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This chapter explores feminist engagements with religion in works by Nawal Sa’dawi and Salwa Bakr. It reads Sa’dawi’s Suqut al-Imam (1987) and Jannat wa Iblis (1992) as feminist dystopias which employ unconventional narrative techniques to augment the dystopic effect and take issue with the founding texts of monotheism as historic vehicles for female oppression. It discusses Salwa Bakr’s rehabilitation of Zulaykha in Wasf al-Bulbul (1993) and explores Al-ʿAraba al-Dhahibiyya la Tasʿad ila al-Samaʾ (1991) by the same author as a critique of religion via the trope of madness, paying attention to how religion, as belief, custom, institution and law, is implicated in the plight of women in the text. The discussion also takes in the Alifa Rifʿat’s stories as a rare example of Islamic literature admitted to the canon. Each of these four chapters begins with a contextual introduction.

This concluding chapter joyfully traces the establishment of the Women's Liberation Movement in the year 1970. Black women collaborated with white women to give rise to the movement and even succeeded in doing so. The chapter describes the Women's Liberation movement as it turned to become a mass radical movement. Thanks to the efforts of women activists the Women's Liberation Movement became the liveliest conversational topic throughout the nation. Even the media was forced to turn in the favor of Women's Liberation and feminist literature flooded the markets. The Women's Liberation Movement gave rise to the view that women were a class in themselves and should not be just viewed as mere victims of capitalism, racism, and male chauvinism.

During the process of the decriminalisation of sex work in New Zealand, several sentiments arose. Of particular interest were the feminist sentiments that both opposed and supported the cause for law reform. This chapter explores the diverse New Zealand feminist views. It uses examples submitted to the Justice and Electoral Select Committee that considered the Prostitution Reform Bill. The submissions selected in the chapter are those from self-identified feminist individuals or organisations or from men and women whose arguments could be considered as feminist. Of the 222 submissions received by the committee, 56 are considered in this chapter, wherein 40 supported decriminalising prostitution and 16 opposed it. The present chapter aims to serve as a guide to achieving a good understanding of the range of arguments based on feminist ideas presented to the committee. It also includes extracts from a published article by a New Zealand feminist, and some influential international feminist literature when deemed necessary. Although the chapter considers prostitution from an international feminist view, it mainly focuses on the views expressed by New Zealand feminists.

This chapter undertakes a reappraisal of Sara Paretsky's 1982 crime novel Indemnity Only. It examines its critical engagement with genre and the diverse landscape of feminist criticism during the period of its publication, and discusses Paretsky's articulation of an evolving feminist position in genre fiction. As we enter the fourth wave of feminism and new feminist initiatives and campaigns take off, an assessment of the importance of second-wave feminist literature in the light of those developments is timely. A number of critics have discussed Paretsky's novel as an example of feminist appropriation of genre fiction. The chapter extends these readings by arguing for its centrality to second-wave feminist fiction, focusing on specific areas and thematic concerns that highlight the complex relationship between Paretsky's text and feminist criticism and illustrate the ongoing dialogue between activism and fiction.

This book brings together the voices and writings of English-speaking women that circulated around the North Atlantic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From Abigail Adams and Nanye’hi (Nancy Ward) to Mercy Otis Warren and Mary Robinson, it looks at women and their revolutionary dreams and words, thus uncovering the many origins of feminist thought and revising the history of feminism. It describes a new approach to literary study known as transatlanticism, which focuses on the transnational and intercultural networks of literary and cultural movement around the Atlantic world, including Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Drawing mostly on women’s writing that appeared in print, the book examines how women’s lives, ideas, imaginations, hopes, and fears were affected by transatlantic movements. It looks at the factors that shaped modern feminist literature and thought, particularly the ideals and the rhetoric of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Finally, it discusses women’s lives and feminist struggles during the so-called Age of Revolutions—a tumultuous and treacherous period for women around the Atlantic world.

