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.

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

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.

Subject to Debate, Katha Pollitt's column in The Nation, has offered readers clear-eyed yet provocative observations on women, politics, and culture for more than seven years. Bringing together eighty-eight of her most astute essays on hot-button topics like abortion, affirmative action, and school vouchers, this selection displays the full range of her indefatigable wit and brilliance. Her stirring new Introduction offers a seasoned critique of feminism at the millennium and is a clarion call for renewed activism against social injustice.

"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 --

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.