| Details | | Publication Date: | 1996-03-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 229 pages | | Height: | 10.0 in | | Width: | 6.8 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 18.4 oz |
Publisher's Note
A rethinking of the history of feminism, this book focuses on feminism as a protest against women's political exclusion and the elimination of sexual difference in politics.
When feminists argued for political rights in the context of liberal democracy they faced an impossible choice. On the one hand, they insisted that the differences between men and women were irrelevant for citizenship. On the other hand, by the fact that they acted on behalf of women, they introduced the very idea of difference they sought to eliminate. This paradox - the need both to accept and to refuse sexual difference in politics - was the constitutive condition of the long struggle by women to gain the right of citizenship. In this new book, remarkable in both its findings and its methodology, award-winning historian Joan Wallach Scott reads feminist history in terms of this paradox of sexual difference.
Industry Reviews
"Joan Scott's tour de force is written with clarity, grace, humor, trenchant knowledge, imagination, and a sense of the politically extravagant. Scott traces the wonderful bravado of feminists who make use of the very terminology of equality, universality, and rights that has excluded women to make a feminist claim on citizenship. Risking paradox, Scott's French feminists in different ways expose the limits of liberalism and demand its radical transformation. After Scott's brilliant book, none of us will be able to read French feminism in the same way again."
Butler
"A magnificent tapestry of feminist theory and politics during the 'long' nineteenth century. It is a feminist's history of feminist history, one that is likely to shape the debate not simply over the history of gender but over the larger questions of political and cultural history."
Poste
"A singularly thoughtful book that is both a definitive history of French Feminism as well as an important contribution to ongoing feminist explorations of `equality' and `difference.' It is theoretically informed history at its best."
Kramnick
"Scott presents feminism as an argument necessary for the health of the body politic, but one that offers no recipe for perfection. It is the sense of feminism as dynamic, searching, inventive, historically specific, and often divided against itself, rather than abstract, timeless, or doctrinaire, that gives this story its spin. A must read for those in search of a better future as well as a thought-provoking past."
Engelstein
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