"A classic of feminist intellectual history. 'Am I That Name' is a sort of Anglo-American end of innocence
for anyone who tries to speak of 'women.' Riley makes the word run, since she cannot make it stand still. She offers
a history of how feminism has faced its paradoxical core."
--Voice Literary Supplement
"Essential reading for philosophers, historians, and feminist theorists."
--History Review of Books
Publisher Web Site, December, 2003
Summary
A new edition of a classic work on the history of feminism.
Writing about changes in the notion of womanhood, Denise Riley examines, in the manner of Foucault, shifting historical
constructions of the category of "women" in relation to other categories central to concepts of personhood:
the soul, the mind, the body, nature, the social.
Feminist movements, Riley argues, have had no choice but to play out this indeterminacy of women. This is made
plain in their oscillations, since the 1790s, between concepts of equality and of difference. To fully recognize
the ambiguity of the category of "women" is, she contends, a necessary condition for an effective feminist
political philosophy.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Does a Sex Have a History?
p. 1
Progresses of the Soul
p. 18
The Social, 'Women', and Sociological Feminism
p. 44
The Womanly Vote
p. 67
Bodies, Identities, Feminisms
p. 96
Notes and References
p. 115
Selective Bibliography
p. 124
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.
