Women on the Verge of Home

Book excerpt: This book explores the idea of "home." Using feminist scholarship and ethnographically grounded readings of historical, literary, and cultural texts, contributors interrogate the comfortable and stable contours of home and ask what it means to women in different social, class, sexual, ethnic, and racial contexts in different times and places. Giving voice to diverse women's understandings of home, the book includes stories of elite white U.S. and Canadian women, rural poor and peasant white women in the United States and France, a British Caribbean freed slave woman, and others.