This is the first anthology to take a theoretical look at violence against women. Each essay shows how philosophy provides a powerful tool for examining a difficult and deep-rooted social problem. Stanley G. French, Wanda Teays, and Laura M. Purdy, all philosophers, present a familiar phenomenon in a new and striking fashion.
The editors employ a two-tiered approach to this vital issue. Contributors consider both interpersonal violence, such as rape and battering; and also systemic violence, such as sexual harassment, pornography, prostitution, and violence in a medical context. The editors have further broadened the discussion to include such cross-cultural issues as rape in war, dowry deaths, female genital mutilation, and international policies on violence against women. Against this wide range of topics, which integrate personal perspectives with the philosophical, the contributors offer powerful analyses of the causes and effects of violence against women, as well as potential policies for effecting change.
Stanley G. French is Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal. Wanda Teays is Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles. Laura M. Purdy is Professor of Philosophy and Ruth and Alberg Koch Professor of Humanities at Wells College. She is the author of In Their Best Interest? and Reproducing Persons, both from Cornell, the coauthor of Bioethics, Justice, and Health Care, and coeditor of Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics and Embodying Bioethics: Feminist Advances.
What People are Saying About This
Rosemarie Tong
The topic of violence against women needs the kind of serious philosophical scrutiny the editors provide in this volume. Not only philosophers, but legal theorists, criminologists, women's studies specialists, political scientists and sociologists will find this book useful.
Virginia Held
This is a fine collection that makes clear why violence against women—from rape and battery to female genital cutting and much else—should receive serious philosophical attention. The essays here clarify the issues and offer recommendations, as should philosophy at its best.
Uma Narayan
Unique and timely. Offering a nice blend of more familiar and less familiar topics, this volume will be interesting to readers with specific interests as well as to readers looking for something new.
Maryann Ayim
In their introduction to Violence against Women, the editors claim that it 'was conceived in the spirit of social transformation'; the constituent chapters of the book more than fulfill this formative conception. The daring and innovative papers focusing on rape, genital mutilation, pornography, domestic violence, and social policy promise to jolt any readers still mired in dogmatic slumbers into transformed, and perhaps uneasy, wakefulness. The strength of argument applied by the authors to extensive empirical and personal experience should abolish forever the possibility of taking seriously many former 'axioms' regarding such concepts as rights, freedom, and humanity. Most important, this volume transforms what it means to do philosophy, exploding old Cartesian boundaries of the purely rational, opening up for philosophical analysis the lives of women as they have actually been lived.
