Gender,sexuality and power in Arab society: Arab feminist criticism of discourse and social order

Adnan, Etel. Sitt Marie Rose. Sausalito, California: Post‐Apollo Press, 1982. 105 pp. $7.50 paper.

El Saadawi. Woman at Point Zero. London: Zed Press, 1983. iv + 106 pp. $6.25 paper.

Sabbah, Fatna A. Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. New York: Pergamon Press. 132 pp. including footnotes and index. $22.50 cloth, $9.95 paper.     

Two Books Review

Book reviewed in this article: Doria Shafik Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart: Cynthia Nelson The Mobilization of Muslim Women in Egypt: Ghada Hashem Talhami     

‘It’s a man’s world’: Recent Studies of Male Representation of the Female in the Middle Ages

Blamires, Alcuin (ed.) Woman Defamed and Woman Defended. An Anthology of Medieval Texts Baldwin, John W. The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 Kay, Sarah and Rubin, Miri (eds) Framing Medieval Bodies Lomperis, Linda and Stanbury, Sarah (eds) Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature Burns, E. Jane Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature Krueger, Roberta L. Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance Cazelles, Brigitte The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century Meale, Carol M. (ed.) Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500 Cherewatuk, Karen and Wiethaus, Ulrike (eds) Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistology Genre     

Whose Body? Recent Historiography Relating to Women,Health and the Medical Profession

Mitchinson, Wendy The Nature of Their Bodies: Women and Their Doctors in Victorian Canada Vertinsky, Patricia A. The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Exercise, and Doctors in the Late Nineteenth Century Borst, Charlotte, G. Catching Babies: The Professionalization of Childbirth, 1870–1920 Apple, Rima, D. (ed.) Women, Health and Medicine in America: A Historical Handbook Rothman, Sheila Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History     

Lost and Found: the Woman Writer in the Eighteenth Century

Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: the Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn's Afterlife Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750’1810 Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (eds), Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700’1830     

Apologia of Classical Evolutionism

Hans C. Buechler and Judith‐Maria Buechler. Carmen: The Autobiography of a Spanish Galician Woman. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1981. xxxi + 242 pp. Index, illustrations. $16.95 cloth, $7.95 paper.     

Compassionate Protector of America: The Symbolism of Old Hickory in a Jackson Woman's Mind

Serving as America's only female newspaper editor during the election of 1832, Anne Royall became possibly the first public “Jackson Woman” by supporting the chief executive's bid for re-election in her sheet titled Paul Pry. A closer look at Royall's recollections from her travels in Alabama from 1818 to 1822 shows her to be a blooming “Jackson Woman” developing before the Jackson party was even conceived. In 1828, Royall's Black Books produced a scathing indictment of American society. Both the Adams and Jackson campaigns actively recruited her for their mud-slinging contest but she declined. Three years later Royall started printing Paul Pry. The Black Books and Paul Pry gave Royall a public voice, and she was not afraid to use it. Between 1818 and 1832, Anne Royall went from being a Jackson admirer to being a public Jackson woman.     

Women anthropologists look at women

Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds. Woman, Culture, and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974. xi + 352 pp. Figures, tables, references, and index. $12.50 (cloth), $3.95 (paper).     

REVIEWS

Storytracking. Text, stories, and histories in Central Australia. By Sam D Gill . Reason and Passion. Representations of gender in a Malay society. By Michael G. Peletz . They Make Themselves: Work and Play among the Baining of Papua New Guinea By Jane Fajans . Rethinking Visual Anthropology Edited by Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy . Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman and the Samoans. By Martin Orans . Anyan's Story. A New Guinea Woman in Two Worlds. By Virginia Watson . Simbu Plant-Lore: Plants used by the People in the Central Highlands of New Guinea By Joachim Sterly . Vernacular Christianity Among the Mulia Dani: An Ethnography of Religious Belief Among the Western Dani of Irian Jaya. Indonesia. By Douglas James Hayward .     

