Abstracts

Abstracts General BiU Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995. xvii + 526 pp.; ülustrations, bibUography, index. ISBN 0-415-09622-7 (pb). This reader, a comprehensive selection of extracts on post-colonial theory and criticism, is designed to make a wide variety of writings easily accessible to scholars. It is divided into fourteen sections with a total of eighty-six selections from previously pubUshed articles. Part VII, entitled "Feminism and Post-ColoniaHsm," contains six articles and is the only one devoted specifically to women. Other sedions include writings on ethnicity , language, the body and performance, history, education, and production and consumption. Jennifer Hargreaves. Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women's Sports. London: Routledge, 1994. 331 pp.; notes, references, index. ISBN 0-415-07028-7 (pb). Employing historical and sociological methodologies, Hargreaves surveys the development of female sports from the nineteenth century to the present. She discusses how theories of sport have neglected the question of gender and shows how physical education expanded in the nineteenth century to include females, ultimately leading to thefr entrance into recreational and competitive sports. She examines how the images of females who partidpate in sports have evolved over the last two centuries and how firmly institutionalized the prejudices against female athletes are. Hargreaves concludes by offering suggestions for ways to establish nondiscriminatory sports programs for all women who wish to participate in them. Annamarie Jagose. Lesbian Utopies. New York: Routledge, 1994. 214 pp.; works cited, index. ISBN 0-415-91019-6 (pb). Jagose explores the stereotype of the lesbian and finds that this culturally constructed category is marginalized. She asserts that lesbians are both everywhere and nowhere, seen yet invisible. Jagose applies feminist theory, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy to a wide range of texts induding fiction, theory, and poetry to theorize how lesbians are © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 2 (Summer) 192 Journal of Women's History Summer sodally produced and how they have in turn shaped and altered the sodal construdion of that category. Lesbian Utopies focuses on attempts to theorize a space, both discursive and extra-discursive, that is located externally to, and independently of, the dominant phaUocentric cultural system. The utopia is an emancipatory space that operates outside of patriarchal legislation and beyond patriarchal comprehension. Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Margaret Strobel, eds. Expanding the Boundaries of Women's History: Essays on Women in the Third World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. 352 pp.; tables, maps, index. ISBN 0-253-20734-7 (pb). The coUection has four sections: Cross-Cultural Contad and Issues of Discourse, Women as Activists, Women as Workers, and Issues in Methodology and Analysis. The articles focus on women's history, mostly of the twentieth century, but some of the nineteenth. The majority of articles pertain to African nations and India, though Latin America and the Caribbean and the Middle East are also represented. The collection is designed as a college-level multicultural introduction to the history of women Hi the Third World. Readings examine the dialogue between the Third and First World cultures and are written from a variety of methodologies and theoretical perspectives. Autumn Stanley. Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995. xxxv + 708 pp.; appendixes, bibHography, index. ISBN 0-81352197 -1 (pb). Stanley reveals the numerous technological contributions that women have made throughout the ages and creates an encyclopedia of women inventors. She begins with women's advancements Hi agriculture and horticulture in prehistoric times, but most of the book concentrates on women's inventions from the eighteenth century to the present. She challenges centuries-old stereotypes about females and their aversion to science and technology. Stanley focuses on five major areas of invention induding agriculture, medicine, reproductive technology, machines, and computers. She gives biographical sketches of these women inventors and lists the patents which have been issued to them. 1996 Abstracts 193 North America Gai Ingham Berlage. Women in Baseball: The Forgotten History. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1994. 224 pp.; photographs, appendix, index. ISBN 0-275-94735-1 (cl). $22.50. American's sport has...