This collection of essays deals with the interplay of language and social change, asking the question: How can language and society be made gender equal? The contributors examine the critical role of language in the lives of white women and women of color in the United States. Since language pervades many dimensions of women’s lives, this study takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the issues considered. The volume is divided into three sections. The first, “Liberating Language,” focuses on the active role women had in altering the extent of linguistic sexism in English during the 1970s. A second section, “Identity Creation,” deals with the alteration of that portion of language which serves to name women and their experiences. The final section, “Women of Color,” offers a rare and timely look at the particular problems confronted by minority women. It argues that women of color have different problems and different links to language than white middle-class women.

In a recent study, ninety percent of women stated that they 'expect to transition' within the next five years. Rather than be frustrated, Rosetti argues that with thought and some elbow grease, transition is not only healthy but rewarding. Women and Transition is a step-by-step how-to guide that every woman can learn from.

Greater knowledge of women's experience, this book argues, will enable all caregivers-whether female or male-to provide better pastoral care when the gender-specific presuppositions of that care are examined. Nine women collaborate to explore how women's life experience both necessitates and models a new, systematic pastoral care. It is the first book to address the broad range of women's pastoral care needs.

This study of women and gender in a Muslim society draws on archival and literary sources as well as the life stories of women to offer a unique ethnographic and historical account of the lives of urban women in contemporary Azerbaijan.

Literacy Practices in Transition explores the connections between local, situated literacy practices and global processes of mobility in the geographical space of the Nordic countries, an example of contemporary mobile societies. The detailed empirical analyses show how these connections affect individuals, practices and policies; how the global and local meet in discourses and practices and how people need to (re)negotiate their way in the complex and messy spaces in which they move. The volume challenges current trends in the global standardization of language and literacy education. Instead, it promotes the idea of literacy as a multiple, multilingual, multimodal and constantly contestable and negotiable phenomenon, which calls for the development of language and literacy education that is sensitive to the needs and experiences of the individual actors.

Just as every society has an economic and political structure, so too every society has a gender structure. Barbara Risman's original research on single fathers, married baby boom mothers, and heterosexual egalitarian couples and their children, reported in this intriguing book, weaves together qualitative and quantitative data from surveys, interviews, and observation. Risman shows how gender as a social structure affects individuals, organizes expectations attached to social positions, and becomes an integral part of social institutions. She provides empirical evidence that human beings are capable of enduring and affective intimate relationships without gender as the central organizing mechanism. The data also strongly indicate that men and women are capable of changing gendered ways of being throughout their lives. In her analysis of nontraditional families, Risman finds that gender expectations can be overcome if couples are willing to flout society and risk "gender vertigo." Most children of such families adopt their parents' beliefs about gender, but they do struggle with the contradictions between parental ideology and folk knowledge and expectations in peer relationships. The author argues that we can create a just society only by creating a society in which gender is an irrelevant category for social life--a post-gender society.

This book examines language choice in contemporary Cambodia. It uses the spread of English, and French attempts at thwarting it in favor of their own language, to study and evaluate competing explanations for the spread of English globally. The book focuses on language choice and policy, and will appeal to scholars in comparative education where language and language policy studies represent a growing area of research interest.