In cultures throughout the world, sex and gender issues have been expressed in proverbs, the world's most concise literary genre. Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet provides revealing insights into the female condition across centuries and continents, as recorded in thousands of vivid and earthy proverbs about women. 
Mineke Schipper explores the similarities, differences, and contradictions that coexist in cultural norms about gender from hundreds of languages and over 150 countries. Grouping the sayings into such categories as the female body, love, sex, childbirth, and female power, she finds stunning patterns in ideas about women—and men. This cross-cultural study and critical analysis of proverbs about women is a unique and intriguing resource to dip into again and again.

Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma studies the intersections of modernism, sexuality, and subjectivity in the work of two leading women modernists. Over the course of her writing career, each came to confront those aspects of her culture and her personal history that resulted in a degraded sense of female sexuality.  In particular, both explored the ways in which traumatic childhood sexual experiences informed their relationship to female corporeality and fiction writing.

As literature written in Latin has almost no female authors, we are dependent on male writers for some understanding of the way women would have spoken. Plautus (3rd to 2nd century BCE) and Terence (2nd century BCE) consistently write particular linguistic features into the lines spoken by their female characters: endearments, soft speech, and incoherent focus on numerous small problems. Dorota M. Dutsch describes the construction of this feminine idiom and asks whether it should be considered as evidence of how Roman women actually spoke.

This book examines the representation of female desire in a broad range of fiction from the late sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, discussing key texts such as Jane Eyre, Pamela, Pride and Prejudice and Arcadia. It focuses on the emerging tensions between moral, social, and generic constraints on female behavior.