Daughters For Sale

This book is the first part of Gianna Patriarca's trilogy on Italian women. Winner of the Milton Acorn award, the collection remains popular today almost 20 years after it was first published.

Daughters for Sale continues the author's journey begun in Italian Women and Other Tragedies, Gianna Patriarca's successful first collection of poems. Here is a compassionate search for understanding lives dislocated by the immigrant experience. Through humour, irony, anger, and reconciliation, Gianna Patriarca reveals the fragility and intensity of the unforgettable characters she meets. Their 'songs in dialect' arise from voices not accustomed to being heard in any official culture. These poetic snapshots of women and men will leave no reader indifferent.

In 1987, more than a decade before the dawn of queer theory, Ifi Amadiume wrote Male Daughters, Female Husbands, to critical acclaim. This compelling and highly original book frees the subject position of 'husband' from its affiliation with men, and goes on to do the same for other masculine attributes, dislocating sex, gender and sexual orientation. Boldly arguing that the notion of gender, as constructed in Western feminist discourse, did not exist in Africa before the colonial imposition of a dichotomous understanding of sexual difference, Male Daughters, Female Husbands examines the structures in African society that enabled people to achieve power, showing that roles were not rigidly masculinized nor feminized. At a time when gender and queer theory are viewed by some as being stuck in an identity-politics rut, this outstanding study not only warns against the danger of projecting a very specific, Western notion of difference onto other cultures, but calls us to question the very concept of gender itself.

While the expectations and circumstances of women’s lives in ancient Israel have received considerable attention in recent scholarship, to date little attention has been focused on the role of daughters in Hebrew narrative‒‒that is, of yet unmarried female members of the household, who are not yet mothers. Kimberly D. Russaw argues that daughters are more than foils for the males (fathers, brothers, etc.) in biblical narratives and that they often use particular tactics to navigate antagonistic systems of power in their worlds. Institutions and power structures favor the patriarch, sons inherit such privileges and benefits, and wives and mothers are ascribed special status because they ensure the patrilineal legacy by birthing sons; but daughters do not receive such social favor or standing. Instead of privileging daughters, systems and institutions control their bodies, restrict their access, and constrict their movement. Combining philological data, social-science models, and cross-cultural comparisons, Russaw examines the systems that constrict biblical daughters in their worlds and the strategies they employ when hostile social forces threaten their well-being.

In 1905, the year preceding the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, Iranian women and girls were sold by needy peasants to pay their taxes, or taken as booty in a raid by Turkoman tribesmen against a village settlement in Northeast Iran. The telling and retelling of the event became a focus for outage and grievance, contributing to both popular mobilizations against autocracy and a constitutional regime. Indeed, the narration of this event took all of Iran by storm. Shortly after the opening of a new parliament in 1906, relatives of some of the captive women demanded that the parliament punish those responsible. The newly reconstituted Ministry of Justice investigated the matter and actually tried several people who were alleged to be responsible. In The Story of the Daughters of Quchan, Afsaneh Najambodi investigates what made this incident more powerful. How did a familiar incident of rural destitution and the story of yet another Turkoman raid became a uniquely outrageous story? Although it captured the Iranian national imagination, this event has been all but forgotten. What does this "amnesia" tell us about the political culture or modern Iran, as well as that country's national memory, and about modernist historiography, as well as that country's national memory, and about modernist historiography in general?

Here is presented for the first time an overview of dental practice and the providers of dental treatment at the close of the eighteenth century in some of the major countries of western Europe and further afield.