Danforth Gallery Artist Spotlight: Anne Mourier

More and more, fathers are deciding to stay at home and care for their children rather than work full-time outside of the home. More and more, Canadian families are lead by single fathers. Shining a spotlight on the lives of stay at home dads and single fathers, Do Men Mother? provides groundbreaking evidence of dramatic changes in mothering and fathering in Canada. Using evidence gathered in a four-year in-depth qualitative study, including interviews with over 100 fathers - from truck drivers to insurance salesmen, physicians to artists - Andrea Doucet illustrates how men are breaking the mold of traditional parenting models. Doucet's research examines key questions such as: What leads fathers to trade earning for caring? How do fathers navigate through the 'maternal worlds' of mothers and infants? Are men mothering or are they redefining fatherhood? Do Men Mother? illuminates fathers' candid reflections on caring and the intricate social worlds that men and women inhabit as they 'love and let go' of their children. In asking and unravelling the question 'do men mother,' this study tells a compelling story about Canadian parents radically re-visioning child care and domestic responsibilities at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The Victorian age is much closer to us in time than we might believe. Yet at that time, in the most technologically advanced nation in the world, people buried meat in fresh earth to prevent mold forming and wrung sheets out in boiling water with their bare hands. Such household drudgery was routinely performed by the grandparents of people still living, but the knowledge of it has passed as if it had never been. Judith Flanders's book is laid out like a Victorian house, taking you through the story of daily life from room to room. In each space she depicts the home's furnishings and decoration: from childbirth in the master bedroom, through the scullery and kitchen, the separate male and female domains of the drawing room and the parlor, and ending in the sickroom. A rich selection from diaries, letters, advice books, magazines, and paintings fills the rooms with the people and personalities of the age. 100 illustrations, 3 8-page color inserts.

A new theory of domesticity depicted through alternative homemakers.

In more than 500 essays and 100 illustrations, the Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft examines the arts, practices and people associated with witchcraft.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER: In Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair offers a provocative reframing of the abortion issue in post-Roe America. In a series of brief arguments, Blair deftly makes the case for moving the abortion debate away from controlling and legislating women's bodies and instead directs the focus on men's lack of accountability in preventing unwanted pregnancies. Highly readable, accessible, funny, and unflinching, Blair builds her argument by walking readers through the basics of fertility (men are 50 times more fertile than women), the unfair burden placed on women when it comes to preventing pregnancy (90% of the birth control market is for women), the wrongheaded stigmas around birth control for men (condoms make sex less pleasurable, vasectomies are scary and emasculating), and the counterintuitive reality that men, who are fertile 100% of the time, take little to no responsibility for preventing pregnancy. The result is a compelling and convincing case for placing the responsibility--and burden--of preventing unwanted pregnancies away from women and onto men.

I can't work, I can't think, I can't connect with anyone anymore. . . . I mope through a day's work and haven't had a promotion in years. . . . It's like I'm being sucked dry, eaten away, swallowed up, coming unglued. . . . These are voices of a few of the tens of millions who suffer from chronic insomnia. In this revelatory book, Gayle Greene offers a uniquely comprehensive account of this devastating and little-understood condition. She has traveled the world in a quest for answers, interviewing neurologists, sleep researchers, doctors, psychotherapists, and insomniacs of all sorts. What comes of her extraordinary journey is an up-to-date account of what is known about insomnia, providing the information every insomniac needs to know to make intelligent choices among medications and therapies. Insomniac is at once a field guide through the hidden terrain inhabited by insomniacs and a book of consolations for anyone who has struggled with this affliction that has long been trivialized and neglected.

An illuminating, erudite, lively search for the real Helen of Troy a chronicle that combines historical inquiry and storytelling from one of Britain's most widely acclaimed and popular historians. As soon as men began to write, they made Helen of Troy their subject; for close to three thousand years she has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield. Because of her double marriage to the Greek king Menelaus and the Trojan prince Paris, Helen was held responsible for an enduring enmity between East and West. For millennia she has been viewed as an exquisite agent of extermination. But who was she? Helen exists in many guises: a matriarch from the Age of Heroes who ruled over one of the most fertile areas of the Mycenaean world; Helen of Sparta, the focus of a cult that conflated Helen the heroine with a pre-Greek fertility goddess; the home-wrecker of theIliad; the bitch-whore of Greek tragedy; the pin-up of Romantic artists. Focusing on Helen;a flesh-and-blood aristocrat from the Greek Bronze Age;Bettany Hughes reconstructs the context of life for this pre-historic princess. Through the eyes of a young Mycenaean woman, Hughes examines the physical, historical, and cultural traces that Helen has left on locations in Greece, North Africa, and Asia Minor. Vivid and compelling, this remarkable book brilliantly unpacks the facts and myths surrounding one of the most enigmatic and notorious figures of all time.

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses examines how women-led healing was delegitimized to make way for patriarchy, capitalism, and the emerging medical industry.  As we watch another agonizing attempt to shift the future of healthcare in the United States, we are reminded of the longevity of this crisis, and how firmly entrenched we are in a system that doesn't work. First published by the Feminist Press in 1973, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses is an essential book about the corruption of the medical establishment and its historic roots in witch hunters. In this new and updated edition, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English delve into the current fascination with and controversies about witches, exposing our fears and fantasies. They build on their classic exposé on the demonization of women healers and the political and economic monopolization of medicine. This quick history brings us up-to-date, exploring today's changing attitudes toward childbirth, alternative medicine, and modern-day witches.