This essay collection draws upon work presented at three national conferences on women and historic preservation held at Bryn Mawr College in 1994, Arizona State University in 1997, and at Mount Vernon College in 2000.

In Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives, anthropologist Wenda Trevathan explores a range of women's health issues, with a specific focus on reproduction, that may be viewed through an evolutionary lens. Trevathan illustrates the power and potential of examining the human life cycle from an evolutionary perspective, and how such an approach could help improve both our understanding of women's health and our ability to respond to health challenges in creative and effective ways.

Contemporary Topics in Women’s Mental Health: Global Perspectives in a Changing Society considers both the mental health and psychiatric disorders of women in relation to global social change. The book addresses the current themes in psychiatric disorders among women: reproduction and mental health, service delivery and ethics, impact of violence, disasters and migration, women’s mental health promotion and social policy, and concludes each section with a commentary discussing important themes emerging from each chapter. Psychiatrists, sociologists and students of women’s studies will all benefit from this textbook. With a Foreword by Sir Michael Marmot, Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London; Chair, Commission on Social Determinants of Health

The feminist women’s health movement of the 1960s and 1970s is credited with creating significant changes in the healthcare industry and bringing women’s health issues to public attention. Decades later, women’s health issues are more visible than ever before, but that visibility is made possible by a process of depoliticization The Vulnerable Empowered Woman assesses the state of women’s healthcare today by analyzing popular media representations—television, print newspapers, websites, advertisements, blogs, and memoirs—in order to understand the ways in which breast cancer, postpartum depression, and cervical cancer are discussed in American public life. From narratives about prophylactic mastectomies to young girls receiving a vaccine for sexually transmitted disease, the representations of women’s health today form a single restrictive identity: the vulnerable empowered woman. This identity defuses feminist notions of collective empowerment and social change by drawing from both postfeminist and neoliberal ideologies. The woman is vulnerable because of her very femininity and is empowered not to change the world, but to choose from among a limited set of medical treatments. The media’s depiction of the vulnerable empowered woman’s relationship with biomedicine promotes traditional gender roles and affirms women’s unquestioning reliance on medical science for empowerment. The book concludes with a call to repoliticize women’s health through narratives that can help us imagine women—and their relationship to medicine—differently.

Breaking new ground in this century, this wide-ranging collection of essays is the first of its kind to address the work of contemporary international women playwrights. The book considers the work of established playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Marie Clements, Lara Foot-Newton, Maria Irene Fornes, Sarah Kane, Lisa Kron, Young Jean Lee, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Djanet Sears, Caridad Svich, and Judith Thompson, but it also foregrounds important plays by many emerging writers. Divided into three sections-Histories, Conflicts, and Genres-the book explores such topics as the feminist history play, solo performance, transcultural dramaturgies, the identity play, the gendered terrain of war, and eco-drama, and encompasses work from the United States, Canada, Latin America, Oceania, South Africa, Egypt, and the United Kingdom. With contributions from leading international scholars and an introductory overview of the concerns and challenges facing women playwrights in this new century, Contemporary Women Playwrights explores the diversity and power of women's playwriting since 1990, highlighting key voices and examining crucial critical and theoretical developments within the field.

Including topics as diverse as feminism and its relationship to the marketplace, plagiarism and copyright, silence and forgetting, and myth in a digital age, this book explores the role of rewriting within feminist literature from the 1970s onwards in relation to the theme of cultural memory.