Product Description

The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise. According to Rosemarie Zagarri, the debate over women's rights began not in the decades prior to 1848 but during the American Revolution itself. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, this book explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution until the election of Andrew Jackson.

Although the period after the Revolution produced no collective movement for women's rights, women built on precedents established during the Revolution and gained an informal foothold in party politics and male electoral activities. Federalists and Jeffersonians vied for women's allegiance and sought their support in times of national crisis. Women, in turn, attended rallies, organized political activities, and voiced their opinions on the issues of the day. After the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a widespread debate about the nature of women's rights ensued. The state of New Jersey attempted a bold experiment: for a brief time, women there voted on the same terms as men.

Yet as Rosemarie Zagarri argues in Revolutionary Backlash, this opening for women soon closed. By 1828, women's politicization was seen more as a liability than as a strength, contributing to a divisive political climate that repeatedly brought the country to the brink of civil war. The increasing sophistication of party organizations and triumph of universal suffrage for white males marginalized those who could not vote, especially women. Yet all was not lost. Women had already begun to participate in charitable movements, benevolent societies, and social reform organizations. Through these organizations, women found another way to practice politics.

Customer Reviews (1)

insightful inquiry into "female politicians" and the backlash against them
Zagarri answers a question that has long puzzled me: Where did the cult of true womanhood come from?Why did Americans of the Jacksonian Era believe they needed to box women in so narrowly?Zagarri argues that the cult of true womanhood represented a backlash against the activities of "female politicians" during and immediately after the American Revolution.She argues persuasively that cultural observers were unnerved by women's open partisanship and spirited engagement with political news and that, as the United States settled into "the new republican order" (134), women were channeled away from partisan activity into attitudes and behaviors that would cultivate political tolerance and social cohesion.Women retained a political role, but after 1820 it was an explicitly non-partisan one.

Zagarri breaks new ground in defining the category of "female politicians," women who did not hold elected office but who followed politics eagerly, developing and expressing political opinions of their own (chapter 2).Many of the activities that Zagarri cites seem symbolic at best: women baked "election cakes" for election day, wore partisan rosettes to church, baited suitors who did not share their political views, and so forth.Others seem inevitable: women who managed farms and businesses for husbands absent on political business certainly contributed to the public good, but did they have any choice in the matter?But though many forms of women's political engagement seem rather modest in their impact, Zagarri amply documents women's interest in politics in the era 1760-1820 and also demonstrates that American men took women's political engagement seriously.This is the best explanation I've ever seen of what might have inspired the backlash against women's political engagement in the Jacksonian era and for much of the nineteenth century.

Essential reading for anyone interested in women in the Revolutionary or nineteenth-century United States. ... Read more

Product Description
France Between the Wars challenges a prevailing assumption that women had little influence or power in France during the interwar period. Sian Reynolds shows how women in fact had both autonomy and authority within the political arena through their activities in social work, peace movements and strikes, and in other areas less directly linked with conventional politics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Wonderful book on an important--but nearly forgotten--topic
Most of the people who were most affected by food rationing--the housewives who had to provide healthy meals for their families--are gone now. Everyone remembers Rosie the Riveter, but few remember the Domestic Army, and the propaganda that accompanied the policies of the Office of Price Administration, by the government, and more importantly by Madison Avenue. This book looks at the mechanics of mandatory food rationing, and then considers the politics and propaganda involved in making food rationing work.

The book is filled with a variety of examples of government rhetoric, Madison Avenue advertising, cookbook instructions, radio broadcasts, diaries, letters, posters, and comments. The scope of research involved in this study is staggering. The book is very well written. It is often difficult to turn a dissertation into an interesting book, but Amy Bentley has succeeded admirably. There are a number of intersting photographs and illustrations, although I would have liked to see even more. This is a fascinating book, and deserving of a much larger audience.

