Elevate Difference

Reviews of University of Pennsylvania Press

Pens and Needles: Women's Textualities in Early Modern England

Pens and Needles takes a new approach to the study of how women expressed themselves in Early Modern England (roughly 1500-1700). It has long been assumed that the gender roles we know today have been consistent over time. Pens, writing, communication, are the realm of men; needles, sewing, the home, are the realm of women. Frye disagrees; she gives extensive examples of women writing in the Early Modern era, from poetry to household accounts.

The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker: The Life Cycle of an Eighteenth-Century Woman (Abridged Version)

The preface to this newly issued, abridged version of Elizabeth Drinker's diary, published originally in three volumes in 1991, reveals the sort of personal relationship the editor has formed with her subject over the past decades, an intimacy that forms often in historical scholarship, especially in single-author studies and even more so when the genre of focus is so inherently intimate, as the diary form certainly is.

Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India

Everyday Nationalism, a publication in "The Ethnography of Political Violence" series, offers readers a provocative and sometimes disturbing look at Hindu nationalist organizations and the role of Indian women in representing the nationalist movement.

Gender Stereotyping: Transnational Legal Perspectives

Gender stereotypes are often studies in contradiction. They can be insidious or glaringly apparent; they are hostile, and occasionally operate out of “benign” sexism. The customs and mores of the society, the media that is consumed in that society, the predominant religion of a culture, and the family unit can all commingle in order to perpetuate gender stereotypes.

The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty and Politics in Modern America

In The War on Welfare, Marisa Chappell compiles a comprehensive record of decades of antipoverty and anti-welfare movements and coalitions, the policies and programs they influenced, and the biases that both shaped and undermined their objectives.