This special study evolved from a WILIG program held in April 1993, at the Society's 87th Annual Meeting.

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive investigation of reproductive freedom in the light of contemporary international law. The author discusses reproductive freedom in the context of feminist legal theory, international human rights and humanitarian law. This holistic approach makes the book unique and enhances its value as a comprehensive resource on the most challenging and contentious issues of our time, i.e., legal abortion, medically assisted reproduction, surrogate motherhood, forced pregnancy during armed conflicts, and many others. The author's aim is to advance current debates about gender equality and reproductive rights, and to deepen the analysis of the legal concepts involved. In surveying the international commitment to women's rights and examining critically the way in which international global and regional human rights bodies and ad hoc international tribunals deal with issues pertaining to reproductive freedom and sexual violence, this volume makes clear to what extent contemporary international law norms may be used as a tool for change, and how they need to be adapted to meet the special needs of girls and women worldwide. Finally, the book explores what improvements are necessary to prevent and protect adolescents, women and men, against violation of their reproductive freedom.

Whilst immigration policy is a highly controversial topic in the West, states continue to receive people who settle, whether as asylum-seekers or refugees, or as family members of existing migrants or labour migrants. Many who move violate the immigration rules either in entering a country or staying beyond the time allowed. The problems illegality entails for migrants shape much of the law and society scholarship in this area and this volume brings together the key articles which shape current thinking. The main topics covered include illegality, mercy and the language of deservingness; transnationality; family and identity; refugees and asylum-seekers.

This volume brings together a collection of classic and contemporary texts which engage with the core problem of sovereignty from the perspective of various legal and law-related sub-disciplines: legal history and theory, constitutional law, international law and relations and EU law. Many of the highlights from the intense debates about the continuing relevance or otherwise of the internal sovereignty of national legal orders and the external sovereignty of states in a rapidly- globalizing world are reproduced here.c

Thomas Gardner argues in this original study that we are just beginning, as a culture, to understand the far-reaching implications of Emily Dickinson's work. Looking at the way quite different writers have enacted and fleshed-out crucial aspects of her poetry, Gardner gives us a Dickinson for our times. Beginning with the work of Lucie Brock-Broido, Alice Fulton, Kathleen Fraser, and Robert Hass, Gardner moves on to analytical chapters and fully developed conversations with four writers in whose work he finds the fullest extension of Dickinson's legacy. The interviews with these four--Marilynne Robinson, Charles Wright, Susan Howe, and Jorie Graham--provide a particularly intimate look at writers at work. In returning to Dickinson's work, Gardner observes, contemporary writers have powerfully extended what he calls her poetics of broken responsiveness in which an acknowledgment of limits leads, paradoxically, to a deep engagement with a world beyond our capacity to master or possess. In the hands of our most important poets and novelists, Dickinson's "emptying of the articulate self" has become a potent means of addressing some of our culture's fundamental erotic, religious, philosophical, and social questions. A Door Ajar makes visible the Dickinson that will matter to writers and readers over the next several decades.

According to recent surveys, approximately 40% of American women between the ages of 18 and 44 do not have children. Yet these women are virtually missing from accounts of women's lives. In this important new work, Mardy Ireland defines a place for women outside the parameters of motherhood and gives voice to the significant number of women who are not mothers. She draws extensively from interviews with over 100 childless women from various ethnic and educational backgrounds, demonstrating the myriad ways they came to view themselves as complete adults without recourse to the traditional defining criteria of motherhood. Her work offers all women--mothers and nonmothers alike--a vision of self-defined adulthood and a recognition that every woman is the subject of her own life. Challenging the assumption of deprivation or deviance that is traditionally applied to childless women in psychological theory and popular culture, Dr. Ireland reframes childlessness as a concept and lays a groundwork for an expanded view of women's identity and psychic development. Using contemporary psychoanalytic theory, she reexamines female identity development and presents a positive interpretation of women who--for whatever reason--are not mothers. To contrast and compare the experiences of her interview subjects, she places them within the changing psychosocial context of the last few decades and categorizes them according to their reasons for childlessness. Included are: 'traditional' women, who are childless by reasons of infertility or health complications; 'transitional' women, who are not mothers because of delaying circumstances; and 'transformative' women, who have actively chosen not to bear children in order to develop lives beyond the field of motherhood. The legend of Lilith, a creation story of the first woman, described in the last chapter, places both female desire and female power in a longstanding historical and mythic context. Animated by excerpts, quotes, and stories from the many interviews, RECONCEIVING WOMEN: SEPARATING MOTHERHOOD FROM FEMALE IDENTITY is illuminating for general readers and professionals alike. It provides valuable insights for anyone interested in women's studies and the psychology of women, and serves as an excellent textbook for courses in these fields.