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The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians

header-bc2017-1024x341We are delighted to inform you that we will be present at The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY on June 1-4, 2017. Please stop by our table to browse the latest selection of books at discounted prices & pick up some free journal samples.

 

If you are unable to attend, we would like to provide you with a special discount offer. For the next 30 days, receive a 25% discount on all Gender Studies titles found on our website. At checkout, simply enter the discount code Berks17. Visit our website­ to browse our newly published interactive online Spring/Summer 2017 New Titles Catalog or use the new enhanced subject searching features­ for a complete listing of all published and forthcoming titles.


Here is a preview of some of our newest releases on display:

 

SISTERS IN ARMS
Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968
Katharina Karcher

Volume 38, Monographs in German History

 

Few figures in modern German history are as central to the public memory of radical protest than Ulrike Meinhof, but she was only the most prominent of the countless German women—and militant male feminists—who supported and joined in revolutionary actions from the 1960s onward. Sisters in Arms gives a bracing account of how feminist ideas were enacted by West German leftist organizations from the infamous Red Army Faction to less well-known groups such as the Red Zora. It analyzes their confrontational and violent tactics in challenging the abortion ban, opposing violence against women, and campaigning for solidarity with Third World women workers. Though these groups often diverged ideologically and tactically, they all demonstrated the potency of militant feminism within postwar protest movements.

Read Introduction

 

Paperback

HONOUR AND VIOLENCE
Gender, Power and Law in Southern Pakistan
Nafisa Shah

Volume 39, New Directions in Anthropology

 

“This is an extremely impressive achievement that makes a significant and substantial contribution to the ethnography of Pakistan and to the broader field of legal anthropology.” · Hastings Donnan, Queen’s University of Belfast

The practice of karo kari allows family, especially fathers, brothers and sons, to take the lives of their daughters, sisters and mothers if they are accused of adultery. This volume examines the central position of karo kari in the social, political and juridical structures in Upper Sindh, Pakistan. Drawing connections between local contests over marriage and resources, Nafisa Shah unearths deep historical processes and power relations. In particular, she explores how the state justice system and informal mediations inform each other in state responses to karo kari, and how modern law is implicated in this seemingly ancient cultural practice.

Read Introduction: Honour Violence, Law and Power in Upper Sindh

 

Paperback

GIRLHOOD AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE
Edited by Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler

 

“Comprised of eighteen erudite, informative, and insightful articles by experts in their field, Girlhood and the Politics of Place is enhanced with the further inclusion of an illuminating Introduction… an Epilogue, numerous figures and a table… and a twenty-one page Index. Presenting a body of seminal and original scholarship, [this volume] is an extraordinary study and highly recommended for both college and university library collections.” · Midwest Book Review

Examining context-specific conditions in which girls live, learn, work, play, and organize deepens the understanding of place-making practices of girls and young women worldwide. Focusing on place across health, literary and historical studies, art history, communications, media studies, sociology, and education allows for investigations of how girlhood is positioned in relation to interdisciplinary and transnational research methodologies, media environments, geographic locations, history, and social spaces. This book offers a comprehensive reading on how girlhood scholars construct and deploy research frameworks that directly engage girls in the research process.

Available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

This edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Full text

 

WAR AND WOMEN ACROSS CONTINENTS
Autobiographical and Biographical Experiences
Edited by Shirley Ardener, Fiona Armitage-Woodward, and Lidia Dina Sciama

 

Drawing on family materials, historical records, and eyewitness accounts, this book shows the impact of war on individual women caught up in diverse and often treacherous situations. It relates stories of partisans in Holland, an Italian woman carrying guns and provisions in the face of hostile soldiers, and Kikuyu women involved in the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya. A woman displaced from Silesia recalls fleeing with children across war-torn Germany, and women caught up in conflicts in Burma and in Rwanda share their tales. War’s aftermath can be traumatic, as shown by journalists in Libya and by a midwife on the Cambodian border who helps refugees to give birth and regain hope. Finally, British women on active service in Afghanistan and at NATO headquarters also speak.

