This collection of papers from the 1993 BSA `Research Imaginations' conference explores the interpenetration of the public and private spheres. The book comprises two sections, one dealing with aspects of employment and finance, the other with domesticity and intimacy. Topics covered include the changing emotional geography of workplace and home, the gendering of aspects of employment and organisation, marital finance and gendered inheritance, the management of food and domestic labour, researching the emotions, and understanding intimate violence.

Why, after several generations of suffrage and a revival of the women's movement in the late 1960s, do women continue to be less politically active than men? Why are they less likely to seek public office or join political organizations? The Private Roots of Public Action is the most comprehensive study of this puzzle of unequal participation. The authors develop new methods to trace gender differences in political activity to the nonpolitical institutions of everyday life--the family, school, workplace, nonpolitical voluntary association, and church. Different experiences with these institutions produce differences in the resources, skills, and political orientations that facilitate participation--with a cumulative advantage for men. In addition, part of the solution to the puzzle of unequal participation lies in politics itself: where women hold visible public office, women citizens are more politically interested and active. The model that explains gender differences in participation is sufficiently general to apply to participatory disparities among other groups--among the young, the middle-aged, and the elderly or among Latinos, African-Americans and Anglo-Whites.

Central to literary, social and political writings of nineteenth-century Ireland are arguments regarding men and women's 'proper' sphere. This pioneering volume examines the significance of gender in shaping public and private life during a century of complex and changing power relations. The interdisciplinary character of the collection ensures a rich variety of perspectives. Contributors explore the roles assigned to men and women in political, social and religious institutions and highlight the consequences of these roles. Investigations of the extent to which gender influenced key historical events such as the Great Irish Famine, the 1848 Rising and the Fenian Movement are among the many original insights offered by the volume. Essays range through the central discourses of nineteenth, century Ireland, from political economy and education, to literature and journalism. In an important extension of the literary canon, many neglected writers of the period are restored to attention.

This political history of middle-class African American women during World War I focuses on their patriotic activity and social work. Nearly 200,000 African American men joined the Allied forces in France. At home, black clubwomen raised more than $125 million in wartime donations and assembled "comfort kits" for black soldiers, with chocolate, cigarettes, socks, a bible, and writing materials. Given the hostile racial climate of the day, why did black women make considerable financial contributions to the American and Allied war effort? Brown argues that black women approached the war from the nexus of the private sphere of home and family and the public sphere of community and labor activism. Their activism supported their communities and was fueled by a personal attachment to black soldiers and black families. Private Politics and Public Voices follows their lives after the war, when they carried their debates about race relations into public political activism.

Series Blurb Oxford Readings in Feminism provide accessible, one-volume guides to the very best in contemporary feminist thinking, assessing its impact and importance in key areas of study. Collected together by scholars of outstanding reputation in their field, the articles chosen represent the most important work on feminist issues, and concise, lively introductions to each volume crystallize the main line of debate in the field. The categories of public and private have been at the centre of feminist theory for the past three decades. Focusing on the gendered relations of sexuality and the body, family life and democratic citizenship, feminists have redirected public debate on questions of privacy and publicity. They have challenged leading theories of the public sphere, adding immeasurably to the historical and cross-cultural understanding of public and private life, from the rise of liberal and democratic institutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to today's media-saturated public sphere. This volume presents the results of this multi-disciplinary feminist exploration. Contributors demonstrate the significance of the public/private distinction in feminist theory, its articulation in the modern and late modern public sphere, and its impact on identity politics within feminism in recent years. Feminism, the Public and the Private offers an essential perspective on feminist theory for students and teachers of women's and gender studies, cultural studies, history, political theory, geography and sociology.

"Drawing on a wealth of scholarship by second-wave feminists and historians of religion, race, and colonialism, Scott shows that the gender equality invoked today as a fundamental and enduring principle was not originally associated with the term "secularism" when it first entered the lexicon in the nineteenth century. In fact, the inequality of the sexes was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. Scott points out that Western nation-states imposed a new order of women's subordination, assigning them to a feminized familial sphere meant to complement the rational masculine realms of politics and economics. It was not until the question of Islam arose in the late twentieth century that gender equality became a primary feature of the discourse of secularism"-- Publisher's description

By juxtaposing the voices of women and men from all walks of life, Sigel finds that women's perceptions of gender relations are complex and often contradictory. Although most women see gender discrimination pervading nearly all social interactions - private as well as public - they do not invariably feel that they personally have been its victims.