An earnest, academic look at Homemakers & the Home Front
During World War II, the United States didn't ration their food as long or as desperately as the Brits and other Europeans had to.It's still interesting to see what the home front had to make do with.In "Eating for Victory", baking gets the political treatment as a point of women's rights and also as propaganda by the government and media to keep women in traditional roles.The skillful, well-dressed homemaker associated most often with 1950s TV moms like June Cleaver is really the Wartime Homemaker.As a reader, one's context of time needs re-adjustment.It used to be the Basic Seven, not the Four Food Groups.People didn't know eating habits could lead to heart disease, and dieting was not in the national mania for women.Perhaps the biggest time warp is understanding the uproar over African American women leaving domestic "Mammy" jobs in affluent homes for higher paying war work.Fathoming that old-world structure of educated women feeling "put-out" and oblivious or resentful of the cultural liberation going on -- it's a real step back in time and mores.(Imagine if Renée on the current TV show "Ally McBeal" were the live-in maid and not Ally's best-friend /roommate / fellow-lawyer.)Amy Bentley's style doesn't escape the scholarly soundbites and droning hum of dissertations.There's enough homey details, however, to make it tolerable.And clearly, Bentley's given her subject careful thought and personal investment.Not every woman was Rosie the Riveter or a Pin-up Girl, but every Rosie and Pin-up was a Wartime Homemaker to some degree.Bentley's book is one of the few to recognize this and to give it due credit. ... Read more

Product Description
How did a group of overwhelmingly poor, older women in a third-world country emerge to become a powerful force in their country's politics? Founded during the Nicaraguan revolution, the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs of Matagalpa comprises women who supported the revolution but did not carry guns; who, in their words, gave up their loved ones to the struggle.

In this book Lorraine Bayard de Volo focuses on this group to reveal what she calls "the dominant but rarely examined maternal identity politics of revolution, war, and democratization." Dividing Nicaraguan politics (1979-99) into four periods, Bayard de Volo uses both macro- and micro-levels of analysis to capture the dialectical relationship between large-scale political processes and the "micropolitics" of collective action. She shows how Sandinistas and anti-Sandinistas mobilized both mothers and maternal imagery and in turn analyzes how this imagery was adopted and manipulated by the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs. Employing a feminist Gramscian approach to address the gendered nature of cultural politics and collective identity, the author shows how, in the battle to capture Nicaraguan hearts and minds, both sides relied primarily on maternal images of women. Such "mobilizing identities" propelled women into unprecedented levels of collective action, yet at the same time !channeled them away from feminist priorities. ... Read more

Product Description
Drawing on an impressive body of new research - including Friedan's own papers - Horowitz traces the development of Friedan's feminist outlook from her childhood in Peoria, Illinois, through her wartime years at Smith College and Berkeley, to her decade-long career as a writer for two of the period's most radical labor journals, the Federated Press and the United Electrical Workers' UE News. He further shows that even after she married and began to raise a family, Friedan continued during the 1950s to write and work on behalf of a wide range of progressive social causes. By resituating Friedan within a broader cultural context, and by offering a fresh reading of The Feminine Mystique against that background, Horowitz not only overturns conventional ideas about "second-wave" feminism but also reveals long submerged links to its past. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Betty the Bolshie?
Founding mother of the Women's Liberation Movement, Betty Friedan, author of the Feminine Mystique, was a long-time CPUSA apparatchik and never the typical suburban bourgeois housewife she posed as.

Facinating insight on a pivotal figure in American feminism
In a clear-eyed yet obviously compassionate examination of Betty Friedan, the "mother" of modern American feminism,Horowitz reveals that his subject was far more worldly and politically concious than she indicated in her 1963 ground breaker.

Although some of today's generation-- whether feminists or not--may scratch heads and wonder why an intellegent articulate woman would intentionally disguise so much of her being while urging other women not to do the same, Friedan had no choice. In a nation somewhat tempered by fresh reccollection of the horrors of McCarthyism, red-baiting and subsequent discreditation of those tarred with the label still ran rampant.

