Women At The Crossroads

Kari Torjesen Malcolm offers readers a satisfying alternative to both traditional and feminist models of what a woman should be.

Winner of the Mormon History Association Best International Book Award The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues to contend with longstanding tensions surrounding gender and race. Yet women of color in the United States and across the Global South adopt and adapt the faith to their contexts, many sharing the high level of satisfaction expressed by Latter-day Saints in general. Caroline Kline explores the ways Latter-day Saint women of color in Mexico, Botswana, and the United States navigate gender norms, but also how their moral priorities and actions challenge Western feminist assumptions. Kline analyzes these traditional religious women through non-oppressive connectedness, a worldview that blends elements of female empowerment and liberation with a broader focus on fostering positive and productive relationships in different realms. Even as members of a patriarchal institution, the women feel a sense of liberation that empowers them to work against oppression and against alienation from both God and other human beings. Vivid and groundbreaking, Mormon Women at the Crossroads merges interviews with theory to offer a rare discussion of Latter-day Saint women from a global perspective.

Women at the Crossroads: A Woman's Perspective on the Weekly Torah Portion comprises 53 essays pertaining to women based on each of the weekly Torah Portions throughout the year. Rebbetzin Chana Bracha Siegelbaum discusses in-depth the characters and dilemmas of the women in the Torah that are relevant to the issues which women encounter today. The author explores the underlying values of laws and rituals that pertain to women by examining the inherent nature of women as presented in the Torah. Based on the intricacies of the Torah text, she shows the beauty and depth of the role of women as portrayed in the Torah and teaches the importance of women and their immense influence on society as prime movers of history. The book is divided into five chapters, corresponding to the five books of the Torah. Each chapter is divided into sections according to each Torah portion. In addition, it includes a comprehensive and useful compilation of biographies of the commentaries quoted in the book. Expounding the Torah text through methodical research of Midrash, Talmud and traditional commentators, such as Rashi and the Ramban, placed side-by-side with Chassidic masters like the Me'or v'Shemesh and modern commentators including Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Rebbetzin Chana Bracha Siegelbaum weaves together the strands that make up the tapestry of life for the contemporary woman.Rather than paying homage to the external, competitive, masculine world, the author demonstrates how Jewish women of today may look inwards to the women in the Torah for guidance in choosing their priorities in life.

HIV ravaged the African continent faster and earlier than any other in the world, spreading primarily through unprotected heterosexual sex. Kaolack, Senegal is a town where travellers and prostitutes converge, and HIV transmission rates have soared, especially among the prostitutes. Going beyond empirical analysis of risk/behaviour data, Women at the Crossroads tells the stories of these women in their own words. The women portrayed keep their profession a secret from their families and friends, but abide by Senegalese law which states that prostitution is legal for those who register with the police and undergo bi-monthly health examinations. By observing one clinic's successful AIDS education campaign, anthropologist Michelle Renaud demonstrates that information presented in a culturally appropriate manner can, in fact, achieve the difficult goal of behaviour change. Although these women claim to be trapped by the social and political forces that have led them to enter prostitution, Renaud argues that they have taken control of their destinies in an inspiring fashion.

With the exception of a few iconic moments such as Rosa Parks’s 1955 refusal to move to the back of a Montgomery bus, we hear little about what black women activists did prior to 1960. Perhaps this gap is due to the severe repression that radicals of any color in America faced as early as the 1930s, and into the Red Scare of the 1950s. To be radical, and black and a woman was to be forced to the margins and consequently, these women’s stories have been deeply buried and all but forgotten by the general public and historians alike. In this exciting work of historical recovery, Dayo F. Gore unearths and examines a dynamic, extended network of black radical women during the early Cold War, including established Communist Party activists such as Claudia Jones, artists and writers such as Beulah Richardson, and lesser known organizers such as Vicki Garvin and Thelma Dale. These women were part of a black left that laid much of the groundwork for both the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and later strains of black radicalism. Radicalism at the Crossroads offers a sustained and in-depth analysis of the political thought and activism of black women radicals during the Cold War period and adds a new dimension to our understanding of this tumultuous time in United States history.

Based on extensive research conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) with participants in The Women's Leadership Program, the book provides a basis for understanding the many choices, tradeoffs, and decisions that face women daily. Showcasing many personal stories, it spotlights five key themes that are essential to guiding executive women's development today - the need to act authentically, make connections, control one's destiny, achieve wholeness, and gain self-clarity."--BOOK JACKET.

Examining four centuries of Midwestern women's history, contributors discuss ways these women's lives both resemble and differ from those of women of other regions. Midwestern female experience is shown to be distinctive in terms of degrees of migration, which resulted in the Midwest becoming a cultural crossroads.

Thirty years after the end of the civil war, Lebanese women are still struggling for gender equality. This study builds on recent scholarship on women’s activism in the Arab world, in the context of the Arab Spring. It examines how discourses of secularism and equal civil rights have informed the contemporary Lebanese women’s movement in their campaigns for a domestic violence law, women’s nationality rights, a women’s quota in parliament, the reform of personal status law and the recognition of civil marriage. This book argues that women are caught between sect and nation, due to Lebanon’s plural legal system, which makes a division between religious and civil law. While both jurisdictions allocate women relational rights, guided by the logic of patrilineal descent, women’s inequality is central to the reproduction of sectarian difference and patriarchal control within the confessional political system, as a whole.