Women’s and Gender History: a Berkshire Essential

Description

Women’s and Gender History, a Berkshire Essential, provides a look at women’s lives and the importance of gender in societies across cultures and time, extending its scope and appeal to younger and older readers, female and male alike. Topics include child nurture, initiation and rites of passage, kinship, sex and sexuality, and education (especially Mary Wollstonecraft’s eighteenth-century advocacy for girls). Some articles address re-considerations of long-accepted terms (such as work and power or matriarchy and patriarchy), or interactions across disciplines that brought gender studies into view. Others highlight movements in the modern era that championed human rights, women’s reproductive rights, suffrage, emancipation, and gay and lesbian rights—up to and beyond bra burning, the symbolic gesture of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s that became a rite of passage for a new wave of women.