Understanding that her grim findings would never receive the light of day in a culture still gushy-eyed over the assumption that every housewife was automatically happy or that option was the only choice for women, she had to employ crafty PR strategies to make the book appealing for original publication and promotion. Her "new idenity" made her a far more appealing media source than a "radical labor activist" since it allowed her to avoid being blamed for her own stigmatization as one of those supposedly unnatural career women whose unhappiness must be self-inflicted.

As a member of third-wave feminism, I profess to having little initial interest in Friedan or her methodology. Because I lived in a world where with comparatively many more choices/rights, was aware of her own internal predjuduces towards intra-feminist movement diversity and antagonism towards Gloria Steinem, I usually wrote off Friedan as an anachronism who although important, was somebody I could not relate to directly. Since I was not married and was childless, I could not see myself in the pages.

After this book, I not only can see why she repackaged herself, but realized that I would do exactly the same thing in her position. I still disagree with Friedan on her minimialization of other feminist leaders, but have a new appreciation of her work and relevance.

Explores the "missing past" forBetty Friedan
In this very readable book, Daniel Horowitz examines Betty Friedan's political and intellectual origins and finds good reason to question the widely held understanding that The Feminine Mystique was written out of theperspective and consciousness of a typical surburban housewife.

ProfessorHorowitz explores the life and thought of the young Bettye Goldstein as anundergraduate at Smith, and then as a labor journalist in the early and mid1940's, and reveals her origins as a committed social critic and advocatewith labor-left origins.

Professor Horowitz treats his subject gently andwith respect.Betty Friedan disagrees with Horowitz's analysis, and thistension adds to the fun. ... Read more

Product Description

As expatriates in Germany and Austria in the 1930s, Kay Boyle, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford, and Lillian Hellman saw the rise of Nazi ideology firsthand. And while all four clearly realized -- as their work demonstrates -- that ethical behavior is the personal corollary of political conviction, scholars of these important American writers have long neglected the significance of the mingling of writing, ethics, and politics in their work.

In American Women Writers Thomas Austenfeld restores ethics and politics to the central places they held in the lives and work of these four women. By documenting the political and ethical apprenticeships each woman served in Germany and Austria, Austenfeld convincingly argues that the genius of these writers exists precisely in their ability to continue the development of their best creative sensibilities -- in spite of and indeed because of the ethical challenges they faced as women writers in the tense prewar world.

Kay Boyle's analysis of the language and cultural expression of occupation, Lillian Hellman's exposure of diplomatic language as furthering war, Katherine Anne Porter's implicit critique of Weimar Germany's class consciousness, and Jean Stafford's searching meditations on guilt and responsibility all argue afresh for the pragmatic goals that fiction and drama can serve in a politically unstable world.

Customer Reviews (2)

A NEW CHAPTER OF AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY
It's not just that Thomas Austenfeld expands our understanding of American literature by grouping together for the very first time four remarkable women writers.Nor is it simply that in discussing the respective experiences of Katherine Anne Porter, Kay Boyle, Jean Stafford, and Lillian Hellman in Nazi Germany he creates a more comprehensive picture of the American expatriate experience. Ultimately what makes this intelligent and sprightly volume so enjoyable and worthwhile is the way in which Austenfeld writes a completely new chapter of American literary history in a manner that is informed, judicious, wise, and imminently readable.

Not worth the intellectual time
This book is not worth the time.Only libraries, craving other points of view, should buy this. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

DONT BELIEVE IT
A brilliant reviewer of appliances would have us believe that Cornell University Press would publish a book of negligible substance and detail.Knows little about the vetting process, which involves careful reviews by prominent academics and experts as well as staff editors.In fact the book is rich in historical, theoretical, and original anecdotal evidence as any reader who takes the time to actually read the book will see.Anyone can file an amazon report but clearly this is no guarantee of insight.

Bouncing Across the Pond
Hart's book was exceptionaly weak in content, spending the majority of the time on justification of methodology.Whenever one thought that an opportunity presented itself to deal with GREECE and GENDER, immediately the reader was bounced across the Atlantic to issues of African American radicalism or culture in the United States.This could have been a great book, if it were 120 pages that actaully dealt with Greece and utilized primary sources as opposed to secondary theoretical sources.Conjecture is not history.

