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Analyzes the evidence for the lives of women living in the White Monastery, located in upper Egypt, under its third abbot, Shenoute, who served from 385–464 c.e. Several of Shenoute's letters, which were written in Coptic and survive in fragmentary form, address periods of conflict either between female monks or between the female community and Shenoute. As a result, they differ in genre from any other evidence of female monasticism in late antiquity and so present a unique corpus of material for investigation. A key issue pertains to Shenoute's efforts to establish his monastic authority over the women's community, which was physically separate from the men's, and the evidence for the women's acceptance and resistance to that expansion. I then argue that gender analysis reveals that Shenoute regarded his efforts as part of the creation of a universal monasticism, which had uniform requirements for male and female monks, including the controversial subject of corporal punishment. It simultaneously reveals, however, points of gender asymmetry, and so inequity, within monastic authority and practices, some promoted by Shenoute and some by the women themselves. Finally, Shenoute's use of the family as a model for the monastery helped him create kinship bonds among all monks, both those who had left their families and those who brought their relatives with them. Like gender, with which the family is intimately connected, this model also allows Shenoute to negotiate tensions and contradictions using egalitarian language while simultaneously constructing patriarchal authority.

For over two hundred years of narrative culture, when female characters try to get together, crazy things happen. Indeed, the greater the means at women’s disposal, the more severe and twisted is the anxious reaction. But behind this broad anxiety lurks a powerful ideal of sympathetic and strategic female networks, an ideal that takes its intimate shape from the expectations of communications media, and that underwrites the very culture that would deny it. The book examines novelistic culture from the British novel to Hollywood film as a series of responses to the threat and promise of female networks. In texts from Clarissa, Emma, and The Portrait of a Lady to Sorry, Wrong Number, Vertigo, and You’ve Got Mail, it argues that a recurring gothic nightmare haunts plots of courtship and marriage, and that the concept of female networks illuminates the exits, for culture and criticism alike. And while this study must of necessity visit an uncanny realm of lost messages and false suitors, telepathy and artificial intelligence, locked rooms and time-traveling stalkers, these occult concerns only confirm the power at stake in the most basic modes of female communication, in gossip, letters, and phones.

One of only a few women who ruled ancient Egypt as a king during its thousands of years of history, Tausret was the last pharaoh of the 19th dynasty (c.1200 bce), the last ruling descendent of Ramesses the Great, and one of only two female monarchs buried in Egypt's renowned Valley of the Kings. Though mentioned even in Homer as the pharaoh of Egypt who interacted with Helen at the time of the Trojan War, she has long remained a figure shrouded in mystery, hardly known even by many Egyptologists. Nevertheless, recent archaeological discoveries have illuminated Tausret's importance, her accomplishments, and the extent of her influence. This book combines distinguished scholars whose research and excavations have increased our understanding of the life and reign of this great woman. This book utilizes recent discoveries to correctly position Tausret alongside famous ruling queens such as Hatshepsut and Cleopatra, figures who have long dominated our view of the female monarchs of ancient Egypt. The book brings together archaeological, historical, women's studies, and other approaches to provide a text that will be an important contribution to the literature of Egyptology.

As a female writer in the shadow of the cultural nimbus generated by her male peers, and as a transcendentalist in the spirit of Emerson among modernists, Susan Glaspell has suffered from literary obscurity from the start. An accomplished playwright, and co-founder of the Provincetown Players, Glaspell created self-reliant female heroines in works which were often dismissed as “experimental” by her colleagues. By focusing on the women of Glaspell’s writing and their struggles with the issues of motherhood and social limitation, this book seeks to vindicate Susan Glaspell and to offer her work to the attention of a new generation of readers. At the same time, the author offers a valuable and topical inquiry into the nature of the cultural and political forces that shape our perceptions of literary “greatness” and, ultimately, the canon.

Much recent work on the history of colonial medicine argues that medicine was the handmaiden of colonial power and of capitalism. Highlighting the tenuousness of colonial power, this book challenges this interpretation through careful investigation of the complicated relationship between medicine, politics, and capital in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. It includes chapters on midwifery training and female circumcision, on health and racial ideology, and on the quest to find the yellow fever virus in East Africa.

This book presents 12 case studies on female legislative representation in new post-communist democracies in Europe. The cases represent a wide range of “pathways” from communist rule. Five rank as lower-middle income (Bulgaria, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine), four as upper-middle income (Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, and two as high-income (Germany and Slovenia). A general framework on legislative recruitment based on Western political science literature is used to explain changes over time within each country. It is shown that many of the theoretical predictions based on existing literature from industrialized democracies hold true in Eastern Europe. The book ends with a discussion on the next steps to take in understanding women’s access to political power in post-communist Europe.

The history of Virgil and his receptions is long and varied. His 20th-century career transformed his appearance as an anaemic imitator of Homer into the ‘Father of the West’, speaking above all for the marginalized and exiled. At the turn of the millennium it is women writers who, having been largely absent from the story of Virgil's reception, are for the first time shaping a new aetas Vergiliana by drawing on his poems to speak of their own preoccupations and concerns. Through an analysis of Virgil's presence in the work of contemporary women writers from North America (Joyce Carol Oates, Janet Lembke, Ursula Le Guin), Britain (Margaret Drabble, A. S. Byatt, Ruth Fainlight, Michèle Roberts, Carol Ann Duffy, U. A. Fanthorpe, Josephine Balmer), Ireland (Eavan Boland), and continental Europe (Christa Wolf, Hélène Cixous, Charlotte Delbo, and Monique Wittig), this book identifies a new Virgil: one who speaks in female tones of the anxieties, exclusions, pleasures, and threats of the contemporary world. While each of the female writers included in this volume draws upon her own distinct cultural heritage, the book focuses on a number of shared themes and values which emerge through their work.