AOJA is an multilingual European project that collect studies in the fields of physical and cultural anthropology, and of the disciplines related to. It offers original researches by scholars of merit and young researchers, with particular attention to proposals by Asian and developing countries authors.

Aemilia Lanyer was a Londoner of Jewish-Italian descent and the mistress of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chamberlain. But in 1611 she did something extraordinary for a middle-class woman of the seventeenth century: she published a volume of original poems.Using standard genres to address distinctly feminine concerns, Lanyer's work is varied, subtle, provocative, and witty. Her religious poem "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum" repeatedly projects a female subject for a female reader and casts the Passion in terms of gender conflict. Lanyer also carried this concern with gender into the very structure of the poem; whereas a work of praise usually held up the superiority of its patrons, the good women in Lanyer's poem exemplify worth women in general.The essays in this volume establish the facts of Lanyer's life and use her poetry to interrogate that of her male contemporaries, Donne, Jonson, and Shakespeare. Lanyer's work sheds light on views of gender and class identities in early modern society. By using Lanyer to look at the larger issues of women writers working within a patriarchal system, the authors go beyond the explication of Lanyer's writing to address the dynamics of canonization and the construction of literary history.

In 1826 thirty-year-old Anna Briggs Bentley, her husband, and their six children left their close Quaker community and the worn-out tobacco farms of Sandy Spring, Maryland, for frontier Ohio. Along the way, Anna sent back home the first of scores of letters she wrote her mother and sisters over the next fifty years as she strove to keep herself and her children in their memories. With Anna's natural talent for storytelling and her unique, female perspective, the letters provide a sustained and vivid account of everyday domestic life on the Ohio frontier. She writes of carving a farm out of the forest, bearing many children, darning and patching the family clothes, standing her ground in religious controversy, nursing wounds and fevers, and burying beloved family and friends. Emily Foster presents these revealing letters of a pioneer woman in a framework of insightful commentary and historical context, with genealogical appendices.

Grace Ellison (d. 1935) actively encouraged dialogues between Turkish and British women at the outset of the twentieth century. Connected with progressive Ottoman elites discussing female and social emancipation, Ellison stayed in an Ottoman harem. Working as a respected journalist, she published articles about British-Turkish relations, Turkish nationalism, and the status of women across cultures. This book recounts Ellison’s stay with her friend Fâtima and features reports on motherhood, employment, polygamy, slavery, harem life, modernization, veiling, and prominent women writers. Despite an impressive legacy, Ellison and her work have almost disappeared from the historical record; the republication of this 1915 work aims to address this neglect.

Few recent topics have claimed as much media and political attention as the fight for the right of same-sex couples to marry legally. Striking at the heart of beliefs about sexuality, marriage, family, and child-rearing, the debate has touched off national and international debate. In this practical guide to the issues and their history, the authors present the issues as a courtroom case would be presented to the jury-with an opening statement, expert testimony, and a closing argument in support of same-sex marriage. Chapters explore how we have arrived at our current understandings of homosexuality and marriage, the impact of same-sex marriage on same-sex relationships and families, the practical civil benefits denied to persons who are not allowed to marry, and the 40-year evolution in the law as it relates to sex and reproduction. This book provides a reasoned and informed history of the subject, and is ideal for readers in government, social work, and the law-and anyone curious about where this contentious issue is headed.

The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul (Stamboul) is a picturesque description of women's life in post-World War I Turkey during a period of social and political turmoil. Here Demetra Vaka (1877-1946), an expatriate of Ottoman Turkey, established American journalist and acquaintance of Prince Sabaheddin, returns to her native Istanbul after a 20-year absence. Describing women's lives in post-World War I Turkey, she reports on the successful project of female emancipation pursued by Mustafa Kemal as part of the nationalist agenda. Noting how much this project had benefited upper- and middle-class Turkish women, Vaka nonetheless regrets that the gradual emergence of the monocultural, modern Republic was bringing an end to the multiethnic character of the Ottoman State.

Melek Hanım, an Ottoman woman of Greek, Armenian, and French heritage, accompanied her husband to various postings in Palestine and Serbia, and shared with him the frustrations of the arbitrary periodic dismissals that characterized late Ottoman politics. Her account of life in Turkey contains details of political intrigue, corruption and demonstrates the influence and mobility available to women in the official households of the Ottoman elite. Filled with maneuvers, murder, divorce, political machinations, and vengeance, Hanım's life was an attempt to gain access to property she viewed as legitimately her own. This book was written during her later exile in Paris.

Hester Donaldson Jenkins (1869-1941), a professor at the American College for Girls in Constantinople from 1900-1909, wrote enthusiastically about the Young Turks who seemed to promise new freedoms for Ottoman women. Jenkins uses her own observations of Constantinople, her students, and their families to construct an account of a "typical" Turkish Muslim woman's life cycle at this turning point in Ottoman history. She directs her comments toward childhood, education, marriage, polygamy, and divorce, in order to correct Western misapprehensions. In its confidence in the bright prospects of American influence and Ottoman reform, this book captures an optimistic moment in which social progress seemed to be thriving.

A prominent novelist, social activist, journalist, and nationalist, Halide Edib Adivar (1882-1964) was one of Turkey's leading feminists in the Young Turk and early Republican period. Memoirs is the first book in her two volume English-language autobiography, published in 1926, while she and her second husband Dr. Adnan were in exile in London and Paris having fallen out of favor with Mustafa Kemal's one-party regime. Edib describes her childhood, her confrontation with her first husband's polygyny, her divorce, and her entry into political and literary writing. Edib's account of her private life provides a unique example of a woman's individual and personal struggle for emancipation and gender equality.

In this diary recording two voyages to Constantinople, Lady Annie Brassey demonstrates her keen eye for human interest and narrative detail. The modern reader will glimpse natural wonders and cultural distinctions of Portuagal, Spain, Moroco, Italy, Greece, and Turkey during the mid-1870s.

Selma Ekrem grew up among the progressive Ottoman Muslim elite. Ekrem benefited from having an unconventional mother, who did not insist on her daughter's veiling. The book covers the family's sojourns outside Istanbul when her father was governor in Jerusalem during the 1908 Young Turk revolution and then governor of the Greek Archipelago Islands, where the whole family was held captive when their island was taken by the Greeks during the Balkan Wars. Returning to Istanbul just as World War I broke out, Ekrem attended the American College for Girls. Frustrated at the restrictions of Turkish female life, Ekrem traveled to America and countered prevalent stereotypes by lecturing on Turkey.

The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul (Stamboul) is a picturesque description of women's life in post-World War I Turkey during a period of social and political turmoil. Here Demetra Vaka (1877-1946), an expatriate of Ottoman Turkey, established American journalist and acquaintance of Prince Sabaheddin, returns to her native Istanbul after a 20-year absence. Describing women's lives in post-World War I Turkey, she reports on the successful project of female emancipation pursued by Mustafa Kemal as part of the nationalist agenda. Noting how much this project had benefited upper- and middle-class Turkish women, Vaka nonetheless regrets that the gradual emergence of the monocultural, modern Republic was bringing an end to the multiethnic character of the Ottoman State.

Born into the Ottoman Muslim elite, Zeyneb Hanoum and her sister Melek Hanoum were given a Western-style education by their progressive father, who expected them subsequently to live the segregated lives of Ottoman ladies. Rebelling, the sisters collaborated with the French author Pierre Loti, hoping that harnessing European intellectual support would speed up Ottoman social reform. Fleeing Istanbul in 1906 for fear of imperial reprisals, the sisters traveled in disguise to Europe, hoping to find "freedom" in the West. With Zeyneb Hanum's letters punctuated by Grace Ellison's introduction, commentary, and footnotes, this book challenges Orientalist stereotypes and documents the vibrant engagement between Eastern and Western women at the fin de siècle.

Hester Donaldson Jenkins (1869-1941), a professor at the American College for Girls in Constantinople from 1900-1909, wrote enthusiastically about the Young Turks who seemed to promise new freedoms for Ottoman women. Jenkins uses her own observations of Constantinople, her students, and their families to construct an account of a "typical" Turkish Muslim woman's life cycle at this turning point in Ottoman history. She directs her comments toward childhood, education, marriage, polygamy, and divorce, in order to correct Western misapprehensions. In its confidence in the bright prospects of American influence and Ottoman reform, this book captures an optimistic moment in which social progress seemed to be thriving.

Born as a Greek Ottoman in Istanbul, Demetra Vaka Brown (1877-1946) moved to America where she became a journalist and novelist, revisiting Turkey to write several books about the twilight of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the Turkish Republic. She based this, her first book, on experiences from 1901, when modernization had made inroads into Ottoman domestic life and the harem was becoming a thing of the past. Her reflections on life in the harem suggest the conflicted nature of her allegiances: Vaka is nostalgic for the Ottoman life that was rapidly disappearing, but she also enjoys the freedoms of a professional American woman.

As Anna Bowman Dodd (1855-1929), a New York travel writer and journalist, journeyed to Istanbul with the American Ambassador to France she embarked on a detailed account of the city and its people. Interested in documenting the changes in Turkey brought about by the "embrace" of modernity and progress, she considers Turkish women's rights, harems and marriage, the management of the household, education, slavery, the Sultan's reign, and nationalist movements in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. She caters to the American market for Orientalism but is also reflexive about its employment, both invoking and undercutting stereotypes as she addresses the "Eastern Question. "