Series Blurb Oxford Readings in Feminism provide accessible, one-volume guides to the very best in contemporary feminist thinking, assessing its impact and importance in key areas of study. Collected together by scholars of outstanding reputation in their field, the articles chosen represent the most important work on feminist issues, and concise, lively introductions to each volume crystallize the main line of debate in the field. The categories of public and private have been at the centre of feminist theory for the past three decades. Focusing on the gendered relations of sexuality and the body, family life and democratic citizenship, feminists have redirected public debate on questions of privacy and publicity. They have challenged leading theories of the public sphere, adding immeasurably to the historical and cross-cultural understanding of public and private life, from the rise of liberal and democratic institutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to today's media-saturated public sphere. This volume presents the results of this multi-disciplinary feminist exploration. Contributors demonstrate the significance of the public/private distinction in feminist theory, its articulation in the modern and late modern public sphere, and its impact on identity politics within feminism in recent years. Feminism, the Public and the Private offers an essential perspective on feminist theory for students and teachers of women's and gender studies, cultural studies, history, political theory, geography and sociology.

Focusing on the Western philosophical tradition and the work of contemporary feminists, Jean Elshtain explores the general tendency to assert the primacy of the public world—the political sphere dominated by men—and to denigrate the private world—the familial sphere dominated by women. She offers her own positive reconstruction of the public and the private in a feminist theory that reaffirms the importance of the family and envisions an "ethical polity."

Feminist scholars in disciplines ranging from law to geography challenge our traditional notion of a public/private divide in legal and public policy in Canada and internationally

In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting the role and representation of women under the Old Regime with their status during and after the Revolution. Basing her work on a wide reading of current historical scholarship, Landes draws on the work of Habermas and his followers, as well as on recent theories of representation, to re-create public-sphere theory from a feminist point of view.Within the extremely personal and patriarchal political culture of Old Regime France, elite women wielded surprising influence and power, both in the court and in salons. Urban women of the artisanal class often worked side by side with men and participated in many public functions. But the Revolution, Landes asserts, relegated women to the home, and created a rigidly gendered, essentially male, bourgeois public sphere. The formal adoption of "universal" rights actually silenced public women by emphasizing bourgeois conceptions of domestic virtue.In the first part of this book, Landes links the change in women's roles to a shift in systems of cultural representation. Under the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime, political culture was represented by the personalized iconic imagery of the father/king. This imagery gave way in bourgeois thought to a more symbolic system of representation based on speech, writing, and the law. Landes traces this change through the art and writing of the period. Using the works of Rousseau and Montesquieu as examples of the passage to the bourgeois theory of the public sphere, she shows how such concepts as universal reason, law, and nature were rooted in an ideologically sanctioned order of gender difference and separate public and private spheres. In the second part of the book, Landes discusses the discourses on women's rights and on women in society authored by Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Gouges, Tristan, and Comte within the context of these new definitions of the public sphere. Focusing on the period after the execution of the king, she asks who got to be included as "the People" when men and women demanded that liberal and republican principles be carried to their logical conclusion. She examines women's roles in the revolutionary process and relates the birth of modern feminism to the silencing of the politically influential women of the Old Regime court and salon and to women's expulsion from public participation during and after the Revolution.

This book explores contemporary transformations of the female Bildungsroman, showing that the intersection of the genre and gender brought to critical attention in the context of second wave feminism remains of equal importance in the era of postfeminism. The female Bildung narrative has acquired an important position in twentieth – and twenty-first century literature through its continuing depiction of female self-discovery and emancipation as a process of negotiating the traditional divisions of female and male roles in relation to the private and public spaces. Recognizing the seminal contribution of feminist criticism to the definition of the genre and the role of feminist cultural processes in its thematic developments, this volume investigates more recent influences on the female Bildung narrative and the influence of the classic female Bildungsroman on contemporary cultural texts. As a collection of fifteen essays written by international scholars, the book offers a representative sample of the narratives of female development, presenting a variety of genres, including the novel, the short story, autobiography, TV series, and Internet video blogs, and theoretical frameworks, adopting hermeneutic, postcolonial, feminist, and postfeminist perspectives. In its diversity, this volume reveals that, despite the ongoing process of women’s emancipation, the heroine’s struggle with the private/public divide has remained, throughout the twentieth century and in the first decades of the new millennium, a central issue in stories about the female quest for self-definition. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of literary, women and gender studies, particularly those interested in the narratives of female development that represent American and British cultural contexts.

Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world. We live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.

Public Theology is a rapidly growing international field of study which focuses on how Christian belief and practice engage with wider social issues. Yet, whilst the ultimate concern of public theology is the well-being of society, this body of theology has largely developed without integrating the thinking of feminist theology and its insights into womens' lives and experience. Public Theology and the Challenge of Feminism argues that public theology risks re-inscribing traditional constructs of public and private, civic and domestic, and uncritical notions of gender and the work and worth of people. The book brings together both theory and case material to expose how public theology has actively downplayed or ignored feminist perspectives and to reveal how constructive feminism can be for the future of public theology.