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September 2025Liberated Pleasure. A workbook for Women
by Julia Sparmann
Far too often, everyday stress, pressure to perform or inner blockages spoil our enjoyment of the most beautiful thing in the world: our female sexuality. How can we free ourselves from firmly internalized taboos? What little tricks can we use to get our sex life back on track and keep the imagination in our head running successfully?Experienced sex therapist Julia Sparmann not only offers surprising solutions to typical problems such as loss of libido, communication difficulties or orgasm problems. She also encourages women to deal confidently with their sexuality and develop a positive body image.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2013Women of the English Nobility and Gentry, 1066-1500
by Jennifer Ward
While there is increasing interest in the lives of medieval women, the documentary evidence for their activities remains little known. This book provides a collection of sources for an important and influential group of women in medieval England, and examines changes in their role and activities between 1066 and 1500. For most noble and gentry-women, early marriage led to responsibilities for family and household, and, in the absence of their husbands, for the family estates and retainers. Widowhood enabled them to take control of their affairs and to play an independent part in the local community and sometimes further afield. Although many women's lives followed a conventional pattern, great variety existed within family relationships, and individuality can also be seen in religious practices and patronage. Piety could take a number of different forms, whether a woman became a nun, a vowess or a noted philanthropist and benefactor to religious institutions. This volume provides a broad-ranging and accessible coverage of the role of noble women in medieval society. It highlights the significant role played by these women within their families, households, estates and communities.
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The ArtsMarch 2026Surrealist women artists and mental illness
by Jenny Anger
Female mental illness has been a prominent and complicated theme in surrealist cultural traditions, including the idealization of women with mental illness in works such as André Breton's Nadja (1928). Art historians have examined this tendency before, but to date there has been no comprehensive study of the lived reality of women surrealist artists with mental illness. How did women's experience and their work intersect with this romanticized vision? Was the masculine dream of feminized, "mad" genius prohibitive or productive for these women artists? After establishing the ideological field within which these women worked, the book turns to case studies of well-known and some lesser-known artists, including Ángeles Santos, Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, Claude Cahun, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Sonja Sekula, and Unica Zürn. This collection of essays contains a wide range of responses, revealing surrealism's generative as well as restrictive force.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2026Rethinking right-wing women
Gender and the Conservative Party, 1880s to the present
by Clarisse Berthezène, Julie Gottlieb
Rethinking Right-Wing Women explores the institutional structures for and the representations, mobilisation, and the political careers of women in the British Conservative Party since the late 19th century. From the Primrose League (est.1883) to Women2Win (est.2005), the party has exploited women's political commitment and their social power from the grass-roots to the heights of the establishment. Yet, although it is the party that extended the equal franchise, had the first woman MP to sit Parliament, and produced the first two women Prime Ministers, the UK Conservative Party has developed political roles for women that jar with feminist and progressive agendas. Conservative women have tended to be more concerned about the fulfilment of women's duties than the realisation of women's rights. This book tackles the ambivalences between women's politicisation and women's emancipation in the history of Britain's most electorally successful and hegemonic political party.
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Business, Economics & LawDecember 2020Women before the court
Law and patriarchy in the Anglo-American world, 1600–1800
by Lindsay R. Moore
Women before the court offers an innovative, comparative approach to the study of women's legal rights during a formative period of Anglo-American history. It traces how colonists transplanted English legal institutions to America, examines the remarkable depth of women's legal knowledge and shows how the law increasingly undermined patriarchal relationships between parents and children, masters and servants, husbands and wives. The book will be of interest to scholars of Britain and colonial America, and to laypeople interested in how women in the past navigated and negotiated the structures of authority that governed them. It is packed with fascinating stories that women related to the courts in cases ranging from murder and abuse to debt and estate litigation. Ultimately, it makes a remarkable contribution to our understandings of law, power and gender in the early modern world.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2023
Medieval women and urban justice
Commerce, crime and community in England, 1300–1500
by Teresa Phipps
This book provides a detailed analysis of women's involvement in litigation and other legal actions within their local communities in late-medieval England. It draws upon the rich records of three English towns - Nottingham, Chester and Winchester - and their courts to bring to life the experiences of hundreds of women within the systems of local justice. Through comparison of the records of three towns, and of women's roles in different types of legal action, the book reveals the complex ways in which individual women's legal status could vary according to their marital status, different types of plea and the town that they lived in. At this lowest level of medieval law, women's status was malleable, making each woman's experience of justice unique.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2026
Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas
by Linda Levy Peck, Adrianna E. Bakos
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2010Women, men and the representation of women in the British Parliaments
Magic numbers?
