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This illustrated volume brings together a wide variety of perspectives on the historic installation, 'Womanhouse' (1972). The introduction discusses the background and creation of this first whole-house feminist installation, a class assignment for the Feminist Art Program in the newly established California Institute of the Arts under the direction of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. Two of the original artists offer remembrances and speak to the project’s impact on their long careers of artmaking. Artistic descendants of the exhibition are discussed: these include whole-house installations which respond to the original, expanding the conversation by including artists of differing races, ethnicities, and gender expressions, and several iterations which served various roles in their communities. Two shows in galleries commemorating 'Womanhouse' and its artistic offspring are also considered. Next, several contemporary artists present their work and discuss how it relates to 'Womanhouse' and the questions it raised. Finally, a contemporary re-imagining of 'Womanhouse' is offered, giving a contemporary take on the historic exhibition. While much has been written about the original exhibition, rarely have we heard from some of the original artists about how their participation affected their careers and artistic output. In addition, this volume offers information on some of the descendant exhibitions. Discussion of these and their impact in the communities housing them underscores the importance of 'Womanhouse' in the lives of women in the years since 1972. Consideration of shows in galleries highlights the difference between them and the house installations. Reactions of contemporary artists offer new insight into the longevity of the original. And a contemporary re-imagining of 'Womanhouse' surprises the reader with unusual additions and re-evaluations.

This book is the second volume edited by Yvonne Bennett examining the lived religious lives of women in 21st-century Britain. The authors continue to explore contemporary women’s spirituality by looking at the way women use rituals and rites within their lives. Coming from different academic fields, the contributors bring together an interdisciplinary collection of voices on the topic of rituals and ritualistic behaviours. The chapters are woven together to shine a heterogeneous light on religion in the twenty-first century and the impact it has on women in Britain today. The volume also examines the editors’ own spirituality alongside that of the participants, offering a hybrid academic-practitioner viewpoint on ritual. The chapters begin and end with a philosophical examination of ritual and the manner in which ritualistic behaviours are incorporated into human experience. This book takes the reader on a journey from the cradle to the grave and from medieval history to the present day.

When asked if being a woman had a negative impact on her ability to succeed as a writer, Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik stated that, even if not a physical impediment, being a woman in a patriarchal society is ‘a tragedy’ in itself. She followed this comment by saying: ‘What matters is what we do with our own tragedies’. Beyond sex assigned at birth, feminized bodies around the world share a similar phenomenological experience, which is dictated by a complicated relationship to space. Before setting pen to paper, the woman writer, a monster herself within patriarchal discourse, must confront the role society has set for her. For a writer in a feminized body, thus, the act of writing never begins with a tabula rasa but with a refusal and a challenge, an ushering out of the supposed ‘eden’ of the domestic. The question of the women-writer’s space is further exacerbated when considering matters of intersectionality. The poetics of space and place change within the confines of different geopolitical structures and their relations amongst each other. How do they shift when the center becomes de-centered and writing stems not from a place of political power but from the quieted voices of minor literature, queer and racialized bodies or subalternized latitudes? This volume will attempt to address these questions with input from a diverse group of scholars dealing with an equally diverse corpus. North and Latin America converse with Europe while ‘genre’ literature, minor literature and ‘gendered’ literatures take center stage. By taking into account a wide array of cultural objects, from poetry and children’s literature to Gothic tales and television shows, this collection of articles reveals the profound link between space and the female experience through the lens of art and literature.

This volume on Women Empowerment is a showcase for readers interested in case studies on Women Empowerment in the Political, Economic, and Legal Contexts from different countries across the world. The case studies here are presented under four sub-themes.

This volume brings together powerful voices and lived experiences from across the globe, spotlighting how women are transforming their realities through health initiatives, education, entrepreneurship, social activism, and legal reforms. From rural India to urban Kenya, from the classrooms of Bangladesh to the legislative halls of the U.S., these stories reveal the multiple layers of struggle and strength that define the global movement for gender equality. Drawing from regions as diverse as Iran, Nigeria, and Latin America, the case studies dive deep into the intersections of gender with caste, age, class, and migration, showing how empowerment is not one-size-fits-all, but built through cultural context, resilience, and community. At the heart of this collection is a bold call to action: to rethink how we measure progress and to center women’s realities in policymaking and advocacy. Whether addressing reproductive health, digital entrepreneurship, or the challenges of elderly and immigrant women, the book highlights strategies that are as practical as they are inspiring. Finally, it offers a rich, comparative lens on how far we’ve come—and how much further we must go—to achieve true gender equality.

