Synopses & Reviews
Romantic love has challenged and vexed feminist thought from its origins. Judging from the shelves of books advising women on love problems, there seems to be an ongoing difficulty in maintaining equality in romantic relationships. Does romance weaken or empower women? Why do women seem overwhelmingly attracted to romantic love in spite of raised consciousness in other areas of life that is a legacy of feminism? Have women always been seen as the sex which most seeks love and is best suited for love?
These are some of the questions Women and Romance: A Reader seeks to address in bringing together a collection of texts specifically focused on the subject of women's conflicted but powerful urge to experience the pleasure and endure the pain of romantic love. The first anthology of its kind, Women and Romance includes historical as well as contemporary selections, personal letters as well as theoretical essays, and social science perspectives as well as literary criticism of the novel and the popular mass-market romance. Wiesser lays out in systematic order for the first time the varying viewpoints and conflicted history of feminist views on romance, from Mary Wollstonecraft and Emma Goldman to Germaine Greer and Lillian Faderman.
Introductions to each entry and section clarify the emerging themes of each era and of separate disciplines, while representing the views of traditionalists and anti-romance second-wave feminists alike.
Contributors include: Charlotte Bronte, Barbara Bross, Eliza Southgate Bowne, Rita Mae Brown, Andreas Capellanus, Patricia Hill Collins, Simone de Beauvoir, Christine Delphy, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Lillian Faderman, Shulamith Firestone, Moderata Fonte, Mary Gaitskill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, Vivian Gornick, Germaine Greer, Lynne Harne, bell hooks, Karen Horney, Carolyn Heilbrun, Audre Lorde, Tania Modleski, Gloria Naylor, Mary Poovey, Janice Radway, William Robinson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jane Rule, Barbara Ryan, Ann Snitow, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gloria Steinem, Mary Wollstonecraft, Victoria Woodhull, Virginia Woolf.
Synopsis
The disintegration of the former Soviet Union, the end of the cold war and the trend of economic developmental "miracles" in disparate regions of the globe have brought a vast transformation to the political, economic, and security configurations of the world. Gone is the bipolar world of superpower rivalry, replaced by new international patterns and trends.
Nowhere is the transformation more striking than in East and Southeast Asia, the region which includes China, Japan, the "four tigers" of Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, and the emerging powers of Southeast Asia. The regional transformation in turn has extended beyond the region itself, profoundly affecting global politics and international relations.
Asia's New World Order traces the overall political, economic, and security developments of the region. The contributors look beyond the customary fixation on great powers to examine developments in the lesser powers, and to search for unforeseen policy implications and directions for the United States.
About the Author
Susan Ostrov Weisser is Professor of English at Adelphi University and Academic Director of the Bard College Clemente Program in the Humanities in Harlem, New York City. She is co-editor of Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds and author of A Craving Vacancy: Women and Sexual Love in the British Novel, 1740-1880, also available from NYU Press.