbians. While both groups of women followed similar paths to independence--separating from their families, pursuing education, finding work, and creating woman-centered communities--they faced different material and cultural challenge and came to claim very different identities. Many of the turn-of-the-century women were prominent during their time, from internationally recognized classicist Edith Hamilton through two early Directors of the Women's Bureau, Mary Anderson and Freida Miller. Maturing during the time of a broad and powerful women's movement, they were among that era's new women, the often-single women who were viewed as in the vanguard of women's struggle for equality. In contrast, never-married women after World War II, especially lesbians, were considered beyond the pale of real womanhood. Before the women's and gay/lesbian liberation movements, they had no positive contemporary images of alternative lives for women. Highlighting the similarities and differences between women-oriented women confronting changing gender and sexuality systems, Spinsters and Lesbians thus traces a continuum among women who constructed lives outside institutionalized heterosexuality.

Author : Emma Liggins
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526111640
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Odd women? written by Emma Liggins and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This genealogy of the 'odd woman' compares representations of spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women’s fiction and auto/biography from the 1850s to the 1930s. Women outside heterosexual marriage in this period were seen as abnormal, superfluous, incomplete and threatening, yet were also hailed as ‘women of the future’. Before 1850 odd women were marginalised, minor characters in British women’s fiction, yet by the 1930s spinsters, lesbians and widows had become heroines. This book examines how women writers, including Charlotte Brontë, Elisabeth Gaskell, Ella Hepworth Dixon, May Sinclair, E. H. Young, Radclyffe Hall, Winifred Holtby and Virginia Woolf, challenged dominant perceptions of singleness and lesbianism in their novels, stories and autobiographies. Drawing on advice literature, medical texts and feminist polemic, it demonstrates how these narratives responded to contemporary political controversies around the vote, women’s work, sexual inversion and birth control, as well as examining the impact of the First World War.

Author : Bridget Hill
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300088205
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Women Alone written by Bridget Hill and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book opens a window into the lives of British spinsters in the mid-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, assessing the opportunities open to them and the restrictions placed upon them within different social classes, occupations, and periods. Hill examines how often spinsters were able to earn enough money to live independently, She looks at the part single women played in religious organisations and the role of friendship and letter-writing in their daily lives. She describes the nature of close relationships between women, some lesbian but many others not. Exploring the spinsters' possibilities of escape from restrictive lives, particularly by emigration or crossdressing, she discusses how successful these were. She provides details about the degree of surveillance single women suffered from the authorities and how often they were seen as a threat to social order. Finally she addresses the question of whether all spinsters of this era were suffering victims or potential viragoes, or neither.

Author : Sheila Jeffreys
Publisher : Spinifex Press
ISBN 13 : 9781875559633
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Spinster and Her Enemies written by Sheila Jeffreys and published by Spinifex Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation. This feminist text is released here with a revised and updated introduction. It examines the activities of feminist campaigners around such issues as child abuse and prostitution and how these campaigns shaped social purity in the 1880s and 1890s.

Author : Kate Bolick
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 0385347146
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spinster written by Kate Bolick and published by Crown. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Notable Book “Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman’s existence.” So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why­ she—along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing—remains unmarried. This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless—the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life. Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives—a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savor.

Author : Emma Donoghue
Publisher : Policy Press
ISBN 13 : 9781447279464
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Passions Between Women written by Emma Donoghue and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passions Between Women looks at stories of lesbian desires, acts and identities from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Far from being invisible, the figure of the woman who felt passion for women in this period was a subject of confusion and contradiction: she could be put in a freak show as a 'hermaphrodite', denounced as a 'tribade' or 'lesbian', revered as a 'romantic friend', jailed as a 'female husband' or gossiped about as a 'woman-lover', 'tommy' or 'Sapphist'. Through an examination of a wealth of new medical, legal and erotic source material, together with re-readings of classics of English literature, Emma Donoghue uncovers the astonishing range of lesbian and bisexual identities described in British texts between 1668 and 1801. Female pirates and spiritual mentors, chambermaids and queens, poets and prostitutes, country idylls and whipping clubs all take their place in an intriguing panorama of lesbian lives and loves. 'Controversial, erotic and radical, Emma Donoghue's lesbian voyage of exploration outlines an astonishing spectrum of gender rebellion which creates a new map of eighteenth-century sexual territories and identities.' Patricia Duncker

Author : Emma Liggins
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781781707296
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Odd Women? written by Emma Liggins and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Laura L. Doan
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780231084109
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Lesbian Postmodern written by Laura L. Doan and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the shifting definitions of the terms lesbian and postmodern, the lesbian in contemporary fiction and Hollywood film, and the pitfalls and rewards of the recent lesbian theory.

Author : JoAnn Loulan
Publisher : Aunt Lute Books
ISBN 13 : 9780933216297
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lesbian Passion written by JoAnn Loulan and published by Aunt Lute Books. This book was released on 1987 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines lesbian self-esteem, dating, passionate friendships, survival after incest and celibacy. Includes research on the lives and sex practices of 1600 lesbians. Explicit descriptions of sex.