Momentslife is a sequence of them. In the joyous times, the spectacular instances seem to hurry by too quickly. In the routine of everyday life, ordinary moments slip by often unnoticed. During anxious times, it is as though every minute creeps by at an agonizingly slow pace. But as Rev. Martha Ward illustrates, God is present at all times, and if we open ourselves to that reality, every moment is holy. In Holy Moments: When Life and Faith Intersect, Rev. Ward links her own personal stories and those of her family with key scriptures to illustrate the variety of ways our life events become holy moments. Her hope is that readers will use her reflections as a springboard to consider how God is present in the moments of their lives.
Focuses on notable African-American women who have helped shape American destiny, including contributors in the fields of politics, sports, and the arts.
Each year, thousands of pilgrims visit the celebrated New Orleans tomb where Marie Laveau is said to lie. They seek her favors or fear her lingering influence. Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau is the first study of the Laveaus, mother and daughter of the same name. Both were legendary leaders of religious and spiritual traditions many still label as evil. The Laveaus were free women of color and prominent French-speaking Catholic Creoles. From the 1820s until the 1880s when one died and the other disappeared, gossip, fear, and fierce affection swirled about them. From the heart of the French Quarter, in dance, drumming, song, and spirit possession, they ruled the imagination of New Orleans. How did the two Maries apply their “magical” powers and uncommon business sense to shift the course of love, luck, and the law? The women understood the real crime—they had pitted their spiritual forces against the slave system of the United States. Moses-like, they led their people out of bondage and offered protection and freedom to the community of color, rich white women, enslaved families, and men condemned to hang. The curse of the Laveau family, however, followed them. Both loved men they could never marry. Both faced down the press and police who stalked them. Both countered the relentless gossip of curses, evil spirits, murders, and infant sacrifice with acts of benevolence. The book is also a detective story—who is really buried in the famous tomb in the oldest “city of the dead” in New Orleans? What scandals did the Laveau family intend to keep buried there forever? By what sleight of hand did free people of color lose their cultural identity when Americans purchased Louisiana and imposed racial apartheid upon Creole creativity? Voodoo Queen brings the improbable testimonies of saints, spirits, and never-before-printed eyewitness accounts of ceremonies and magical crafts together to illuminate the lives of the two Marie Laveaus, leaders of a major, indigenous American religion.
During her first visit to the beautiful island of Pohnpei in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, anthropologist Martha Ward discovered people who grew quarter-ton yams in secret and ritually shared a powerful drink called kava. She managed a medical research project, ate dog, became pregnant, and responded to spells placed on her. Thirty years later she returned to Pohnpei to learn what had happened there since her first visit. Were islanders still relaxed and casual about sex? Were they still obsessed with titles and social rank? Was the island still lush and beautiful? Had the inhabitants remained healthy? This second edition of Wards best-selling account is a rare, longitudinal study that tracks people, processes, and a place through decades of change. It is also an intimate record of doing fieldwork that immerses readers in the sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and the sensory richness of Pohnpei. Ward addresses the ageless ethnographic questions about family life, politics, religion, traditional medicine, magic, and death together with contemporary concerns about postcolonial survival, the discontinuities of culture, and adaptation to the demands of a global age. Her insightful discoveries illuminate the evolution of a culture possibly distant from yet important to people living in other parts of the world.
Martha Ward tracks the development and reception of neo-impressionism, revealing how the artists and critics of the French art world of the 1880s and 1890s created painting's first modern vanguard movement. Paying particular attention to the participation of Camille Pissarro, the only older artist to join the otherwise youthful movement, Ward sets the neo-impressionists' individual achievements in the context of a generational struggle to redefine the purposes of painting. She describes the conditions of display, distribution, and interpretation that the neo-impressionists challenged, and explains how these artists sought to circulate their own work outside of the prevailing system. Paintings, Ward argues, often anticipate and respond to their own conditions of display and use, and in the case of the neo-impressionists, the artists' relations to market forces and exhibition spaces had a decisive impact on their art. Ward details the changes in art dealing, and chronicles how these and new freedoms for the press made artistic vanguardism possible while at the same time affecting the content of painting. She also provides a nuanced account of the neo-impressionists' engagements with anarchism, and traces the gradual undermining of any strong correlation between artistic allegiance and political direction in the art world of the 1890s. Throughout, there are sensitive discussions of such artists as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, as well as Pissarro. Yet the touchstone of the book is Pissarro's intricate relationship to the various factions of the Paris art world.
