Infidel feminism is the first in-depth study of a distinctive brand of women’s rights that emerged out of the Victorian Secularist movement. It looks at the lives and work of a number of female activists, whose renunciation of religion shaped their struggle for emancipation. Anti-religious or secular ideas were fundamental to the development of feminist thought, but have, until now, been almost entirely passed over in the historiography of the Victorian and Edwardian women’s movement. In uncovering an important tradition of Freethinking feminism, this book reveals an ongoing radical and free love current connecting Owenite feminism with the more ‘respectable’ post-1850 women’s movement and the ‘New Women’ of the early twentieth century. This book will be invaluable to both scholars and students of social and cultural history and feminist thought, and to interdisciplinary studies of religion and secularisation, as well as those interested in the history of women’s movements more broadly.

Infidel feminism is the first in-depth study of a distinctive brand of women's rights that emerged out of the Victorian Secularist movement. Anti-religious or secular ideas were fundamental to the development of feminist thought, but have, until now, been almost entirely passed over in the historiography of the Victorian and Edwardian women's movement. In uncovering an important tradition of Freethinking feminism, this book reveals an ongoing radical and free love current connecting Owenite feminism with the more 'respectable' post-1850 women's movement and the 'New Women' of the early twentieth century. Schwartz looks at the lives and work of a number of female activists associated with organised Secularism, whose renunciation of religion encouraged and shaped their support for women's emancipation. These self-proclaimed 'infidel' feminists championed moral autonomy, free speech, and the democratic dissemination of knowledge. Alongside their rejection of god-given notions of sexual difference and a critique of the Christian institution of marriage such Freethinking principles provided powerful intellectual tools with which to challenge dominant and oppressive constructions of womanhood. Their contribution to the wider feminist movement was significant at a time when the issue of women's rights was integral to the creation of modern definitions of 'religion' and 'secularism' and when feminists and anti-feminists, Christians and Freethinkers battled over who had women's best interests at heart. This book will be invaluable to both scholars and students of social and cultural history and feminist thought, and to interdisciplinary studies of religion and secularisation. Its accessible style will also ensure that it appeals to those interested in the history of women's movements more broadly.

In this profoundly affecting memoir from the internationally renowned author of The Caged Virgin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells her astonishing life story, from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya, to her intellectual awakening and activism in the Netherlands, and her current life under armed guard in the West. One of today's most admired and controversial political figures, Ayaan Hirsi Ali burst into international headlines following an Islamist's murder of her colleague, Theo van Gogh, with whom she made the movie Submission. Infidel is the eagerly awaited story of the coming of age of this elegant, distinguished -- and sometimes reviled -- political superstar and champion of free speech. With a gimlet eye and measured, often ironic, voice, Hirsi Ali recounts the evolution of her beliefs, her ironclad will, and her extraordinary resolve to fight injustice done in the name of religion. Raised in a strict Muslim family and extended clan, Hirsi Ali survived civil war, female mutilation, brutal beatings, adolescence as a devout believer during the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and life in four troubled, unstable countries largely ruled by despots. In her early twenties, she escaped from a forced marriage and sought asylum in the Netherlands, where she earned a college degree in political science, tried to help her tragically depressed sister adjust to the West, and fought for the rights of Muslim immigrant women and the reform of Islam as a member of Parliament. Even though she is under constant threat -- demonized by reactionary Islamists and politicians, disowned by her father, and expelled from her family and clan -- she refuses to be silenced. Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright little girl evolved out of dutiful obedience to become an outspoken, pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious pressures, no story could be timelier or more significant.

No detailed description available for "Feminist Theory, Women's Writing".

Sexual Progressives is a major new study of the feminists and socialists who campaigned against the moral conservatism of the Victorian period. Drawing on a range of sources, from letters and diaries to radical newspapers and utopian novels, it provides the first group portrait of Scotland’s hitherto neglected sexual rebels. They include Bella and Charles Pearce, prominent Glasgow socialists and disciples of an American-based mystic who taught that religion needed ‘re-sexed’; Jane Hume Clapperton, a feminist freethinker with advanced views on birth-control and women’s right to sexual pleasure; and Patrick Geddes, founder of an avant-garde Edinburgh subculture and co-author of an influential scientific book on sex. A consideration of their lives and work forces a reappraisal of our understanding of British sexual progressivism during this period and will therefore be of interest to all historians of modern gender and sexuality.

A Taste for Brown Sugar boldly takes on representations of black women's sexuality in the porn industry. It is based on Mireille Miller-Young's extensive archival research and her interviews with dozens of women who have worked in the adult entertainment industry since the 1980s. The women share their thoughts about desire and eroticism, black women's sexuality and representation, and ambition and the need to make ends meet. Miller-Young documents their interventions into the complicated history of black women's sexuality, looking at individual choices, however small—a costume, a gesture, an improvised line—as small acts of resistance, of what she calls "illicit eroticism." Building on the work of other black feminist theorists, and contributing to the field of sex work studies, she seeks to expand discussion of black women's sexuality to include their eroticism and desires, as well as their participation and representation in the adult entertainment industry. Miller-Young wants the voices of black women sex workers heard, and the decisions they make, albeit often within material and industrial constraints, recognized as their own.

This groundbreaking book breaks with established canons and resists some of the stereotypes of feminist biblical studies. It features a wide range of contributors who showcase new methodological and theoretical movements such as feminist materialisms, intersectionality, postidentitarian 'nomadic' politics, gender archaeology, and lived religion, and theories of the human and the posthuman. The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field engages a range of social and political issues, including migration and xenophobia, divorce and family law, abortion, 'pinkwashing', the neoliberal university, the second amendment, AIDS and sexual trafficking, and the politics of 'the veil'. Foundational figures in feminist biblical studies work alongside new voices and contributors from a multitude of disciplines in conversations with the Bible that go well beyond the expected canon-within-the-canon assumed to be of interest to feminist biblical scholars. Moving beyond the limits of a text-orientated model of reading, this collection looks at how biblical texts were actualized in the lives of religious revolutionaries, such as Joanna Southcott or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It charts the politics of the Pauline veil in the self-understanding of Europe and reads the 'genealogical halls' in the book of Chronicles alongside acts of commemoration and forgetting in 9/11 and Tiananmen Square.