Gender studies: women and girls Books

Book SynopsisToday, when fifty percent of couples who marry eventually get divorced, it's clear that we have moved from a culture in which \u0022marriage is forever\u0022 to one in which \u0022marriage is contingent.\u0022 Author Karla Hackstaff looks at intact marriages to examine the impact of new expectations in a culture of divorce. Marriage in a Culture of Divorce examines the shifting meanings of divorce and gender for two generations of middle-class, married couples. Hackstaff finds that new social and economic conditions both support and undermine the efforts of spouses to redefine the meaning of marriage in a culture of divorce. The definitions of marriage, divorce, and gender have changed for all, but more for the young than the old, and more for women than for men. While some spouses in both generations believe that marriage is for life and that men should dominate in marriage, the younger generation of spouses increasingly construct marriage as contingent rather than forever. Hackstaff presents this evidence in archival case studies of couples married in the 1950s, which she then contrasts with her own case studies of people married during the 1970s, finding evidence of a significant shift in who does the emotional work of maintaining the relationship. It is primarily the woman in the '50s couples who \u0022monitors\u0022 the marriage, whereas in the '70s couples both husband and wife support a \u0022marital work ethic,\u0022 including couples therapy in some cases. The words and actions of the couples Hackstaff follows in depth - the '50s Stones, Dominicks, Hamptons, and McIntyres, and the '70s Turners, Clement-Leonettis, Greens, Kason-Morrises, and Nakatos -- reveal the changes and contradictory tendencies of married life in the U.S. There are traditional relationships characterized by male dominance, there are couples striving for gender equality, there are partners pulling together, and partners pulling apart. Those debating \u0022family values\u0022 should not forget, Hackstaff contends, that there are costs associated with marriage culture as well as divorce culture, and they should view divorce as a transitional means for defining marriage in an egalitarian direction. She convincingly illustrates her controversial position, that although divorce has its cost to society, the divorce culture empowers wives and challenges the legacy of male dominance that previously set the conditions for marriage endurance.Trade Review"This is a very important book... Hackstaff has given us some brilliant insights into one of the most important social, psychological, and moral problems of our time." -Eli Sagan, author of Freud, Women, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil "How do men and women feel about marriage in a culture of divorce? In this brilliant book, Hackstaff gets down to the key details in which culture, attachment, and power interact. This book makes giant strides in our understanding of marriage in the modern day." -Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work "Karla Hackstaff shows that the truth about American marriage is far more complex-and hopeful-than the divorce alarmists would have it." -Arlene Skolnick, author of Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty "In this timely work, Karla Hackstaff adds richly to the contemporary discussions about the future of marriage and, by extension, the futures of the family and constructs of gender." -Terry Arendell, Professor, Colby College, and author of Mothers and Divorce and Fathers and Divorce "It is not possible in this review to do justice to the richness of Hackstaff's interview data, the nuanced quality of her analysis and the breadth of her knowledge. Every page of this book is worth studying." -The Women's Review of BooksTable of ContentsCONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: Watershed in the Meaning of Marriage 1 Marriage and the Construction of Ideology: From Marriage Culture to Divorce Culture 2 The Shifting Grounds for Divorce: Structural and Cultural Conditions for Change 3 The Push of Marriage Culture Among '50s Spouses 4 The '50s Dominicks: Dominating with Divorce Culture 5 The '50s Hamptons and Other Couples: Redefining Marriage Culture in Terms of Gender Equality 6 '50s Spouses Secure Equal Footing in Divorce Culture 7 The '50s Era in a Rearview Mirror 8 The Pull of Divorce Culture: Divorce Anxiety Among '70s Spouses 9 '70s Couples Aim for Relational Equality 10 The '70s Greens: Traditionalism in the 1990s 11 "Topsy-Turvy" Marriage Among '70s Spouses 12 Divorce Culture: A Quest for Relational Equality in Marriage Appendix: Methodological Notes Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisInterviews with Turkish maids yield surprising facts about class and gender rolesTrade Review"A sophisticated and sensitive text on domestic service in Turkey that singles itself out by a powerful account of the micro-sociology of power. It engages the reader in much broader debates about the mutual relations of class and gender, the role of patriarchal controls in shaping informal female labor markets and the management of status differentials by women in their daily lives. An important scholarly contribution written in a lucid and accessible style."—Deniz Kandiyoti, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London"Untidy Gender makes contributions to a large number of debates in several social science fields and sub-fields. And it does so on an extraordinarily sound methodological base: Ozyegin was able to construct a random sample for her 'women in the basement.' This is the gold standard of research, and may be unique in the research annals of studies of domestic workers."—Rae Lesser Blumberg, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia"This original book sheds new light on the dynamics of modernity and newly constituted urban identities. Through a careful ethnographic study of paid domestic work, Ozyegin illuminates the varied ways in which relations of class and gender inequalities are shaped and maintained. American audiences interested in rural-urban migrants, in intersectionalities of race, class, and gender, and in identities, power, and resistance in the workplace will find some of the most compelling ethnography and many valuable theoretical nuggets in this book."—Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Southern CaliforniaTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. The View from Downstairs 2. Husbands, Households, and Other Determinants of Women's Work 3. Neither Maids Nor Cleaners 4. Intimate Weapons of the Weak 5. The Domestic Work of Maids, Mothers, and Men 6. Earning Power and Women's Prerogative 7. Conclusion Appendix: Sampling Procedures Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisWomen Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India combines historical data with years of ethnographic fieldwork to investigate women's participation in the culture of Sufi shrines in India and the manner in which this participation both complicates and sustains traditional conceptions of Islamic womanhood. Kelly Pemberton's fieldwork offers an assessment of the contemporary circumstances under which a woman may be recognized as a spiritual authority or guide--despite official denial of such status--and an examination of the discrepancies between the commonly held belief that women cannot perform in the public setting of shrines and her own observations of women doing precisely that. She demonstrates that the existence of multiple models of master and disciple relationships have opened avenues for women to be recognized as spiritual authorities in their own right. Specifically Pemberton explores the work of performance, recitation, and ritual mediation carried out by women connected with Sufi orders through kinship and spiritual ties, and she maps shifting ideas about women's involvement in public ritual events in a variety of contexts, circumstances, and genres of performance. She also highlights the private petitioning of saints, the Prophet, and God performed by poor women of low social standing in Bihar Sharif. These women are often perceived as being exceptionally close to God yet are compelled to operate outside the public sphere of major shrines.

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Book SynopsisStudy of three North American women novelists combining the standpoints of gender studies and narratology. By analyzing the works of Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich through the lenses of subjectivity, gender studies, and narratology, Caroline Rosenthal brings to light new perspectives on their writings. Although all three authors write metafictions that challenge literary realism and dominant views of gender, the forms of their counter-narratives vary. In her novel Intertidal Life, Thomas traces the disintegration of an identity through narrative devices that unearth ruptures and contradictions in stories of gender. In contrast, Marlatt, in Ana Historic, challenges the regulatory fiction of heterosexuality. She offers her protagonist a way out into a new order that breaks with the law of the father, creating a "monstrous" text that explores the possibilities of a lesbian identity. In her tetralogy of novels made up of Love Medicine, Tracks, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace, Erdrichresists definite readings of femininity altogether. By drawing on trickster narratives, she creates an open system of gendered identities that is dynamic and unfinalizable, positing the most fragmented worldview as the most enduring. By applying gender and narrative theory to nuanced analysis of the texts, Rosenthal's study elucidates the correlation between gender identity formation and narrative. Caroline Rosenthal is Professor and Chair of American Literature at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Her book Narrative Deconstructions of Gender was published by Camden House in 2003.Trade ReviewAn intelligent and lucid book opening new vistas on three major contemporary writers. * CANADIAN LITERATURE *Rosenthal's study . puts forward an innovative and interesting thesis -- that narratological and gender-specific issues are intrinsically interrelated in the novels she discusses. * ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK *Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments Introduction Framing Theories "Alice Hoyle: 1,000 Interlocking Pieces": Identity Deconstructions in Audrey Thomas's Intertidal LifeIntertidal Life "You Can't Even Imagine?": Monstrous Possibilities of Female Identity in Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic "Her Laugh an Ace": Narrative Tricksterism in Louise Erdrich's Tetralogy Conclusion Works Consulted Index

