Police officers are vital to maintaining security and the continuity of national functions. Thus, Police officers are more exposed to different kinds of psychological concerns. However, a female in this kind of profession, based on various studies, experienced higher levels of stress because of other factors. Further, the primary goal of this study is to investigate the psychological well-being, lived experiences, challenges, and coping mechanisms of female police officers. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study were: (1) (...) Female police officers had conceptualized themselves as brave, flexible, and adaptive. And they cope with stress with positive thinking that results in healthy psychological well-being. (2) Female police officers showed dedication and engagement to serve the people. They even used their resources for the public and sacrificed most of their time in the office. (3) Female police officers' primary motivation to continue their careers is their families, and serving the public brings joy to them. (4) However, female police officers experience disrespect while working in the field, and they always have fear in their life as police officers. Moreover, they need more time to spend with their families. Furthermore, it is highly suggested to provide opportunities for enhancing quality time with their family, specifically with their children. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S83-S88, March‐April 2022.

Mihaela Miroiu, Otilia Dragomir (eds.), Naşterea. Istorii trăite (Giving Birth. Life-stories), Iaşi: Polirom, 2010.

The objective of this article is to revise the dominating narrative of communism as male generational history. With the aid of memoirs of communist women, many of whom started their political activity before WWII and belonged to the power-wielding elites of Stalinist Poland, the author shows that the former constituted an integral part of the generation which had planned a revolution and ultimately took over power. Their texts were imbued with a matrilineal perspective on the history of communism: the authors (...) emphasized that other women had strongly motivated them to become involved in politics. However, the memoirs revealed something more: as an attempt to establish new models of emancipation and to transmit them to younger generations of women, they were to rekindle the memory of women as the active agent of that part of Polish history which contemporary feminists refuse to remember. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo fundamental explorar la posibilidad de un currículum de la Herstory del Arte, entendiendo por ésta, la visibilidad de las biografías y las contribuciones artísticas de las mujeres. Así pues, por un lado, este estudio aborda cómo deconstruir el currículum oculto, a través de una propuesta de currículum postmoderno que incorpore las her/stories del Arte. Por otro lado, se lleva a cabo un análisis cuantitativo de la presencia o ausencia de las mujeres artistas en (...) el currículum de las materias de Historia del Arte de las diferentes legislaciones españolas hasta desembocar en un estudio basado en el análisis crítico del discurso feminista del currículum de Fundamentos del Arte I y II de bachillerato. (shrink)

Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists foreground how the oft-touted apocalypse that the Covid-19 pandemic heralds is not new, nor does it signify the great rupture into chaos that those from within modernity-coloniality often claim it to be. Rather Covid-19 is preceded by and will be out-lived by the apocalyptic anti-life onto-epistemological logics that are foundational to the production of hetero-patriarchal capitalist- coloniality. However, one would commit the violence of reproduction of the epistemological logics and rationalities constitutive (...) of the current system if the story ended there. We have survived and our survival points to the urgent necessity and responsibility of social theory to listen to the story of the pandemic from a Black/Indigenous genealogy and to begin the sense-making of the Covid-19 pandemic, from prior to this particular virus, outside, against and beyond the politics of knowledge of critical social theory itself. Thus, I invite you to journey to an affirmative re-enfleshment of reason and theory-making in relation to and dialogue with Black, Indigenous, and subaltern Mestiza feminist movements in southwest Colombia and in southeast so-called Australia in the unceded lands of the Awabakal and the Worimi. I explore this through the metaphor, the materiality, the cosmology and the herstory of the mangrove swamps a knowing-being otherwise visible to the dehumanising gave of Whiteness and bring to thought three stories of a politics of knowledge of/as the Black/racialised and feminised body/flesh. To do this is to suggest that the co-creation of pathways which are life affirming and life making beyond and out of the post-Covid 19 conjuncture involves an epistemological-political project which decolonises and feminises the containments of reason and knowing being of coloniality/modernity. (shrink)

This is a particularly important time to be reconsidering and revisiting radical feminism. The contemporary visibility of trans rights movements, and the unsurprising, accompanying backlash from a variety of camps makes this a politically charged and tense moment for reflection on the herstory, present, and future of this school of feminism.