by Anna Manasco-Dionne
This is the first book to consider the difference women MPs make for women constituents in Britain by comparing women parliamentarians' activities, priorities and perceptions to those of their male colleagues. It uncovers complicated gender dynamics that have been neglected in other works because of an exclusive focus on the activities of women MPs, and mounts a systematic challenge to the idea that a critical mass of women is necessary for women's presence to matter. By comparing the representation received by women from a parliament with few women to that received from a parliament with many women, Anna Dionne leads the reader to understand why numbers are not magic. Her empirical research includes interviews with over eighty parliamentarians in London, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the amassing of an unprecedented and comprehensive database of representatives' legislative activities. She compares how men and women and different political parties introduce and support bills and motions, ask parliamentary questions, participate in committee and floor debates, and work behind the scenes for cross-party consensus and on constituency casework. The analysis considers gender similarities and differences throughout the policy process and explains the gender dynamics with a new sensitivity to their fluctuation. ;
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November 2021Femicide
Violence against women
by Julia Cruschwitz, Carolin Haentjes
In Germany, 132 women were murdered by their (ex-)partners over the past year, according to police statistics. An attempted murder happened every other day – the real figure is in all probability much higher. Julia Cruschwitz and Carolin Haentjes unveil their book on femicides in Germany with research from interviews with academics, criminologists, police officers, social workers, lawyers, survivors, witnesses and relatives and their analysis of scientific reports. Their work highlights how the issue of femicides affects the whole of society, but there are sensible ways to protect women more effectively from male violence. All we must do is take steps to follow these.
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Family & home stories (Children's/YA)February 1905Little Women
by Louise May Alcott
Little Women "has been read as a romance or as a quest, or both. It has been read as a family drama that validates virtue over wealth", but also "as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well".[6]:34 According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott created a new form of literature, one that took elements from Romantic children's fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels, resulting in a totally new format. Elbert argued that within Little Women can be found the first vision of the "All-American girl" and that her multiple aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters.
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The ArtsMarch 2013Women, the arts and globalization
Eccentric experience
by Marsha Meskimmon, Amelia Jones, Dorothy C. Rowe, Dorothy Rowe, Marsha Meskimmon
Women, the arts and globalization: Eccentric experience is the first anthology to bring transnational feminist theory and criticism together with women's art practices to discuss the connections between aesthetics, gender and identity in a global world. The essays in Women, the Arts and Globalization demonstrate that women in the arts are rarely positioned at the centre of the art market, and the movement of women globally (as travelers or migrants, empowered artists/scholars or exiled practitioners), rarely corresponds with the dominant models of global exchange. Rather, contemporary women's art practices provide a fascinating instance of women's eccentric experiences of the myriad effects of globalization. Bringing scholarly essays on gender, art and globalization together with interviews and autobiographical accounts of personal experiences, the diversity of the book is relevant to artists, art historians, feminist theorists and humanities scholars interested in the impact of globalization on culture in the broadest sense. ;
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Literature & Literary StudiesNovember 1999Plays on women
Anon, Arden of Faver
by David Bevington, Kathleen McLuskie
Based on the original and authoritative Revels texts, Plays on women brings together four plays which dramatise the lives of women in Shakespeare's England The only available anthology focusing on women and including the four plays most often discussed. . . . ;
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The ArtsAugust 2010Women artists between the Wars
'A fair field and no favour'
by Katy Deepwell