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Book SynopsisFirst comparative study of an unlikely group of authors: 18th-century women peasants. This is the first comparative study of a highly unlikely group of authors: eighteenth-century women peasants in England, Scotland, and Germany, women who, as a rule, received little or no formal education and lived by manual labor, many of them in dire poverty. Among them are the English washerwoman Mary Collier, the English domestic servants Elizabeth Hands and Molly Leapor, the German cowherd Anna Louisa Karsch, the Scottish diarywoman Janet Little, theScottish domestic servant Christian Milne, and the English milkmaid Ann Cromartie Yearsley. Their literature is here linked with one of the major eighteenth-century aesthetic trends in all three countries, the Natural Genius craze, which culminated in highland primitivism in Scotland and England, and in the Sturm und Drang in Germany. Kord's analysis of the peasant women's works and the bourgeois response enables us to find new answers to questionsthat have centrally influenced our thinking about what makes art Art. Kord's book provides a fresh look at some of this fascinating literature, and at the roles and attitudes of the lower classes and of women in the Art world of the day. It also advances a revolutionary thesis: that the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie established itself as the dominant cultural class not primarily, as is commonly held, in opposition to aristocratic culture, but more importantly through its dissociation from and suppression of lower-class art forms. Susanne Kord is Professor and Head of the Department of German at University College London. Her book Little Detours: The Letters and Plays of Luise Gottsched was published by Camden House in 2000. Click here to read an interview with Susanne Kord (Word document 25KB)Trade ReviewKord's book is key reading for anyone interested in critically considering the influence of 18th-century aesthetic trends on literary history from a current perspective....[It] represents scholarship at its very best. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *[A] pioneering systemtheoretical work... an intellectually challenging study which ... is throughout a pleasure to read. * ARBITRIUM *All future considerations of the noncanonical or faux canonical in eighteenth-century studies, regardless of their national or generic focus, should engage with this bold and clearly argued book. * EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES *The great merit of Kord's excellent and highly recommended study is her thorough research and criticism of bourgeois aesthetics. She gives a voice to authors whom literary criticism has otherwise overlooked. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Aesthetic Evasions and Social Consequences 1: Back to Nature: Bourgeois Aesthetic Theory and Lower-Class Poetic Practice 2: The Wild and the Civilized: Poet Making 3: The Life as the Work 4: A Literature of Labor: Poetic Images of Country Life 5: Inspired by Nature, Inspired by Love: Two Poets on Poetic Inspiration 6: Of Patrons and Critics: Reading the Bourgeois Reader Conclusion: On the Gender and Class of Art Appendix: Short Biographies of Peasant Women Writers Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisBrings to light unsuspectedly rich sources of humor in the works of prominent nineteenth-century women writers. Nineteenth-century German literature is seldom seen as rich in humor and irony, and women's writing from that period is perhaps even less likely to be seen as possessing those qualities. Yet since comedy is bound to societal norms, and humor and irony are recognized weapons of the weak against authority, what this innovative study reveals should not be surprising: women writers found much to laugh at in a bourgeois age when social constraints, particularlyon women, were tight. Helen Chambers analyzes prose fiction by leading female writers of the day who prominently employ humor and irony. Arguing that humor and irony involve cognitive and rational processes, she highlights the inadequacy of binary theories of gender that classify the female as emotional and the male as rational. Chambers focuses on nine women writers: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Ida Hahn-Hahn, Ottilie Wildermuth, Helene Böhlau, Marie vonEbner-Eschenbach, Ada Christen, Clara Viebig, Isolde Kurz, and Ricarda Huch. She uncovers a rich seam of unsuspected or forgotten variety, identifies fresh avenues of approach, and suggests a range of works that merit a place onuniversity reading lists and attention in scholarly studies. Helen Chambers is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK.Trade Review[T]his well-researched study, which includes an extensive list of 'works cited,' is an important step in reevaluating a topic typically ignored in nineteenth-century German-language literature ... and uses a solid methodological approach to do so. * MONATSHEFTE *Students . often bemoan the dearth of comic characters and plots in canonical German literature. Heroines, in particular, appear destined for death. A very different picture emerges, however, from Helen Chambers' new book.. [The] study is an important contribution to nineteenth-century women's literature.. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *For scholars and students of nineteenth-century German and Austrian women's writings, this volume is a 'must have.' . In each of four chapters we meet two writers whose intent and strategy bear commonality: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Ida Hahn-Hahn, Ottilie Wildermuth and Helene Böhlau, Ada Christen and Clara Viebig, Isolde Kurz and Ricarda Huch. For example, the chapter on Christen and Viebig steers us to 'Laughter and Pain in the World of Work,' that on Kurz and Huch to 'The Humor of Skeptical Idealism.' Maria von Ebner-Eschenbach alone is accorded an entire chapter due to her singular use of satire and physical comedy. . It is hoped that this study will serve as inducement to expand the project of translating these writers' works. * H-NET *Table of ContentsIntroduction Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Ida Hahn-Hahn: Overcoming Seriousness? Ottilie Wildermuth and Helene Böhlau: Harmless Humor or Subtle Psychology? Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Satire, Physical Comedy, Irony, and Deeper Meaning Ada Christen and Clara Viebig: Laughter and Pain in the World of Work Isolde Kurz and Ricarda Huch: The Humor of Skeptical Idealism Conclusion Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisComprehensive view of Andreas-Salomé's fictional works, focusing on her depictions of women and questions of narrative and identity. The writer and intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) fascinates scholars of German literature because of her associations with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud and because she was active in the cultural and intellectual vanguardof late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Austria. Recent editions of her fictional works have garnered wider attention from scholars of literature and theory, particularly those interested in women's studies, identity politics, and narrative theory. This study analyzes how Andreas-Salomé depicted women in her fictional works just as feminism was emerging, revealing a complex engagement with questions of narrative and identity. More than mere thematic explorations of women's changing roles in society, her works investigate the concept of identity and its relationship to gender, sexuality, and narrative representation. She is as concerned with a cultural crisis of femininityand masculinity as with the identity crises of her individual women characters. This book offers the best account of Andreas-Salomé's literary works, de-emphasizing biographical and psychoanalytical perspectives but taking into account the sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts in which they were written. It also adds to contemporary theoretical discourses on gender, feminism, and identity. Muriel Cormican is Professor of German at the University of West Georgia, Carrollton, Georgia.Trade ReviewLucid, convincing study. * CHOICE *Cormican's study contributes to the ongoing re-evaluation of the importance of the extraordinary individual that was Lou Andreas-Salomé. * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction Woman versus Women: Gender, Art, and Decadence in "Der Mensch als Weib" and Eine Ausschweifung Articulating Identity: Narrative as Mastery and Self Mastery in Fenitschka Marriage and Science: Discourses of Domestication in Das Haus Untamed Woman: Talking about Sex and Self in Jutta Motherhood, Masochism, and Subjectivity in Ma: Ein Portraet Returning the Gaze: Uppity Women in Menschenkinder

