Uses examples from film, television, literature, and everyday life to survey all aspects of both women's physical and social experience, and argues that gender bias is embedded in all current social systems

What impact has the rapid economic development of Asia had on women? Why is Asia still home to the largest number of impoverished women? How does the feminization of poverty, one of the most urgent issues facing the continent, actually take place ? This remarkable book charts the effects of the economic boom on women across Asia. The author, one of Japan’s leading journalists, demonstrates how Asian women are confronting rapid economic development which is accompanied by widespread infringement of human rights. Analysing the lives of women in Japan, Thailand, the Phillipinnes, Taiwan, China, Nepal and Korea, Yayori Matsui explores the impact of globalization - including the feminization of migration and an increase in the trafficking of women sexual violence - from the ‘comfort’ women to child prostitution development projects - the cause of mass deforestation and displacement of communities However she also describes women’s credit co-ops, democratization movements and unionization of women workers. She meets women who have organized anti-logging blockades, literacy classes and campaigns against trafficking. She finds women across Asia resisting the dictatorship of development, the feminization of poverty and patriarchal values. Throughout the continent, she finds the seeds of hope for a new Asia.

In a significant reinterpretation of early Romanticism, Judith Pascoe shows how English literary culture in the 1790s came to be shaped by the theater and by the public's fascination with theater. Pascoe focuses on a number of intriguing historical occurrences of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, emphasizing how writers in all areas of public life relied upon theatrical modes of self-representation. Pascoe adduces as evidence the theatrical posturing of the Della Cruscan poets, the staginess of the Marie Antoinette depicted in women's poetry, and the histrionic maneuverings of participants in the 1794 treason trials. Such public events as the treason trials also linked the newly powerful role of female theatrical spectator to that of political spectator. New forms of self representation and dramatization arose from that synthesis.In their uniting of theatrical and literary realms, Pascoe maintains, women writers were inspired by the most famous actress of the era, Sarah Siddons. Siddons's shrewd deployment of her private life in the construction of her public persona serves as a model for such disparate poets as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson.