Klein Viola 1908 1973 (1 results)
Published by London ; New York : Routledge, 1989 1989
- Softcover
Seller: Steven Wolfe Books, Newton Centre, MA, U.S.A.Steven Wolfe Books
Contact seller5-star seller, Klein, Viola, 1908-1973. The feminine character : history of an ideology. With a new introduction by Janet Sayers. London ; New York : Routledge, 1989, Third Edition, xlvi, 202pp., sewn PAPERBACK, very good. Cover design: Philip Barker. The substantial 1989 preface by Janet Sayers acknowledges assistance from Lisa Klein and ot…hers. Sayers: "In 1946 The Feminine Character was pathbreaking. It preceded by three years Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. But, like The Second Sex, it also involved the application of a man's ideas to the woman question. Just as Jean-Paul Sartre encouraged de Beauvoir to write about her sex, and just as he provided her resulting book's existentialist philosophy, so too Karl Mannheim provided Klein with The Feminine Character's main theoretical and methodological motifs" (xvii). - REAR COVER TEXT: What is femininity? The Feminine Character describes the historical and biographical factors shaping individual social scientists' ideas of gender - biological, psychoanalytic, psychometric, anthropological, and sociological. First published in 1946, the book anticipated by three years Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in challenging then-dominant norms of femininity. Viola Klein's account of the historical development and change in psychological sex differences, and in attitudes to femininity, remains as important today as when it was first published. Then it was important in deconstructing the ideology of femininity used to persuade women to return to full-time housework from the work they had become accustomed to during the Second World War. Now it is important in combating the neglect by feminist as well as non-feminist theories of the historical movement and change in received ideas of femininity. // Janet Sayers, author of books on women and biology, psychology, and sociology, has written an introduction specially for this new edition. Tracing the personal sources of The Feminine Character of Viola Klein's experiences as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Europe and immigrant to England, she details the book's bearing on current social science and feminist debates about sex, race, and class; and about androgyny, bisexuality, and mothering. // The Author: Born in Vienna, Viola Klein (1908-1973) studied at the Sorbonne, and at the Univer -si ties of Vienna and Prague, and settled in London in 1939 after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. From 1964 until shortly before her death, she was Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Reading. Her other books are: Women's Two Roles (co-written with Alva Myrdal) and Britain's Married Women Workers. 9780415025720 ISBN 0415025729.
