Woman S Fortitude

"This anthology aims to bring together writings by African-American women between 1832 and 1920, the period when they began to write for American audiences and to use history to comment on political and social issues of the day. The pieces are by more familiar nineteenth-century writers in Black America--like Maria Stewart, Francis E. W. Harper, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson--as well as lesser-known mothers and teachers whose participation in their local educational systems thrust them into national intellectual conversations. Each piece will have a headnote providing biographical information about its author as well as contextual information about its publication and the topic being discussed. The volume will contain a substantial introduction to the overall enterprise of Black women's historical writings. Because the editors are both trained in American studies and religious history, their introduction will particularly highlight religious themes and venues in which these writings were presented. This book should appeal to general readers of books like those in the Schomburg Library series, as well as those who work and teach American history, African American studies, women's studies, American literature, and American religious history"--Provided by publisher.

This book examines issues of identity and difference, both theoretically and as represented in curriculum materials. Here debates over the cultural character of the curriculum are characterized as debates over the American national identity. The editors argue that historically, cultural conservatives have failed to appreciate that the United States is, in a fundamental and central way, an African and African-American place. European Americans are, in a cultural sense, also black, and the failure to teach sequestered suburban (usually Caucasian) students about their (cultural) African and African-American heritage perpetuates their delusion regarding their deeper identities. A curriculum which reflects the non-synchronous identity of Americans is sketched in the last section. Such a curriculum involves not only the inclusion of African and African-American content, but interracial intellectual marriage as well. Contributors to this book include Peter Taubman, Susan Edgerton, Beverly Gordon, Alma Young, Wendy Luttrell, Cameron McCarthy, Patricia Collins, Roger Collins, Brenda Hatfield, Marianne H. Whatley, and Joe L. Kincheloe.

Volume I problematizes the concepts of Enlightenment and revolution, revealing how the former did not wholly cause the latter. The volume also provides a comprehensive analysis of the American Revolution, making it essential to American historians and scholars of the Atlantic World.

This fascinating work illustrates how Jane Austen's novels treat questions raised by 18th and 19th century thinkers and writers concerning women's education. It points out that just as Jane Austen's novels are aesthetically superior to those of her didactic contemporaries, her thinking is far less doctrinaire than theirs. This study will increase every reader's enjoyment of the novels by illuminating their humor and it will also indicate why Austen must be considered a feminist. Those interested in British Romantics, Women's Studies, and the History of Education will find this book particularly valuable.

There emerged, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a reflexive relationship between shifting codes of legal evidence in British courtrooms and the growing fascination throughout Europe with the "primitive" Scottish Highlands. New methods for determining evidential truth, linked with the growing prominence of lawyers and a formalized division of labor between witnesses and jurors, combined to devalue the authority of witness testimony, magnifying the rupture between experience and knowledge. Juries now pronounced verdicts based not upon the certainty of direct experience but rather upon abstractions of probability or reasonable likelihood. Yet even as these changes were occurring, the Scottish Highlands and Hebridean Islands were attracting increased attention as a region where witness experience in sublime and communal forms had managed to trump enlightened progress and the probabilistic, abstract, and mediated mentality on which the Enlightenment was predicated. There, in a remote corner of Britain, natives and tourists beheld things that surpassed enlightened understanding; experience was becoming all the more alluring to the extent that it signified something other than knowledge. Matthew Wickman examines this uncanny return of experiential authority at the very moment of its supposed decline and traces the alluring improbability of experience into our own time. Thematic in its focus and cross-disciplinary in its approach, The Ruins of Experience situates the literary next to the nonliterary, the old beside the new. Wickman looks to poems, novels, philosophical texts, travel narratives, contemporary theory, and evidential treatises and trial narratives to suggest an alternative historical view of the paradoxical tensions of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras.

In the early years of contesting patriarchy in the academy and religious institutions, feminist theology often presented itself as a unified front, a sisterhood. The term "feminist theology," however, is misleading. It suggests a singular feminist purpose driven by a unified female cultural identity that struggles as a cohesive whole against patriarchal dominance. Upon closer inspection, the voice of feminist theology is in fact a chorus of diverging perspectives, each informed by a variety of individual and communal experiences, and an embattled scholarly field, marked by the effects of privilege and power imbalances. This complexity raises an important question: How can feminist theologians respect the irreducible diversity of women's experiences and unmask entrenched forms of privilege in feminist theological discourse? In Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference, Margaret D. Kamitsuka urges the feminist theological community to examine critically its most deeply held commitments, assumptions, and goals-especially those of feminist theologians writing from positions of privilege as white or heterosexual women. Focusing on women's experience as portrayed in literature, biblical narrative, and ethnographic writing, Kamitsuka examines the assumptions of feminist theology regarding race and sexuality. She proposes theoretical tools that feminist theologians can employ to identify and hopefully avoid the imposition of racial or sexual hegemony, thus providing invaluable complexity to the movement's identity, and ultimately contributing to current and future Christian theological issues. Blending poststructuralist and postcolonial theoretical resources with feminist and queer concerns, Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference makes constructive theological proposals, ranging from sin to christology. The text calls feminist theologians to a more rigorous self-critical approach as they continue to shape the changing face of Christian theological discourse.