Inderscience is a publisher that disseminates the latest research across the broad fields of science, engineering, and technology; management, public and business administration; environment, ecological economics and sustainable development; computing, ICT and internet/web services, and related areas. (Trial runs through April 21, 2022)
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Image one: E-book titled A Medieval Woman's Companion (2016) - synopsis: Focusing on women from Western Europe between c. 300 and 1500 CE in the medieval period and richly carpeted with detail, A Medieval Woman's Companion offers a wealth of information about real medieval women who are now considered vital for understanding the Middle Ages in a full and nuanced way. Short biographies of 20 medieval women illustrate how they have anticipated and shaped current concerns, including access to education; creative emotional outlets such as art, theater, romantic fiction, and music; marriage and marital rights; fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, contraception and gynecology; sex trafficking and sexual violence; the balance of work and family; faith; and disability.
Image two: E-book titled Lady Lushes: Gender, Alcoholism, and Medicine in Modern Ameria (2017) - synopsis: From the glamorous hard-drinking flapper of the 1920s to the disgraced and alcoholic wife and mother played by Lee Remick in the 1962 film “Days of Wine and Roses,” alcohol consumption by American women has been seen as both a prerogative and as a threat to health, happiness, and the social order. In Lady Lushes, medical historian Michelle L. McClellan traces the story of the female alcoholic from the late-nineteenth through the twentieth century. She draws on a range of sources to demonstrate the persistence of the belief that alcohol use is antithetical to an idealized feminine role, particularly one that glorifies motherhood. Lady Lushes offers a fresh perspective on the importance of gender role ideology in the formation of medical knowledge and authority.
Image one: Queen of Vaudeville: The Story of Eva Tanguay (2012) - synopsis: In her day, Eva Tanguay (1879-1947) was one of the most famous women in America. Widely known as the “I Don’t Care Girl”—named after a song she popularized and her independent, even brazen, persona—Tanguay established herself as a vaudeville and musical comedy star in 1901 with the New York City premiere of the show My Lady—and never looked back. Queen of Vaudeville is a dynamic portrait of a dazzling and unjustly forgotten show business star.
Image two: Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture (2012) - synopsis: This collection of essays examines the lives of women across Russia – from wealthy noblewomen in St. Petersburg to desperately poor peasants in Siberia – discussing their interaction with the church and the law, and their rich contribution to music, art, literature, and theatre. It shows how women struggled for greater autonomy and, both individually and collectively, developed a dynamic but often overlooked presence in Russia’s culture and society during the long nineteenth century (1800-1917).
Image one: E-book titled Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (2019) - synopsis: This path-breaking book documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Native American reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present, integrating a localized history of childbearing, motherhood, and activism on the Crow Reservation in Montana with an analysis of trends affecting Indigenous women more broadly. Blending local and intimate family histories with the histories of broader movements such as WARN (Women of All Red Nations), Theobald links the federal government's intrusion into Indigenous women's reproductive and familial decisions to the wider history of eugenics and the reproductive rights movement. She argues convincingly that colonial politics have always been--and remain--reproductive politics.
Image two: E-book titled Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017) - synopsis: It is no secret that 19th century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as "medical superbodies" highly suited for medical experimentation. In this book, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.
Image one: E-book titled Women and Power at the French Court, 1483-1563 (2018) - synopsis: Explores the ways in which a range of women “as consorts, regents, mistresses, factional power players, attendants at court, or as objects of courtly patronage” wielded power in order to advance individual, familial, and factional agendas at the early sixteenth-century French court. This collection provides a perspective spanning from the reigns of Charles VIII to Henri II, a time when the French court was a renowned center of culture and at which women played important roles. Cross-disciplinary in its perspectives, these essays by historians, art, and literary scholars investigate the dynamic operations of gendered power in political acts, recognized status as queens and regents, ritualized behaviors such as gift-giving, educational coteries, and through social networking, literary and artistic patronage, female authorship, and epistolary strategies.
Image two: E-book titled Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics (2018) - synopsis: Brings together groundbreaking essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship. This collection, featuring work by both senior and rising scholars, considers topics including the politics of visibility, histories of Asian American participation in women of color political formations, accountability for Asian American “settler complicities” and cross-racial solidarities, and Asian American community-based strategies against state violence as shaped by and tied to women of color feminisms.
Image one: E-book titled Black Women in Politics: Demanding Citizenship, Challenging Power, and Seeking Justice (2018) - synopsis: This book explores how Diasporic Black women engage in politics, highlighting three dimensions—citizenship, power, and justice—that are foundational to intersectionality theory and politics as developed by Black women and other women of color. By extending beyond particular time periods, locations, and singular definitions of politics, Black Women in Politics sets itself apart in the field of women’s and gender studies in three ways: by focusing on contemporary Black politics not only in the United States, but also the African Diaspora; by showcasing politics along a broad trajectory, including social movements, formal politics, public policy, media studies, and epistemology; and by including a multidisciplinary range of scholars, with a strong concentration of work by political scientists, a group whose work is often excluded or limited in edited collections.
Image two: E-book titled Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues (2020) - synopsis: This book argues that women served as leaders in a number of synagogues during the Roman and Byzantine periods. The evidence for this consists of nineteen Greek and Latin inscriptions in which women bear the titles “head of the synagogue,” “leader,” “elder,” “mother of the synagogue,” and “priestess.” These inscriptions range in date from 27 B.C.E. to perhaps the sixth century C.E. and in provenance from Italy to Asia Minor, Egypt, and Palestine. While new discoveries make this a growing corpus of material, a number of the inscriptions have been known to scholars for some time. The book contains a new preface by the author.