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Book SynopsisAn examination of the past half-century's critical reassessments of one of the most-studied American poets. When Klaus Lubbers's meticulously detailed Emily Dickinson: The Critical Revolution appeared in 1968, examining Dickinson criticism up to 1962, a second revolution in Dickinson criticism was already gathering force, as a new generation of scholars representing a wide spectrum of critical perspectives began reassessing the poet's life and work. In the intervening forty years, approximately 100 books about Dickinson and her oeuvre have appeared, making her one of the most extensively studied American poets in history. Approaching Emily Dickinson provides an objective examination of that vast body of scholarship. It gives detailed attention to the principal trends in Dickinson scholarship during the past half-century: biographical studies; feminist perspectives on the poet's life and work; rhetorical and stylistic analyses; textual studies of the bound and unbound fascicles and the so-called worksheet drafts; studies of Dickinson's social and cultural milieu, including influences on her spirituality, and of her theories of poetry. Fred White also examines Dickinson's artistic reception -- an area of ever-growing fascination, not only among Dickinson scholars but among artists, creative writers, dramatists, and musicians for whom Dickinson's genius has proven to be a powerful conduit for insights into the human condition. A fundamental research tool for both scholars and students, Approaching Emily Dickinson also enables fruitful comparisons both among and within the different critical and artistic perspectives. Fred D. White is Professor of English at Santa Clara University. His studies of Emily Dickinson have been published in College Literature and in the Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson.Trade ReviewWhite's comprehensive and engaging book so effectively unites a balanced assessment of relevant scholarship with insight into prevailing trends that it is destined to become essential reading for both students coming to Dickinson for the first time and scholars long familiar with the field of Dickinson studies. White helps experienced scholars acknowledge those whose work has made their own thought possible at the same time that he provides those new to Dickinson with a lively sense of the expanding panorama of interpretive possibilities that continues to define the field of Dickinson scholarship. -- Paul Crumbley, Utah State University, president of The Emily Dickinson International SocietyFred White's survey of Dickinson scholarship since 1960 is an essential resource for both long-term readers of Dickinson and those coming to her work for the first time. Readers interested in knowing how Dickinson criticism developed from 1960 to the present will find this book a highly informative and stimulating read. * THE EMILY DICKINSON JOURNAL *Table of ContentsIntroduction Approaching Dickinson's Rhetoric, Poetics and Stylistics Trends in Dickinson Biography and Biographical/Psychoanalytic Criticism The Feminist Revolution in Dickinson Crticism The Manuscripts of a Non-Print Poet Dickinson in Cultural Context: Principal Critical Insights Dickinson's Poetic Spirituality Scholarship on Archetypal and Philosophical Themes in Dickinson's Poetry Reassesing Dickinson's Poetic Project: A Postmodern Perspective Emily Dickinson in Belles Lettres, Music, and Art Concluding Reflections Selected Editions of Emily Dickinson's Poems and Lettres Works Cited Index Index of First Lines

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Book SynopsisEssays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which German women's literature has been conceived. What is the status of women's writing in German today, in an era when feminism has thoroughly problematized binary conceptions of sex and gender? Drawing on gender and queer theory, including the work of Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, the essays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which "women's literature" has been conceived. With aneye to the literary and feminist legacy of authors such as Christa Wolf and Ingeborg Bachmann, contributors treat the works of many of contemporary Germany's most significant literary voices, including Hatice Akyün, Sibylle Berg,Thea Dorn, Tanja Dückers, Karen Duve, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, Katharina Hacker, Charlotte Roche, Julia Schoch, and Antje Rávic Strubel -- authors who, through their writing or their roles in the media, engage with questionsof what it means to be a woman writer in twenty-first-century Germany. Contributors: Hester Baer, Necia Chronister, Helga Druxes, Valerie Heffernan, Alexandra Merley Hill, Lindsay Lawton, Sheridan Marshall, Mihaela Petrescu, Jill Suzanne Smith, Carrie Smith-Prei, Maria Stehle, Katherine Stone. Hester Baer is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Maryland. Alexandra Merley Hill is Associate Professor of German at the University of Portland.Trade Review[S]ucceeds in demonstrating the continued relevance of 'German women's writing,' not least its ability to critique, destabilize, and confound. . . . A welcome resource for undergraduate and graduate seminars, the volume is also of value for scholarly research on the diverse approaches and authors that constitute the field of the field of German women's writing today. -- Brigitte Rossbacher * STUDIES IN 20TH- AND 21ST-CENTURY LITERATURE *[A] very useful volume which takes stock of women's writing today while also exploring how women have been affected by socio-cultural, political, and economic changes. -- Linda Shortt * MONATSHEFTE *[A] volume which shows the variety of topics covered by women's German-language writing today. It succeeds in fulfilling its aim of making the case for women's writing in the age of neoliberalism and for feminist analysis that avoids what is facile or categorical. -- Stuart Parkes * JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN STUDIES *[E]ngaging, provocative . . . . [D]emonstrates . . . the ways in which feminist analyses open up texts to critical questions of gender within larger configurations of identity and the lasting need to consider women's literature. -- Barbara Kosta * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *The volume succeeds in making the case for the relevance of reading and researching women's writing in the twenty-first century. . . . It . . . is a fine example of careful, profound, and progressive scholarship. Editors and contributors are to be commended for this excellent work. -- Katharina Gerstenberger * GEGENWARTSLITERATUR *Baer and Hill have put together an attractive collection that seeks to analyze contemporary fiction in conjunction with feminism. Using new perspectives in feminist theory, the contributors offer original interpretations and challenging insights. . . . Approaching contemporary literature in fresh, productive ways, all these essays are interesting and well researched. . . . Recommended. * CHOICE *In sum, this volume presents a valuable and highly recommended reference for anyone interested not only in contemporary women's writing, but also intersectional feminist research and the debates surrounding feminist literary criticism. -- Sonja Klocke * WOMEN IN GERMAN NEWSLETTER *Table of ContentsIntroduction: German Women's Writing Beyond the Gender Binary - Hester Baer and Alexandra Merley Hill Language-Bodies: Interpellation and Gender Transition in Antje Rávic Strubel's Kältere Schichten der Luft and Judith Hermann's "Sonja" - Necia Chronister Matrilineal Narrative and the Feminist Family Romance - Valerie Heffernan The Pitfalls of Constructing a Female Genealogy: Cultural Memory of National Socialism in Recent Family Narratives - Katherine Stone Reckoning with God: Attitudes toward Religion in German-Language Women's Writing in the Twenty-First Century - Sheridan Marshall Muslim Writing, Women's Writing - Lindsay Lawton Popfeminism, Ethnicity, and Race in Contemporary Germany: Hatice Akyün's Popfeminist Autobiographic Works Einmal Hans mit scharfer Soße (2005) and Ali zum Dessert (2008) - Mihaela Petrescu The Awkward Politics of Popfeminist Literary Events: Helene Hegemann, Charlotte Roche, and Lady Bitch Ray - Carrie Smith-Prei The Awkward Politics of Popfeminist Literary Events: Helene Hegemann, Charlotte Roche, and Lady Bitch Ray - Maria Stehle The Indictment of Neoliberalism and Communism in the Novels of Katharina Hacker, Nikola Richter, Judith Schalansky, and Julia Schoch - Helga Druxes Sounds of Silence: Rape and Representation in Juli Zeh's Bosnian Travelogue - Jill Suzanne Smith Bibliography Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThe first book to trace the critical reception of the great African American woman writer, attending not only to her fiction but to her nonfiction and critical writings. Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is the most important American novelist since Faulkner, the most significant American woman writer since Dickinson, and the most widely read African American public intellectual of the last half century. Her influence as a writer, critic, editor, teacher, and scholar is profound: she changed the face of literature and literary criticism in the US, if not worldwide. Yet despite the ever-expanding field of Morrison scholarship, no book tracing her critical reception has existed, until now. The book is as much a cultural history of America as a reception history of an American writer. Morrison worked brilliantly in many genres - fiction, of course (novels and short stories); drama/staged performance; poetry; non-fiction on historical, social, and political issues; and critical writings on the work of others and on her own work. She generated a literary-critical methodology that recognizes and embraces rather than ignores the African American presence in US literature, and thus transformed American academics' attitude toward American letters. The story of Morrison's achievement in making a home for herself - and for other women and people of color - in the stony bedrock of "white male" American literature is the subject of this book.Trade ReviewThis is the first book to discuss and theorize the critical reception of Morrison's fiction; in this it is an invaluable resource for Morrison scholars. I certainly wish it had been available to me when I was writing my book on Morrison! The book will also be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of cultural and American studies, as it provides an original and astute cultural history of the United States in its foregrounding of the shifting cultural and historical context of Morrison's oeuvre. * Andrea O’Reilly, York University, author of Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart *There is nothing quite like this study on the market. It will be an extremely helpful reference work for anyone writing about Toni Morrison. * Keith Byerman, Indiana State University, author of Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1: The Bluest Eye (1970) 2: Sula (1973) 3: Song of Solomon (1977) 4: Tar Baby (1981) 5: Beloved (1987) 6: Jazz (1992) 7: Paradise (1997) 8: Love (2003) 9: A Mercy (2008); Home (2012); God Help the Child (2015) Coda Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisAlthough women's charitable bazaars have contributed millions of dollars to important causes and institutions, they have long been thought of—by both historians and the public—as trivial events. Beverly Gordon corrects this view in Bazaars and Fair Ladies, the first history of women's fundraising fairs in the United States. Tracing their development from the early 1800s to the present day, Gordon show how women's fairs have reflected and influenced American culture, including styles of display and presentation, forms of public entertainment, attitudes about consumption and commodities, and perceptions of other cultures and of the past.Gordon surveys the fundraising fair phenomenon through its various names and incarnations, including ladies' sales, ladies' fairs, fancy fairs, fetes, festivals, carnivals, boutiques, and church or charity bazaars, and the many causes these events have benefitted, such as abolition, suffrage, and war relief. Drawing on a wide variety of historical documents—newspaper and magazine accounts, souvenir programs, photos, scrapbooks—as well as on fictional representations, interviews with fairgivers, and participant observation, Gordon provides detailed descriptions of fairs characteristic of specific periods, recreating what it felt like to walk into a Civil War sanitary fair or into Boston's "Atlantic City Boardwalk" fair of 1922. Throughout, she analyzes the ways in which the fundraising fair functioned as a vehicle for aesthetic and social meaning, creating rich environments that celebrated communal bonds.Gordon stresses the role women's bazaars played within the larger fair culture, demonstrating that many of the trends evident in American agricultural and trade fairs and international exhibitions had their origins in women's fundraisers. Highlighting changes in fair themes, aesthetic environments, consumer fashions, and critical responses from the public, Gordon also looks at similarities and differences among participants from varied ethnic and geographic communities. Gracefully written and abundantly illustrated, Gordon's study of this vital American cultural institution sheds light on 175 years of women's creativity, fellowship, and community-building.The Author: Beverly Gordon is a professor in the Environment, Textiles, and Design Department and serves the folklore and women's studies programs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of several books, including Shaker Textile Arts and American Indian Art: The Collecting Experience.