A real contribution from an extraordinary scholar
I have heard about Dr. Hart's work for years and find her reputation as a ground-breaking scholar with novel, but significant, ideas for research is well-deserved.This work is especially important as so many of that generation are now passing away. ... Read more

Product Description
Over the past decade, psychoanalysis has been at the centre of debates within the humanities, crucial to new ways of reading literature and a focus of continuing controversy for feminism. In these essays, Jacqueline Rose draws on these concerns while arguing that a shift of attention is now needed, from desire, sexuality and writing, to the place of the unconscious in the furthest reaches of our cultural and political lives. With essays on war, Margaret Thatcher and the dispute over seduction in relation to Freud, she offers new forms of potential psychopolitical understanding. Finally, in two extended essays on Melanie Klein and the earliest controversies over her theories, she suggests that it is time for a radical re-reading of her work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

depressing but helpful
This book was published in 1993.This makes it hard to read, since several times Drakulic talks about the war being "almost over".When one knows that the worst in the former Yugoslavia was yet to come this makes this depressing book even more depressing.But, it's worth reading to get an inside account of how the war in Yugoslavia seemed to a smart, cosmopolitan reporter.It's not a history of the conflict nor an analytic account of it.You'll not fully understand the war or why it happend by reading this book.But, you'll understand the people to a greater degree.Drakulic is a very sympathetic writer who portrays her subjects (including herself) in a very humane way at a time when it was all to easy to forget the humanity of others.It's worth reading for that alone.

The intimacies of war
THE BALKAN EXPRESS: FRAGMENTS FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF WAR by Slavenka Drakulic, is a book of short essays that are memoirs and written illustrations of what it is like to find the country in which you live divided by war. Under Drakulic's hand, this stops being a political abstraction of battling ideas (pan-Slavism vs. independent nation states), but a physical and psychological hardship of the intimate and emotionally scarring, deadly violence and nihilistic realities of war in one's own neighborhood.

While this book -- published in the nid 1990s, with essays dating from July 1991 to January 1994, through the complete Croatian war of secession and the beginning and continuation of the war in Bosnia that killed 200,000 and displaced millions -- is somewhat dated for us now that we know of the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina (and the eventual war in Kosovo), the timelessness of the ideas she expresses about war seems as if it would always be salient, especially now as the United States has soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Drakulic, who also wrote Cafe Europa and S: A Novel about the Balkans, details the outcomes of war, sometimes unexpected, sometimes not. While she mentions violent and ghastly images of war (a young couple of lovers, a Serb and a Bosnian, who have obtained permission to leave Sarajevo for Belgrade are shot in the no-man's land outside the city on their officially permitted leave-taking, the bodies left in the grass for days), she dwells more on the psychological understanding of war in one's own country, one's own city, one's own neighborhood. ("My friend in Paris who moved there when she was 10 years old, at the end of the Algerian war, told me that her teacher had asked her why, even after years of living in France, she walked down a street zig-zag. This is how you walk to avoid a bullet, she explained to her teacher. And this is what the generation of children who survived a war in Croatia will do, walk zig-zag and run to hide in cellars at the sound of aeroplane.")

Drakulic notices that war became real to her in small, personal moments of realization, such as when she sent her college-age daughter from Zagreb to live in Canada with her Serbian father, and saw that her daughter was taking clothes for all year round and her worn, stuffed, childhood stuffed-animal companion, in case she couldn't come back. She sees how she herself judges a refugee friend negatively for wearing fancy shoes and makeup, realizing that she has an underlying belief that a refugee should have no joy. She notes how the war follows refugees wherever they go; the war follows her to Slovenia, a famous Croatian actress to New York and her friends to Paris in their thinking and values. She writes about the shock she feels when she meets a young man, a soldier from Vukovar, in Zagreb after the city fell to the Serbs, who was so young, she can't get past what he's been through for his age.