Starting with a critique of existing methodologies and histories of the period, this book examines the production of women artists, looking at different areas and aspects of their activities, and particularly contrasting the lives of different generations of women artists. Many of these women's names or their works are not familiar in art histories of the twentieth century. The book analyses how women artists' presence which was consistently one third of the artists in many major exhibiting groups became less than 10% of the museum purchases and in art historical texts for this period. Comparisons are made between the opportunities presented to women artists and those of their male peers in the light of considerable change and restructuring within the art world in Britain during this period, principally due to the growing influence of modernism in the art market. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesDecember 2011Women of the right spirit
Paid organisers of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), 1904–18
by Krista Cowman, Pamela Sharpe, Penny Summerfield, Lynn Abrams, Cordelia Beattie
This book is the first investigation on how official organizers built and sustained the national militant campaign of the Women's Social and Political Union between 1903 and 1918. Whilst the overall policy of the Union was devised by an ever-decreasing circle of women, centred around the mother-daughter team of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, much of its actual activity, including its more extreme militant actions such as arson, was devised and implemented by these organizers who worked in the provinces and in London. Women of the right spirit reveals organizers to be a diverse bunch of women, whose class backgrounds ranged from the aristocratic to the extremely impoverished. It describes the ways in which they were recruited and deployed, and the work they undertook throughout Britain. The exhausting pace of their itinerant life is revealed as well as the occasions when organizers fell out with their employers or their own branches. Taking the story of the WSPU's workers up to the end of the First World War, it considers what directions they took when votes for women became a reality. The book will appeal to academics, postgraduates and undergraduates with an interest in women's history, as well as a more general readership wishing to understand the extent of support for the votes for women campaign and the mechanisms through which it organized. ;
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Literature & Literary StudiesFebruary 1994Italian women writing
by Sharon Wood
How has it happened that from being politely ignored or marginalized just half a century ago, women writers in Italy are now at the centre of literary activity? To what extent does writing by women reflect the successes and failures of Italy in the post-war period? What form did the feminist movement in Italy take, and how did this affect what - and how - women wrote? And how are women who write responding to a more fragmented post-modern age? These are just some of the questions asked of the relationship between women and fiction in post-war Italy in this anthology. It includes stories by Cialente, Ginzburg, Ortese, Morante, Romano, Maraini and Duranti as well as Bompiani, Sanvitale, Mizzau, Scaramuzzino, Capriolo and Petrignani. The thirteen stories presented offer a range of style and content indicative of the wealth and diversity of writing by women, and their reading is supported by critical notes and an extensive vocabulary. This is a clear and challenging introduction to the rich field of women and fiction in Italy. ;
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Literature & Literary StudiesAugust 2013Women reading Shakespeare 1660–1900
An anthology of criticism
by Ann Thompson, Sasha Roberts
Women reading Shakespeare, 1660-1900 comprehensively rediscovers a lost tradition of women's writing on Shakespeare. Since Margaret Cavendish published the first critical essay on Shakespeare in 1664, women have written as scholars, critics, editors, performers and popularisers of Shakespeare. Many found in Shakespeare criticism the opportunity to raise a wide variety of issues, ranging from the use of women in society, family life, social relations and ethnic difference. In their different ways, women appropriated Shakespeare to their own ends - not always in step with their male contemporaries. Virtually none of this work is available today; it is unread and unknown. This fascinating anthology draws upon extensive new research to collect for the first time in one volume the Shakespeare criticism of some fifty British and American women writing before 1900. It includes the work of both familiar and unknown names and represents the diversity of literary genres used by women: the scholarly article, the periodical essay, book-length studies, personal memoirs, books for children, school editions. The volume also includes previously unknown Shakespeare illustrations by women, and a general introduction to the development of women's criticism of Shakespeare before 1900. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2020Medieval women and urban justice
by Teresa Phipps, Cordelia Beattie
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