Delamotte (English, Arizona State Univ.), Jean O'Barr (director of women's studies, Duke Univ.), and Natania Meeker, a Duke graduate student, have compiled an impressive collection of women's writings through the ages. The book is organized into six sections: Sexuality, Spirituality, and Power; Work and Education; Representing Women; Writing the Body Politic; Identifying Sources of Resistance; and Vision and Transformation. The collection presents writings ranging from Sumangalamata, a Buddhist nun (sixth century B.C.E.) to a section from the "Platform for Action" of the Beijing Conference in 1995. Also very useful are indexes by geographical location and chronology, since women from 40 countries are included. This will make an excellent reader for survey classes on world history as well as women's history and studies. Highly recommended for high school and academic libraries.?Sharon Firestone, Ross-Blakley Law Lib., Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
One has difficulty imagining anyone
not being impressed by this prodigious volume. It is a perfect book for a women's studies class, particularly because of its unusualy broad range, and a book many undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty will wish to read from cover to cover. --
ChoiceThe editors have collected a remarkable range of writings from more than 100 women from 40 countries, spanning almost 2,600 years. General readers as well as scholars will be absorbed by the poems, journal entries, letters between friends, speeches, fictional accounts, and personal observations...We leave these pages with the inspiration that comes from knowing that women have resisted oppression for over two millenia. Now we can plot our future--by borrowing from our past. --
Ms. Magazine[A]n impressive collection of women's writings through the ages...This will make an excellent reader for survey classes on world history as well as women's history and studies. Highly recommended for high school and academic libraries. --
Library JournalWomen Imagine Change is a seminal contribution to the literature on women and social change. DeLamotte, Meeker, and O'Barr demonstrate great sensitivity, sophistication, and political savvy in their selection of narratives, organization of the volume, and commentaries on the book's central themes. Grounded in women's lived experience, which it neither trivializes or romanticizes,
Women Imagine Change is a great monument to women's resistance. -- Amrita Basu, Amherst College
This is an incredibly ambitious collection of women's aspirations for social change, across ages, lands, and cultures. The collection represents the very latest and most probing apporoaches to gender and history, in a thoroughly accessible way, through the clear and diverse voices of women across world history. -- Ellen DuBois, co-editor of
Unequal SistersBridging centuries, continents and cultures, this volume is a wonderful testament to women's resistance to the limitations of gendered worlds. It belongs in every library and on every woman's bookshelf. -- Susan McGee Bailey, Executive Director, The Wellesley Centers for Women
A formidable volume that dares to take on the whole world and covers more than 2000 years of history. --
National Women's Studies JournalThey're all here--Sappho, Christine de Pizan, Fatima Mernissi, Alexander Kollentai. But they are only the tip of this astounding feminist historical iceberg. Here in one volume, each speaking with first person immediacy and intimacy, are theorizing activist women from dozens of cultures, across two millenia. Japanese, Senegalese, Bengali, English, African American, Russian women analyzing and strategizing. Here are women you've read about but need to re-read, women who you've
meant to read and then all the women thinkers who you haven't even relized--till now--that you must read. -- Cynthia Enloe, author of
Does Khaki Still Become You?This book is accessible, broad in scope, and at once clear in its editorial rationale. The authors provide a feminist reader; this work is not simply a collection of stories about women. It is a collection that shows how throughout history women's resources have been exploited by the patriarchy, exercising power over their lives. --
Journal of Popular Culture
