Like the corset, the women's magazines which emerged in the nineteenth century produced a `natural' idea of femininity: the domestic wife; the fashionable woman; the romancing and desirable girl. Their legacy, from agony aunts to fashion plates, are easily traced in their modern counterparts. But do these magazines and their promises empower or disempower their readers? A Magazine of Her Own? is a lively and revealing exploration of this immensely popular form from its beginnings. In fascinating detail Margaret Beetham investigates the desires, images and interpretations of femininity posed by a medium whose readership was and still is almost exclusively female. A Magazine of Her Own is at once a chronological tracing of the history, a collection of intriguing case studies and an intervention into recent debates about gender and sexuality in popular reading. It is a book which anyone who is interested in the unique, influential world of the woman's magazine - students, scholars and general readers alike - will want to read

The fictional representation of the family has long been regarded as a Dickensian speciality. But while nineteenth-century reviewers praised Dickens as the pre-eminent novelist of the family, any close examination of his novels reveals a remarkable disjunction between his image as the quintessential celebrant of the hearth, and his interest in fractured families. Catherine Waters offers an explanation of this discrepancy through an examination of Dickens's representation of the family in relation to nineteenth-century constructions of class and gender. Drawing upon feminist and new historicist methodologies, and focusing upon the normalising function of middle-class domestic ideology, Waters concludes that Dickens's novels record a shift in notions of the family away from an earlier stress upon the importance of lineage and blood towards a new ideal of domesticity assumed to be the natural form of the family.

Our families are our first and most important ethical training grounds. But what is the family? And what are our ethical commitments to our family members and to the broader moral community? After a brief introductory chapter on basic ethical concepts and theories, the essays in this volume provide readers with ethical analyses of issues ranging from same-sex marriage to a controversial proposal to “license” parents. The chapters cover love, sex, marriage, parents and children, the relationship between the family and the larger moral community, and the influence of emerging technologies on the ethical issues inherent in family life. The volume is intended to open up this exciting territory in applied ethics to those interested in philosophy, family studies, social work, and to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the ethical forces at work in this most basic social institution.

Caroline Bancroft History Prize 2021, Denver Public Library Armitage-Jameson Prize 2021, Coalition of Western Women's History David J. Weber Prize 2021, Western History Association W. Turrentine Jackson Prize 2021, Western History Association Tiny You tells the story of one of the most successful political movements of the twentieth century: the grassroots campaign against legalized abortion. While Americans have rapidly changed their minds about sex education, pornography, arts funding, gay teachers, and ultimately gay marriage, opposition to legalized abortion has only grown. As other socially conservative movements have lost young activists, the pro-life movement has successfully recruited more young people to its cause. Jennifer L. Holland explores why abortion dominates conservative politics like no other cultural issue. Looking at anti-abortion movements in four western states since the 1960s—turning to the fetal pins passed around church services, the graphic images exchanged between friends, and the fetus dolls given to children in school—she argues that activists made fetal life feel personal to many Americans. Pro-life activists persuaded people to see themselves in the pins, images, and dolls they held in their hands and made the fight against abortion the primary bread-and-butter issue for social conservatives. Holland ultimately demonstrates that the success of the pro-life movement lies in the borrowed logic and emotional power of leftist activism.