Spanning a historical period that begins with women’s exclusion from university debates and continues through their participation in coeducational intercollegiate competitions, Debating Women highlights the crucial role that debating organizations played as women sought to access the fruits of higher education in the United States and United Kingdom. Despite various obstacles, women transformed forests, parlors, dining rooms, ocean liners, classrooms, auditoriums, and prisons into vibrant spaces for ritual argument. There, they not only learned to speak eloquently and argue persuasively but also used debate to establish a legacy, explore difference, engage in intercultural encounter, and articulate themselves as citizens. These debaters engaged with the issues of the day, often performing, questioning, and occasionally refining norms of gender, race, class, and nation. In tracing their involvement in an activity at the heart of civic culture, Woods demonstrates that debating women have much to teach us about the ongoing potential for debate to move arguments, ideas, and people to new spaces.

The sixteenth century was an age of politically powerful women. Queens, acting in their own right, and female regents, acting on behalf of their male relatives, governed much of Western Europe. Yet even as women ruled—and ruled effectively—their right to do so was hotly contested. Men’s voices have long dominated this debate, but the recovery of texts by women now allows their voices, long silenced, to be heard once again. Debating Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe is a study of texts and textual production in the construction of gender, society, and politics in the early modern period. Jansen explores the “gynecocracy” debate and the larger humanist response to the challenge posed by female sovereignty.

A magisterial reconstruction and analysis of the heated debates around the 'woman question' during the French Third Republic.

Gerhard (sociology, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Germany) examines equality as a principle and practice of law in history, and legal theory from a feminist perspective. She reviews the history of the women's movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on Germany, and examines three major legal issues: women's rights in the public sphere, women's legal capacities in private law, and women's human rights. This work was first published in German in 1990 (C.H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung); this American edition, somewhat revised, was translated by Allison Brown and Belinder Cooper and includes a new foreword. c. Book News Inc.

"A concise yet rich guide to the sex/gender debates....Professor Warnke has crafted an incisive synthesis of debates around a set of questions that have consistently preoccupied scholars for nearly six decades."---Lessie Jo Frazier, Indiana University --

By analyzing “law in the making” between 2012 and 2018 and focusing on the conceptualization of gender, the book strives to determine why there is to date no family law in Palestine despite controversial public debates.

Debating Women's Citizenship, 1930-1960 is about the agency of Indian feminists and nationalists whose careers straddle the transition of colonial India to an independent India. It addresses some of the critical aspects of the encounter, engagement and dialogue between the Indian state and its women citizens, in particular, how this generation conceptualised the relationship between citizenship, equality and gender justice, and the various spheres in which the meaning and application of this citizenship was both broadened and narrowed, renegotiated and pursued. The book focuses on a cohort of nationalists and feminists who were leading members of the All India Women's Conference (AIWC) and the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW). Drawing on the richness and depth of life histories through autobiography and oral interviews, together with archival research, this book excavates the mental products of these women's lives, their ideas, their writings and their discourse, to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the feminist political personas of this generation, and how these personas negotiated the political and social terrains of their time. The book attempts to produce a new picture of this era, one in which there was far more activity and engagement with the state and with civil society on the part of this generation than previously acknowledged.