| Description |
xii, 395 p. ; 25 cm. |
| Series |
Women and history ; v. 2 |
|
Lerner, Gerda, 1920-2013
Women and history ; v. 2.
|
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (p. 331-376) and index. |
| Contents |
The educational disadvantaging of women -- Self-authorization -- The way of the mystics-1 -- The way of the mystics-2 -- Authorization through motherhood -- One thousand years of feminist Bible criticism -- Authorization through creativity -- The right to learn, the right to teach, the right to define -- Female clusters, female networks, social spaces -- The search for women's history. |
| Summary |
"Patriarchy traced the development of the ideas, symbols, and metaphors by which men institutionalized their domination of women. Now, in The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, the eagerly awaited concluding volume of the Women and History Series, Lerner documents the twelve-hundred-year struggle of women to free their minds from patriarchal thought, to create Women's History, and to achieve a feminist consciousness. Lerner argues that the millennia-old educational disadvantaging of women and their marginalization in the intellectual life of Western civilization retarded women's ability to comprehend their condition and to define their needs as a group. She shows the devastating impact on women's psychology of notions of their innate mental inferiority, reinforced generation after generation by the teachings of family, church, and state. Through examining over a thousand years of feminist biblical criticism, Lerner illustrates her most important insight - the discontinuity of Women's History. The generation to generation transmission of knowledge on which the building of civilization rests did not work for women. Because they did not know its history, each generation of women used their energies and talents reinventing ideas that other women had already defined - this greatly delayed the development of women's consciousness of themselves as members of a group. In a series of fascinating portraits of individual women who resisted patriarchal indoctrination, Lerner discusses women mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and later Protestant mystics, and brings to life the many women of great literary talent, from Christine de Pisan to Louise Labe to Emily Dickinson, who simply bypassed patriarchal thought and created alternate worlds for themselves.". |
| Subject |
Women -- History.
|
|
Feminist theory -- History.
|
|
Women intellectuals -- History.
|
|
Civilization, Western -- History.
|
| ISBN |
0195066049 (alk. paper) |
|
9780195066043 (alk. paper) |
|