In this paper, we argue for craftivism as a form of social activism with a political depth reached through making. From Mary Wollstonecraft to the suffragettes, Betsy Greer to DIY, craftivism has had a place in feminist activism. The human tradition for making objects combined with the online possibility of documentation, has made craftivism a political weapon. But it is a soft weapon, where the power lies in the pain and suffering it reminds us off. This protest is often performed (...) by women and history shows that this is why craft has been seen as something other than art, and as a form of political protest today. This article ties the history of feminist craft to the current movement of craftivism, arguing for this art herstory to be part of the canon and part of a political solution. (shrink)

This article analyses the radical feminist formulations of the ‘witch’, focusing on the second-wave feminist sense of urgency to construct a political ‘we’ and to create a common identification with the historical oppression of women. The figure of the ‘witch’ represents here a dimension of (feminist) fantasy that, retrospectively, needs to be seen as a therapeutic attempt both to break through the silence and invisibility of female history and to elevate the notion of female alterity over the complementarity of the (...) phallogocentric system. Conveying the tension between past and present, the ‘witch’ becomes a crucial metaphor for herstory, that is, a form of feminist mythology constituting an alternative to the established male-centered master-story. (shrink)

This article draws out the politics of value by exploring the language used by the Black Lives Matter movement. It argues that this movement’s value claims, evident in the language of “mattering,” mobilize tensions between mate­rial and aspirational systems of human interdependence. To this end, this article examines Patrisse Khan-Cullors’s When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (2018) as a text that articulates the political vision of this movement. It also draws extensively from Alicia Garza’s “A (...) Herstory of the Black Lives Matter Move­ment” (2014) and the platform of the Movement for Black Lives. It argues that the tension between value and values enables a choice between different imaginations of our relationship to the material world as well as a choice among diverse means of self-representation in struggles for inclusion. Value claims, such as those made by the Black Lives Matter movement embrace political contestation in a way that is deeply intersectional. Moreover, this movement’s claims about prioritization and distinction are paradoxically offered as a way of achieving equality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:104 Feminist Studies 44, no. 1. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Estelle Carol The Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective: A Memoir In 1973, the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective worked in an old run-down second-floor office on Belmont Avenue, which we shared with the main offices of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU).1 They call it New Town now, but in 1973, there wasn’t much new about it. We weren’t (...) the only artists in the building though; downstairs was a tattoo parlor. Still, it was better than having the studio located in my apartment on Newport Street, where there were silkscreen tables in the dining room and a bathroom that doubled as a darkroom. My bedroom door opened directly into the dining room and usually reeked of the foul chemicals we used to make the posters. Just one OSHA inspection would have shut us down forever, but it was not until later that we learned about the dangers of long-term exposure. On Newport Street, the apartment was right next to the Ravenswood Branch of the “L,” and it shook like the aftershock of a California earthquake each time a train passed. But we were in the midst of a women’s revolution, and our priorities were clear. 1. The Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective (WGC) was a “workgroup” of the CWLU from the very start. There were about 25 workgroups and other groups within the CWLU. CWLU outreach to recruit new members got a lot of new women into WGC. WGC, Women’s Liberation Rock Band, and Womankind Newspaper were the cultural arms of the CWLU. Cultural outreach to attract new CWLU members and new feminists to the movement in general was critical to the CWLU’s success. In Celebration of Amazons, 194. All posters designed and silkscreened collectively by the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, www.cwluherstory.org. Courtesy of CWLU Herstory Project. All posters are on silkscreen. Turning Through Time, Workwoven, 195. Sisterhood Is Blooming, Springtime Will Never Be the Same, 190. Chicago Women’s Labor History, 194. International Women’s Day (reprinted from a Cuban poster). ABOVE Healthcare Is for People, Not for Profit, 195. OPPOSITE Abortion Is a Personal Decision, Not a Legal Debate, 190. ABOVE Healthcare Is for People, Not for Profit, 195. OPPOSITE Abortion Is a Personal Decision, Not a Legal Debate, 190. OPPOSITE Chicago Maternity Center, 192. ABOVE Lesbian Pride, 192. Mountain-Moving Day, 