Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence explores the paradox of the nineteenth-century girls’ book. On the one hand, early novels for adolescent girls rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy. On the other, they provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. The early girls’ book frames female adolescence as an opportunity for productive investment in the self. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves, the education they provide, and the girl’s essentially good nature neutralize the girl’s own anxieties about maturity. These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. The purpose of these novels is to approach adolescence—a category that continues to engage and perplex us—from another perspective, one in which fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self are celebrated. They provide alternatives to cultural beliefs about what it was like to be a white, middle-class girl in the nineteenth century and challenge the assumption that the evolution of the girls’ book is always a movement towards less sexist, less restrictive images of girls. Drawing on forgotten bestsellers in the United States and Germany (where this genre is referred to as Backfischliteratur), Transforming Girls offers insightful readings that call scholars to reexamine the history of the girls’ book. It also outlines an alternate model for imagining adolescence and supporting adolescent girls. The awkward adolescent girl—so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls—remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them.

This book explores representations of girlhood and young womanhood in recent English language children's fantasy by focusing on two fantastic body transformation types: invisibility and age-shifting. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theory, the study discusses the tropes of invisibility and age-shifting as narrative devices representing gendered experiences. The transformations offer various perspectives on a girl's changing body and identity and provide links between real-life and fantastic discourses of gender, power, invisibility and aging. The main focus is on English-language fantasy published since the 1970s but the motifs of invisibility and age-shifting in earlier tales and children's books is reviewed; this is the first study of children's fantasy literature that considers these tropes at length. Novels discussed are from both critically acclaimed authors and the less well known. Most of the novels depicting invisible or age-shifting girls are neither thoroughly conventional nor radically subversive but present a range of styles. In terms of gender, children's fantasy novels can be more complex than they are often interpreted to be.

A jargon-free, non-technical, and easily accessible introduction to women's studies! All too many students enter academia with the hazy idea that the field of women's studies is restricted to housework, birth control, and Susan B. Anthony. Their first encounter with a women's studies textbook is likely to focus on the history and sociology of women's lives. While these topics are important, the emphasis on them has led to neglect of equally important issues. Transforming the Disciplines: A Women's Studies Primer is one of the first women's studies textbooks to show feminist scholarship as an active force, changing the way we study such diverse fields as architecture, bioethics, history, mathematics, religion, and sports studies. Although this text was designed as an introduction to women's studies, it is also rewarding for upper-level or graduate students who want to understand the pervasive effects of feminist theory. Most chapters provide a bibliography or list of further reading of significant works. Its clear, jargon-free prose makes feminist thought accessible to general readers without sacrificing the revolutionary power of its ideas. In almost thirty essays, covering a broad range of subjects from anthropology to chemistry to rhetoric, Transforming the Disciplines exemplifies the changes achieved by feminist thought. Transforming the Disciplines: combines a high standard of writing and scholarship with personal insight includes both traditional academic arguments and alternative, non-agonistic forms of discussion embraces an international scope challenges traditional assumptions, models, and methodologies offers an inter- and multidisciplinary approach strengthens readers’understanding of the big picture not only for women but for all disempowered groups critiques feminism as well as patriarchal society Feminist theory is grounded in a questioning of traditional assumptions about what is right, natural, and self-evident, not just about the roles and nature of men and women but about how we think, what we teach, whose experience matters, and what is important. Transforming the Disciplines is the first textbook to show the consequences of those questions -- not the answers themselves, but the consequences of the willingness to ask and the transformations that have occurred when the “right” answers changed.

This book explores how the labour and leisure lives of people in contemporary rural China have been structured and transformed, discussing the changing dynamics of power relations both between and within genders, and in local (village and family/household) and remote (the state and market) contexts. It combines perspectives from sociology, gender studies, social history and demography to investigate the changes and continuities in the lives of women and men in Lianhe, a rural village in central China, examining the period from 1926 to 2013 through the lens of labour and leisure. Employing methods from the field of ethnography, the research focuses on the life stories of three generations, including 57 women in Lianhe. The book develops a ‘double comparison’ analytical framework to compare the organisation of labour and leisure in the three respective generations, proceeding, on the one hand, diachronically along the historical time, that is, the pre-collective era, collective era and reform era, and synchronically along the women’s life stages on the other. In so doing, the book links women’s shifting role in changing family/household forms with broader socio-economic, political, demographic and cultural changes. Moreover, it employs a holistic perspective to reflect changing patterns in women’s labour and leisure by disrupting the remunerated/unremunerated, home/labour, within/outside household and labour/leisure dichotomies, and exploring the interrelations between them. Based on this, the book then identifies the determinants of rural women’s labour and leisure and reveals the women’s experiences of their changing identities, particularly concerning their relationships with their parents (-in-law), sisters (-in-law), husbands and children. Particularly highlighting the interdependence and inequality among women, it also reveals their own perception of their identities and relationships, and their understanding of husband–wife fairness and gender equality. Lastly, it demonstrates that the prevalent androcentrism in the remote world does not match the increasing husband–wife fairness in the local world and argues that this mismatch has caused the complex and paradoxical experiences and subjectivities of these women. Given its scope, the book is of interest to scholars, students and researchers in the fields of sociology, anthropology, gender and development, as well as a general audience looking to explore contemporary rural China.

When you hear a riveting story, does it thrill your heart and stir your soul? Do you hunger for truth and goodness? Do you secretly relate to Belle’s delight in the library in Beauty and the Beast? If so, you may be on your way to being a book girl. Books were always Sarah Clarkson’s delight. Raised in the company of the lively Anne of Green Gables, the brave Pevensie children of Narnia, and the wise Austen heroines, she discovered reading early on as a daily gift, a way of encountering the world in all its wonder. But what she came to realize as an adult was just how powerfully books had shaped her as a woman to live a story within that world, to be a lifelong learner, to grasp hope in struggle, and to create and act with courage. She’s convinced that books can do the same for you. Join Sarah in exploring the reading life as a gift and an adventure, one meant to enrich, broaden, and delight you in each season of your life as a woman. In Book Girl, you’ll discover: how reading can strengthen your spiritual life and deepen your faith, why a journey through classic literature might be just what you need (and where to begin), how stories form your sense of identity, how Sarah’s parents raised her to be a reader—and what you can do to cultivate a love of reading in the growing readers around you, and 20+ annotated book lists, including some old favorites and many new discoveries. Whether you’ve long considered yourself a reader or have dreams of becoming one, Book Girl will draw you into the life-giving journey of becoming a woman who reads and lives well.

Public education has expanded to serve large populations across the regions of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Many nations in these regions are moving into a phase of public education in which a variety of factors are being identified as influencing the quality of public education and its ability to serve all children and adolescents. It has become evident that ethnic background, gender, religious affiliation, and ability/disability are important factors in who is served and how well the individual is served. The chapters in this volume, Book 8, of Research on Education in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East document and describe the status, success, and limitations of public education’s efforts at transformation. They provide points from which further research and practice might occur.

Challenging widely-held assumptions of 19th-century social history in Ireland, this book examines the influence of Irish nuns on the Irish Catholic cultural revolution. It claims they were not merely passive servants, but educated women at the centre of the creation of a devout Catholic culture.