General Women's Studies

The Chalice and the Blade by Raine Eisler
     What a clear, structured and scholarly path to follow as one learns of self and discovers the real story of human kind. I read this book over 5 years ago based on a friend's recommendation while on travel in California. When I returned, I had finished reading the book and was shocked, enlightened, and relieved to re-learn about our human story and the invaluable role that the feminine presence has played in history, religion, econony, etc. This book answered so many questions that have been unanswered for me over the years. Now, I know!
    The book does transcends "women studies". In fact, I was delighted to see this book favorably reviewed and recommended as a management text reading in a trade publication for American Society of Training & Development about 2 years ago.
    Now, if only it was possible for our high school and college students to read this book in our classrooms. What a thrill it would be to witness the scholarly debates that this book would surely generate.

Intimate Nature : The Bond Between Women and Animals
by Linda Hogan (Editor), Deena Metzger (Editor), Brenda Peterson (Editor)
    As any lover of animals will tell you, creatures of the natural world bring inspiration and spiritual insight to their human admirers. In this collection of essays, ponderings, poems, and interviews, which includes contributions from Jane Goodall, Barbara Kingsolver, Ursula Le Guin, and Tess Gallagher, readers are able to glimpse the personal yet profoundly universal impact of animals on women's lives. Even more, they can experience the relational and spiritual feminine model for animal study. In their introduction, editors Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger, and Brenda Peterson explain, "This strong sense of compassion that many women bring to the study, celebration, and love of animals has been world changing and visionary. We can now say that the old guard of detached science is being replaced with the new guardians, many of them the women in this Book." --

The Whole Woman by Germaine Greer
For women born in the immediate postwar period, there were the years BG and AG--"before Greer" and "after Greer." It's all too easy to underestimate its influence, but the fact is that in 1970 every self-respecting woman on the Left owned a copy of "The Female Eunuch." Thirty years later, Germaine Greer is ready to get angry again. In "The Whole Woman," she analyzes, among other issues, the invasive ways in which the health industry persuades women to have their bodies and reproductive systems "managed." Greer lays out the facts about the high failure rate and devastating side effects of in vitro fertilization and the incongruence between the "success" of breast implants in achieving the "perfect" mammary to please men and the continuing failures in detecting and treating increasingly prevalent breast cancer. Greer's polemic has the confident virtuosity of wit and maturity. Celebrating women's successes, "The Whole Woman" is a more positive book than "The Female Eunuch."  Her unique combination of outrageous humor and assertiveness continues to lead the way forward for women who want to take control of their lives.

First Sex : The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World by Helen E. Fisher
    Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher isn't afraid of immodest proposals. The woman who demystified four million years' worth of romance in "Anatomy of Love" now suggests in "The First Sex" that evolution favors women.  Citing recent research in biology, sociology, sociobiology, and anthropology, Fisher makes a strong case for a near future in which the natural talents of women as thinkers, communicators, and healers, adapted to the age of information, create a new kind of
global leadership in business, medicine, and education, skewing the power dynamics of sex and relationships towards the feminine.  Women, she says, are contextual thinkers to a far greater degree than men; this "web thinking," as Fisher dubs it, is an asset in a global marketplace. Women are far more talented than men at achieving win-win outcomes in negotiations. On an organizational level, women are less interested in rank and more interested in relationships and networking, an essential
attribute in a world without borders. In the arena of education, women have a natural talent for language and self-expression; as healers, they enjoy an emotional empathy with their charges that can and will redefine doctor-patient relationships. And, she
predicts, in the next century women will reinvent love by asserting feminine sexuality and creating peer marriages, true partnerships. While Fisher's future may seem idealized, her science and her sociology make for a well-reasoned case that the people Simone de Beauvoir once defined as "the second sex" are about to move to the head of the class.

Women Helping Women - Websites

Women to the World, Inc. is an international nonprofit Christian service organization committed to improving the lives of disenfranchised women and children. We connect women of resource to women in need.

  www.womentotheworld.org/