192. ABOVE Detail from Mountain-Moving Day, 192. OPPOSITE Women Unite, Take Back the Night, 199. Lipstick and Blood (reprinted from a Cuban design). Women Are Not Chicks, 191. Liberation School for Women, 192. Boycott Red Coach Lettuce, 192. Working Women Unite, 195. International Women’s Day, Many Waves But One Ocean, 192. Estelle Carol 121 If you look at Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective posters, you’ll rarely see a person’s name on them, because we decided early on that art had been done all wrong by men. It was based on egotism and the cult of the individual—the great-men-of-art syndrome. So we decided to throw all that out, and art now had to be a collective experience. So every poster that we created had to be done by committee. Every one. We had a system in which any one of the collective could get an idea or a phrase or an image and decide to do a poster. They would ask two or three other members to be their assistants and to help develop the idea. And then in little teams they would physically create the poster in silk screen. It had to be a collective process. There’s no way that one single woman could really do it because we were using very primitive reproduction methods, and we needed at least three people to run the silk screen. The silk screens were all hand printed. No machines. If a poster was more than one color, it had to be hand printed, one color at a time, so it was very, very labor intensive. And... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Shimmering Maya and Other EssaysPatrick HenryThe Shimmering Maya and Other Essays, by Catharine Savage Brosman; 149 pp. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994, $24.94.When the author was fifteen, she held the rank of “prospector” at Girl Scout Camp. Now, over forty years later, she is “digging down through the layers, sifting through the running stream of memory” (p. 14). Her art of prospecting affords the reader (...) a linear impression of a journey that begins with “The Shimmering Maya,” a recountal of a family move in August 1944 from Colorado to South Texas. “Desert Silvery Blue” describes life in Alpine, Texas, while “Leaving for Good” narrates her experience of displacement as she departs Alpine in 1951 to attend Rice Institute, known then as “the atheist school” (p. 37). From Alpine to Houston, she experiences the greening of America and the shock of Gulf Coast humidity, “a sensation of being hit in the face and smothered” (p. 42). At Rice, she finishes her degrees, travels to France, her intellectual home, and returns, in “Cherry Time”—“Yes, Virginia, there is a Virginia” (p. 52)—to describe her life in full bloom during this relatively short but intense period, spent in and around the state of Virginia, before her permanent move to New Orleans. Two essays conclude the volume even as they bend back toward its beginning. “Winter Light” narrates the life of her grandfather, Edward Hill, newspaperman, teacher, doctor, writer, and formidable learner whom she knew only in the winter of his life but whose light illuminated her being and “whose heir I feel, or wish, myself to be” (p. 130). “Turn My Face Out to the West” recounts a recent camping trip in New Mexico but, more profoundly, a return to the Western land of her youth. Like the Anasazi and Pueblo Indians, she too was born there and, reclaiming their heritage as partly hers, extols their solar-based science, courage, sense of community, independent spirit, and love and respect for the land.Brosman paints being, however, as well as becoming. Essays six through eleven focus more centrally than the others on her habitual self: her self-portrait as teacher, scholar, poet, traveler, and traditional woman. As a teacher of language, she offers “at once an end and a means” (p. 86) and, as literature teacher, not “entertainment chiefly but the pursuit of truth” (p. 88), undogmatically attempting to elicit self-awareness without imposing a single view. [End Page 136] A traditional woman who has never felt uncomfortable around men and doesn’t consider them her enemies, Brosman thinks Women’s Studies are “regressive” (p. 84), deplores language “barbarisms” such as “chairperson” and “herstory” (p. 75), and holds for a “nongendered intellectual patrimony of arts, letters, and science” (p. 84). While she admits that it’s a miracle that all marriages don’t simply fall apart, the differences between the sexes, she argues, constitute “the whole basis for attraction” (p. 70), and she prefers her cigar-smoking husband “to men who boast about their Hollandaise sauce” (p. 70). Not interested “in valorizing only the male principle” (p. 70), she seeks “vigor of mind” in all persons and considers herself a “feminist in the cupboard,” one who operates within the family but travels freely and enjoys a rich professional life. She links herself to her Aunt Margaret and other “closet feminists” (p. 100) in her family’s history who demonstrated self-reliance and a sense of their own value, and argues, against de Beauvoir’s thesis in The Second Sex, that female work for American women of the nineteenth century did indeed, like male work, go beyond biology “to remake the world through invention (production)” (p. 102).Brosman demands a metaphysical self-consciousness that recognizes unhappiness, anguish, and disorder but concomitantly posits the good life as the synthetic unity of the mind, body, and heart. This metaphysical consciousness is deeply rooted in the physical world—we are not only in the world but of it—and in a shared sense of place and a commitment to communal enterprises. Her thought is perhaps above all characterized throughout by a sense of “grace” and the “intimation of... (shrink)

