The author of Just Desserts: Women and Food issues a startling but compelling call for single women to embrace their freedom and redefine and celebrate a non-genital sexuality. Essential reading for any woman who has ever felt that her body is not her own.

The author of Just Desserts: Women and Food issues a startling but compelling call for single women to embrace their freedom and redefine and celebrate a non-genital sexuality. Essential reading for any woman who has ever felt that her body is not her own.

For a full list of entries and contributors, sample entries, and more, visit the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women website. Featuring comprehensive global coverage of women's issues and concerns, from violence and sexuality to feminist theory, the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women brings the field into the new millennium. In over 900 signed A-Z entries from US and Europe, Asia, the Americas, Oceania, and the Middle East, the women who pioneered the field from its inception collaborate with the new scholars who are shaping the future of women's studies to create the new standard work for anyone who needs information on women-related subjects.

What causes people to give up sex? Abbott's provocative and entertaining exploration of celibacy through the ages debunks traditional notions about celibacy--a practice that reveals much about human sexual desires and drives.

In our world today, many single and celibate people find themselyes isolated on all sides. In the secular culture with its glorification obsexual behavior, celibacy is seen as restrictive, a denial of one's deepest nature. In religious circles, for anyone but Roman Catholie priests, being single is often seen as a temporary and unfortunate stage in life something to be stoically endured until marriage. But in fact millions of people in the pews of Profestant Episcopal and Catholic churches every week are living a single life, and many are happy to stay that way. Whether widowed, never married, or divorced, many believers understand their single lives not as a passing moment but as a celebratory way of life rich in its own benefits and rewards. In this book Annemarie Kidder offers the theological basis for what so many Christians experience in their own lives. By examining be Hebrew and Christian scriptures early church writings from the East and West and later commentators, she develops a theology of the single life applicable to both women and men. Protestan, Episcopal, and Catholic. This book is a must-read for all single Christians, both those who feel called to remain single and those who for whatever reason find themselves single for long periods of time. Book jacket.