Author: Éadaoin Agnew File Type: pdf This book is about Victorian womens representations of colonial life in India. These accounts contributed to imperial rule by exemplifying an idealized middle-class femininity and attesting to the Anglicisation of the subcontinent. Writers described familiarly feminine modes of experience, focusing on the domestic environment, household management, the family, hobbies and pastimes, romance and courtship and their busy social lives. However, this book reveals the extent to which their lives in India bore little resemblance to their lives in Britain and suggests that the acclaimed transportation of the home culture was largely an ideological construct iterated by women writers in the service of the Raj. In this way, they subverted the constraints of Victorian gender discourses and were part of a growing proto-feminism. **

Author: Jenny Brown File Type: pdf When House Speaker Paul Ryan urged U.S. women to have more children, and Ross Douthat requested More babies, please, in a New York Times column, they openly expressed what U.S. policymakers have been discussing for decades with greater discretion. Using technical language like age structure, dependency ratio, and entitlement crisis, establishment think tanks are raising the alarm if U.S. women dont get busy having more children, well face an aging workforce, slack consumer demand, and a stagnant economy.Feminists generally believe that a prudish religious bloc is responsible for the protracted fight over reproductive freedom in the U.S., and that politicians only attack abortion and birth control to appeal to those values voters. But hidden behind this conventional explanation is a dramatic fight over womens reproductive labor. On one side, elite policymakers want an expanding workforce reared with a minimum of employer spending and a maximum of unpaid womens work.On the other side, women are refusing to produce children at levels desired by economic planners. By some measures our birth rate is the lowest it has ever been. With little access to childcare, family leave, health care, and with insufficient male participation, U.S. women are conducting a spontaneous birth strike.In other countries, panic over low birth rates has led governments to underwrite childbearing and childrearing with generous universal programs, but in the U.S., women have not yet realized the potential of our bargaining position. When we do, it will lead to new strategies for winning full access to abortion and birth control, and for improving the difficult working conditions U.S. parents now face when raising children.**ReviewJenny Brown compellingly explains the low U.S. birthrate those primarily responsible for the labor of bearing and raising children (women) are responding as one should to lousy working conditionsby going on strike! Browns bold and brilliant book ventures into terrain that left and feminist thinkers have avoided for far too long. A breathtakingly accessible analysis, supported by riveting and intimate testimonials, its also an inspiring call to action.Liza Featherstone, The NationAn astute analysis of power relations not only in the sphere of reproduction but also in the worlds of work, immigration, and government policy as they bear on womens ability to control their bodies. Brown illuminates the historical context of the writings of Marx and Malthus, the crusades of Comstock, and recurring elite pleas for women to supply more workers and soldiers. Birth Strike lays bare why U.S. women who want to be mothers, and those who dont, have it far worse here than in Europe. Then she tells us how to change that. Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes a serious contribution to the debate around womens reproductive labor and its vital place in womens liberation. A must read for those seeking to understand and carry on the struggle. Carol Hanisch, womens liberation pioneer and author of the 1969 articleThe Personal is Political Jenny Browns rational and forthright answer to what the abortion struggles are about will surprise American women on both sides of the issue. Hint its not religion nor politics. Peggy Dobbins, author of From Kin to Class, WITCH founderJenny Browns book Birth Strike is a game-changer and is equal in significance to Betty Friedans Feminine Mystique which sparked a movement in the 1960s. Carol Downer, Feminist Womens Health Centers founder and author of A Womans Book of ChoicesBirth Strike is a well-researched and wide-ranging analysis of how the public responsibilities of pregnancy and parenting have been privatized to benefit a capitalist for-profit system designed to minimize labor costs to produce wealth for the few. Offers fresh insight into how womens biological power may be harnessed to resist reproductive oppression. Loretta J. Ross, author of Reproductive Justice An Introduction and editor of Radical Reproductive Justice This book lays bare how U.S. politics around race and immigration are closely connected to the struggle for reproductive freedom, both in the past and today. You will never think about reproductive rights in the same way again. Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America and director of Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University Jenny Brown provides a compelling case that the battle over abortion and birth control is not just a religious or cultural difference of opinion. Rather, within these battles are deeper debates over the control of human labor. Capitalism cannot exist without labor, and employers have a strong interest in ensuring a steady supply. The more women can control their own bodies, the less power capitalists have over social reproduction. Filled with fascinating history and contemporary analysis, this book illuminates how womens liberation is in fundamental conflict with capitalism. Read this book to learn how women must take their political struggle beyond what are often narrowly misunderstood as womens issues. Stephanie Luce, professor of labor studies and sociology, City University of New York, author of Fighting for a Living Wage and Labor Movements Global Perspectives Why are we still struggling for childcare and paid leave in the U.S.? Basic rights to birth control and abortion? In Birth Strike, Jenny Brown exposes the economic interests at play and shows the mighty power of women to change the game. Lise Vogel, author of Marxism and the Oppression of WomenAbout the Author Jenny Brown is a womens liberation organizer and former editor of Labor Notes. She was a leader in the grassroots campaign to have morning-after pill contraception available over-the-counter in the U.S. She is co-author of Womens Liberation and National Health Care and author of Without Apology The Abortion Struggle Now (Verso).