This study proposes interpretive strategies for nineteenth-century American women's novels. Harris contends that women in the nineteenth century read subversively, 'processing texts according to gender based imperatives'. Beginning with Susannah Rowson's best-selling seduction novel Charlotte Temple (1791), and ending with Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913), Harris scans white, middle-class women's writing throughout the nineteenth century. In the process she both explores reading behaviour and formulates a literary history for mainstream nineteenth-century American women's fiction. Through most of the twentieth century, women's novels of the earlier period have been denigrated as conventional, sentimental, and overwritten. Harris shows that these conditions are actually narrative strategies, rooted in cultural imperatives and, paradoxically, integral to the later development of women's texts that call for women's independence. Working with actual women's diaries and letters, Harris first shows what contemporary women sought from the books they read. She then applies these reading strategies to the most popular novels of the period, proving that even the most apparently retrograde demonstrate their heroines' abilities to create and control areas culturally defined as male.

"In this compelling study, Marian Morton traces the development of public and private health-care policies for single mothers and identifies the ways in which attitudes about religion, race, and cultural definitions of womanhood affected their treatment." "Focusing on the history of the public hospital and four private maternity homes in Cleveland, Morton considers the care of unwed mothers in the context of developing American social policy from the mid-nineteenth century to today. While social policy has taken on a growing responsibility for health care of dependent people, the perception of unwed mothers as "sinful" by the Christian church and "undeserving" because their situation was brought about by moral failure has differentiated them from other dependent populations. Government provides unmarried mothers with the least support, and private maternity homes, run mostly by churches, have remained committed to the nineteenth-century notion of spiritual reclamation. As Morton shows, regardless of the time period, women pregnant out-of-wedlock have been the dependent population most easily disciplined by private agencies and the most resented and politically vulnerable recipients of public assistance." "This vital work sheds new light on the current controversies over public assistance and legalized abortion and offers a powerful appraisal of the uncertainties and inequities of American social policy as it applies to women who fail to conform to social definitions of womanhood."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Covers the themes such as rebellion, persecution and injustice in Restoration England. This book talks about a disturbing period of British history through the characters of Lady Alice Lisle and Judge Jeffreys, a period when fairness, justice and truth were cast aside in the interests of political power and conformity.

This volume isolates the cause of continuing disparities not only between blacks and whites, but among blacks as well. Key factors discussed include the current state of the economy and the influence of public policies.

Policing remains one of the most controversial areas of criminal justice, and recent years have seen major changes in every aspect of policing. This completely revised second edition argues that through these changes enduring and fundamental divisions can be traced.