Becoming Modern Women

Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture is a literary and cultural history of love and female identity in Japan during the 1910s-30s.

In the decade following World War I, nineteenth-century womanhood came under attack not only from feminists but also from innumerable "ordinary" young women determined to create "modern" lives for themselves. These young women cut their hair, wore short skirts, worked for wages, sought entertainment outside the home, and developed new attitudes toward domesticity, sexuality, and their bodies. Historians have generally located the origins of this shift in women's lives in the upheavals of World War I. Birgitte Søland's exquisite social and cultural history suggests, however, that they are to be found not in the war itself, but in much broader social and economic changes. Søland's engrossing chronicle draws on a rich variety of sources--including popular media and medical works as well as archival records and oral histories--to examine how notions of femininity and womanhood were reshaped in Denmark, a small, largely agrarian country that remained neutral during the war. It explores changes in the female body and personality, the forays of young women into the public sphere, the redefinition of female respectability, and new understandings of married life as evidenced in both cultural discourses and social practices. Though specific in its focus, the book raises broad comparative questions as it challenges common assumptions about the social and sexual upheavals that characterized the Western world in the postwar decade. In a remarkably engaging fashion, it shows why the end of World War I did not lead to the return of "normal" life in the 1920s.

Explores the imagery of woman in Mexican art and visual culture. Examines how woman signified a variety of concepts, from modernity to authenticity and revolutionary social transformation, both before and after the Mexican Revolution.

Million-copy NYT bestseller! "Fiction at its best!" —New Woman magazine “Bestsellers like Decades, Husbands And Lovers and Love And Money have established Ruth Harris as one of the frankest, most stylish, and most compelling voices in contemporary fiction." —Chicago Sun-Times Meet three modern women—and the men in their lives. Jane Gresch: Her delicious revenge on her lying, cheating, thieving ex makes her rich and famous, but then what?? Lincky Desmond: Smart, beautiful and hard working, she marries Mr. Right—but risks it all for Mr. Oh-so-wrong. Elly McGrath: When her husband dumps her for another, younger woman, she doesn’t get mad. She gets even. Owen Casals: He is handsome, horny, and magnetic. Everyone knows it—and so does he. "Funny, sad, vivid, and raunchy. Harris seeks to enliven and entertain, and she does it in spades." —Cleveland Plain-Dealer “Glory be! Excellent. This is the story of today’s women.” —Los Angeles Times Ruth Harris is “brilliant, trenchant, chic and ultra-sophisticated, a writer who has all the intellect of Mary McCarthy, all the insight of Joan Didion.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram "Excellent! Thoroughly delightful!" —Los Angeles Times "Author Ruth Harris' rapier wit spices up a coming-of-age-in-the-sexist-'60s story. Funny, sad, vivid, and more than raunchy enough to satisfy the most ribald appetites. Harris seeks to enliven and entertain, and she does it in spades." —Cleveland Plain-Dealer "Ruth Harris has written a superb 'rags to riches' story. Harris creates characters that are alive and familiar. These three women, Lincky, Jane and Elly, are like old friends, women we've all known. Their experiences, hopes and fears are universal and, yet, like most modern women they, too, wonder if they will find the right man and or how to get rid of the wrong one. Each in their own way finds success at the top and a successful relationship. You'll love MODERN WOMEN." —West Coast Review of Books “Bestsellers like Decades, Husbands And Lovers and Love And Money have established Ruth Harris as one of the frankest, most stylish, and most compelling voices in contemporary fiction." —Chicago Sun-Times MODERN WOMEN was originally published in hard cover and paperback by St. Martin's Press. All five books in the Park Avenue Series are available as GooglePlay ebooks. Decades (Book # 1)--The compelling story of a marriage at risk, a family in crisis and a woman on the brink set against the tumultuous decades of the mid-twentieth century. "Absolutely perfect." --Publisher's Weekly "Terrific!" --Cosmopolitan "Powerful. A gripping novel." --Women Today Book Club https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Ruth_Harris_DECADES_Park_Avenue_Series_Book_1?id=iMfHBAAAQBAJ Husbands And Lovers (Book # 2)--Million copy NYT bestseller! Winner, Best Contemporary, Romantic Times! The story of a wallflower who turns herself into a lovely and desirable woman and the two handsome, successful men who compete for her love. "Steamy and fast-paced." --Cosmopolitan https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Ruth_Harris_Husbands_And_Lovers_Park_Avenue_Series?id=-DX3AgAAQBAJ Love And Money (Book #3)--#1 on Amazon's Movers and Shakers. Rich girl, poor girl. Sisters and strangers until the handsome, mysterious man they both love--and murder—bring them face to face. "Richly plotted. First-class entertainment." --NY Times "Fast-paced, superior fiction. A terrifically satisfying 'good read.'" --Fort Lauderdale News Sun-Sentinel https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=6TD3AgAAQBAJ The Last Romantics (Book # 5)--A sweeping love story set in Paris and New York during the glamorous Jazz Age of the 1920's. He is dashing, handsome and celebrated but dangerously flawed. She is a gifted fashion designer who has the world at her feet. She is beautiful, charming, lonely, haunted by a desperate secret. "I love it, I love it! Fantastic, immensely readable." --Cosmopolitan "Gloriously romantic." --Kirkus https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=oHH4AgAAQBAJ Keywords, Series Keywords: Historical fiction, women's fiction, single woman, funny, humor, hilarious, sexy, bestseller, cheating boy friend, marriage, divorce, JFK, assassination, sex, women, marriage, divorce, Texas, New York, publishing, career woman, wife, journalist, author, affair, 20th Century