'Ages and Stages: A Glimpse into the Lives of Women in the Academy' offers the perspectives of ten women academics, mostly but not exclusively from the United States, who share both their struggles and their successes in the world of higher education. Ranging from graduate students to those nearing retirement, the essay authors aim to write in conversation with one another and to bring readers into the conversation. Readers will find various perspectives on issues unique to women academics—including motherhood, societal expectations, and institutional assumptions—and will discover various methods of navigating the unique challenges of women academics.

With the stagnant low percentages of women in STEM careers, identifying practices to satisfy the growing need for professionals in those fields is critical to improve recruitment and retention. Supportive relationships, like mentors and sponsors, have been shown to both inspire women to pursue those careers and to help them succeed in them. This book explores how developing supportive connections helps students, faculty, and teachers see STEM professions as being a place for women to grow and succeed. Early chapters provide essential mentor characteristics and explore engineering education gender inequity from a teacher's perspective of stereotypes, stereotype threat, and bias, offering culturally relevant teacher mentoring approaches to promote equitable pre-college engineering education. Middle chapters describe K-12 mentoring programs: mentorship initiatives empowering young South African Women and girls to advance to mathematical-related careers; programs, methods and activities to achieve the desired goal of making young students aspire to become scientists; and engagement year-round in grades 9-12 combined with 40 years of iterative evaluation created a finely-honed enrichment program for low-income Black women in urban public high schools. A longitudinal undergraduate mentoring program for mentoring early college students in Louisiana provides further insights in that section. The final four-chapter section describes mentoring programs for professors and teachers: reciprocal mentor relationships and role shifting within an informal peer mentoring group; differences between mentoring relationships and sponsoring relationships within academia; the impact of culturally responsive mentorship (CRM) on the development and expression of a pre-service teacher’s woman of science identity; and a program that aims to recruit and retain STEM pre-service teachers and STEM teachers of color. With several longitudinal mentoring programs, several programs for women of color, this book fills a gap to help grow the numbers of women in STEM.

What stage of development are women’s rights as human rights? By specifically regarding the prevention and elimination of all forms of Violence Against Women, the book focuses on two European Mediterranean countries: Italy and Spain. The book first considers the chronological description and analysis of the main international documents, those belonging to the United Nations apparatus, followed by the analysis of the sources on Gender-Based Violence Against Women (GBVAW) of the Council of Europe and the European Union. The analysis of international documents guarantees an initial overview of the debate on GBVAW, following a top-down approach, from the UN to the national level. Successively, the focus is on both national sources as well as the level of government responsiveness in terms of policies on GBVAW in Italy and Spain, while also comparing the cases. The book adopts multimethod research based on qualitative text analysis; an examination of the level of national Government Responsiveness to GBVAW, and a series of in-depth interviews with targeted individuals. The final aim of this book is to understand how international (UN) and regional (CoE, EU) documents on GBVAW, along with the categories and expressions used within the documents, have contributed to different policies in countering GBVAW in Italy and Spain, while also highlighting the reasons why the two countries responded differently. Within a comprehensive international scenario, this book intends to create space for debate on possible future EU policies aimed at contrasting GBVAW.

'Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art' boldly reasserts the importance of the Madwoman more than four decades after the publication of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s seminal work in feminist literary criticism, 'The Madwoman in the Attic'. Since Gilbert and Gubar’s work was published, the Madwoman has reemerged to do important work, rock the academic boat, and ignite social justice agency inside and outside of academic spaces, moving beyond the literary context that defined the Madwoman in the late 20th century. In this dynamic collection of essays, scholars, creative writers, and Mad activists come together to (re)define the Madwoman in pluralistic and expansive ways and to realize new potential in Mad agency. This collection blazes new directions of thinking through Madness as a gendered category, comprised of a combination of creative works that (re)imagine the figure of the Madwoman, speeches in which Mad-identifying artists and writers reclaim the label of “Madwoman,” and scholarly essays that articulate ambitious theories of the Madwoman. The collection is an interdisciplinary scholarly resource that will appeal to multiple academic fields, including literary studies, disability studies, feminist studies, and Mad studies. Additionally, the work contributes to the countermovement against colonial, sanist, patriarchal, and institutional social practices that continue to silence women and confine them to the metaphorical attic. Appealing to a broad audience of readers, 'Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art' is a cutting-edge inquiry into the implications of Madness as a theoretical tool in which dissenting, deviant, and abnormal women and gender non-conforming writers, artists, and activists open the door to Mad futurities.