The impact of feminist thinking on contemporary knowledge is examined in this intriguing study. Emerging from the 2009 lecture series “Feminist Knowledge Reconsidered: Feminism and the Academy,” this book covers current ideas about feminism in relation to education, society, and the future potential for feminist research and teaching in the university context. Connecting early stories of women who defied their exclusion from knowledge creation to contemporary challenges for feminism in universities, this collection assesses how feminist knowledge has influenced dominant thinking and transformed teaching and learning. It also focuses on the challenges for feminism as corporatization redefines the role of universities in a global world. The essays reflect on both historical and contemporary themes from a diversity of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, but they are united in their exploration of how feminism’s continuing contribution to knowledge remains significant, even fundamental, to the transformation of knowledge in both the academy and the world.

Reconsidering Knowledge: Feminism and the Academy

Politics & Social Sciences

Luxton, Meg

Mossman, Mary Jane

Women's Studies

Fernwood Publishing

"It's a girl!" As the Ontario press announced, Canada's first woman lawyer was called to the Ontario bar in February 1897. Quiet Rebels explores experiences of exclusion among the few women lawyers up to 1957, and how their experiences continue to shape gender issues in the contemporary legal profession. Author Mary Jane Mossman tells the stories of all 187 Ontario women lawyers 1897-1957, revealing the legal profession's gendered patterns. As a small handful at the Law School, (sometimes the only woman), they were often ignored, and they faced discrimination in obtaining articling positions and legal employment. Most were Protestant, white, and middle-class, and a minority of Jewish, Catholic, Black, and immigrant women lawyers faced even greater challenges. The book also explores some changes, as well as continuities, for the much larger numbers of Ontario women lawyers in recent decades. This longitudinal study of women lawyers' gendered experiences in the profession during six decades of social, economic, and political change in early twentieth-century Ontario identifies factors that created - or foreclosed - women lawyers' professional success. The book's final section explores how some current women lawyers, in spite of their increased numbers, must remain "quiet rebels" to succeed.

Quiet Rebels: A History of Ontario Women Lawyers

History

Americas

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

This comparative study explores the lives of some of the women who first initiated challenges to male exclusivity in the legal professions in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Their challenges took place at a time of considerable optimism about progressive societal change, including new and expanding opportunities for women, as well as a variety of proposals for reforming law, legal education, and standards of legal professionalism. By situating women's claims for admission to the bar within this reformist context in different jurisdictions, the study examines the intersection of historical ideas about gender and about legal professionalism at the turn of the twentieth century. In exploring these systemic issues, the study also provides detailed examinations of the lives of some of the first women lawyers in six jurisdictions: the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia, India, and western Europe. In exploring how individual women adopted different legal arguments in litigated cases, or devised particular strategies to overcome barriers to professional work, the study assesses how shifting and contested ideas about gender and about legal professionalism shaped women's opportunities and choices, as well as both support for and opposition to their claims. As a comparative study of the first women lawyers in several different jurisdictions, the book reveals how a number of quite different women engaged with ideas of gender and legal professionalism at the turn of the twentieth century.

The First Women Lawyers: A Comparative Study of Gender, Law and the Legal Professions

Legal Education

Hart Publishing

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mossman, Mary Jane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Mossman, Mary Jane