A recurring theme of the book is how the war has taken a pluralistic nation of apolitical people (in her generation, born in the 1950s), who didn't notice or care about who was Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, or their religions, Orthodox, Muslim and Catholic, respectively, and obliterated them as individuals in favor of categorizing them as Croatians, Bosnians and Serbs above all else, and refusing them the right of being their own persons and "othering," as the literary critics say, those in different demographic categories, drafting them to kill those Others, or support the slaughter of those Others because their lives now depend on it.

This book is highly effective in helping one see what it would be like to have war break out within 100 miles of you, and come nearer every day. Though Drakulic writes that the war in the Balkans can be held, emotionally, at a distance by Europeans ("the 'other' is the lawless 'Balkans' they pretend not to understand") and by Americans ("For the USA it's more or less a 'European problem'), she destroys any complacency the reader might feel as far away in time and space from the Balkans with her highly intimate and moving glimpses into the psychological horrors of war in a world more like ours than it is different.

Powerful, Compelling and Shocking!
This book frightened me but also made me aware of the dangers of saying that we live in a safe world.Nothing could be further from the truth! I am an avid reader of the war in the Balkans and have found only one other book that so graphically depicts the atrocities and harsh realities of modern-day war. Beautifully written and easy for the layman to understand.

A Yugoslavian woman becomes a Croatian woman.
I thought Drakulic's writing describe the feelings of someone's whose society has been destroyed and a new one springs up.Her feelings as well as others are exposed in this book.This book summarizes the dispair of those who witnessed the Serbo-Croatian War of 1990-1991.I think the feelings described in this book, might only apply to the minority of the Croatian people.It certainly conveys a mother's anguish at seeing her child in a country at war.
I think this book conveys the human disaster of war.People suffer in a number of ways.They may not be soldiers, but they still suffer.Old ways die, and new ways may not be convenient to old people.Opportunities arise as can be seen where the woman confiscated another woman's apartment.War makes people old.I think all these feelings are conveyed in the book.

Living War
I read this book while studying the Balkans in school and shortly after September 11th. The book is about living war, a concept that is impossible to understand until one has been in a war like situation or has read this book. While I know that I can never say I felt as much pain as she did, I do have a better understanding of what it must have been like for her after 911 and after reading this book. It is an enjoyable read with the ability to touch on deep subjects without being too complex. ... Read more

Product Description
This political history of middle-class African American women during World War I focuses on their patriotic activity and social work. Nearly 200,000 African American men joined the Allied forces in France. At home, black clubwomen raised more than $125 million in wartime donations and assembled "comfort kits" for black soldiers, with chocolate, cigarettes, socks, a bible, and writing materials. Given the hostile racial climate of the day, why did black women make considerable financial contributions to the American and Allied war effort? Brown argues that black women approached the war from the nexus of the private sphere of home and family and the public sphere of community and labor activism. Their activism supported their communities and was fueled by a personal attachment to black soldiers and black families. Private Politics and Public Voices follows their lives after the war, when they carried their debates about race relations into public political activism. ... Read more

Product Description
The Civil War-era U.S. Sanitary Commission (USSC) was the largest wartime benevolent institution. Judith Ann Giesberg demonstrates convincingly that that generation of women provided a crucial link between the local evangelical crusades of the early nineteenth century and the sweeping national reform and suffrage movements of the postwar period.

Drawing on Sanitary Commission documents and memoirs, the author details how northern elite and middle-class women's experiences in and influence over the USSC formed the impetus for later reform efforts. Giesberg explores the ways in which women honed organizational and administrative skills, developed new strategies that combined strong centralized leadership with regional grassroots autonomy, and created a sisterhood that reached across class lines. She begins her study with an examination of the Woman's Central Association of Relief, an organization that gave birth to the USSC. Giesberg then discusses the significant roles of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Dorothea Lynde Dix, and Henry Whitney Bellows, and considers the rationale for bringing women and men together in a collaborative wartime relief program. She shows how Louisa Lee Schuyler, Abigail Williams May, and other young women maneuvered and challenged the male-run Commission as they built an effective national network for giving critical support to soldiers on the battlefield and their families on the home front.