In Caribbean literature, being gazed upon is often part of a larger design of imperial governance, conquest and appropriation, where surveillance is constant and omnipresent, particularly in texts that centre on life on the plantation or are set within the colonial house itself. In his first novel Witchbroom, Trinidadian writer Lawrence Scott presents a family saga through the eyes of the family’s last surviving member, Lavren, a hermaphrodite, trickster-narrator who travels through time to write down the record of his/herstory. (...) To tell his/her ‘Carnival Tales’, the narrator sets the scene in the houses of Kairi, in which the turret room features prominently. The room’s shape, location and the vantage point it offers to its privileged entrants allows them to have eyes on everything that goes on on the family estate and to record events accordingly. But the turret room also serves as a place of gendered confinement and seclusion replete with blind spots that the trickster-narrator–or, perhaps, the implied author?–will expose through his/her own supervisory gaze. As such, this contribution proposes to analyse the turret room as a complex and somewhat paradoxical site where scopic power serves at once to hide and reveal, and as a space that concomitantly functions as a ‘heterotopia of deviation’. By focusing on the carnivalesque, metafictional dimensions of the novel more particularly, the article will ultimately seek to examine iterations of authorial control and reader manipulation as literary reassessments of panopticism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies Edited by Bernadette J. BrootenEboni Marshall TurmanBeyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies EDITED BY BERNADETTE J. BROOTEN New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 352 pp. $30.00In her introduction to this edited collection of essays, Bernadette Brooten asserts that religion has long been complicit in the construction and practice of the logic of human enslavement. She provocatively claims that religion (...) and the racial and sexual norms that emerge from religious inquiry have historically [End Page 236] designated women and other bodies that defy white male normativity as inherently “slaveable.” She further contends that the religious and sexual legacies of slavery are not relegated to a moment in time, now past and gone. Rather, contemporary society is the heir of a flesh-and-blood hierarchy that continues to shape its “social values, religious thought, and economic realities” (3). The remnants of enslavement persist among human communities not only as a lived reality that, as Mende Nazer suggests in the epilogue, continues to threaten the lives and life chances of poor women and children throughout the world, but also as a blood memory—a recollection that runs so deep into the social fabric of our theopolitical worlds that in spite of slavery’s superficial obscurity, it remains as the pulse of human everydayness, lurking beneath the surface of daily exchanges.The insidious legacies of slavery that emerge from bigoted God-talk promote dehumanizing racial-sexual stereotypes, dictate the quality of marriage and intimate relationships, corrupt and exploit sexual expression, and drive the development of public policy and law in ways that disproportionately marginalize and disempower women and girls. Consequently, this volume proposes resistance and calls readers to communal action that renounces slavery in all its forms.In parts 2, 3, and 4, the essays detail the racial, religious, and sexual character of slavery by focusing on the experience of black women’s oppression in America. This focus on the varieties of black women’s enslavement—from legal chattel slavery and social-political bondage to incarceration—provides the groundwork for the volume’s subsequent engagement of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic law, which demonstrates how slavery and its concomitant assignment and rationalization of embodied inferiority has been primarily cultivated by sacred texts. In her essay, for example, Sheila Briggs explicitly connects religious belief and dehumanizing practices; she ingeniously links religious textual interpretation with the sexual violence of early Christian gladiatorial practices in ancient amphitheaters.In parts 5 and 6, the volume reintroduces the substance of slavery’s legacies by way of a historical survey that connects enslavement across social contexts. In linking Debra Blumenthal’s discussion of slavery in late medieval Spain and Catherine Clinton’s analysis of the racial hypocrisies of Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond to the problem of the Bible and the oppression it yields for sexual minorities as uncovered by Sylvester Johnson, Brooten exposes