Gender Ideology And Action

The nine essays in this volume examine women's public and private lives from sixteenth century England to twentieth-century Chicago, from Queen Elizabeth I to Jane Addams of Hull House. Editor Janet Sharistanian's main purpose in organizing these essays is to offer a response to and a critique of theories of the domestic/public split in Western ideology and history that have emerged from feminist anthropology.

Review: ?The provocative essays in this collection examine women's public roles in Western civilization, principally in England and the US. The essays revise or reinterpret a theory originally postulated in 1974 by cultural anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo, which suggested that the dichotomy between women in the private sphere and men in the public sphere was a useful analytical construct for studying women in all cultures.

By 1980, Rosaldo had begun modifying this approach, urging scholars to look at the relationship between the private and public spheres in concrete historical and cultural contexts before making any generalizations. The authors represented in Gender, Ideology, and Action have followed Rosaldo's later advice and focused on the private/public roles of women in specific historical settings....

The most sweeping and theoretical contribution explores how the modern feminist concept, the personal is political, ' affects feminist literature and literary criticism. A striking common theme of the collection is that women, no matter what their prescribed roles in a given culture, found ways to engage in and contribute to the public sector while not always understanding the implications of this.

Upper-division undergraduates and above.?-Choice

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