BOOK REVIEWS

P. J. P. Goldberg (ed.) Woman is a Worthy Wight. Women in English Society c. 1200–1500 Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany 1800–1914 Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 Mary Buckley (ed.) Perestroika and Soviet Women     

Book Reviews

Twenty Years On, special issue of Australian Historical Studies (1996) Carpenter, Jennifer and MacLean, Sally-Beth (eds) Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women (1995); Ward, Jennifer (ed.) Women of the English Nobility and Gentry, 1066–1500 (1995); Goldberg, P. J. (ed.) Women in England c. 1275–1525. Documentary Sources (1995) Surtz, Ronald E. Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of Saint Teresa of Avila (1995); Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne Feminism and the Honor Plays of Lope de Vega (1993) Matter, E. Ann and Coakley, John (eds) Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Attistic Renaissance (1994); Monson, Craig A. Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (1995) Goodman, Dena The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994) Ruane, Christine Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Russian City Teachers, 1860–1914 (1994) Dyhouse, Carol No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870–1939 (1995) Bonner, Thomas Neville To the Ends of the Earth: Women’s Search for Education in Medicine (1992); Roberts, Shirley Sophia Jex-Blake. A Woman Pioneer in Nineteenth Century Medical Reform (1993); Leneman, Leah In the Service of Life: The Story of Elsie Inglis and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (1994) Hartman Strom, Sharon Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900–1930 (1992); Kwolek-Folland, Angel Gendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870–1930 (1994); Cohen, Miriam Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City, 1900–1950 (1992) Swindells, Julia (ed.) The Uses of Autobiography (1995) Alexander, Sally Becoming a Woman and Other Essays in 19th and 20th Century Feminist History (1994): Davidoff, Leonore Worlds Between: Historial Perspectives on Gender and Class (1995)     

Things Japanese: Something old,something new

Bernstein, Gail Lee. Haruko's World: A Japanese Farm Woman and Her Community. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983. xvii + 199 pp. including maps, photographs. $15.00 cloth.

Lebra, Takie Sugiyama. Japanese Women: Constraint and Fulfillment. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984. xi + 315 pp. including notes, references, glossary, index. $18.95 cloth.

Smith, Robert J. Japanese Society: Tradition, Self and the Social Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. xii + 176 pp. including notes, bibliography, author ₍and subject indices. $19.95 cloth.

Smith, Robert J., and Ella Lury Wiswell. The Women of Suye Mura. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. xxxvii + 293 pp. including maps, photographs, glossary, index. $7.50 paper.     

Book Reviews

Book review in this article: Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (ed.) Le moyen age Erika Uitz, Die Frau in der mittelalterlichen Stadt [Woman in the medieval city Gerald Beyreuther, Barbara Pätzold and Erika Uitz (eds) Fürstinnen und Städterinnen. Frauen im Mittelalter [Noblewomen and Townswomen. Women in the Middle Ages] Emilie Amt (ed.) Women's Lives in Medieval Europe. A Sourcebook Autumn Stanley, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes Towards a Revised History of Technology Constance Wall Holt, Welsh Women: An Annotated Bibliography of Women in Wales and Women of Welsh Descent in America Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon Kimberly Marshall (ed.) Rediscovering the Muses: Women's Musical Traditions Paola Corti (ed.) Annali dell'lstituto Alcide Cervi [Annals of the Alcide Cervi Institute] Margherita Pelaja, Matrimonio e sessualità a Roma nell'Ottocento [Marriage and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Rome] Silvia Franchini, Elites ed educazione femminile nell'Italia dell'Ottocento: L'Istituto della SS. Annunziata di Firenze [Elites and female education in nineteenth-century Italy: The Institute of St Annunziata in Florence] Barbara Kanner, Women in English Social History 1800–1914: A Guide to Research in Three Volumes Jane Lewis, Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England Emily Groszos Ooms, Women and Millenarian Protest in Meiji Japan: Deguchi Nao and Mmotoky Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern Ellen Wiley Todd, The‘New Woman’Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street Julie Wheelwright, The Fatal Lover. Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage Lucie Aubrac, Outwitting the Gestapo Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France 1917–1927 Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain     

Sex differences: Genuine and spurious

Corine Hutt. Males and Females. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972. 158 pp. Figures, references and index. $2.45.

John Money and Anke Ehrhardt. Man & Woman, Boy & Girl. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. xiv + 311 pp. Illustrations, figures, bibliography, glossary, and index. $3.50.

Ann Oakley. Sex, Gender and Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. 223pp. Illustrations, figures and references. $2.95.     

