What are the relations between feminism and history, feminist politics and historical practice? What are the connections between gender and class? What part have racial identities and ethnic difference played in the construction of Englishness? Through a series of provocative and richly detailed essays, Catherine Hall explores these questions. She argues that feminism has opened up vital new questions for history and transformed familiar historical narratives. Class can no longer be understood outside of gender, or gender outside of class. But (...) English identities have also been rooted in imperial power. White, Male and Middle Class explores the ways in which middle-class masculinities were rooted in conceptions of power over dependants - whether black or female. (shrink)

A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain't I a Woman has become a must-read for all those interested in the nature of black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the black woman's involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions. The result is nothing short of groundbreaking, giving this book a critical place on every feminist scholar's bookshelf.

A gem of a book for scholars in race and ethnic relations and sociobiology.... Van den Berghe analyzes various forms that race and ethnic relations have displayed including colonial empires, slavery, middleman minorities, caste systems, and assimilation. The causes and consequences of these systems are brilliantly teased out employing historical and crosscultural examples. Libraries with any work at all on race and ethnic relations or sociobiology should acquire this book. Choice.

Contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism. Perhaps trouble need not carry such a..

Ever since feminist theory introduced the distinction between sex and gender, the question of what it means to be a woman has preoccupied feminist thought. In ____Gender__ ____Trouble ____ Judith Butler questions whether it is possible to "be" a woman at all or, for that matter, any gender.

How have ideas about white women figured in the history of racism? Vron Ware argues that they have been central, and that feminism has, in many ways, developed as a political movement within racist societies. Dissecting the different meanings of femininity and womanhood, Beyond the Pale examines the political connections between black and white women, both within contemporary racism and feminism, as well as in historical examples like the anti-slavery movement and the British campaign against lynching in the United States. (...) Beyond the Pale is a major contribution to anti-racist work, confronting the historical meanings of whiteness as a way of overcoming the moralism that so often infuses anti-racist movements. (shrink)