This “essential read” (Gretchen Rubin) from the author of Savvy Auntie tells the funny, sexy, and sometimes heartbreaking stories of today's well-educated, successful women who expected love, marriage, and children, but instead find themselves in the “Otherhood” as their fertile years wane. More American women are childless than ever before—nearly half those of childbearing age don’t have children. While our society often assumes these women are “childfree by choice,” that’s not always true. In reality, many of them expected to marry and have children, but it simply hasn’t happened. Wrongly judged as picky or career-obsessed, they make up the “Otherhood,” a growing demographic that has gone without definition or visibility until now. In Otherhood, author Melanie Notkin reveals her own story as well as the honest, poignant, humorous, and occasionally heartbreaking stories of women in her generation—women who expected love, marriage, and parenthood, but instead found themselves facing a different reality. She addresses the reasons for this shift, the social and emotional impact it has on our collective culture, and how the “new normal” will affect our society in the decades to come. Notkin aims to reassure women that they are not alone and encourages them to find happiness and fulfillment no matter what the future holds. A groundbreaking exploration of an essential contemporary issue, Otherhood inspires thought-provoking conversation and gets at the heart of our cultural assumptions about single women and childlessness.

Through fifteen essays that work from a rich array of primary sources, this collection makes the novel claim that early modern European women, like men, had a youth. European culture recognised that, between childhood and full adulthood, early modern women experienced distinctive physiological, social, and psychological transformations. Drawing on two mutually shaped layers of inquiry -- cultural constructions of youth and lived experiences -- these essays exploit a wide variety of sources, including literary and autobiographical works, conduct literature, judicial and asylum records, drawings, and material culture. The geographical and temporal ranges traverse England, Ireland, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, and Mexico from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. This volume brings fresh attention to representations of female youth, their own life writings, young women's training for adulthood, courtship, and the emergent sexual lives of young unmarried women.

In the pathbreaking tradition of Backlash and The Time Bind, The Conflict, a #1 European bestseller, identifies a surprising setback to women's freedom: progressive modern motherhood Elisabeth Badinter has for decades been in the vanguard of the European fight for women's equality. Now, in an explosive new book, she points her finger at a most unlikely force undermining the status of women: liberal motherhood, in thrall to all that is "natural." Attachment parenting, co-sleeping, baby-wearing, and especially breast-feeding—these hallmarks of contemporary motherhood have succeeded in tethering women to the home and family to an extent not seen since the 1950s. Badinter argues that the taboos now surrounding epidurals, formula, disposable diapers, cribs—and anything that distracts a mother's attention from her offspring—have turned childrearing into a singularly regressive force. In sharp, engaging prose, Badinter names a reactionary shift that is intensely felt but has not been clearly articulated until now, a shift that America has pioneered. She reserves special ire for the orthodoxy of the La Leche League—an offshoot of conservative Evangelicalism—showing how on-demand breastfeeding, with all its limitations, curtails women's choices. Moreover, the pressure to provide children with 24/7 availability and empathy has produced a generation of overwhelmed and guilt-laden mothers—one cause of the West's alarming decline in birthrate. A bestseller in Europe, The Conflict is a scathing indictment of a stealthy zealotry that cheats women of their full potential.

The "woman question", this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western contruction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.

Offering a comparative and international approach to early modern women's writing, the essays gathered here focus on multiple literatures across Italy, France, England, and the Low Countries. Individual essays investigate women in diverse social classes and life stages, ranging from siblings and mothers to nuns to celebrated writers. The collection overall is invested in crossing geographic, linguistic, political, and religious borders and in exploring familial, political, and religious communities.

The French Revolution created a new cultural world that freed women from the constraints of corporate privilege, aristocratic salons, and patriarchal censorship, even though it failed to grant them legal equality. Women burst into print in unprecedented numbers and became active participants in the great political, ethical, and aesthetic debates that gave birth to our understanding of the individual as a self-creating, self-determining agent. Carla Hesse tells this story, delivering a capacious history of how French women have used writing to create themselves as modern individuals. Beginning with the marketplace fishwives and salon hostesses whose eloquence shaped French culture low and high and leading us through the accomplishments of Simone de Beauvoir, Hesse shows what it meant to make an independent intellectual life as a woman in France. She offers exquisitely constructed portraits of the work and mental lives of many fascinating women--including both well-known novelists and now-obscure pamphleteers--who put pen to paper during and after the Revolution. We learn how they negotiated control over their work and authorial identity--whether choosing pseudonyms like Georges Sand or forsaking profits to sign their own names. We encounter the extraordinary Louise de Kéralio-Robert, a critically admired historian who re-created herself as a revolutionary novelist. We meet aristocratic women whose literary criticism subjected them to slander as well as writers whose rhetoric cost them not only reputation but marriage, citizenship, and even their heads. Crucially, their stories reveal how the unequal terms on which women entered the modern era shaped how they wrote and thought. Though women writers and thinkers championed the full range of political and social positions--from royalist to Jacobin, from ultraconservative to fully feminist--they shared common moral perspectives and representational strategies. Unlike the Enlightenment of their male peers, theirs was more skeptical than idealist, more situationalist than universalist. And this alternative project lies at the very heart of modern French letters.