Women Called To Witness

A collection of essays that examine how foods express American cultural values.

Het beeld van de figuren Maria, Maria Magdalena, Martha en andere vrouwen in het evangelie van Johannes, waarin zij worden voorgesteld als toeschouwers en ooggetuigen.

In Women Called to Witness, Nancy A. Hardesty locates the roots of American feminism in the evangelical revivals that emerged during the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century. She thus challenges the conventional wisdom that any movement for women's rights is a secular one because religion is inherently oppressive toward women. First published in 1984 and now revised and updated, this book focuses particularly on the followers of Charles Grandison Finney, an evangelist whose revivals spread from upstate New York eastward to New England and westward to Ohio. The author shows that in Finney's brand of revivalism, personal and social salvation were inseparably linked, and thus the evangelical strategies used in spreading the Christian gospel were readily adapted to various social crusades, including temperance, abolition, and eventually suffrage. Hardesty shows that such leaders as Frances Willard, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton all had links to the Finneyite revivals. All were active in the various reforms the revivals spawned.

"Call to Witness is the true story of one woman's battle with disability, discrimination, and a leading pharmaceutical powerhouse. Jane Gagliardo was a throwaway employee, fired after working nearly a decade for a leading vaccine maker when her disability surfaced. Jane is fearless and impassioned, and her story will leave readers empowered to stand up for themselves, even if it means standing alone. This 2002 landmark case changed the law and challenges the way corporations do business today. This riveting dramatic account sheds fascinating insight into the world of vaccine production, both past and present, that will have every reader searching through their immunization record--this corporation literally runs in the veins of millions of Americans."-- Page [4] of cover.

In Baring Witness , Welker and thirty-six Mormon women write about devotion and love and luck, about the wonder of discovery, and about the journeys, both thorny and magical, to humor, grace, and contentment. They speak to a diversity of life experiences: what happens when one partner rejects Church teachings; marrying outside one's faith; the pain of divorce and widowhood; the horrors of spousal abuse; the hard journey from visions of an idealized marriage to the everyday truth; sexuality within Mormon marriage; how the pressure to find a husband shapes young women's actions and sense of self; and the ways Mormon belief and culture can influence second marriages and same-sex unions. The result is an unflinching look at the earthly realities of an institution central to Mormon life.

Black women are strong. At least that's what everyone says and how they are constantly depicted. But what, exactly, does this strength entail? And what price do Black women pay for it? In this book, the author, a psychologist and pastoral theologian, examines the burdensome yoke that the ideology of the Strong Black Woman places upon African American women. She demonstrates how the three core features of the ideology--emotional strength, caregiving, and independence--constrain the lives of African American women and predispose them to physical and emotional health problems, including obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and anxiety. She traces the historical, social, and theological influences that resulted in the evolution and maintenance of the Strong Black Woman, including the Christian church, R & B and hip-hop artists, and popular television and film. Drawing upon womanist pastoral theology and twelve-step philosophy, she calls upon pastoral caregivers to aid in the healing of African American women's identities and crafts a twelve-step program for Strong Black Women in recovery.