All Things Women
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View Rights PortalThe Small Publisher Rights Showcase contains a carefully curated selection of books being published by small and independent publishers from across the UK.
View Rights PortalStage rights! explores the work and legacy of the first feminist political theatre group of the twentieth century, the Actresses' Franchise League. Formed in 1908 to support the suffrage movement through theatre, the League and its membership opened up new roles for women on stage and off, challenged stereotypes of suffragists and actresses, created new work inspired by the movement and was an integral part of the performative propaganda of the campaign. Introducing new archival material to both suffrage and theatre histories, this book is the first to focus in detail on the Actresses' Franchise League, its membership and its work. The volume is formulated as a historiographically innovative critical biography of the organisation over the fifty years of its activities, and invites a total reassessment of the League within the accepted narratives of the development of political theatre in the UK.
The traditional narrative of the mid-century (1930s-60s) is that of a wave of expansion and constriction, with the swelling of economic and political freedoms for women in the 1930s, the cresting of women in the public sphere during the Second World War, and the resulting break as employment and political opportunities for women dwindled in the 1950s when men returned home from the front. But as the burgeoning field of interwar and mid-century women's writing has demonstrated, this narrative is in desperate need of re-examination. Mid-century women's writing: Disrupting the public/private divide aims to revivify studies of female writers, journalists, broadcasters, and public intellectuals living or working in Britain, or under British rule, during the mid-century while also complicating extant narratives about the divisions between domesticity and politics.
In the 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoyed by their victories, they promised to lead a global struggle for the expansion of women's electoral rights. Charting the common trajectory of the colonial suffrage campaigns, Distant Sisters uncovers the personal and material networks that transformed feminist organising. Considering intimate and institutional connections, well-connected elites and ordinary women, this book argues developments in Auckland, Sydney, and Adelaide-long considered the peripheries of the feminist world-cannot be separated from its glamourous metropoles. Focusing on Antipodean women, simultaneously insiders and outsiders in the emerging international women's movement, and documenting the failures of their expansive vision alongside its successes, this book reveals a more contingent history of international organising and challenges celebratory accounts of fin-de-siècle global connection.
Feminism is a living phenomenon, but its history can and should be recorded. A number of serious works on the history of the women's movement and feminism have been published in Ukraine, but it is only recently that the history of Ukrainian feminism appeared in the form of a graphic novel. This book is our humble attempt to try and cover the vast history of Ukrainian feminism on a moderate number of pages. We have mentioned many outstanding personalities, but we have not mentioned even more names, for which we immediately apologise - after all, a lot has happened in 150 years and it’s hard to fit all into a relatively small graphic novel. This book may be of interest to those who have only recently become interested in feminism, as it is a brief introduction to the history of Ukrainian feminism. More experienced readers will be delighted to notice some additional details and stories to what they already know.
This book rigorously investigates the contemporary state of children's rights and the multifaceted challenges facing children, uncovering the complexities at their core. In 1989, the United Nations introduced the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), ratified by 196 nations, promising a world where children's rights would reign supreme. In practice, however, realising these rights proves intricate and often precarious. Policies may shine on paper, but their implementation grapples with the challenges posed by global governance structures, national strategies, and local factors. Over three decades since the CRC's inception, this book scrutinises the true efficacy of international commitments, shedding light on underexplored issues and revealing shortcomings in both discourse and actions. With diverse, interdisciplinary perspectives, it recognises the profound influence of global and transnational forces in generating outcomes that impact children's rights and welfare.