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Book SynopsisAngela Davis, Assata Shakur (a.k.a. JoAnne Chesimard), and Elaine Brown are the only women activists of the Black Power movement who have published book-length autobiographies. In bearing witness to that era, these militant newsmakers wrote in part to educate and to mobilize their anticipated readers. In this way, Davis's Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), Shakur's Assata (1987), and Brown's A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (1992) can all be read as extensions of the writers' political activism during the 1960s.Margo V. Perkins's critical analysis of their books is less a history of the movement (or of women's involvement in it) than an exploration of the politics of storytelling for activists who choose to write their lives. Perkins examines how activists use autobiography to connect their lives to those of other activists across historical periods, to emphasize the link between the personal and the political, and to construct an alternative history that challenges dominant or conventional ways of knowing.The histories constructed by these three women call attention to the experiences of women in revolutionary struggle, particularly to the ways their experiences have differed from men's. The women's stories are told from different perspectives and provide different insights into a movement that has been much studied from the masculine perspective. At times they fill in, complement, challenge, or converse with the stories told by their male counterparts, and in doing so, hint at how the present and future can be made less catastrophic because of women's involvement.The multiple complexities of the Black Power movement become evident in reading these women's narratives against each other as well as against the sometimes strikingly different accounts of their male counterparts.As Davis, Shakur, and Brown recount events in their lives, they dispute mainstream assumptions about race, class, and gender and reveal how the Black Power struggle profoundly shaped their respective identities.

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Book SynopsisAn engaging and surprising history of surgeries on the clitoris, revealing what the therapeutic use of female circumcision and clitoridectomy tells us about American medical ideas concerning the female body and female sexuality. From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, American physicians treated women and girls for masturbation by removing the clitoris (clitoridectomy) or clitoral hood (female circumcision). During this same time, and continuing to today, physicians also performed female circumcision to enable women to reach orgasm. Though used as treatment, paradoxically, for both a perceived excessive sexuality and a perceived lack of sexual responsiveness, these surgeries reflect a consistent medical conception of the clitoris as a sexual organ. In recent years the popular media and academics have commented on the rising popularity in the United States of female genital cosmetic surgeries, including female circumcision, yet these discussions often assume such procedures are new. In Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Treatment, Sarah Rodriguez presents an engaging and surprising history of surgeries on the clitoris, revealing how medical views of the female body and female sexuality have changed -- and in some cases not changed -- throughout the last century and a half. Sarah B. Rodriguez is lecturer in medical humanities and bioethics and in global health studies at Northwestern University.Trade ReviewThis book should not only be read (and taught) by medical historians and historians of gender and sexuality, but--with the recent surge of genital plastic surgery--one would wish for a copy of Female Circumcision in the waiting rooms of America's plastic surgeons. * BULLETIN OF THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE *Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy throws a flood of light on a dark and neglected corner of American medical practice, described by one retired gynaecologist as 'a lucrative industry' and a 'thriving business few people spoke about afterwards.' It is to her great credit that Rodriguez has broken this silence, and her book will be required reading for anybody interested in the issues it covers. * JOURNAL OF SOCIAL HISTORY *Rodriguez convincingly presents clitoral surgeries as normalized practices in US medical history, and the clitoris as a site of cultural and medical contestation throughout this 150-year period. The book brings valuable new perspectives to medical history in capturing the complex interaction between medicine and culture in the control of women's bodies and sexuality. * JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE *I recommend Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States to readers who want to know more about clitoral surgeries in the American context. The book would also make an excellent teaching tool; it would fit well on syllabi for women's history, the history of medicine, or the history of sex. * NURSING CLIO *Rodriguez convincingly argues that the history of clitoral surgery reveals medicine's approach to female sexuality. She seeks to counter narratives of medical 'misogyny' with a more nuanced story that situates the practice . . . in historical context. * JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY *Rodriguez vividly and persuasively places the clitoris at the center of a centuries-long medical debate about what's wrong with the female body, and how it can be surgically adapted to androcentric sexual norms. Required reading if you think the barbaric days of genital cutting are in the American past. -- -- Rachel Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria,' the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual SatisfactionTable of ContentsIntroduction: Rethinking the History of Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States Women, Masturbation, and Clitoral Surgery, 1862-1945 Children, Masturbation, and Clitoral Surgery since 1890 Female Sexual Degeneracy and the Enlarged Clitoris, 1850-1941 Female Circumcision to Promote Clitoral Orgasm, 1890-1945 Female Circumcision as Sexual Enhancement Therapy during the Era of the Vaginal Orgasm, 1940-66 Female Circumcision and the Divisive Issue of Female Clitoral Sexual Pleasure Go Public, 1966-89 James Burt and the Surgery of Love, 1966-89 Conclusion: Genital Geographies Appendix: The Clitoris in Anatomy and Gynecology Texts Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAn invaluable reference work chronicling the lives of over 200 women who received medical degrees in the United States before the Civil War. This groundbreaking reference work contains brief biographical articles for over two hundred women, most of them little known, who graduated from schools of medicine in the United States before the Civil War. The volume includes an introductory essay examining the social and religious backgrounds of the women graduates, as well as their motivations for becoming physicians and their varying degrees of success as practitioners. In addition, the essay offersinformation on what physician training and practice were like during the period, as well as on the need for reform that provided a setting for women's entry into the profession. The biographical entries are supplemented by a chronological table of female medical graduates and a geographical table indicating the places in which they practiced. Edward C. Atwater is emeritus professor of medicine and the history of medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine.Table of ContentsIntroduction The Excellent Miss Blackwell Biographical Dictionary of 222 Graduates Appendix A: Chronological List of Graduates and the Schools They Attended Appendix B: Medical Graduates of the American Hydropathic Institute, 1851 and 1852 Appendix C: Pre-Civil War Women Medical Doctors Mentioned in Books and Biographical Dictionaries Appdenix D: Principal Locations in Which the Earliest Woman Medical Graduates Served Professionally Lists Showing Career Choices and Accomplishments of the Graduates General Bibliography Index of Names

