Product Description

This ambitious book explores challenges to male hegemony throughout continental Europe. It focuses especially on France, but it also offers comparative material on developments in the German-speaking countries and in the smaller European nations and aspiring nation-states. Spanning 250 years, the sweeping coverage extends from Portugal to Poland, Greece to Finland, Ireland to Ukraine, and Spain to Scandinavia as well as international and transnational feminist organizations. The study has several objectives. For general readers and those interested primarily in the historical record, it provides a comprehensive, comparative account of feminist developments in European societies, as well as a rereading of European history from a feminist perspective. By placing gender, or relations between women and men, at the center of European politics, where the author argues that it belongs but from which it has long been marginalized, the book aims to reconfigure our understanding of the European past and to make visible a long but neglected tradition of feminist thought and politics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #933101 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Review
'This is an important work both for its recovery of little-studied aspects of European feminisms and for the reinterpretation of its main strands. The author's ability to situate feminisms squarely in the political and intellectual history of Europe, as well as in various chronological, geographical, and ideological contexts, is particularly impressive. Decentering Anglo-American and including 'more peripheral' national histories should reorient the historical study of European (and perhaps by implication, other) feminisms.'Mary Lynn Stewart, Simon Fraser University