In Her Place: A Documentary History of Prejudice Against Women - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1591023807 ISBN 13: 9781591023807

Publisher: Prometheus, 2006

Synopsis

The long history of prejudice against women has been the focus of many academic studies, but until now there has been no attempt to collect actual examples of this prejudice from books, articles, and scholarly monographs. In Her Place gathers together dozens of works - mostly by American writers over the past two centuries but also by some European writers who influenced American thought - that embody the scorn and contempt for the "weaker sex" that most women endured for countless generations until very recently. Masterfully edited by S. T. Joshi, who has included brief biographies of the writers as well as footnotes to explain obscure historical, literary, and other allusions, much of this material has never been reprinted since its original publication.As Joshi points out, this is the work, not of a few isolated cranks, but of the leading members of the intellectual, social, and political communities. They published their opinions through prestigious publishers, magazines, and newspapers. Scientists purported to discover physiological evidence for woman's supposed intellectual deficiencies and their absence of the "creative faculty." Fear of women's sexuality was a prime motivator of a great deal of prejudice, ranging from disapproval of coeducation to a defense of the double standard of morality, whereby men but not women were permitted sexual dalliance without undue censure. Religion, always a pillar of social conservatism, emphasized women's subordination to men as a commandment handed down by God. So thorough was men's indoctrination of sexual prejudice throughout society that even women absorbed it and came to believe in their own inferiority.Reading the unabashed bias against women so evident in these pages brings the entrenched misogyny of American society into vivid focus and makes one appreciate all the more the immense efforts of feminists who for more than a century have worked to overcome the stereotypes of "womanly" behavior long enforced by men.

About this title

About the Author:

S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer, scholar, and editor. His books include The Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism; Documents of American Prejudice; In Her Place: A Documentary History of Prejudice against Women; God’s Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong; Atheism: A Reader; H. L. Mencken on Religion; The Agnostic Reader; What Is Man? and Other Irreverent Essays by Mark Twain and The Angry Right: Why Conservatives Keep Getting It Wrong.

From Booklist:

Joshi starts his (yes, his) history of prejudice against women off with a bang. "And now bear with me . . . while I show you what you, dear ladies, cannot do." This, from -nineteenth-century Congregational minister John Todd's pamphlet entitled "Woman's Rights," presages the thrust and purpose of all the essays to follow. From Dr. Edward H. Clarke's flagrant disdain for female intelligence in an 1873 essay in which he opines that too much education robs the so-called more important female reproductive organs of the blood they need by channeling it to the brain, to Professor Stephen Goldberg's 1973 polemic regarding the "Inevitability of Patriarchy," Joshi's compilation of articles, excerpts, and treatises traces more than a century of the most vitriolic anti-feminist writings from preeminent scholars, clergy, physicians, and politicians. Anyone wishing to understand the overwhelming challenges faced by women's-rights activists from the movement's earliest days to the dawn of the Second Wave need look no further than Joshi's illuminating and downright infuriating examples of pervasively misogynistic thinking. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1591023807
• ISBN 13: 9781591023807
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 458
• Editor: Joshi S. T.