Prof. Ruth Perry Published in Changing Places: Feminist Essays on Empathy and Relocation

Prof. Ruth Perry has an essay, “The Maternal Body and the State: How Women’s Reproductive Capacity has Undermined Their Share in State Power,” available in Changing Places: Feminist Essays on Empathy and Relocation. Prof. Perry says, “When one examines the historical relationship between women’s rights and the constellation of ideas about political equality, democracy, liberty, and individual rights—as these ideas surfaced in the Athenian Polis, the Italian city states, and most definitively for our culture, in Enlightenment England—it appears that the subordination of women is intrinsic to the process by which power is democratized among men.” Inanna Publications describes the book: “In Changing Places, eleven authors, based mostly in Canada, show how their positions and perspectives have been changed by working against the grain. They refuse to sever sentient experiences from the grounds of knowledge and of politics, but instead see questions of gender as embodied in spaces both metaphorical and lived…empathy engages some of the key areas of disciplinary concern:  othering and its critique; the subjectivities of self; reporting about experience; and the significance of reflexive modes of inquiry.”