The New Feminist Agenda

Feminists opened up thousands of doors in the 1960s and 1970s, but decades later, are U.S. women where they thought they would be? The answer, it turns out, is a resounding no. Surely there have been gains. Women now comprise nearly 60 percent of college undergraduates and half of all medical and law students. They have entered the workforce in record numbers, making the two wage earner family the norm. But combining a career and family turned out to be more complicated than expected. While women changed, social structures surrounding work and family remained static. Affordable and high quality child care, paid family leave, and equal pay for equal work remain elusive for the vast majority of working women. In fact, the nation has fallen far behind other parts of the world on the gender equity front. We lag behind more than seventy countries when it comes to the percentage of women holding elected federal offices. Only 17 percent of corporate boards include women members. And just 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies are led by women. It is time, says the author, to change all that. Looking back over five decades of advocacy, she analyzes where progress stalled, looks at the successes of other countries, and charts the course for the next feminist revolution, one that mobilizes women, and men, to call for the kind of government and workplace policies that can improve the lives of women and strengthen their families.

Feminists opened up thousands of doors in the 1960s and 1970s, but decades later, are U.S. women where they thought they'd be? The answer, it turns out, is a resounding no. Surely there have been gains. Women now comprise nearly 60 percent of college undergraduates and half of all medical and law students. They have entered the workforce in record numbers, making the two-wage-earner family the norm. But combining a career and family turned out to be more complicated than expected. While women changed, social structures surrounding work and family remained static. Affordable and high-quality child care, paid family leave, and equal pay for equal work remain elusive for the vast majority of working women. In fact, the nation has fallen far behind other parts of the world on the gender-equity front. We lag behind more than seventy countries when it comes to the percentage of women holding elected federal offices. Only 17 percent of corporate boards include women members. And just 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies are led by women. It's time, says Madeleine M. Kunin, to change all that. Looking back over five decades of advocacy, she analyzes where progress stalled, looks at the successes of other countries, and charts the course for the next feminist revolution--one that mobilizes women, and men, to call for the kind of government and workplace policies that can improve the lives of women and strengthen their families.

In the length of time from Gloria Steinem to Courtney Love, young feminists have grown up with a plethora of cultural choices and images. In THIRD WAVE AGENDA, feminists born between the years 1964 and 1973 discuss the things that matter NOW, both in looking back at the accomplishments and failures of the past--and in planning for the challenges of the future. 10 halftones.

In today's 'post-feminist' society, feminism is often portrayed as unfashionable and irrelevant. But since the turn of the millennium, a revitalised feminist movement has emerged to challenge these assumptions and assert a vibrant new agenda. Reclaiming the F Word reveals the what, why and how of the new feminist movement and what it has to say about women's lives today. From cosmetic surgery to celebrity culture and parenting to politics, from rape to religion and sex to singleness, this groundbreaking book reveals the seven vital issues at stake for today's feminists, and calls a new generation back to action.

Essays by researchers, counselors, and health professionals identify the implications of the HIV/AIDS epidemic for women in Britain and present an overview of the important medical, social, cultural, and political issues raised for feminist theory and practice. Topics include the impact of HIV/AIDS on women's lives, the effectiveness of current services for women, and new models for challenging the social factors conducive to the spread of HIV. Includes a list of British organizations for women affected by AIDS. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author of the New York Times bestseller Useful Idiots and popular columnist Mona Charen takes a close, reasoned look at the aggressive feminist agenda undermining the success and happiness of men and women across the country In this smart, deeply necessary critique, Mona Charen unpacks the ways feminism fails us at home, in the workplace, and in our personal relationships--by promising that we can have it all, do it all, and be it all. Here, she upends the feminist agenda and the liberal conversation surrounding women's issues by asking tough and crucial questions, such as: Did women's full equality require the total destruction of the nuclear family? Did it require a sexual revolution that would dismantle traditions of modesty, courtship, and fidelity that had characterized relations between the sexes for centuries? Did it cause the broken dating culture and the rape crisis on our college campuses? Did it require war between the sexes that would deem men the "enemy" of women? Have the strides of feminism made women happier in their home and work life. (The answer is No.) Sex Matters tracks the price we have paid for denying sex differences and stoking the war of the sexes--family breakdown, declining female happiness, aimlessness among men, and increasing inequality. Marshaling copious social science research as well as her own experience as a professional as well as a wife and mother, Mona Charen calls for a sexual ceasefire for the sake of women, men, and children.

In this explosive new book, acclaimed French author Elisabeth Badinter attacks a most unlikely force undermining women’s equality: liberal motherhood, in thrall to all that is “natural.” Attachment parenting, co-sleeping and on-demand breastfeeding—these hallmarks of contemporary motherhood have succeeded in tethering women to the home and family to an extent not seen since the 1950s. The taboos surrounding epidurals, formula and disposable diapers—anything that distracts a mother’s attention from her offspring—have turned child rearing into a singularly regressive force. In sharp, engaging prose, Badinter names a reactionary shift that has been intensely felt but never clearly articulated until now. A bestseller in Europe, The Conflict is a scathing indictment of a stealthy zealotry that cheats women of their full potential.

This collection of new feminist essays represents the work of young critics researching and teaching in British Universities. Aiming to set the agenda for feminist criticism in the nineties, the essays debate themes crucial to the development of feminist thought: among them, the problems of gendered knowledge and the implications of accounts of gendered language, cultural restraints on the representation of sexuality, women’s agency, cultural and political change, a feminist aesthetics and new readings of race and class. This variety is given coherence by a unity of aim – to forge new feminist discourses by addressing conceptual and cultural questions central to problems of gender and sexual difference. The topics of discussion range from matrilinear thought to seventeenth-century prophecy; the poetry of Amelia Lanyer to Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs; from Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf to eighteenth-century colonial painting of the South Pacific; from medieval romance to feminist epistemology. The essays utilise and question the disciplines of literary criticism, art history, photography, psychoanalysis, Marxist history and post-structuralist theory.