Heather, Ostman – författare

American Women Activists and Autobiography examines the feminist rhetorics that emerge in six very different activists’ autobiographies, as they simultaneously tell the stories of unconventional women’s lives and manifest the authors’ arguments for social and political change, as well as provide blueprints for creating tectonic shifts in American society.

Exploring self-narratives by six diverse women at the forefront of radical social change since 1900—Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Angela Davis, Mary Crow Dog, and Betty Friedan—the author offers a breadth of perspectives to current dialogues on motherhood, essentialism, race, class, and feminism, and highlights the shifts in situated feminist rhetorics through the course of the last one hundred years.

This book is a timely instructional resource for all scholars and graduate students in rhetorical studies, composition, American literature, women''s studies, feminist rhetorics, and social justice.

American Women Activists and Autobiography examines the feminist rhetorics that emerge in six very different activists’ autobiographies, as they simultaneously tell the stories of unconventional women’s lives and manifest the authors’ arguments for social and political change, as well as provide blueprints for creating tectonic shifts in American society.

Exploring self-narratives by six diverse women at the forefront of radical social change since 1900—Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Angela Davis, Mary Crow Dog, and Betty Friedan—the author offers a breadth of perspectives to current dialogues on motherhood, essentialism, race, class, and feminism, and highlights the shifts in situated feminist rhetorics through the course of the last one hundred years.

This book is a timely instructional resource for all scholars and graduate students in rhetorical studies, composition, American literature, women''s studies, feminist rhetorics, and social justice.

This book explores the Catholic aesthetic and mystical dimensions in Kate

Chopin’s fiction within the context of an evolving American Catholicism in the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a close reading of her

novels and numerous short stories, Kate Chopin and Catholicism looks at the

ways Chopin represented Catholicism in her work as a literary device that served

on multiple levels: as an aesthetic within local color depictions of Louisiana, as a

trope for illuminating the tensions surrounding nineteenth-century women’s

struggles for autonomy, as a critique of the Catholic dogma that subordinated

authenticity and physical and emotional pleasure, and as it pointed to the

distinction between religious doctrine and mystical experience, and enabled the

articulation of spirituality beyond the context of the Church. This book reveals

Chopin to be not only a literary visionary but a writer who saw divinity in the

natural world.