Synopses & Reviews
History is not just about great personalities, wars, and revolutions; it is also about the subtle aspects of more ordinary matters. On a day-to-day basis the aspects of life that most preoccupied people in late eighteenth- through mid nineteenth-century Mexico were not the political machinations of generals or politicians but whether they themselves could make a living, whether others accorded them the respect they deserved, whether they were safe from an abusive husband, whether their wives and children would obey themand#8212;in short, the minutiae of daily life.
Sonya Lipsett-Riveraand#8217;s Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750and#8211;1856 explores the relationships between Mexicans, their environment, and one another, as well as their negotiation of the cultural values of everyday life. By examining the value systems that governed Mexican thinking of the period, Lipsett-Rivera examines the ephemeral daily experiences and interactions of the people and illuminates how gender and honor systems governed these quotidian negotiations. Bodies and the built environment were inscribed with cultural values, and the relationship of Mexicans to and between space and bodies determined the way ordinary people acted out their culture.
Synopsis
Women and men are more alike than we might think. In this accessible and enthusiastic introduction Mary Holmes explains how sociological approaches to gender can help us understand how and why everyday life is often so different for women and men, despite their similarities.
Synopsis
Why are we so insistent that women and men are different? This introduction to gender provides a fascinating, readable exploration of how society divides people into feminine women and masculine men. Gender and Everyday Life explores gender as a way of seeing women and men as not just biological organisms, but as people shaped by their everyday social world. Examining how gender has been understood and lived in the past; and how it is understood and done differently by different cultures and groups within cultures; Mary Holmes considers the strengths and limitations of different ways of thinking and learning to ?do? gender.
Key sociological and feminist ideas about gender are covered from Christine Pisan to Mary Wollstonecraft; and from symbolic interactionism to second wave feminism through to the work of Judith Butler. Gender and Everyday Life illustrates gender with a range of familiar and contemporary examples: everything from nineteenth century fashions in China and Britain, to discussions of what Barbie can tell us about gender in America, to the lives of working women in Japan. This book will be of great use and interest to students to gender studies, sociology and feminist theory.
About the Author
Sonya Lipsett-Rivera is a professor of history at Carleton University. She is the author of To Defend Our Water with the Blood of Our Veins: The Struggle for Resources in Colonial Puebla and coeditor of The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America.