Poor Women, Powerful Men chronicles the achievements and subsequent failure of the Louisiana Family Health Foundation, the most extensive family planning program ever to operate in the United States. Martha C. Ward's even-handed account reveals the mechanisms--of politics, poverty, and public health policies--at work in the perpetual controversies surrounding reproductive rights and the delivery of health care services to the poor. Ward's book begins in the early 1960s when Louisiana was among the most underdeveloped states and ranked at the bottom of all scales measuring illiteracy, illegitimacy, and infant mortality. Despite the free statewide Charity Hospital system, many routine preventive medical and public health services were not available to poor women and their children, particularly if they were black. But in the mid-1960s, a visionary group of doctors and health care practitioners began to clear the hurdles erected by law, church, and the medical-political establishment. By 1970 they had set up the first statewide family planning program for poor people in the United States. The Louisiana experiment was a spectacular success. The Ford, Rockefeller, and Kellogg Foundations poured millions of dollars into the program. The Great Society and War on Poverty programs placed a high priority on the health of poor mothers and infants. With the help of the population lobby--including Planned Parenthood and the Agency for International Development--the Family Health Foundation moved into Latin America and other developing areas. But in 1974, the bubble burst. Accusations of fiscal mismanagement, fraudulent statistics, patronage, and political payoffs led to federal indictments and jail sentences for top officials. Poor women and powerful men, the black and white communities, and the liberal and conservative medical factions were pitted against each other. With the collapse of the program, methods for handling the epidemic of adolescent pregnancies and the high infant mortality rate reverted to the state bureaucracies. Poor Women, Powerful Men is the first book-length account of the Louisiana experiment. In a clear and dispassionate voice, Ward demonstrates that many of the questions raised by the experiment persist. Is family planning an answer to the cycle of poverty, teenage pregnancies, and infant mortality? How can the conflict between private and public delivery of medical care be resolved? Where do the reproductive rights of women fit into governmentally supported birth control programs? We seem no closer today to answering these questions than the Louisiana Family Health Foundation was more than a decade ago.
Poor Women, Powerful Men chronicles the achievements and subsequent failure of the Louisiana Family Health Foundation, the most extensive family planning program ever to operate in the United States. Martha C. Ward's even-handed account reveals the mechanisms—of politics, poverty, and public health policies—at work in the perpetual controversies surrounding reproductive rights and the delivery of health care services to the poor. Ward's book begins in the early 1960s when Louisiana was among the most underdeveloped states and ranked at the bottom of all scales measuring illiteracy, illegitimacy, and infant mortality. Despite the free statewide Charity Hospital system, many routine preventive medical and public health services were not available to poor women and their children, particularly if they were black. But in the mid-1960s, a visionary group of doctors and health care practitioners began to clear the hurdles erected by law, church, and the medical-political establishment. By 1970 they had set up the first statewide family planning program for poor people in the United States. The Louisiana experiment was a spectacular success. The Ford, Rockefeller, and Kellogg Foundations poured millions of dollars into the program. The Great Society and War on Poverty programs placed a high priority on the health of poor mothers and infants. With the help of the population lobby—including Planned Parenthood and the Agency for International Development—the Family Health Foundation moved into Latin America and other developing areas. But in 1974, the bubble burst. Accusations of fiscal mismanagement, fraudulent statistics, patronage, and political payoffs led to federal indictments and jail sentences for top officials. Poor women and powerful men, the black and white communities, and the liberal and conservative medical factions were pitted against each other. With the collapse of the program, methods for handling the epidemic of adolescent pregnancies and the high infant mortality rate reverted to the state bureaucracies. Poor Women, Powerful Men is the first book-length account of the Louisiana experiment. In a clear and dispassionate voice, Ward demonstrates that many of the questions raised by the experiment persist. Is family planning an answer to the cycle of poverty, teenage pregnancies, and infant mortality? How can the conflict between private and public delivery of medical care be resolved? Where do the reproductive rights of women fit into governmentally supported birth control programs? We seem no closer today to answering these questions than the Louisiana Family Health Foundation was more than a decade ago.
Takes a cross-cultural approach to the study of women A World Full of Women, 6/e, combines descriptive ethnography, gender theory, and international statistics to present a comprehensive picture of the lives of women. Readers will better comprehend and contextualize women’s issues and experiences in today’s world. This title explores the diversity of women’s lives from class to culture, with examples ranging from women’s work to marriage patterns, health issues, violence against women, and grassroots organizing.
Presents a collection of quotes by Martha Stewart that, when culled together, describe her in her own words, through every phase of her life, from running a business, to making a home and building an empire.
This collection of biographies describes the lives of courageous and daring women of color who have changed the course of American history, in government, sports, the arts, and more.
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