This fresh perspective on the evolution of women's political culture fills an important gap in the literature, and it will appeal to historians, women's studies scholars, and Civil War buffs alike. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description

Daughters of the Union casts a spotlight on some of the most overlooked and least understood participants in the American Civil War: the women of the North. Unlike their Confederate counterparts, who were often caught in the midst of the conflict, most Northern women remained far from the dangers of battle. Nonetheless, they enlisted in the Union cause on their home ground, and the experience transformed their lives.

Nina Silber traces the emergence of a new sense of self and citizenship among the women left behind by Union soldiers. She offers a complex account, bolstered by women's own words from diaries and letters, of the changes in activity and attitude wrought by the war. Women became wage-earners, participants in partisan politics, and active contributors to the war effort. But even as their political and civic identities expanded, they were expected to subordinate themselves to male-dominated government and military bureaucracies.

Silber's arresting tale fills an important gap in women's history. She shows the women of the North--many for the first time--discovering their patriotism as well as their ability to confront new economic and political challenges, even as they encountered the obstacles of wartime rule. The Civil War required many women to act with greater independence in running their households and in expressing their political views. It brought women more firmly into the civic sphere and ultimately gave them new public roles, which would prove crucial starting points for the late-nineteenth-century feminist struggle for social and political equality.

Customer Reviews (1)

daughters of the Union
Book was sent out immediately, arrived within a few days, and was of excellent quality. ... Read more

Product Description
Until recently, histories of women tended to be segregated from the larger historical context. This pioneering volume places the role of women within the history of the interwar years, whenboth the women's and socialist movements became prominent, and raises the key question of how power was distributed between the genders in a historical setting. The emblematic title of this volume highlights the fundamental conception of this comparative study of eleven West European countries: that in the interwar decades two great movements gained in strength, converged, diverged, competed, and cooperated. Each of these movements is viewed as acomplex matrix of organized and unorganized participants. However, by far the most provocative questions deal with gender relations. Central to these are definitions of femininity and masculinity in terms of mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at the workplace, in the home, and in the political arena. The mystique of the "new woman" in the 1920s and the 1930s challenged traditional notions of gender identity and relations, not the least of which was the redefinition of the role of men.The main issue addressed in this volume is not how male socialists "dealt with" the woman question or how women functioned in or outside left-wingparties; it rather centers on illustrating the power distribution between the sexes in specific political and cultural contexts. This rigorously focused and coherent volume, to which some of the best-known scholars in the field have contributed, will no doubt establish itself as the standard reference work for years to come. ... Read more

Product Description
This original and historically rich book examines the influence of gender in shaping the Egyptian nation from the nineteenth century through the revolution of 1919 and into the 1940s. In Egypt as a Woman, Beth Baron divides her narrative into two strands: the first analyzes the gendered language and images of the nation, and the second considers the political activities of women nationalists. She shows that, even though women were largely excluded from participation in the state, the visual imagery of nationalism was replete with female figures. Baron juxtaposes the idealization of the family and the feminine in nationalist rhetoric with transformations in elite households and the work of women activists striving for national independence. ... Read more

Product Description
This Was Not Our War shares amazing first-person accounts of twenty-six Bosnian women who are reconstructing their society following years of devastating warfare. A university student working to resettle refugees, a paramedic who founded a veterans’ aid group, a fashion designer running two nonprofit organizations, a government minister and professor who survived Auschwitz—these women are advocates, politicians, farmers, journalists, students, doctors, businesswomen, engineers, wives, and mothers. They are from all parts of Bosnia and represent the full range of ethnic traditions and mixed heritages. Their ages spread across sixty years, and their wealth ranges from expensive jewels to a few chickens. For all their differences, they have this much in common: all survived the war with enough emotional strength to work toward rebuilding their country. Swanee Hunt met these women through her diplomatic and humanitarian work in the 1990s. Over the course of seven years, she conducted multiple interviews with each one. In presenting those interviews here, Hunt provides a narrative framework that connects the women’s stories, allowing them to speak to one another.