the vast and prevailing scope of slavery that affects all of us—women and girls, men and boys, sexual minorities, and even those who dare to fall in love across racial boundaries. In parts 7 and 8, Frances Smith Foster and Dwight Hopkins directly engage the “herstories” of black women who are marked by the legacies of slavery and yet who have consistently resisted in creative and effective ways (271). [End Page 237]Undoubtedly, this volume is a critical contribution to the field insofar as it uncovers an enduring social issue that continues to influence how we engage each other across differences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The breadth of its disciplinary scope proves to be overwhelming at times. Nonetheless, Brooten’s constructive method serves well to emphasize the titanic complexity of enslavement and the challenge of its demolition.Eboni Marshall TurmanDuke Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Feminism is all about demanding equality and learning to love yourself. But not too much - men hate that! From the writers of Reductress, the subversive, satirical women's magazine read by over 2.5 million visitors a month, comes HOW TO WIN AT FEMINISM: The Definitive Guide to Having It All--And Then Some! This ultimate guide to winning feminism--filled with four-color illustrations, bold graphics, and hilarious photos--teaches readers how to battle the patriarchy better than everybody else. From the herstory of (...) feminism to how to apologize for having it all, readers will learn how to be a feminist at work and at home with tips that include: How to Do More with 33 Cents Less How to Be Sex-Positive Even When You're Bloated How to Love Your Body Even Though Hers Is Better The 9 Circles of Hell for Women Who Don't Help Other Women Designer Handbags to Hold All Your Feminism How to Get Catcalled For Your Personality HOW TO WIN AT FEMINISM is a fresh take on women's rights through the lens of the funniest women in comedy today. With this book as your wo-manual, you'll shatter that glass ceiling once and for all (but you'll still need to clean up the mess). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies Edited by Bernadette J. BrootenEboni Marshall TurmanBeyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies EDITED BY BERNADETTE J. BROOTEN New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 352 pp. $30.00In her introduction to this edited collection of essays, Bernadette Brooten asserts that religion has long been complicit in the construction and practice of the logic of human enslavement. She provocatively claims that religion (...) and the racial and sexual norms that emerge from religious inquiry have historically [End Page 236] designated women and other bodies that defy white male normativity as inherently “slaveable.” She further contends that the religious and sexual legacies of slavery are not relegated to a moment in time, now past and gone. Rather, contemporary society is the heir of a flesh-and-blood hierarchy that continues to shape its “social values, religious thought, and economic realities” (3). The remnants of enslavement persist among human communities not only as a lived reality that, as Mende Nazer suggests in the epilogue, continues to threaten the lives and life chances of poor women and children throughout the world, but also as a blood memory—a recollection that runs so deep into the social fabric of our theopolitical worlds that in spite of slavery’s superficial obscurity, it remains as the pulse of human everydayness, lurking beneath the surface of daily exchanges.The insidious legacies of slavery that emerge from bigoted God-talk promote dehumanizing racial-sexual stereotypes, dictate the quality of marriage and intimate relationships, corrupt and exploit sexual expression, and drive the development of public policy and law in ways that disproportionately marginalize and disempower women and girls. Consequently, this volume proposes resistance and calls readers to communal action that renounces slavery in all its forms.In parts 2, 3, and 4, the essays detail the racial, religious, and sexual character of slavery by focusing on the experience of black women’s oppression in America. This focus on the varieties of black women’s enslavement—from legal chattel slavery and social-political bondage to incarceration—provides the groundwork for the volume’s subsequent engagement of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic law, which demonstrates how slavery and its concomitant assignment and rationalization of embodied inferiority has been primarily cultivated by sacred texts. In her essay, for example, Sheila Briggs explicitly connects religious belief and dehumanizing practices; she ingeniously links religious textual interpretation with the sexual violence of early Christian gladiatorial practices in ancient amphitheaters.In parts 5 and 6, the volume reintroduces the substance of slavery’s legacies by way of a historical survey that connects enslavement across social contexts. In linking Debra Blumenthal’s discussion of slavery in late medieval Spain and Catherine Clinton’s analysis of the racial hypocrisies of Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond to the problem of the