SUNY series in Gender and Society – serie

Looking at the discourse on female weight reduction in American culture, Confessing Excess analyzes contemporary dieting and the weight loss literature by taking up the themes of confession and surveillance. Spitzack argues that dieting is characterized by confession (of "excess") which women internalize and which necessitates ongoing surveillance or monitoring of the body. Informal conversations and in-depth interviews also juxtapose women's everyday dieting experiences with the discourse of dieting texts. By evaluating the cultural construction of women in this manner, the author illuminates the power strategies that offer self-acceptance at the price of self-condemnation.

This book examines university teaching from several perspectives: What male and female professors do in the classroom, their perceptions and feelings about teaching, and how students respond. Data were gathered by observing professors in their classrooms, doing selected unstructured interviews, and soliciting evaluations/feedback from their students. This triangulation of data provides a richness of information and insight into the process of university teaching.In addition to providing useful feedback to professors and administrators, this study integrates several social psychological approaches to gender with more recent feminist formulations. The findings support recently developed perspectives which argue that gender is a constantly created social phenomenon, not one cast securely in the concrete of social structure.

Circles and Settings: Role Changes of American Women is an original, comprehensive analysis of changing roles of American women at a time of great upheaval and public, as well as social science, commentary. Using a symbolic interactionist framework, with role seen as a set of negotiated relations, Lopata analyses the roles of wife, mother, kin member (daughter, sister, grandmother) homemaker, job holder in different settings, as well as friend, neighbor, volunteer, and activist. This book comprehensively pulls together all the major involvements of American women using both historical and comparative perspectives to show the evolution of these roles over the last century.

The authors highlight how structural circumstances in countries with various degrees of industrialization are associated with specific policies. The analyses of women's experiences reveal the variety of ways in which private patriarchy in families combines with public patriarchy in economies and states to create a system of domination which subordinates women. The authors detail how gender is constructed under specific political, economic, and cultural circumstances, and seek to understand how state policies with differing sensitivities to women's issues have produced mixed outcomes for women and their families in the process of economic development.

An examination of the class and gender conditions of working-class women in the coal mining fields reveals how they struggled for development and change and how the struggle sometimes lead to empowerment.This book is an examination of gender and social change in the coalfields and nearby areas of Southwest Virginia from the standpoint of working-class Appalachia women. Through intensive life history interviews and participant observation, the author explores women's lives within the spheres of family, work, and community, and how women have changed through participating in grassroots community development, income-generation, labor, and support groups. Grounded in feminist theory, the work offers insights into collective action, empowerment, and development in the United States, and relates these issues to international "women in development" scholarship and practice.

An examination of the class and gender conditions of working-class women in the coal mining fields reveals how they struggled for development and change and how the struggle sometimes lead to empowerment.This book is an examination of gender and social change in the coalfields and nearby areas of Southwest Virginia from the standpoint of working-class Appalachia women. Through intensive life history interviews and participant observation, the author explores women's lives within the spheres of family, work, and community, and how women have changed through participating in grassroots community development, income-generation, labor, and support groups. Grounded in feminist theory, the work offers insights into collective action, empowerment, and development in the United States, and relates these issues to international "women in development" scholarship and practice.

The first anthology in English on modern Spanish women's history and identity formation.This book, the first anthology in English, links the concerns of Spanish women's history to those of women's history elsewhere in Europe and throughout the world. The contributors, representing the best of the new historical scholarship, expand our knowledge of the general field of Spanish history and contribute to the reconfiguring of European history through the inclusion of the Spanish experience. They tie empirical inquiries into the history of women in Spain to current feminist theoretical concerns, including debates about identity and agency, and they show how "contesting identities" also lead to "contesting categories" and into broad debates about cultural particularism.