The women describe what it was like living in a vibrant multicultural community that suddenly imploded in an onslaught of violence. They relate the chaos; the atrocities, including the rapes of many neighbors and friends; the hurried decisions whether to stay or flee; the extraordinary efforts to care for children and elderly parents and to find food and clean drinking water. Reflecting on the causes of the war, they vehemently reject the idea that age-old ethnic hatreds made the war inevitable. The women share their reactions to the Dayton Accords, the end of hostilities, and international relief efforts. While they are candid about the difficulties they face, they are committed to rebuilding Bosnia based on ideals of truth, justice, and a common humanity encompassing those of all faiths and ethnicities. Their wisdom is instructive, their courage and fortitude inspirational. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Political auto-goal
This is yet another attempt to water down the real cause of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.The reader will conclude that the agressor was not Serbia and Monteneagro, but....some crazy local politicians who succeded in fomanting the heatred after coming to power.Reader is fooled into beleiving that this heatred had nothing to do with previous history, which is full of bloodshed caused by this monsterous project of Greater Serbia.Personal tragedies of these woman are masterfully twisted into illusion that "we lived like a brothers during Marshall Tito", who by the way was one of the biggest criminals and dictatiors in the recent history.If I wrote this when this communist Tito was alive, I'd be in the gulag before this message treavelled from my computer to amazon's server.Poor book, full of illusions and lies!Stay away.

"If all soldiers were women, there would not be so much bloodshed."
Feeling utterly betrayed by their leaders, twenty-six women from all over Bosnia meet with Swanee Hunt, former US Ambassador to Austria and Chair of Women Waging Peace, a global policy initiative.In their own words, they describe the war which ravaged their country and reduced it to rubble.As they make clear from the outset, this war was not a result of age-old ethnic antagonisms in the Balkans, where city after city had been peacefully multi-ethnic and where most families had loyalties to more than one group.It was the direct result, they believe, of the nationalism fomented by unscrupulous politicians, especially Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, as they seized power and wealth in the vacuum which existed following the death of Marshall Tito.

The twenty-six speakers are Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, atheists (former Communists), and Jews, all bright, articulate women who are, and have been, working to heal their society.They include engineers, several journalists and physicians, a teacher, a member of the Bosnian Parliament, a professor at the School of Economics, a landscape architect, a member of the seven-member shared Presidency, a farm wife, a flower shop owner, a teenage student, and an art gallery owner, and they represent all areas of Bosnia, from Srebrenica to Mostar, Tuzla, and Sarajevo.

With one voice, they blame their politicians for the atrocities of the war, pointing out that their leaders' manipulation of the international press and their sectarian chauvinism led to ethnic fundamentalism in a country which had previously been multicultural.The imposition of traditional roles on women led to their enforced withdrawal from decision-making, and they universally agree that that they might have been able to influence the direction of the country toward more cultural understanding and better communication if they had been allowed to continue their previous political, professional, and social roles.

The stories here are lively, personal, often incredibly sad, and absolutely unforgettable.Beautiful color portraits of the women, along with brief biographies, make each woman a "living" voice, and the reader is struck by how much these women typify women around the world.Most remarkably the women, despite the losses of parents, husbands, sons, and friends, all continue rebuilding their country, ignoring ethnic labels as they work to get housing for all refugees, find medical supplies and equipment, establish a women's collective, work with rape victims, plan conferences to bring together women from all over the country, make radio broadcasts, organize news agencies, write books, promote international awareness of the atrocities in Bosnia (especially in Srebrenica), care for the elderly, become ambassadors, and run schools.

Hunt's book and the words of these remarkable women are a major achievement in the understanding of this terrible war, a war far different from what most of us have been led to believe.Fourteen magnificent photographs, in addition to the women's portraits, will wring the heart--an unrecognizable national library, a snow-covered Sarajevo soccer field which is now a cemetery, and a decimated dormitory in the Olympic village.Yet amidst the carnage are smiling women who are changing the face of Bosnia.As Kada tells Hunt, "Thank you for telling my story.What's written down will last." n Mary Whipple

A Book Every Woman Should Read
I found this book to be unbelievably moving, especially the pictures of the women, which helped me realize that these women are just like you and me, and that this could happen to any one of us.I can not imagine the strength required and exhibited by each of these women, and thank Ms. Hunt for sharing their stories.Every woman in America should read this book!

