San Antonio College Library

The matriarchy is one of the most hotly contested issues between contending schools in anthropology. This book affirms that the maternal clan system was the original form of social organization and explains why. It also traces its development and the causes of its downfall. Evelyn Reed takes us on an expedition through prehistory from cannibalism to culture--and uncovers the world of the ancient matriarchy. Tracing the origins of the "incest taboo,"...

"One of the world's most widely-read psychoanalysts, Erich Fromm was a groundbreaking thinker on gender and sex, issues which have come to have a profound impact on psychology in recent years. He believed that a state of war has existed between the sexes for some six thousand years - a "guerrilla war" which followed the triumph of men over women and reorganized society on the basis of male domination, turning women into the property of men. As long...

A dual narrative in which a woman finds a cookbook buried in the basement of her new home and becomes captivated with the cookbook's previous owner, a 1950s housewife. Dissatisfied with her own life, she becomes absorbed in learning the story--and the secrets--of the last woman who lived in her house. Alice Hale left a career in publicity to become a writer and follow her husband to the New York suburbs. Unaccustomed to filling her days alone in...

"Decade after decade, violence against women has gained more attention from scholars, policy makers, and the general public. Social scientists in particular have contributed significant empirical and theoretical understandings to this issue. Strikingly, scant attention has focused on the victimization of women who want to leave their hostile partners. This groundbreaking work challenges the perception that rural communities are safe havens from the...

In an original contribution to the psychoanalytic approach to literature, Doreen Fowler focuses on the fiction of four major American writers - William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison - to examine the father's function as a "border figure." Although the father has most commonly been interpreted as the figure who introduces opposition and exclusion to the child, Fowler finds in these literary depictions fathers who instead...

What role did manhood play in early American politics? In A Republic of Men, Mark E. Kann argues that the American founders aspired to create a "republic of men" but feared that "disorderly men" threatened its birth, health, and longevity. Kann demonstrates how hegemonic norms of manhood - exemplified by "the Family Man," for instance - were deployed as a means of stigmatizing unworthy men, rewarding responsible men with citizenship, and empowering...

This study of the much-mythologized Southern belle offers a serious look at the lives of white women and their harsh and restricted place in the slave society before the Civil War. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of hundreds of planter wives and daughters, the author sets before us the daily life of the plantation mistress and her ambiguous intermediary position in the hierarchy between enslaver and enslaved.