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Book SynopsisThis biography of writer, translator, teacher, and feminist Ada Gobetti, the first in English or Italian, frames her activism in the Resistenza as a chapter in a lifetime of resistance. By the time Turin was liberated in April 1945, writer, translator, teacher, and women's rights activist Ada Gobetti had been fighting fascism for almost twenty-five years. This biography frames her wartime activism in the Resistenza as a chapter in a lifetime of resistance. Gobetti participated in the underground Giustizia e Libertà movement, and helped to found the Partito d'Azione, a political party whose members asked her to represent them as vice mayor of Turin after the war. For Gobetti, the Resistenza also brought an awareness of the specific talents, needs, and rights of Italian women. This led her to organize other Italian women against German occupiers and Fascist oppressors, found an underground women's newspaper, and solidify her views regarding women as a political force. After 1945, resistance meant espousing a set of ideals exemplified by the best that came out of the Resistenza, ideals of grassroots democracy, women's rights, and democratic education for which Gobetti would fight for the rest of her life. Jomarie Alano is a visiting scholar at Cornell University's Institute for European Studies. She is the translator and editor of Ada Gobetti's Diario partigiano, published by Oxford University Press in 2014 as Partisan Diary: A Woman's Life in the Italian Resistance.Trade ReviewA meticulously detailed and engaging account. * ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW *Alano writes with clarity and enthusiasm that makes this biography engaging and an enjoyable read. * JOURNAL OF MODERN HISTORY *This thorough book about one woman's struggle against a brutal regime keeps the memory alive. CANADIAN JOURNAL OF HISTORY Ada Gobetti entered politics in 1918 by joining the staff of Piero Gobetti's radical journal, Energie Nove, and her life was lived within words and ideas. By 1943, she had joined the armed resistance, but her role remained that of an intellectual, not a soldier. Her concerns, from the very beginning, had been not so much about herself but about Italy's and Europe's democratic future. * AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction Early Years (1902-1918) New Life (1918-1920) The Path of Resistance (1920-1926) Resisting Alone (1926-1939) Antifascism for Children (1939-1940) War (1940-1943) The Resistenza (1943-1945) Postwar Politics (1945-1947) Women's Rights, Human Rights (1947-1961) Educating Resisters (1947-1968) Conclusion: The Legacy of Resistance Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisUncovers the life of Jane Cumming, who scandalized her contemporaries with tales of sexual deviancy but also defied cultural norms, standing up to male authority figures and showing resilience. In 1810 Edinburgh, the orphaned Scottish-Indian schoolgirl Jane Cumming alleged that her two schoolmistresses were sexually intimate. The allegation spawned a defamation suit that pitted Jane's grandmother, a member of the Scottish landed gentry, against two young professional women who were romantic friends. During the trial, the boundary between passion and friendship among women was debated and Jane was viewed "orientally," as morally corrupt and hypersexual. Located at the intersection of race, sex, and class, the case has long been a lightning rod for scholars of cultural studies, women's and gender history, and, given Lillian Hellman's appropriation of Jane's story in her 1934 play The Children's Hour, theater history as well. Frances B. Singh's wide-ranging biography, however, takes a new, psychological approach, putting the notorious case in the context of a life that was marked by loss, separation, abandonment--and resilience. Grounded in archival and genealogical sources never before consulted, Singh's narrative reconstructs Cumming's life from its inauspicious beginnings in a Calcutta orphanage through her schooling in Elgin and Edinburgh, an abusive marriage, her adherence to the Free Church at the time of the Scottish Disruption, and her posthumous life in Hellman's Broadway play. Singh provides a detailed analysis not only of the case itself, but of how both Jane's and her teachers' lives were affected in the aftermath.Trade Review[Makes] an important contribution to unveiling the complicated relationship that involves racial, gender/sexual, and class prejudice in nineteenth-century Scotland. * BAVS NEWSLETTER *A welcome addition to histories of modern sexuality in Scotland, a field in which significant lacunae remain. * INNES REVIEW *A pacy highly readable and detailed account of the fascinating life of a young Indian-Scottish woman. * HISTORY SCOTLAND *This book is one of the first monographs to grapple with the history of Indian-Scottish children and in its rich research begins to open up the experiences of such children and to ask what happened to them when they were placed in Scottish society. In this, it offers an important starting point for what shall no doubt become a larger conversation. * English Historical Review *Singh's lively conference presentations . . . have prompted many of us to express hope that she would offer us a deeper dive into the influences around and within the life of a woman who embodies the figure of an outsider in many ways . . . The result is a many-faceted examination of not just Cumming and her extended family, but the eighteenth century as a whole. -- Susan Spencer, University of Oklahoma * Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer *Scandal and Survival is a timely and interesting contribution to the literature on the ways that concepts of race and sexuality shaped the lives of early 19th-century women. The use of recent sociological work on the experience of international adoptions adds a compelling frame to the treatment of Jane Cumming's experience. * Pam Perkins, University of Manitoba *Frances Singh's new biography brilliantly narrates each dramatic turn in this serpentine saga, giving perhaps the most detailed and thorough account yet of Cumming's extraordinary life. . . . Singh's thorough scholarship makes an important contribution to that effort and reveals an early modern world that bears some astonishing similarities to the present. * 1650–1850 Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Placing Jane Ante Jane Educating Jane (1) Educating Jane (2) Jane and the Lords of the Law (1) Jane and the Lords of the Law (2) Jane and William Tulloch Jane, Posthumously Conclusion: Assessing Jane Acknowledgments Appendix A: Marianne Woods, Jane Pirie and Romantic Friendship Appendix B: What Really Happened to Miss Marianne Woods and Miss Jane Pirie? Appendix C: Corinna: A Ballad Appendix D: Richard Rose's letter Written from the Manse of Kinnedar dated January 12, 1835 Appendix E: Jane's letter Written from the Dallas Manse dated 15 February 1836 to Sir William regarding wood stealing at Dallas Works Cited

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Book SynopsisBorn in a small river town in the largely Muslim province of Sandzak, Munevera Hadzisehovic grew up in an area sandwiched between the Orthodox Christian regions of Montenegro and Serbia, cut off from other Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her story takes her from the rural culture of the early 1930s through the massacres of World War II and the repression of the early communist regime to the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. It sheds light on the history of Yugoslavia from the interwar kingdom to the break-up of the socialist state. Hadzisehovic paints a picture not only of her own life, but also of the lives of other Muslims, especially women, in an era and an area of great change. Readers are given a loving yet accurate portrait of Muslim customs pertaining to the household, gardens, food and dating - in short, of everyday life. She writes from the inside out, starting with her emotions and experiences, then moving outward to the facts that concern those interested in this region: the role of the Ustashe, Chetniks and Germans in World War II; the attitude of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia toward Muslims; and the tragic state of ethnic relations that led to war again in the 1990s. Some of Hadzisehovic's experiences and many of her views may be controversial. She speaks of Muslim women's reluctance to give up the veil, the disapproval of mixed marriages and the problems between Serb and Croat nationals. Her benign view of Italian occupation is in stark contrast to her depiction of bloodthirsty Chetnik irregulars. Her analysis of Belgrade's Muslims suggests that class differences were just as important as religious affiliation. In this personal story, Hadzisehovic mourns the loss of two worlds - the orderly Muslim world of her childhood and the secular, multi-ethnic world of communist Yugoslavia.