Image one: E-book titled Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History (2018) - synopsis: Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities.
Image two: E-book titled Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (2016) - synopsis: Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn all made lasting impressions with the cinematic cross-dressing they performed onscreen. What few modern viewers realize, however, is that these seemingly daring performances of the 1930s actually came at the tail end of a long wave of gender-bending films that included more than 400 movies featuring women dressed as men. Laura Horak spent a decade looking at American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early 20th century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity. Girls Will Be Boys excavates a rich history of gender-bending film roles, enabling readers to appreciate the wide array of masculinities that these actresses performed—from sentimental boyhood to rugged virility to gentlemanly refinement.
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"For most of history, 'anonymous' was a woman." - said by Virginia Woolf
Image one: E-book titled Wives and Wanderers in a New Guinea Highlands Society: Women's Lives in the Wahgi Valley (2022) - synopsis: Brings to the reader anthropologist Marie Reay’s field research from the 1950s and 1960s on women’s lives in the Wahgi Valley, Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Dramatically written, each chapter adds to the main story that Reay wanted to tell, contrasting young girls’ freedom to court and choose partners, with the constraints (and violence) they were to experience as married women. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of gender relations, anthropology and feminism, Melanesia and the Pacific. The material in this book, which Reay had written by 1965 but never published, remains startlingly contemporary and relevant.
Image two: E-book titled Women, Disability, and Culture (2020) - synopsis: Women and girls with disabilities find themselves constantly having to deal with multiple, intersectional discrimination due to both their gender and their disability, as well as social conditioning. Indeed, the intersection made up of factors such as race, ethnic origin, social background, cultural substrate, age, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, gender, disability, status as refugee or migrant and others besides, has a multiplying effect that increases discrimination yet further. This book seeks to focus attention on the condition of women with disabilities, offering points for reflection on the different, often invisible, cultural and social undertones that continue to feed into prejudicial stereotypes.
"When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful." - said by Malala Yousafzai
Image one: E-book titled The Awakening (1899) - synopsis: Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating a mixed reaction from contemporary readers and critics. The novel's blend of realistic narrative, incisive social commentary, and psychological complexity makes The Awakening a precursor of American modernist literature; it prefigures the works of American novelists such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and echoes the works of contemporaries such as Edith Wharton and Henry James.
Image two: E-book titled Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (2010) - synopsis: Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman (1860–1935) launched her career as a lecturer, author, and reformer with the story for which she is best-known today, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” She was hailed as the “brains” of the US women’s movement, whose focus she sought to broaden from suffrage to economics. Her most influential sociological work criticized the competitive individualism of capitalists and Social Darwinists, and touted altruistic service as the prerequisite to both social progress and human evolution. By 1900, Gilman had become an international celebrity, but had already faced a scandal over her divorce and “abandonment” of her child. Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents new insights into the life of a remarkable woman whose public solutions often belied her private anxieties. It aims to recapture the drama and complexity of Gilman’s life while presenting a comprehensive scholarly portrait.
"In a time of destruction, create something." - said by Maxine Hong Kingston
Image one: E-book titled Starring Red Wing!: The Incredible Career of Lilian M. St Cyr, the First Native American Film Star (2019) - synopsis: The epic biography Starring Red Wing! brings the exciting career, dedicated activism, and noteworthy legacy of Ho-Chunk actress Lilian Margaret St. Cyr vividly to life. Known to film audiences as “Princess Red Wing,” St. Cyr emerged as the most popular Native American actress in the pre-Hollywood and early studio-system era in the United States, befriending and working with icons such as Mary Pickford, Jewell Carmen, Tom Mix, Max Sennett, and William Selig.
Image two: E-book titled Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan: The Development of the Feminist Movement (2011) - synopsis: With chapters on public, private, and missionary schools for girls, their students, and teachers, on social and political groups women created, on female employment, and on women’s participation in print media, this book offers a new perspective on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese history. Women’s founding of and participation in conflicting discourses over the value of women in Meiji public life demonstrate that during this period active and vocal women were everywhere, that they did not meekly submit to the dictates of the government and intellectuals over what women could or should do, and that they were fully integrated in the production of Meiji culture.
"I need to listen well so that I hear what is not said." - sayd by Thuli Madonsela
Image one: Women's History Month
Image two: E-book titled Passing (1929) - synopsis: Nella Larsen’s Passing, a captivating and prescient exploration of identity, sexuality, self-invention, class, and race set amidst the pealing boisterousness of the Jazz Age. When childhood friends Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry cross paths at a whites-only restaurant, it’s been decades since they last met. Married to a bigoted white man who has no idea that she is African American, Clare has fully embraced her ability to “pass” as a white woman. Irene, also light-skinned and living in Harlem, is shocked by Clare’s rejection of her heritage, though she too passes when it suits her needs. This encounter sparks an intense relationship between the two women who, as acclaimed critic and novelist Darryl Pinckney writes in his insightful introduction, reflect Larsen’s own experience of being “between black and white, and culturally at home nowhere.”
Image three: E-book titled The Collected Essays of Josephine J. Turpin Washington: A Black Reformer in the Post-Reconstruction South (2019) - synopsis: Newspaper journalist, teacher, and social reformer, Josephine J. Turpin Washington led a life of intense engagement with the issues facing African American society in the post-Reconstruction era. This volume recovers numerous essays, many of them unavailable to the general public until now, and reveals the major contributions to the emerging black press made by this Virginia-born, Howard University-educated woman who clerked for Frederick Douglass and went on to become a writer with an important and unique voice.
