"This is the kind of book I've been looking for."-Bonnie Zimmerman, author of The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969-1989. The energy spent on all sides of debates about women's separatism demonstrates the vitality of separatism as an important issue. Excited by the prospect that changes in their personal lives could reverberate through the nation, many women have organized rural communes and urban business collectives, putting ideas into practice. Separatism and Women's Community reviews debates in separatist theory, historical narratives by members of separatist collectives, and utopian novels that envision how collectives might be formed. Shugar compares the ideas and proposals of theorists-including Robin Morgan, Shulamith Firestone, Joyce Cheney, Joan Nestle, Ti-Grace Atkinson, and the Radicalesbians-with the experience of women from collectives as diverse as Cell 16, the Combahee River Collective, the Gutter Dyke Collective, the Seattle Collective, the Bloodroot Collective, and the Lavender Woman Collective of Chicago. Despite the attempts to connect action and thought, many women were ill-prepared for the problems they found in collective life. Women who theorized that oppression based on difference was a man-made phenomenon were confronted by other women who challenged their racism, classism, or homophobia. The community had to respond to these confrontations in ways that would strengthen, rather than destroy, their tentative connections with other women. Dana R. Shugar is an assistant professor of English and women's studies at the University of Rhode Island.

How women-only communities provide spaces for new forms of culture, sociality, gender, and sexuality Women’s lands are intentional, collective communities composed entirely of women. Rooted in 1970s feminist politics, they continue to thrive in a range of ways, from urban households to isolated rural communes, providing spaces where ideas about gender, sexuality, and sociality are challenged in both deliberate and accidental ways. Herlands, a compelling ethnography of women’s land networks in the United States, highlights the ongoing relevance of these communities as vibrant cultural enclaves that also have an impact on broader ideas about gender, women’s bodies, lesbian identity, and right ways of living. As a participant-observer, Keridwen N. Luis brings unique insights to the lives and stories of the women living in these communities. While documenting the experiences of specific spaces in Massachusetts, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Ohio, Herlands also explores the history of women’s lands and breaks new ground exploring culture theory, gender theory, and how lesbian identity is conceived and constructed in North America. Luis also discusses how issues of race and class are addressed, the ways in which nudity and public hygiene challenge dominant constructions of the healthy or aging body, and the pervasive influence of hegemonic thinking on debates about transgender women. Luis finds that although changing dominant thinking can be difficult and incremental, women’s lands provide exciting possibilities for revolutionary transformation in society.

Author note: Penny A. Weiss, Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University, is the author of Gendered Community: Rousseau, Sex, and Politics. Marilyn Friedman, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Washington University, is the author of What Are Friends For? Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory.

Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women’s everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author’s sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women’s newspaper advice columns, Cameroon’s first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman.

In Defence of Separatism is a timely book. When it was first written in 1976, although it was an important subject of conversation among many feminists it was not welcomed by academics or publishers. When a political group wants to strategise so that its members can arrive at agreed-on political tactics and ideas, they call for, and create, separate spaces. These might be in coffee shops, in community centres, in one another's homes or in semi-public spaces such as workers clubs, even cinemas. When the proletariat was rebelling, they did not ask the capitalists and aristocracy to join them (even if a few did); when the civil rights movement started it was not thanks to the ideas and politics of white people (even though some whites joined to support the cause); when the women's liberation movement sprang into life, it was women joining together to fight against their oppression. The difference is that women are supposed to love men.Through careful argument, Susan Hawthorne takes us through the ideas which are central to her argument. She analyses the nature of power, oppression, domination and institutions and applies these to heterosexuality, rape and romantic love. She concludes with a call for women, all women no matter their sexuality, to have separate spaces so they can work together to change the world and end patriarchy.This 2019 edition includes a Preface, Afterword and additional commentary in italicised footnotes that bring the reader up to date on changes, developments and controversies in feminist theory.

Examines the work of artists trained at the Viennese Women's Academy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Explores generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies on art, craft, and design.