A profound, compassionate, eloquent book from the heart
This is an exquisitely executed book about the struggles of women in Bosnia to survive the ravages of a war fuelled by political expedience and glamorized as an ethnic struggle.Swanee Hunt's own tone of moral outrage never eclipses the voices of the women she has interviewed.She writes of them with love, and also finds much love in them, a love only more startling for having survived such intense hatred.This book is a great, great achievement, both for its singular mix of empathy and for its clarity.As Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl found meaning in the Holocaust without diminishing its horror, so Hunt finds a language of strength and power in these compromised lives.This is a book about the very best and very worst of humanity.

This Was Not Their War, But All Wars are "Ours"
This Was Not our War by former U.S. Ambassador to Austria Swanee Hunt is a deeply troubling and hopeful work. First-person accounts of twenty-six Bosnian women from diverse backgrounds form a narrative for understanding conflict and daily life in the Balkans during the 1990's.As the reader meets these women and enters into their experiences, and especially their powerful movements to build a peaceful society, we not only encounter their lives, but through them gain some sense of the struggles and hopes of people caught in other similar contemporary human disasters in Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Sudan.

The women whose stories are presented here are teachers and politicians, business owners and factory workers, journalists and physicians.They are Muslim, Orthodox, Jewish, Catholic and non-religious.They are Croats and Serbs and very clear that the ethnic distinctions on which so much destruction was based was largely a myth of justification amplified out of all proportion by those who made the war.

Each woman who was interviewed is presented with a photo and a brief biography which had great impact on me as a reader, bringing them to life.And once they were alive, then the narrative and history also came to life in a much more personal way.They are like women I know, my friends and neighbors.

I believe it is in making that connection that this work is most important and valuable. When the people involved in war seem like strangers to me, I can tend to distance from what I read and see and hear.The particulars of these women in their photos, narratives and biographies broke through that kind of shield.In doing so, I came to understand that the Bosnian conflict, while not of their choosing or design, was like all wars, our war, in which we all participate and suffer and to which we all have power to respond.Our way as humans in this world does not have to be this kind of warring madness.Ambassador Hunt's book helps us see the possibilities of other ways.
... Read more

Product Description
An examination of women's roles in politics and society in the contemporary Russian Federation as it creates a new market economy and democratic course born of a millennium of history and nearly 75 years of authoritarian communist rule. ... Read more

Product Description
Univ. of California, Los Angeles. Examines the individual and combined influence of religion, morality, race, politics, personal history, sociopolitical context, and economics on a woman's decision to continue or terminate her pregnancy. ... Read more

Product Description
By examining the writings of Lebanese women she calls the Beirut Decentrists, Miriam Cooke challenges the notion that only men write about war. Although of differing political and religious beliefs, it is these Decentrists--women bound by common exclusion from both the literary canon and social discourse--whose vision will rebuild shattered Lebanon. The author traces the transformation in consciousness that took place among women who observed and recorded the progress toward chaos in Lebanon. During the so-called two-year war of 1975-6, little comment was made about those who left the cauldron of violence (usually men in search of economic security), but with time attitudes changed. Women became increasingly aware that they had stayed out of responsibility for others and that they had survived. This growing awareness served as a catalyst, and the Beirut Decentrists began describing a society that had gone beyond the masculinization normal in most wars and achieved an almost unprecedented feminization. Emigration, expected behavior for men before 1975, was rejected; staying, expected behavior for women before 1975, became the standard of Lebanese citizenship. The writings of the Beirut Decentrists offer a way out of anarchy. If men and women could espouse the Lebanese woman's sense of responsibility, the energy that fueled unrelenting savagery could be turned to reconstruction. ... Read more

Product Description