Gender Studies Book List
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism – On Sale
The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women, Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women.…
Pompilia
A Feminist Reading of Robert Browning's The Ring and The Book
By Ann P. Brady
When Count Guido Franceschini was tried by a Roman court in 1698 for the rape and murder of his young wife Pompilia, he had the church, the state, and “all of sensible Rome” supporting him. Their cynical mandate sprang from the traditional belief that in a patriarchal society the male should wield absolute power, including the power of life and death, over the female.…
The Prisoner Pear
Stories from the Lake
The twelve stories in The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake take place in an affluent suburb of Portland, Oregon, but they could be taken from any number of similar enclaves across the United States.…
Profiles of Ohio Women, 1803-2003 – On Sale
The state of Ohio has produced an impressive number of remarkable women, women who have moved to the forefront of their professions or have enriched their communities or have made a difference in myriad ways.…
Raising the Dust – On Sale
The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Raising the Dust identifies a heretofore-overlooked literary phenomenon that author Beth Sutton-Ramspeck calls "literary housekeeping." The three writers she examines rejected turn-of-the-century aestheticism and modernism in favor of a literature that is practical, even ostensibly mundane, designed to "set the human household in order.…
Recollections of Anaïs Nin – On Sale
By Her Contemporaries
Edited by Benjamin Franklin V
Recollections of Anaïs Nin presents Nin through the eyes of twenty-six people who knew her. She is the unconventional, distant aunt; the thoughtful friend; the owner of a strangely disarming voice; the author eager for attention yet hypersensitive to criticism; the generous advisor to a literary magazine; the adulteress; the beautiful septuagenarian; the recommender of books--the contributors elaborate on thses and many other perceptions of Nin.…
Recollections of Virginia Woolf
In the words of its editor, “This book is not intended to provide an assessment of Virginia Woolf’s work. A great deal has already been written about her novels and critical essays. It is concerned essentially with Virginia Woolf herself: about whom little has been said in print.…
Red, White, Black & Blue – On Sale
A Dual Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia
Edited by Dolores Johnson
By William M. Drennen Jr. and Kojo (William T.) Jones Jr.
Red, White, Black, and Blue began as a collaborative memoir by William M. "Bill" Drennen, a European American, and Kojo (William T.) Jones, an African American. These Appalachian men grew up in the South Hills section of Charleston, West Virginia.…
Resisting Regionalism – On Sale
Gender And Naturalism In American Fiction, 1885-1915
When James Lane Allen defined the “Feminine Principle” and the “Masculine Principle” in American fiction for the Atlantic Monthly in 1897, he in effect described local color fiction and naturalism, two branches of realism often regarded as bearing little relationship to each other.…
Rookwood and the Industry of Art – On Sale
Women, Culture, and Commerce, 1880-1913
Rookwood Pottery of Cincinnati--the largest, longest-lasting, and arguably most important American Art Pottery--reflected the country's cultural and commercial milieux in the production, marketing, and consumption of its own products.…
Ruskin’s Mythic Queen – On Sale
Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture
John Ruskin's prominence as the author of "Of Queen's Gardens," his principal statement of Victorian gender opposition, makes him an ideal example for analyzing the power of mythic discourse to undermine gender division.…
Sarah the Priestess
The First Matriarch of Genesis
The only source in which Sarah is mentioned is the Book of Genesis, which contains very few highly selective and rather enigmatic stories dealing with her. On the surface, these stories tell us very little about Sarah, and what they do tell is complicated and confused by the probability that it represents residue surviving from two differnt written sources based on two independent oral traditions.…
Staking Her Claim – On Sale
The Life of Belinda Mulrooney, Klondike and Alaska Entrepreneur
By Melanie J. Mayer and Robert N. DeArmond
If Horatio Alger had imagined a female heroine in the same mold as one of the young male heroes in his rags-to-riches stories, she would have looked like Belinda Mulrooney. Smart, ambitious, competitive, and courageous, Belinda Mulrooney was destined through her legendary pioneering in the wilds of the Yukon basin to found towns and many businesses.…
Stepping Forward – On Sale
Black Women in Africa and the Americas
Edited by Catherine Higgs, Barbara A. Moss and Earline Rae Ferguson
A unique and important study, Stepping Forward examines the experiences of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black women in Africa and African diaspora communities from a variety of perspectives in a number of different settings.…
Stolen Life
The Journey of a Cree Woman
By Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson
The award-winning Stolen Life is a remarkable collaborative work between a distinguished novelist and a Cree woman who broke a lifetime of silence to share her story. Imprisoned for murder at the age of twenty-seven, Yvonne Johnson sought out Rudy Wiebe, the chronicler of her ancestor Big Bear, as a means of coming to terms with her self, her past, and the crime that defines her future.…
The Sturdy Oak
A Composite Novel of American Politics
Edited by Elizabeth Jordan
In the spring of 1916, as the workers for woman suffrage were laying plans for another attack on the bastions of male supremacy, the idea for The Sturdy Oak was born. Based on the rules of an old parlor game, wherein one person begins a narrative, another continues it, and another follows, this collaborative effort by the leading writers of the day, such as Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Canfield, and Kathleen Norris, is a satiric look at the gender roles of the time.…
Subjects on Display
Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity
By Beth Newman
Subjects on Display explores a recurrent figure at the heart of many nineteenth-century English novels: the retiring, self-effacing woman who is conspicuous for her inconspicuousness. Beth Newman draws upon both psychoanalytic theory and recent work in social history as she argues that this paradoxical figure, who often triumphs over more dazzling, eye-catching rivals, is a response to the forces that made personal display a vexed issue for Victorian women.…
Taking Root – On Sale
Narratives of Jewish Women in Latin America
In Taking Root, Latin American women of Jewish descent, from Mexico to Uruguay, recall their coming of age with Sabbath candles and Hebrew prayers, Ladino songs and merengue music, Queen Esther and the Virgin of Guadalupe.…
The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature – On Sale
Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development.…
Vernon Lee – On Sale
Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual
By Christa Zorn
The subject of renewed interest among literary and cultural scholars, Vernon Lee wrote more than forty books, in a broad range of genres, including fiction, history, aesthetics, and travel literature. Early on, Lee established her reputation as a public critic whose unconventional viewpoints stood out among those of her contemporaries.…