Read Introduction: Women’s Autobiographical and Biographical Experiences of War across Continents: An Introduction

 

NEW IMAGINARIES
Youthful Reinvention of Ukraine’s Cultural Paradigm
Edited and Translated by Marian J. Rubchak
Foreword Martha Kichorowska Kebalo

 

“…a complex and well‐researched volume that raises critical questions about the nature of contemporary cultural and political shifts in Ukraine and offers some worthy fresh ideas and views. The book might be of interest to different groups of readers, ranging from those from within Ukraine, who might want to look at themselves through the looking glass, to scholars and journalists who have a professional interest in the country or are just seeking a short but thorough summary of the local cultural and political landscapes.” · Journal of Soviet & Post-Soviet Politics & Society

Having been spared the constraints imposed on intellectual discourse by the totalitarian regime of the past, young Ukrainian scholars now engage with many Western ideological theories and practices in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom and uncensored scholarship. Displacing the Soviet legacy of prescribed thought and practices, this volume’s female contributors have infused their work with Western elements, although vestiges of Soviet-style ideas, research methodology, and writing linger. The result is the articulation of a “New Imaginaries” — neither Soviet nor Western — that offers a unique approach to the study of gender by presenting a portrait of Ukrainian society as seen through the eyes of a new generation of feminist scholars.

Read Introduction

 

GENDER HISTORY IN A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders
Edited by Oliver Janz and Daniel Schönpflug

 

“This rich and varied collection of essays, tied together by the editors’ clear explanatory rationale, provides much evidence to support Janz’s and Schonpflug’s claim that a transnational perspective opens new lines of inquiry and insights for historians of international women’s and gender history.” · Women & Social Movements in the US

Recent debates have used the concept of “transnational history” to broaden research on historical subjects that transcend national boundaries and encourage a shift away from official inter-state interactions to institutions, groups, and actors that have been obscured. This approach proves particularly fruitful for the dynamic field of global gender and women’s history. By looking at the restless lives and work of women’s activists in informal border-crossings, ephemeral NGOs, the lower management of established international organizations, and other global networks, this volume reflects the potential of a new perspective that allows for a more adequate analysis of transnational activities. By pointing out cultural hierarchies, the vicissitudes of translation and re-interpretation, and the ambiguity of intercultural exchange, this volume demonstrates the critical potential of transnational history. It allows us to see the limits of universalist and cosmopolitan claims so dear to many historical actors and historians.

 

WOMEN AND THE CITY, WOMEN IN THE CITY
A Gendered Perspective on Ottoman Urban History
Edited by Nazan Maksudyan

 

“An impressive work of seminal scholarship, Women and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective of Ottoman Urban History is a compendium of seven original articles… Enhanced with the inclusion of two pages of notes on contributors; an eighteen page bibliography; and a twenty-one page index, Women and the City, Women in the City is an especially recommended addition to academic library Women’s Studies, Turkish Cultural History, and Ottoman History reference collections and supplemental studies reading lists.” · Midwest Book Review

An attempt to reveal, recover and reconsider the roles, positions, and actions of Ottoman women, this volume reconsiders the negotiations, alliances, and agency of women in asserting themselves in the public domain in late- and post-Ottoman cities. Drawing on diverse theoretical backgrounds and a variety of source materials, from court records to memoirs to interviews, the contributors to the volume reconstruct the lives of these women within the urban sphere. With a fairly wide geographical span, from Aleppo to Sofia, from Jeddah to Istanbul, the chapters offer a wide panorama of the Ottoman urban geography, with a specific concern for gender roles.

 

NEGOTIATING IDENTITY IN SCANDINAVIA
Women, Migration, and the Diaspora
Edited by Haci Akman

 

Gender has a profound impact on the discourse on migration as well as various aspects of integration, social and political life, public debate, and art. This volume focuses on immigration and the concept of diaspora through the experiences of women living in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Through a variety of case studies, the authors approach the multifaceted nature of interactions between these women and their adopted countries, considering both the local and the global. The text examines the “making of the Scandinavian” and the novel ways in which diasporic communities create gendered forms of belonging that transcend the nation state.

 

Available In Paperback

NIGHTTIME BREASTFEEDING
An American Cultural Dilemma
Cecília Tomori

Volume 26, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives

 

“Tomori’s research reveals that these two fields—breastfeeding and sleep—are intricately intertwined not only in practice but also theoretically through analysis that exposes the contradictions inherent in the cultural norms governing these intimate embodied experiences.” · Anthropologica

Nighttime for many new parents in the United States is fraught with the intense challenges of learning to breastfeed and helping their babies sleep so they can get rest themselves. Through careful ethnographic study of the dilemmas raised by nighttime breastfeeding, and their examination in the context of anthropological, historical, and feminist studies, this volume unravels the cultural tensions that underlie these difficulties. As parents negotiate these dilemmas, they not only confront conflicting medical guidelines about breastfeeding and solitary infant sleep, but also larger questions about cultural and moral expectations for children and parents, and their relationship with one another.