George Egerton,James Joyce and the Irish Künstlerroman

George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859–1945), from Co. Laois, was the New Woman author most closely associated with the Decadent movement. As such, she was also the New Woman writer most profoundly affected by the downfall of Oscar Wilde. After the Wilde trials of 1895, Egerton's connection to Decadence and New Womanhood would make her work anathema to much of the British public. This essay will argue that ongoing tendencies to situate her texts solely within the New Woman categorisation and an English cultural location have had the detrimental effect of obscuring their importance to a specifically Irish literary tradition. By examining Egerton's 1898 novel The Wheel of God, focusing on its status as an Irish Künstlerroman written from a position of exile, and drawing comparisons between it and the works of James Joyce, this essay will seek to redress this imbalance.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. Alice Kessler-Harris, A Woman's Wage. Historical Meanings and Social Consequences. Hilary Marland (trans), ‘Mother and Child Were Saved’: The Memoirs (1693–1740) of the Frisian Midwife Catharina Schrader. Ann Taves (ed), Religion and Domestic Violence in Early New England: The Memoirs of Abigail Abbott Bailey. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, Nature, Gender and Science in New England. Carol A. Kolmerten, Women in Utopia: The Ideology of Gender in the American Owenite Communities. Sally L. Kitch, Chaste Liberation: Celibacy and Female Cultural Status. Frances Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias. Shahida Lateef, Muslim Women in India: Political and Private Realities, 1890s–1980s. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: the British Experience. Ruth Compton Brouwer, New Women for Cod: Canadian Presbyterian Women and India Missions, 1876–1914. Catriona Blake, The Charge of the Parasols. Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman. Gynaecology & Gender in England, 1800–1929. Felicia Gordon, The Integral Feminist: Madeleine Pelletier, 1874–1939.     

Spying in the British Post Office,Victorian Politics and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

In 1844, the British public learned that the government was secretly opening exiled Young Italy leader Giuseppe Mazzini’s private letters and sharing information with continental authorities. For outraged citizens, espionage in that quintessential liberal institution, the reformed British Post Office, appeared un-English, despotic and criminal, the makings of a Gothic plot. Representations of the Post Office Scandal in Parliament and print predict the revision of the Gothic into the sensation novel that occurred with the publication of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Attention to the fields of Anglo-Italian studies, mid-Victorian print culture and the development of narrative form in the mid-nineteenth century illustrates the historical and political implications of letter-opening for the emergence of a new fictional genre. The Post Office Espionage Scandal and The Woman in White share a central place in a mid-Victorian moment of evolution in the mutually constitutive relationship between Italian and British national identities, producing and reflecting a crisis in Britishness focused on the secret tyrannies concealed beneath the surface of Victorian liberalism. The letter-opening scandal reveals a crisis in Victorian liberalism in the political realm and the media, while The Woman in White translates this Victorian crisis of confidence into a literary genre defined by exposing the sordid undercurrents of British society: sensation fiction. Together, the espionage scandal and Collins’s novel respond to and generate a challenge to Victorian complacency that emerged out of the collision of British and Italian politics and culture in the mid-nineteenth century.     

“We're not a paper for working women,but of and by them”: Australian communist party womens’ papers 1930–1939

Historical studies of the radical left in Australia have, until recently, been neglectful of the contribution of female activists. The specific problems and issues faced by these women have been largely ignored. For instance, the principal academic history of the CPA mentions in passing only a handful of prominent women members and alludes to no issues which were of specific concern to the female membership of the CPA (Davidson, 1969). However, despite a ’line’ which opposed separate womens’ organisations, the CPA was sufficiently mindful of the specificity of a range of issues facing women to establish a separate national women's journal in 1930. This journal was called Working Woman, and continued in publication until 1936, when it was succeeded by a new journal entitled Woman Today, which went out of existence in 1939.     

Book Reviews

Book review in this Article: Joanna E. Ziegler, Sculpture of Compassion. The Pieta and the Beguines in the Southern Low Countries c.1300-C.1600 Thomas V. Cohen and Elizabeth S. Cohen, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome: Trials before the Papal Magistrates Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe Wayne E. Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art Hilary Marland, The Art of Midwifery. Early Modern Midwives in Europe Susan Brock and E. A. J. Honigman (eds) Playhouse Wills, 1558–1642. An Edition of Wills by Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in the London Theatre Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James Laura Levine, Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization 1579–1642 Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women's Literary History Richard Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660–1730 Mona Scheuermann, Her Bread to Earn: Women, Money, and Society from Defoe to Austen N. H. Keeble (ed.) The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman: A Reader Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500–1760: A Social History Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews in this Article: Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages,. David Levine, Reproducing Families. The political economy of English population history. Mikiso Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Callows: Rebel Women in Pre-war Japan. Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism. Brian Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries, Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars. Birgit Sawyer and Anita Goransson (eds), Manliga strukturer och kvinnliga strategier. Susan Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside: women's roles in rural development in the Soviet Union. Veronica Strong-Boag, The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919–1939.