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Book SynopsisThis is a book about how we define knowledge and how we think about moral and political questions. It argues that the prevailing systems of knowledge, morality, and politics are rooted in views that are exclusionary and therefore legitimate injustice, patriarchy, and violence. That is, these views divide humans into different kinds along a hierarchy whose elite still defines the systems that shape our lives and misshape our thinking. Like the first edition of Transforming Knowledge, this substantially revised edition calls upon us to continue to liberate our minds and the systems we live within from concepts that rationalize inequality. It engages with the past fifteen years of feminist scholarship and developments in its allied fields (such as Cultural Studies, African American Studies, Queer Studies, and Disability Studies) to critique the deepest and most vicious of old prejudices. This new edition extends Minnich's arguments and connects them with the contemporary academy as well as recent instances of domination, genocide, and sexualized violence. * Updated to consider recent scholarship in Gender, Multicultural, Postcolonial, Disability, Native American, and Queer Studies, among other fields of study * Revised to include an extended analysis of the conceptual errors that legitimate domination, including the construction of kinds (\u0022genders\u0022) of human beings * Revised to include new materials from a variety of cultures and times, and engages with today's contemporary debates about affirmative action, postmodernism, and religionTrade Review"In Transforming Knowledge, Second Edition, Elizabeth Minnich dissects the fundamental errors underlying patriarchal thought systems and explains the resistances faced by those working towards an inclusive, truly democratic restructuring of knowledge. This welcome new edition offers the philosophical foundation for the urgent tasks of holistic thinking and a truly life- and earth-saving activism. A brilliant and indispensable book."-Gerda Lerner, Robinson-Edwards Professor of History, Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author, Creation of Patriarchy, Creation of Feminist Consciousness, and Fireweed: A Political Autobiography "Transforming Knowledge, Second Edition enacts the urgent ethical project of demonstrating that informed, careful thinking and passionate politics are fundamental to envisioning a just, liberal education, and a democratic public university. Minnich challenges the reader in her gentle yet sharply critical arguments to examine the epistemic confusions and errors that underlie disciplinary knowledges, curricular strategies, and research paradigms. A brilliantly persuasive, deeply pedagogical book by one of the most insightful and compassionate feminist philosophers writing today."-Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Professor of Women's Studies, Syracuse University, and author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing SolidarityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Still Transforming KowledgeI. Thinking: An Introductory EssayThinking about women, or, "Women's work is never done" * Thinking as philosophical fieldwork * Thinking in the New Academy * Some reframings of thinking from the New Academy: From The One to The Many, From nouns to verbs, From external (additive) to internal (transactional) relationalities, From divided to mutually formative theory and practice * Questioning "Theory" * Returning to the fieldII. Still Transforming Knowledge: Circling Out, Pressing DeeperClassifying humans by kind * Conceptual errors as psychotic conceptualizations * Including nature * Re-ordering historical time * Rights, public/private-and privatization * ReligionPreface and AcknowledgmentsA note on sourcesA note on usage: "We", "Black"/"white" and entwined racializations, Scare quotesAcknowledgments1. No One BeginningCentering critique * More personal beginnings * Speaking as and for ourselves * Why do curricula matter?2. Contextual Approaches: Thinking AboutAccess to the curriculum: some background * Contemporary movements: equality, recognition * Early-and continuing-questions: Scholarship vs. politics?, The disciplines, "Lost women", "Add women and stir" * Critique and reflexive thinking: Thinking with and without the tradition * Public/private * Philosophical cultural analysis; psychotic cultural systems3. Conceptual Approaches: Thinking ThroughConceptual errors: the root problem, Dividing by 'kind' * Some examples from the curriculum * A traditional story * Paideia * Novus ordo seclorum: ideals and practices in the "New World"4. Errors Basic to Dominant TraditionsFaulty generalization & hierarchically invidious monism * Useful universals? Distinguishing thinking from knowing * Articulating the hierarchy: Sex/gender, class, racializations * "Reverse discrimination" * Taking the few to represent all: 'Markers' of particularity, Invisibility, Circular reasoning * Mystified concepts: Excellence, Judgment, Equality, Rationality, intelligence-and good papers, Liberal arts, Woman, Sex, Man, War, Gender * Partial Knowledge: Impartial, objective knowledge; Unanimity; Emotions, animals, morality; Undoing partial public authority; Personal, subjective, located knowledges: relativism? * Continuing resistance to transformation: Professionalization5. Circling Back, Keeping GoingFrom errors to visions * Reclaiming intimacy, universality, public life * Thinking and acting

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Book SynopsisA beautifully written, dramatic memoir from one of women's history's foundersTrade Review"Gerda Lerner's absorbing memoir bears witness to the major events of the twentieth century...[She] is a gifted storyteller who writes with passion and clarity. This political autobiography is a must read!"-Joyce Antler, Samuel Lane Professor of American Jewish History and Culture, Brandeis University "A spirited, eminently readable and unapologetic memoir of leftist life in a rightist era...[L]eaving readers hungry for more[,] Lerner's autobiography also makes a fine contribution to social history."-Kirkus Reviews "Fireweed is made out of courage and wisdom. One of the finest historians of our time has written an eloquent memoir that makes clear how Women's History has grown out of lived experience. Read it as a story of a girl coming of age in dark times; read it as a story of a brave young woman who lives her progressive ideals in cold war America. I simply could not put down this loving, chilling and heartbreaking book."-Linda K. Kerber, May Brodbeck Professor of History, University of Iowa and author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship "Gerda Lerner, a leading pioneer in Women's History...presents an especially vivid account of the connections between her ambivalent but loving relations with her parents...and her own escape from fascism and quest for both autonomy and a professional career."-Professor David Brion Davis, Director, Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and author of In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery "[A] superb memoir... Lerner's power and precision as a writer makes this story read like a fast-paced novel."-Linda Gordon, Professor of History, NYU "Most people become historians by going to school day and night for years. Gerda Lerner became a historian by working in her youth in social justice and women's rights movements that became history. Then, in middle age, she went to school day and night-finally becoming one of our preeminent writers and teachers of Women's History. Fireweed is a wonderful and inspiring story for young women."-Grace Paley "[Fireweed] reads like a novel..."-The New York Times Book Review "As a work of prose, this autobiography has a peculiar beauty. Some of the lines are magical... Perhaps the most striking aspect of Gerda Lerner's memoir, as of her many other publications, is the lucidity of her vision... But, like the eloquent Simone de Beauvoir, who also told her own life, she has made it difficult for any would-be biographer to do better."-The Women's Review of BooksTable of ContentsA Note on UsageIntroductionPart I: BeginningsPart II: Becoming an AmericanPart III: Becoming an American RadicalPart IV: In the Eye of the StormThanksPhotograph gallery

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Book SynopsisA pioneering study of women's movements in two developing-world revolutions and post-revolutionary transitions to neo-liberal democraciesTrade Review"Women's Activism and Feminist Agency in Mozambique and Nicaragua provides a compelling account of women's contributions to revolutionary struggle and social transformation in two nations, illuminating the enormity of the challenge posed by gender equality, the effects of revolution on women's and men's lives, and the increasing precariousness of social justice struggles in a globalizing world."—Mary Hawkesworth, Professor and Chair, Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, and Editor in Chief, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and SocietyTable of ContentsList of Maps and Tables Preface Acknowledgements List of Acronyms 1. "Women Must Occupy and Give Themselves the Place They Deserve" Women's Activism and Feminist Agency in Mozambique and Nicaragua 2. "After Acknowledging Differences, We Must Also See What We Have in Common" Feminist Contestations and Commonalities across First World/Third World, African, and Latin American Divides 3. "Doing a Revolution Doesn't Stop You from Being Machista" The Birth of Revolutionary Women's Organizations and the Limits of Marxism-Leninism in Mozambique and Nicaragua 4. "Women are Not Cows—We Are Active Agents of History" Autonomy Struggles Emerge in Mozambique and Nicaragua 5. "The Oppressed Woman Is Easier to Deal With" Political Participation, Legal Reforms, and Cultural Constraints in Mozambique and Nicaragua 6. "I Can Do Anything a Man Can Do" Military Participation, Economic Production, and Women's Emancipation in Mozambique and Nicaragua 7. "There Are No Alternatives: Is This Really Democracy?" Democratization and Civil Society in Mozambique and Nicaragua 8. "Partners in the Home, at Work, and on the Street" The Contemporary Women's Movements and Emergent Feminisms in Mozambique and Nicaragua Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA pioneering study of women's movements in two developing-world revolutions and post-revolutionary transitions to neo-liberal democraciesTrade Review"Women's Activism and Feminist Agency in Mozambique and Nicaragua provides a compelling account of women's contributions to revolutionary struggle and social transformation in two nations, illuminating the enormity of the challenge posed by gender equality, the effects of revolution on women's and men's lives, and the increasing precariousness of social justice struggles in a globalizing world."—Mary Hawkesworth, Professor and Chair, Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, and Editor in Chief, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and SocietyTable of ContentsList of Maps and Tables Preface Acknowledgements List of Acronyms 1. "Women Must Occupy and Give Themselves the Place They Deserve" Women's Activism and Feminist Agency in Mozambique and Nicaragua 2. "After Acknowledging Differences, We Must Also See What We Have in Common" Feminist Contestations and Commonalities across First World/Third World, African, and Latin American Divides 3. "Doing a Revolution Doesn't Stop You from Being Machista" The Birth of Revolutionary Women's Organizations and the Limits of Marxism-Leninism in Mozambique and Nicaragua 4. "Women are Not Cows—We Are Active Agents of History" Autonomy Struggles Emerge in Mozambique and Nicaragua 5. "The Oppressed Woman Is Easier to Deal With" Political Participation, Legal Reforms, and Cultural Constraints in Mozambique and Nicaragua 6. "I Can Do Anything a Man Can Do" Military Participation, Economic Production, and Women's Emancipation in Mozambique and Nicaragua 7. "There Are No Alternatives: Is This Really Democracy?" Democratization and Civil Society in Mozambique and Nicaragua 8. "Partners in the Home, at Work, and on the Street" The Contemporary Women's Movements and Emergent Feminisms in Mozambique and Nicaragua Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

