by Caroline Sweetman (1995)
The UN Human Rights Conference in 1993 proclaimed that 'Women's rights are human rights'. This book in the Focus on Gender series explores issues of women's rights including the legal background and history of human rights legislation, the special human-rights problems of women in situations of conflict or as refugees, violence against women as a human-rights violation, women's rights as workers, the rights of disabled women, and the importance of providing information and training to enable women to claim their rights. Focusing on women's rights involves the recognition that, throughout the world, legal systems to guarantee rights have their roots in cultures which discriminate against women. Development and human rights are closely linked, and the empowerment of women to claim the human rights to which they are entitled will enable them to take full advantage of development processes.
Marianne Berger Woods
"This annotated bibliography includes all period novels with a New Woman protagonist and all period articles with the New Woman as primary subject, along with several poems, cartoons, advertisements, and artworks. Because the New Woman was also the target of many derisive articles, poems, and visual works, these critical response pieces are included as well"--Provided by publisher.
Monica Byrne
In a Catholic reformatory in 1914, three teenage girls (Anne, Theresa, and Lucy) pass the time with masturbation rituals, though they're innocent of the "sinful" nature of the act. Then a belligerent new girl, Joan, shows up, bearing illegal contraband: birth control materials distributed by the women's-rights activist Margaret Sanger. The girls start reading the material and jokingly pretend to venerate Sanger as a saint, but then they undergo a profound conversion experience. They begin to follow Sanger's life in the newspaper, pretending that they're traveling on their own, assassinating enemies and taking lovers at will. Through their letters to each other, they reveal their pasts, marked by abuse. The girls slide deeper and deeper into their illusion, to the extent that objects from their fantasy world start appearing in the real one -- including a baby.
Derek C. Maus
Overview: Although 2002 MacArthur Fellowship recipient Colson Whitehead ardently resists overarching categorizations of his work, Derek C. Maus argues in this volume that Whitehead's first six books are linked by a careful balance between adherence to and violation of the wisdom of past generations. Whitehead bids readers to come along with him on challenging, often open-ended literary excursions designed to reexamine accepted notions of truth. Understanding Colson Whitehead unravels the parallel structures found within Whitehead's fiction from his 1999 novel The Intuitionist through 2011's Zone One. In his choice of literary forms, Whitehead attempts to revitalize the limiting formulas to which they have been reduced by first imitating and then violating the conventions of those genres and sub-genres. Whitehead similarly tests subject matter, again imitating and then satirizing various forms of conventional wisdom as a means of calling out unexamined, ignored, and/or malevolent aspects of American culture. Although only one of many subjects that Whitehead addresses, race often takes a place of centrality in his works and, as such, serves as the prime example of how Whitehead asks his readers to revisit their assumptions about meanings and values. By jumbling the literary formulas of the detective novel, the heroic folktale, the coming-of-age story, and the zombie apocalypse, Whitehead reveals the flaws and shortcomings of many of the long-lasting stories through which Americans have defined themselves. Some of the stories Whitehead focuses on are explicitly literary in nature, but he more frequently directs his attention toward the historical and cultural processes that influence how race, class, gender, education, social status, and other categories of identity determine what an individual supposedly can and cannot do.
Andre Norton
When his position at court is usurped by his half brother, a young Egyptian nobleman seeks to regain his standing through military victories against the enemy.