Read Introduction

 

Available In Paperback

THE SURPLUS WOMAN
Unmarried in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918
Catherine L. Dollard

Volume 30, Monographs in German History

 

“Dollard’s work makes important contributions to German cultural history, social history, and gender history, focusing attention on the construction of the stereotype of single women as abnormal, a problem to be solved, in Imperial Germany, and the way that the German women’s movement co-opted this icon for its own purposes of reform. She also brings to attention several lesser-known German female activists who have often been overlooked.” · German Studies Review

The first German women’s movement embraced the belief in a demographic surplus of unwed women, known as the Frauenüberschuß, as a central leitmotif in the campaign for reform. Proponents of the female surplus held that the advances of industry and urbanization had upset traditional marriage patterns and left too many bourgeois women without a husband. This book explores the ways in which the realms of literature, sexology, demography, socialism, and female activism addressed the perceived plight of unwed women. Case studies of reformers, including Lily Braun, Ruth Bré, Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne, Helene Lange, Alice Salomon, Helene Stöcker, and Clara Zetkin, demonstrate the expansive influence of the discourse surrounding a female surfeit. By combining the approaches of cultural, social, and gender history, The Surplus Woman provides the first sustained analysis of the ways in which imperial Germans conceptualized anxiety about female marital status as both a product and a reflection of changing times.


Forthcoming

THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT
Impacts and Outcomes
Edited by Kristina Schulz

Volume 22, Protest, Culture & Society

 

For over half a century, the countless organizations and initiatives that comprise the Women’s Liberation movement have helped to reshape many aspects of Western societies, from public institutions and cultural production to body politics and subsequent activist movements. This collection represents the first systematic investigation of WLM’s cumulative impacts and achievements within the West. Here, specialists on movements in Europe systematically investigate outcomes in different countries in the light of a reflective social movement theory, comparing them both implicitly and explicitly to developments in other parts of the world.

 

MAD MÄDCHEN
Feminism and Generational Conflict in Recent German Literature and Film
Margaret McCarthy

 

The last two decades have been transformational, often discordant ones for German feminism, as a new cohort of activists has come of age and challenged many of the movement’s strategic and philosophical orthodoxies. Mad Mädchen offers an incisive analysis of these trans-generational debates, identifying the mother-daughter themes and other tropes that have defined their representation in German literature, film, and media. Author Margaret McCarthy investigates female subjectivity as it processes political discourse to define itself through both differences and affinities among women. Ultimately, such a model suggests new ways of re-imagining feminist solidarity across generational, ethnic, and racial lines.

 

THE DANCE OF NURTURE
Negotiating Infant Feeding
Penny Van Esterik and Richard A. O’Connor

Volume 6, Food, Nutrition, and Culture

 

Breastfeeding and child feeding at the center of nurturing practices, yet the work of nurture has escaped the scrutiny of medical and social scientists. Anthropology offers a powerful biocultural approach that examines how custom and culture interact to support nurturing practices. Our framework shows how the unique constitutions of mothers and infants regulate each other. The Dance of Nurture integrates ethnography, biology and the political economy of infant feeding into a holistic framework guided by the metaphor of dance. It includes a critique of efforts to improve infant feeding practices globally by UN agencies and advocacy groups concerned with solving global nutrition and health problems.


Berghahn Journals

 

Aspasia

The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History

 

Aspasia aims to transform European women’s and gender history by expanding comparative research on women and gender to all parts of Europe, creating a European history of women and gender that encompasses more than the traditional Western European perspective.

 

 

Girlhood Studies

An Interdisciplinary Journal

Girlhood Studies is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for the critical discussion of girlhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and for the dissemination of current research and reflections on girls’ lives to a broad, cross-disciplinary audience of scholars, researchers, practitioners in the fields of education, social service and health care and policy makers. International and interdisciplinary in scope, it is committed to feminist, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression approaches and solicits manuscripts from a variety of disciplines.

 

 

Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques

Special Issue: Women, Gender, and Law: Essays from the Gender and Medieval Studies Conference and the Mid-America Medieval Association in Honor of the Late Shona Kelly Wray

 

Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques (HRRH) has established a well-deserved reputation for publishing high quality articles of wide-ranging interest for over forty years. The journal, which publishes articles in both English and French, is committed to exploring history in an interdisciplinary framework and with a comparative focus. Historical approaches to art, literature, and the social sciences; the history of mentalities and intellectual movements; the terrain where religion and history meet: these are the subjects to which Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques is devoted.