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Book Synopsis Changing the Rules of Engagement brings to life the authentic, vivid stories of leadership from inspiring and adventurous women who achieved the extraordinary by serving their country in the U.S. military. These women shattered the glass ceiling and performed extraordinary feats by refusing to take “no” for an answer and learning how to lead in traditionally male-dominated environments. Martha LaGuardia-Kotite skillfully captures their leadership lessons, struggles, and successes—showing how courageous and tenacious women can achieve their goals and help change policy, insights also applicable to today’s leaders in corporate and business boardrooms. Whether soaring into outer space with the second woman to command a space shuttle or plunging to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean with a combat veteran special operations diver, these profiles in leadership highlight a range of powerful examples: from Vivien Crea, a vice commandant of the Coas

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Book SynopsisThe career of Spain’s celebrated author Carmen Martín Gaite spanned the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s dictatorship, and the nation’s transition to democracy. She wrote fiction, poetry, drama, screenplays for television and film, and books of literary and cultural analysis. The only person to win Spain’s National Prize for Literature (Premio Nacional de las Letras) twice, Martín Gaite explored and blended a range of genres, from social realism to the fantastic, as she took up issues of gender, class, economics, and aesthetics in a time of political upheaval. Part 1 (“Materials”) of this volume provides resources for instructors and a literary-historical chronology. The essays in part 2 (“Approaches”) consider Martín Gaite’s bestknown novel, The Back Room (El cuarto de atrás), and other works from various perspectives: narratological, feminist, sociocultural, stylistic. In an appendix, the volume editor, who was a friend of the author, provides a new translation of Martín Gaite’s only autobiographical sketch, alongside the original Spanish.

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Book SynopsisFrom its founding in 1901 through the second half of the twentieth century, the Fort Worth section of the National Council of Jewish Women fostered the integration of its members into the social and cultural fabric of the greater community. Along the way, it championed important social causes, including an Americanization school for immigrants and literacy initiatives. But by 1999, facing declining membership and - according to some - decreased relevance to the lives of Jewish women, the Council's national and local leaders found themselves confronting the end of the group's existence.Hollace Ava Weiner has mined the records of this organization at both the local and national levels, interviewed surviving members, and examined Fort Worth newspapers and other local historical documents. Her lively and careful study reveals that the Fort Worth Council of Jewish Women was, in fact, so successful that it prepared the way for its own obsolescence. By century's end, the members and the times had changed more rapidly than the Council.While ""Jewish ""Junior League"""" focuses on a particular organization in a particular city, it simultaneously serves as a case study for the exploration of important themes of women's and Jewish history throughout the twentieth century.Trade ReviewIn Hollace Weiner's capable hands, the history of the 'rise and demise' of the Fort Worth Council of Jewish Women becomes a cautionary tale that anyone interested in women's organizations should read and ponder. A refershing and untraditional institutional history, Jewish 'Junior League' makes a major league contribution to Jewish women's studies. - Jonathan D. Sarna, Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Brandeis University

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Book SynopsisStories of Oprah is a collection of essays that explores Oprah Winfrey's broad reach as an industry and media brand. Contributors analyze a number of topics touching on the ways in which her cultural output shapes contemporary America. The volume examines how Oprah has fashioned a persona--which emphasizes her rural, poverty-stricken roots over other factors--that helps her popularize her unique blend of New Age spirituality, neoliberal politics, and African American preaching. She packages New Age spirituality through the rhetoric of race, gender, and the black preacher tradition. Oprah's Book Club has reshaped literary publishing, bringing Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy to a broad number of readers. Her brand extends worldwide through the internet. In this volume writers analyze her positions on teen sexuality, gender, race, and politics, and the impact of Winfrey's confessional mode on mainstream television news.The book also addresses twenty-first-century issues, showing Winfrey's influence on how Americans and Europeans responded to 9/11, and how Harpo Productions created a deracialized film adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in 2005. Throughout, Stories of Oprah challenges readers to reflect on how Oprah the Industry has reshaped America's culture, history, and politics.

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Book SynopsisThe Widows’ Handbook is the first anthology of poems by contemporary widows, many of whom have written their way out of solitude and despair, distilling their strongest feelings into poetry or memoir. This stirring collection celebrates the strategies widows learn and the resources they muster to deal with people, living space, possessions, social life, and especially themselves, once shock has turned to the realization that nothing will ever be the same. As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says in her foreword, losing one’s partner is “a loss like no other.”,The Widows’ Handbook is a collection of poetry from 87 American women of all ages, legally married or not, straight and gay, whose partners or spouses have died. Some of the poets are already published widely—including more than a dozen prizewinners, four Pushcart nominees, and two regional poets laureate. Others are not as well known, and some appear in print for the first time here. With courage and wry humor, these women encounter insidious depression, poignant memories, bureaucratic nonsense, unfamiliar hardware, well-intentioned but thoughtless remarks, demanding work, spiritual revelation, and unexpected lust, navigating new relationships in the uncertain legacy of sexual liberation. They write frankly about being paralyzed and about going forward. Their poems are honest, beautiful, and accessible.Only poetry can speak such difficult truths and incite such intense empathy. While both men and women understand the bewilderment, solitude, and change of status thrust upon the widowed, women suffer a particular social demotion and isolation. Anyone who has lost a loved one or is involved in helping the bereaved will be able to relate to the experiences conveyed in The Widows’ Handbook.

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Book SynopsisPersonal essays relating key issues and insights from women in medicine What We Bring to the Practice of Medicine brings together a collection of short essays from women physicians working in diverse fields of medicine around the world. Through compassion, humor, and resiliency, their stories reveal the truth of what life is like for a variety of women in medicine.While men and women physicians face different challenges and bring different historical experiences to the examination table, the history of medicine has been primarily told by men. Doctors Kimberly Greene-Liebowitz and Dana Corriel compile the pieces in this collection to highlight the many topics of concern for women physicians––some of which may be unknown to medical field outsiders. Topics include the physician-patient relationship, mastery of clinical practice, barriers to career advancement and success, and the challenge of balancing a demanding professional life with domestic responsibilities, an issue brought to the fore by the COVID-19 pandemic.What We Bring to the Practice of Medicine showcases the experiences of women physicians at every stage of their careers as well—from the beginning of medical school to the brink of retirement. These 40 essays are an expansive, unprecedented examination of what drives clinical and personal decisions and demonstrate how a physician's character is intricately intertwined with their approach to caregiving and the practice of medicine.Trade Review"A necessary and urgent collection of immense wisdom and humor, vulnerability and strength, and, most of all, the voices of extraordinary women."—Jay Baruch, MD, author of Tornado of Life: A Doctor's Journey through Constraints and Creativity in the ER "If it's possible for the pages of a book to actually live and breathe in your hands, this is it. These pages move and have a pulse of their own. The prose is exceptional; the stories are absolutely captivating. Each page is a gem in its own right. I will never look at my female colleagues the same way again; I don't think I appreciated the extra level of heroism required of women in medicine. I'm a better person for having read What We Bring to the Practice of Medicine."—Louis M. Profeta, MD, author of The Patient in Room Nine Says He's God "Raw, genuine accounts of . . . medical professionals. These are personal narratives by female physicians juggling professional and personal roles, struggling with grief and exceptionally long hours, sacrificing, and facing fear. Each vignette provides a new angle, a new struggle, a new reward."—Kathleen O'Shea, author of So Much More Than a Headache: Understanding Migraine through Literature

