About this product: A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Faludi lays out a two-fold thesis in this aggressive work: First, despite the opinions of pop-psychologists and the mainstream media, career-minded women are generally not husband-starved loners on the verge of nervous breakdowns. Secondly, such beliefs are nothing more than anti-feminist propaganda pumped out by conservative research organizations with clear-cut ulterior motives. This backlash against the women's movement, she writes, "stands the truth boldly on its head and proclaims that the very steps that have elevated women's positions have actually led to their downfall." Meticulously researched, Faludi's contribution to this tumultuous debate is monumental and it earned the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction.
The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise. According to Rosemarie Zagarri, the debate over women's rights began not in the decades prior to 1848 but during the American Revolution itself. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, this study explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution until the election of Andrew Jackson.
Although the period produced no collective movement for women's rights, women built on precedents established during the Revolution and gained an informal foothold in party politics and male electoral activities. Federalists and Jeffersonians vied for women's allegiance and sought their support in times of national crisis. Women, in turn, attended rallies, organized political activities, and voiced their opinions on the issues of the day. After the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a widespread debate about the nature of women's rights ensued. The state of New Jersey attempted a bold experiment: for a brief time, women there voted on the same terms as men.
Yet as Zagarri argues, this opening for women soon closed. By 1828, women's politicization was seen more as a liability than as a strength, contributing to a divisive political climate that repeatedly brought the country to the brink of civil war. The increasing sophistication of party organizations and triumph of universal suffrage for white males marginalized those who could not vote, especially women. Yet all was not lost. Women had already begun to participate in charitable movements, benevolent societies, and social reform organizations. Through these organizations, women found another way to practice politics.
Spanning the first fifty years of the nation's history, Revolutionary Backlash uncovers women's forgotten role in early American politics and explores an alternative explanation for the emergence of the first women's rights movement.
About this product: Global Backlash is the first book to move beyond the monolithic portrayal of the globalization protests that have escalated since Seattle and are not likely to abate soon. With trenchant analysis and dozens of primary documents from a variety of popular and uncommon sources, Robin Broad explores proposals and initiatives coming from the backlash to answer the question, But what do they want? A range of sophisticated propositions and a vibrant debate among segments of the backlash emerge. Highly readable and analytically powerful, this book is vital to understanding the most potent protest movement of our times. Visit our website for sample chapters!
About this product: It seems like it was just yesterday that Prozac was a miracle pill, a medication that could not only make sick people well, but "better than well."
By the end of the 1990s, Prozac and similar drugs--Paxil, Zoloft, and others--were being prescribed for everything from depression to anxiety to drug addiction to ADD. About 70 percent of prescriptions for these antidepressants were being written by family physicians, rather than psychiatrists.
Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, a psychiatrist who has a private practice and also works for Harvard University Health Services, sees this antidepressant mania as dangerous, even reckless. He notes that these drugs can have severe side effects, including uncontrollable facial and body tics, which could be signs of severe and permanent brain damage. About 50 percent of patients suffer often-debilitating withdrawal symptoms from them, and about 60 percent end up with sexual dysfunction. And Prozac may make a small number of people homicidal or suicidal, or both.
But there are alternatives: in Germany, for example, St. John's wort outsells Prozac 25 to 1, showing that doctors and patients there understand that the herbal remedy works as well as the synthetic ones for mild to moderate depression. [Editor's note: St. John's wort has been shown to interfere with the actions of the transplant rejection drug cyclosporin and the AIDS drug indinivir.] And diet, exercise, 12-step programs, and good old-fashioned psychotherapy can work well, too. Even for severe depression requiring medication, Dr. Glenmullen shows how the drugs can be used with other treatments and then discontinued after a year or less.
Moreover, Prozac Backlash discusses exactly what depression is and isn't; Dr. Glenmullen reviews hundreds of scientific studies, and discusses numerous case studies from his practice and others. Because of that detail, medical professionals may be this book's most likely readers, but anyone who has been on an antidepressant, or is close to someone who is, will also want to give Prozac Backlash a careful read. The brain you save could be your own. --Lou Schuler
About this product: This controversial work counters the forces that are discrediting allegations and suppressing recognition of the alarming incidence of child abuse in our society. John Myers brings together the work of experts to make the volume crucial reading for anyone concerned with this critical debate.
The book begins with an historical and sociological exploration of the issue. The Backlash then focuses on the experiences of various public bodies charged with child protection, such as Child Protective Services in the United States and their opponents, for example Victims of Child Abuse Laws (VOCAL). The volume also examines the backlash in Europe with a case study from The Netherlands and concludes with a survey of backlash literature and recommendations for responding to this attack on child protection.
About this product: In his insightful, award-winning work Fire and Ice, Environics president Michael Adams explored the growing divergence between American and Canadian values. Using the same mixture of polling and analysis in American Backlash, Adams fixes his penetrating gaze on contemporary America—the exceptional society. Exploding the accepted wisdom of an America divided bitterly into camps of red and blue, Adams's data show that the values rift between Republicans and Democrats is negligible when compared with the gulf between politically engaged citizens (of either party) and the nearly half of Americans who are politically disaffected. American Backlash goes beyond the red and blue dichotomy, beyond the litany of divisive political issues that receive so much attention in American public discourse: abortion, stem-cell research, euthanasia, same sex marriage, Darwin versus Genesis, and prayer in schools. Widening the lens to examine the psychology of American society as a whole, Adams's research suggests that it is neither Red nor Blue America that represents the overall trajectory of social change in the United States. Rather, it is politically disengaged Americans, people who increasingly embrace values of brash individualism and hedonism, who are the greatest barometer of where American society is headed.
About this product: This work scrutinizes the prefix-based language of post-backlash feminism and calls for a reclamation of American feminist terminology. Questioning the merits of "Do Me feminism,"; "Eco feminism"; and "girlie,"; among other isms, the author argues that the proliferation of so-called "prefix feminisms;" has weakened the feminist movement by narrowing its focus into shallow interpretations of a broad social and political cause. The author assesses anti-feminist media coverage, particularly following the Reagan administration and the Clinton-Lewinski affair, and concludes that efforts to reclaim a pro-woman politic must begin with reclaiming pro-woman language.
About this product: Affirmative action remains one of the most divisive issues in America, remaining unsolved since the 1960s civil rights legislation. Though many works have attempted to solve the dilemma, none have tried to identify the underlying causes of the backlash against the policy. In order to understand affirmative action's future, one must understand its evolution, its opposition, and its application both in America and in other nations. In a multi-disciplinary approach, this book examines affirmative action from comparative, historical, policy, and sociological perspectives. Also included is a list of Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action.
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