Available in paperback for the first time, this important collection of essays illustrates the complexity, richness and diversity of the suffrage movement. Combining historical reappraisal with lively accounts of the culture of the women's suffrage movement, this volume offers a unique focus. It includes studies of the fascinating, but neglected groups that participated in the campaign: the Women's Franchise League; the Women's Freedom League; the Women's Tax Resistance League and the United Suffragists. This is accompanied by feminist research on the poetry, fiction and drama that emerged from women's struggle for the vote. In addition there are reappraisals of two leading figures in the Pankhursts' Women's Social and Political Union, an illuminating analysis of the relationship between suffrage and sexuality, and a discussion of what happened away from the metropolis, as well as of the little known campaign to extend the vote after 1918. ;
This is the first book-length account of the women's liberation movement in Scotland, which, using documentary evidence and oral testimony, charts the origins and development of this important social movement of the post-1945 period. In doing so, it reveals the inventiveness and fearlessness of feminist activism, while also pointing towards the importance of considering the movement from the local and grassroots perspectives, presenting a more optimistic account of the enduring legacy of women's liberation. Not only does this book uncover the reach of the WLM but it also considers what case studies of women's liberation can tell us about the ways in which the development of the movement has been portrayed. Previous accounts have tended to equate the fragmentation of the movement with weakness and decline. This book challenges this conclusion, arguing that fragmentation led to a diffusion of feminist ideas into wider society. In the Scottish context, it led to a lively and flourishing feminist culture where activists highlighted important issues such as abortion and violence against women. ;
In this fascinating study, Samantha George explores the cultivation of the female mind and the feminised discourse of botanical literature in eighteenth-century Britain. In particular, she discusses British women's engagement with the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and his unsettling discovery of plant sexuality. Previously ignored primary texts of an extraordinary nature are rescued from obscurity and assigned a proper place in the histories of science, eighteenth-century literature, and women's writing. The result is groundbreaking: the author explores nationality and sexuality debates in relation to botany and charts the appearance of a new literary stereotype, the sexually precocious female botanist. She uncovers an anonymous poem on Linnaean botany, handwritten in the eighteenth century, and subsequently traces the development of a new genre of women's writing - the botanical poem with scientific notes. The book is indispensable reading for all scholars of the eighteenth century, especially those interested in Romantic women's writing, or the relationship between literature and science.
This anthology makes available to students and general readers the rich variety of Victorian magazines for women. The extracts range from fashion magazines to feminist journals, from serious works for Christian mothers to tales of romance and passion for 'sweethearts'. Focusing on the historical development of the British women's magazine, this extensively illustrated work gives access to texts which few readers ever see. The first main section describes and illustrates eight kinds of magazine for women. Though they have common features, the differences between the drawing room journal of the 1830s and 1840s and the cheap domestic magazines of the 1890s are clearly demonstrated. The second section focuses on those elements which made up the magazine's typical mix of ingredients, including fiction, the fashion plate, poetry, political journalism, advice columns and reader's letters. The last section is the most comprehensive listing of British Victorian women's magazines which currently exists. This is a work of scholarship but one which will appeal to students of Cultural, Historical, Literary and Women's Studies, as well as to the general interested reader. Like the magazines it represents, it offers its readers both entertainment and instruction. ;
This book describes how human rights have given rise to a vision of benevolent governance that, if fully realised, would be antithetical to individual freedom. It describes human rights' evolution into a grand but nebulous project, rooted in compassion, with the overarching aim of improving universal welfare by defining the conditions of human well-being and imposing obligations on the state and other actors to realise them. This gives rise to a form of managerialism, preoccupied with measuring and improving the 'human rights performance' of the state, businesses and so on. The ultimate result is the 'governmentalisation' of a pastoral form of global human rights governance, in which power is exercised for the general good, moulded by a complex regulatory sphere which shapes the field of action for the individual at every turn. This, unsurprisingly, does not appeal to rights-holders themselves.
The book offers interdisciplinary analyses of the impact of Brexit on the rights of EU27 citizens in the UK, Britons in the UK and the EU, and third-country nationals. It combines a historical examination of citizenship and migration between the UK, Europe and the Commonwealth with the analysis of policies and of the experiences of the different groups impacted by Brexit. The book discusses Brexit within the larger history and dynamics of UK and EU citizenship and migration. The individual chapters look at how Brexit is transforming the citizenship rights of different groups, including issues of loss of citizenship and experiences of naturalisation. They further examine the fears of the groups impacted, and larger issues of belonging, marginalisation, political orientations and mobilisations that cross legal status, nationality, ethnicity, race and class.
Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, Karen Garner documents international women's history through the lens of the long-established Western-led international organisations that defined and dominated women's involvement in global politics from the 1925 founding of the Joint Standing Committee of Women's International Organisations up through the UN Decade for Women (1976-85). Documenting specific global campaigns in episodes that span the twentieth century, Garner includes biographical information about lesser known international leaders as she discusses important historic debates regarding feminist goals and strategies among women from the East and West, North and South. This interdisciplinary study addresses questions of interest to historians, political scientists, international relations scholars, sociologists, and feminist scholars and activists whose work promotes women's and human rights. ;
Available in paperback for the first time, and drawing on a wide range of archival sources, Shaping a global women's agenda documents international women's history through the lens of the long-established Western-led international organisations that defined and dominated women's involvement in global politics from the 1925 founding of the Joint Standing Committee of Women's International Organisations up through the UN Decade for Women (1976-85). Documenting specific global campaigns in episodes that span the twentieth century, Garner includes biographical information about lesser known international leaders as she discusses important historic debates regarding feminist goals and strategies among women from the East and West, North and South. This interdisciplinary study addresses questions of interest to historians, political scientists, international relations scholars, sociologists, and feminist scholars and activists whose work promotes women's and human rights.
'Early modern women's manuscript poetry' is an anthology of texts by fourteen women poets writing between 1589 and 1706. It is the only currently available anthology of early modern women's writing which focuses exclusively on manuscript material. Authors include Mary Sidney, Lucy Hutchinson and Katherine Philips; central figures in the emerging canon of early modern women writers, but whose work appears in a fresh and very different light in the manuscript context emphasised by this anthology. The volume also includes substantial excerpts from a recently discovered verse paraphrase of Genesis, thought to be by the previously unknown seventeenth-century writer Mary Roper, as well as selections from the unjustly neglected poet, Hester Pulter. The mix of canonical and non-canonical writers makes this book ideal for use on undergraduate and early postgraduate courses, while specialists will be particularly interested in the sophisticated and varied material taken from less familiar sources. ;
If you ask someone the name of a famous politician, you will probably hear a European or American name. And this will once again confirm how little we know about women in politics from other parts of the world. In our book you will find stories of famous politicians and statesmen from different Muslim countries. These women not only became the first parliamentarians, prime ministers, ministers, speakers of parliament in their countries, but went through a thorny path, became influential and famous both at home and abroad. The book will help to understand the Muslim world and the nature of women’s rights in Islam, the contradictions and combinations of feminism in the conventional «West» and «East». The author examines social movements and organizations public campaigns and protests in Muslim countries that have influenced women’s political rights and led to significant changes in the Middle East and beyond.
The author spent 15 years in prison. She interviewed most of her inmates about the crimes for which they were imprisoned for, selected the best stories, and narrated them as brilliant true crime stories told during their everyday life of imprisonment. At the same time, she shows how commiting a crime was the only way to escape from an oppresing living conditions. Every story dives into the human condition and its social restrains, in magnificent story-telling techniques not exent of a sour sense of humour.
"I am Jugoslovenka" argues that queer-feminist artistic and political resistance were paradoxically enabled by socialist Yugoslavia's unique history of patriarchy and women's emancipation. Spanning performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, lesbian activism and press photos of female snipers in the Yugoslav wars, the book analyses feminist resistance in a range of performative actions that manifest the radical embodiment of Yugoslavia's anti-fascist, transnational and feminist legacies. It covers celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s to today, including Marina Abramovic, Sanja Ivekovic, Vlasta Delimar, Tanja Ostojic, Selma Selman and Helena Janecic, along with music legends Lepa Brena and Esma Redzepova. "I am Jugoslovenka" tells a unique story of women's resistance through the intersection of feminism, socialism and nationalism in East European visual culture.
This book mainly studies the development and evolution of the structure and craftsmanship of the Phoenix Songtao style Miao women's clothing. Taking the origin and evolution of the Phoenix Songtao style Miao women's clothing as a breakthrough point, it studies the geographical environment and structural characteristics of its location, and analyzes its cultural and artistic characteristics and its development and evolution. Take the Phoenix Songtao style Miao women's clothing structure tailoring evolution as The starting point is to elaborate on the evolution of the structural design of the top, bellyband and trousers from three aspects: traditional structural tailoring, improved structural tailoring and modern industrial tailoring; taking the inheritance of Phoenix Songtao style Miao women’s clothing craftsmanship as the starting point, starting from traditional handmade The development and evolution of the production process of the coat, bellyband and trousers are discussed in three development stages: modern single-quantity single-cutting production and modern industrial production; finally, through the decoration of Phoenix Songtao style Miao women's clothing, the interaction of its decorative features and skills is analyzed. It also analyzes the current development status of Phoenix Songtao style Miao women's clothing, and proposes corresponding development strategies.