Bible and the oppression it yields for sexual minorities as uncovered by Sylvester Johnson, Brooten exposes the vast and prevailing scope of slavery that affects all of us—women and girls, men and boys, sexual minorities, and even those who dare to fall in love across racial boundaries. In parts 7 and 8, Frances Smith Foster and Dwight Hopkins directly engage the “herstories” of black women who are marked by the legacies of slavery and yet who have consistently resisted in creative and effective ways (271). [End Page 237]Undoubtedly, this volume is a critical contribution to the field insofar as it uncovers an enduring social issue that continues to influence how we engage each other across differences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The breadth of its disciplinary scope proves to be overwhelming at times. Nonetheless, Brooten’s constructive method serves well to emphasize the titanic complexity of enslavement and the challenge of its demolition.Eboni Marshall TurmanDuke Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Shimmering Maya and Other EssaysPatrick HenryThe Shimmering Maya and Other Essays, by Catharine Savage Brosman; 149 pp. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994, $24.94.When the author was fifteen, she held the rank of “prospector” at Girl Scout Camp. Now, over forty years later, she is “digging down through the layers, sifting through the running stream of memory” (p. 14). Her art of prospecting affords the reader (...) a linear impression of a journey that begins with “The Shimmering Maya,” a recountal of a family move in August 1944 from Colorado to South Texas. “Desert Silvery Blue” describes life in Alpine, Texas, while “Leaving for Good” narrates her experience of displacement as she departs Alpine in 1951 to attend Rice Institute, known then as “the atheist school” (p. 37). From Alpine to Houston, she experiences the greening of America and the shock of Gulf Coast humidity, “a sensation of being hit in the face and smothered” (p. 42). At Rice, she finishes her degrees, travels to France, her intellectual home, and returns, in “Cherry Time”—“Yes, Virginia, there is a Virginia” (p. 52)—to describe her life in full bloom during this relatively short but intense period, spent in and around the state of Virginia, before her permanent move to New Orleans. Two essays conclude the volume even as they bend back toward its beginning. “Winter Light” narrates the life of her grandfather, Edward Hill, newspaperman, teacher, doctor, writer, and formidable learner whom she knew only in the winter of his life but whose light illuminated her being and “whose heir I feel, or wish, myself to be” (p. 130). “Turn My Face Out to the West” recounts a recent camping trip in New Mexico but, more profoundly, a return to the Western land of her youth. Like the Anasazi and Pueblo Indians, she too was born there and, reclaiming their heritage as partly hers, extols their solar-based science, courage, sense of community, independent spirit, and love and respect for the land.Brosman paints being, however, as well as becoming. Essays six through eleven focus more centrally than the others on her habitual self: her self-portrait as teacher, scholar, poet, traveler, and traditional woman. As a teacher of language, she offers “at once an end and a means” (p. 86) and, as literature teacher, not “entertainment chiefly but the pursuit of truth” (p. 88), undogmatically attempting to elicit self-awareness without imposing a single view. [End Page 136] A traditional woman who has never felt uncomfortable around men and doesn’t consider them her enemies, Brosman thinks Women’s Studies are “regressive” (p. 84), deplores language “barbarisms” such as “chairperson” and “herstory” (p. 75), and holds for a “nongendered intellectual patrimony of arts, letters, and science” (p. 84). While she admits that it’s a miracle that all marriages don’t simply fall apart, the differences between the sexes, she argues, constitute “the whole basis for attraction” (p. 70), and she prefers her cigar-smoking husband “to men who boast about their Hollandaise sauce” (p. 70). Not interested “in valorizing only the male principle” (p. 70), she seeks “vigor of mind” in all persons and considers herself a “feminist in the cupboard,” one who operates within the family but travels freely and enjoys a rich professional life. She links herself to her Aunt Margaret and other “closet feminists” (p. 100) in her family’s history who demonstrated self-reliance and a sense of their own value, and argues, against de Beauvoir’s thesis in The Second Sex, that female work for American women of the nineteenth century did indeed, like male work, go beyond biology “to remake the world through invention (production)” (p. 102).Brosman demands a metaphysical self-consciousness that recognizes unhappiness, anguish, and disorder but concomitantly posits the good life as the synthetic unity of the mind, body, and heart. This metaphysical consciousness is deeply rooted in the physical world—we are not only in the world but of it—and in a shared sense of place and a commitment to communal enterprises. Her thought is perhaps above all characterized throughout by a sense of “grace” and the “intimation of... (shrink)