This chapter builds upon the works of James Smethurst, Alan Wald, William J. Maxwell, and Bill V. Mullen by reading Alice Childress’s 1950s writings in the context of her Left activism and her connection to a Left feminist community. It argues for the significance of Childress’s work to the development of black feminist literature and criticism by looking at the ways that she developed her ideas as part of a cadre of Left women who fought to create an alternative to the dehumanizing stereotypes of black women in film and on television. Childress helped in educating the Left on what Claudia Jones referred to as the “special problems of Negro women” by creating a play that showed the effects of segregation, limited job opportunities, and racial violence on working-class black women.

This chapter illuminates the construction of caring selves in the work of feeding the urban poor. It develops the idea of moral selving in the context of charitable action and makes clear how structural arrangements guide self-betterment while concurrently individual actions make possible particular structural arrangements. It provides an opportunity to consider how volunteerism, charity, rehabilitation, social movement activism, and welfare provision are not mutually exclusive practices but rather are configured in complicated and often contradictory ways in the context of both the actions of different individuals and the work of different organizations. It addresses how the formulation of moral selving and its particular manifestations at Loaves & Fishes and The Salvation Army fits into social psychological understandings of the emotional self and orientation of the self, as well as the feminist literature on the caring self. Furthermore, it indicates an intriguing correlation between the moral rhetoric and institutional structure at The Salvation Army, its emphasis on honor, and the predominantly male nature of the volunteer force and their predominantly working-class roots. The Salvation Army, with its resemblance to muscular Christianity, promised reclaimed manhood through hard work and battle with the evils of the body.

In this review of David Brin’s Glory Season, Jones foregrounds the issues that arise when feminism is looked at from a male perspective. She criticises the text for presenting a feminist utopia so clearly designed by a man and analyses the sexual stereotyping that comes out of it.

The chapter provides and introductive summary of the book. It provides a review of the important aspects and studies available in understanding the background of women’s work and its devaluation through the history of industrialization and growth of capitalism and patriarchy. The chapter also discusses briefly the need and importance of the study of feminist literature on the question of work, production, and reproduction in the capitalist economy. It explains the relevance of the study of the honorary women workers in India’s anganwadis through the history of the Integrated Child Development Scheme. It discusses in detail the relevance of the study towards a better understanding of women’s work in India. It also provides a chapter-wise brief of all the chapters in the book.

This chapter contains the first review in the final section of the book, ‘The Reviews’. Within it, Jones critically analyses Sarah Lefanu’s In the Chinks of the World Machine. In her review, Jones addresses the relationship between feminism and science fiction and assesses the relevance of gender roles.

‘Sex: The Brains of Female Hyena Twins’ was originally a paper read at the second annual conference of the Academic Fantastic Fiction Network, at Reading University in December 1994, and was also published in Strange Attractors. Throughout the essay, Jones makes comparisons to the sexual habits and composition of other species and wildlife, but pays particularly close attention to the changing attitudes toward gender, human sexual behaviour and social roles in feminist science fiction and other literature.

This chapter contains Jones’ review of Carolyn J. Cherryh’s novels, mainly Serpent’s Reach and Cyteen. In her review, Jones foregrounds Cherryh’s use of strong female protagonists, and looks at the methods and techniques used to realistically put forward a futuristic piece of fiction.

Chapter 2 offers different models and parameters of female agency. Iliadic and Odyssean women are differentiated in terms of their roles in war- and peacetime respectively, and the ways in which Andromache and Helen weave are used as case studies for ‘normal’ and ‘exceptional’ female characters. The chapter engages closely with these exceptional women, bringing together Helen and Penelope in terms of their liminal position in society and the elevated agency that allows. Drawing on feminist literature on female communicative channels and the potentially liberating power of technology, this chapter then presents the ‘politics of objects’: the creation and distribution of textiles through which supposedly ‘commodified’ characters create their own kind of commerce, and their own way of communicating.