Sexuality and Subordination uses the insights of a range of disciplines to examine the construction of gender in nineteenth-century Britain and France. With contributions from history, literature, sociology and philosophy, its interdisciplinary approach demonstrates the extent to which a common focus can illuminate problems inaccessible to any single discipline. 'Victorianism' is generally understood to mean sexual double standards, hypocrisy and prudery among the middle classes. But, as this collection shows, the representation of sexuality in the nineteenth century was more diverse and complex than is sometimes realized. Both art and literature point to the deployment of sexual metaphors and imagery, and the language of educated public opinion was shaped by the dichotomy between mind and matter, between rationality and sexuality. The contributors to this volume explore how women, in questioning their subordination, had to challenge a construction of femininity which imposed sexual ignorance.

During the early modern period, men and women in England lived their lives within a social and gender framework inherited from biblical times. Patriarchy - the social and cultural dominance of the male - has long been a feature of western civilization, and this work attempts to provide a portrait of the origins and operation of the system over a long stretch of the English past.

The Subordinated Sex traces the enduring, powerful legacy of male attitudes toward women, their sexuality, and their roles as wives and mothers. Traditionally the creators and chroniclers of opinion, men have until recently written a history that reflects only their own convictions and impressions--a history rarely punctuated by a female voice and founded on an almost universal belief in women's inferiority. Acclaimed as a pioneering study when first published in 1973, Vern Bullough's work has since established itself as a standard in historical literature on women. Updated and revised with Sarah Slavin and Brenda Shelton, The Subordinated Sex is a vast survey ranging from prehistoric to contemporary times, examining a diversity of cultures, and taking into account writings from a great variety of sources. From a consideration of Babylonian legal codes to Victorian prescriptive medical pamphlets, medieval clerical treatises to Islamic erotic poetry, Bullough and his coauthors recount not only how men have portrayed women but also how they have justified their subordination of the opposite sex. In recent years, women have successfully challenged males' self-designated role as gatekeepers of written records and have found within the past a more complete view of how women lived, what they thought, and what they achieved. By focusing, however, not on women's history but on the history of men's attitudes toward their female companions, The Subordinated Sex reveals, more than any other single work, the conditions that sparked the feminist movement and the reasons it must inspire a change in the lives of men as well as women.

Andrea Dworkin, once called "Feminism's Malcolm X," has been worshipped, reviled, criticized, and analyzed-but never ignored. The power of her writing, the passion of her ideals, and the ferocity of her intellect have spurred the arguments and activism of two generations of feminists. Now the book that she's best known for-in which she provoked the argument that ultimately split apart the feminist movement-is being reissued for the young women and men of the twenty-first century. Intercourse enraged as many readers as it inspired when it was first published in 1987. In it, Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women's subordination to men. (This argument was quickly-and falsely-simplified to "all sex is rape" in the public arena, adding fire to Dworkin's already radical persona.) In her introduction to this twentieth-anniversary edition of Intercourse, Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, discusses the circumstances of Dworkin's untimely death in the spring of 2005, and the enormous impact of her life and work. Dworkin's argument, she points out, is the stickiest question of feminism: Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed?

This book provides a unique social science reading on the construction of nation, gender and sexuality and on the interactions among them. It includes international case studies from Indonesia, Ireland, former Yugoslavia, Liberia, Sri Lanka, Australia, the USA, Turkey, China, India and the Caribbean. The contributors offer both the masculine and feminine perspective, exposing how nations are comprised of sexed bodies, and exploring the gender ironies of nationalism and how sexuality plays a key role in nation building and in sustaining national identity. The contributors conclude that control over access to the benefits of belonging to the nation is invariably gendered; nationalism becomes the language through which sexual control and repression is justified masculine prowess is expressed and exercised. Whilst it is men who claim the prerogatives of nation and nation building it is, for the most part, women who actually accept the obligation of nation and nation building.

Carole Pateman is one of the foremost political theorists writing in English today. In this outstanding new work, she presents a major reinterpretation of modern political theory. She shows how standard discussions of social contract theory tell only half the story. The sexual contract which establishes modern patriarchy and the political right of men over women is never mentioned. In a wide-ranging and scholarly discussion, Pateman examines the significance of the political fictions of the original contract and the slave contract. She also offers a sweeping challenge to conventional understandings - of both left and right - of actual contracts in everyday life: the marriage contract, the employment contract, the prostitution contract and the new surrogacy contract. By bringing a feminist perspective to bear on the contradictions and paradoxes surrounding women and contract and the relation between the sexes, she is able to shed new light on the fundamental problems of freedom and subordination. The Sexual Contract will become a classic text in the politics of gender and will be of major interest to students of social and political theory and philosophy, women's studies, sociology and jurisprudence.

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet—and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.