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Book SynopsisHow Ohio's women were essential to the national women's suffrage movement Conversations and legal battles surrounding voting rights, once again a topic looming large in the United States, reflect a long history of such debates and suffrage campaigns. The struggle for women's voting rights, in particular, required persistence in the face of defeat, and unbeknownst to most people, Ohio—the fifth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment—played a key role in the national women's suffrage movement.Covering 70 years of the movement, from 1850 through 1920, Jamie Capuzza demonstrates that the tendency to overlook the contributions of Ohio suffragists dates back to the earliest years of the movement. Ohioans were the first to petition a government for women's enfranchisement, and Ohioans helped build the infrastructure for the movement by forming the nation's first state women's rights organization and by hosting two of the earliest national women's rights conventions.Many of the movement's early leaders were Ohioans, including Frances Barker Gage, a movement leader since the 1850s who was among the first to emphasize the inherent connections between gender and race by linking women's suffrage to African American suffrage; Victoria Claflin Woodhull, a stockbroker, newspaper publisher, and radical activist who was the first woman ever to address the US Congress or to run for the US presidency; and Harriet Taylor Upton, president of the Ohio Women's Suffrage Association longer than any other woman and executive in the National American Woman's Suffrage Association, who hobnobbed with presidents and congressmen. Also among the leadership were African Americans with Ohio connections such as Mary Church Terrell, Frances Harper, Julia Cooper, Hallie Brown, Jane Hunter, Carrie Clifford, and Jewelia Higgins.The Fifth Star describes these determined leaders, their agenda, organizational capacity, and political engagement. Drawing on extensive historical records and primary sources, including suffrage convention proceedings, state senate and house reports, local mainstream and feminist media, and the personal letters and diaries of Ohio reformers, Capuzza details this fight in the context of the national women's rights movement and parallel reform movements like abolitionism and temperance. The Fifth Star is a story of remarkable perseverance and determination in pursuit of the most fundamental right in a democracy, the right to vote.Trade Review"In The Fifth Star, Jamie Capuzza deftly situates Ohio women's long fight for social reform and women's rights within the larger arc of US women's history. Capuzza brings to life a colorful cast of Ohio women, long overshadowed by their sisters to the east, who fought side by side with the likes of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Carrie Chapman Catt. And offering a timely reminder to readers today, Capuzza also shows how women working at the local and state levels can drive national movements for change. The Fifth Star will likely stand as the definitive history of Ohio women's struggle to secure their rights for decades to come." —Gina M. Martino, author of Women at War in the Borderlands of the Early American Northeast

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Book SynopsisHow do women who are members of a church with a predominately patriarchal power structure experience personal agency in formal religious settings, in intimate relationships, publicly, and individually? From Jane Manning James, an African American woman who found empowerment and strength in Mormon ritual despite suffering exclusion based on her race, to contemporary church members who are more likely to prioritize personal revelation than hierarchy, Mormon women have answered this question in a numerous ways. This engaging and seminal volume employs vivid primary documents, candid surveys, and illuminating oral histories to explore the perspectives of Latter-day Saint women. Contributors include lay members and prominent scholars in multiple disciplines, including both LDS and non-LDS viewpoints.Trade Review“Without question, this is the strongest collection of essays and articles on the historical place of Mormon women in many years, if not ever.” —Andrea G. Radke-Moss, author of Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West“This work provides a comprehensive contribution to a range of historical and contemporary realities of Mormon women. Issues of race, interracial marriage in Mormonism and the experience of Asian Mormons, of European Mormons, of an African, and of an American Indian give important contributions on these themes. This book will take its place as an essential.” —Rosemary Radford Ruether, author of Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History

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Book SynopsisA profound shift is occurring among women working in agriculture—they are increasingly seeing themselves as farmers, not only as the wives or daughters of farmers. The authors draw on more than a decade of research to document and analyze the reasons for the transformation. As their sense of identity changes, many female farmers are challenging the sexism they face in their chosen profession. In this book, farm women in the northeastern United States describe how they got into farming and becamesuccessful entrepreneurs despite the barriers they encountered in agricultural institutions, farming communities, and even their own families. Their strategies for obtaining land and labor and developing successful businesses offer models for other aspiring farmers.Pulling down the barriers that women face requires organizationsand institutions to become informed by what the authors call a feminist agrifood systems theory (FAST). This framework values women’s ways of knowing and working in agriculture: emphasizing personal, economic, and environmental sustainability, creating connections through the food system, and developing networks that emphasize collaboration and peer-to-peer education. The creation and growth of a specific organization, the Pennsylvania Women’s Agricultural Network, offers a blueprint for others seeking to incorporate a feminist agrifood systems approach into agricultural programming. The theory has the potential to shift how farmers, agricultural professionals, and anyone else interested in farming think about gender and sustainability, as well as to change how feminist scholars and theorists think about agriculture.

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Book SynopsisIn 2016, a female videogame programmer and a female journalist were harassed viciously by anonymous male online users in what became known as GamerGate. Male gamers threatened to rape and kill both women, and the news soon made international headlines, exposing the level of abuse that many women and minorities face when participating in the predominantly male online culture.Gaming Masculinity explains how the term “gamer” has been constructed in the popular imagination by a core group of male online users in an attempt to shore up an embattled form of geeky masculinity. This latest form of toxicity comes at a moment of upheaval in gaming culture, as women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals demand broader access and representation online. Paying close attention to the online practices of trolling and making memes, author Megan Condis demonstrates that, despite the supposedly disembodied nature of life online, performances of masculinity are still afforded privileged status in gamer culture. Even worse, she finds that these competing discourses are not just relegated to the gaming world but are creating rifts within the culture at large, as witnessed by the direct links between the GamerGate movement and the recent rise of the alt-right during the last presidential election.Condis asks what this moment can teach us about the performative, collaborative, and sometimes combative ways that American culture enacts race, gender, and sexuality. She concludes by encouraging designers and those who work in the tech industry to think about how their work might have, purposefully or not, been developed in ways that are marked by gender.

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Book SynopsisWhat can organizational leaders in business, education, government, and most any enterprise learn from an unemployed, unmarried woman who lived in patriarchal, misogynistic rural England more than 200 years ago? As it turns out, a great deal. In identifying the core virtues of Austen’s heroines—confidence, pragmatism, diligence, integrity, playfulness, and humility—Andrea Kayne uncovers the six principles of internally referenced leadership that, taken together, instruct women how to tap into a deep well-spring of personal agency and an internal locus of control no matter what is going on around them. Utilizing practical exercises, real-life case studies, and literary and leadership scholarship, Kicking Ass in a Corset maps out effective leadership that teaches readers how to tune out the external noise and listen to themselves so that they can truly live and lead from the inside out.

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Book SynopsisEmily Dickinson on sex, desire, and 'the chapter . . . in the night.' Emma Goldman against the tyranny of marriage. Ida B. Wells against lynching. Anna Julia Cooper on Black American womanhood. Frances Willard on riding a bicycle. Perhaps the first of its kind, Radicals is a two-volume collection of writings by American women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special attention paid to the voices of Black, Indigenous, and Asian American women.In Volume 2: Memoir, Essays, and Oratory, selections span from early works like Sarah Mapps Douglass's anti-slavery appeal 'A Mother's Love' (1832) and Maria W. Stewart's 'Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall' (1833), to Zitkala-Sa's memories in 'The Land of Red Apples' (1921) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's moving final essay 'The Right to Die' (1935). In between, readers will discover a whole host of vibrant and challenging lesser-known texts that are rarely collected today. Some, indeed, have been out of print for more than a century.Unique among anthologies of American literature, Radicals undoes such silences by collecting the underrepresented, the uncategorizable, the unbowed-powerful writings by American women of genius and audacity who looked toward, and wrote toward, what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called 'a lifted world.'Trade ReviewThis smart collection stands out for its inclusivity-of genres, of voices, and of writings whose very audacity has made them less widely known. Readers will meet new historical figures and also discover new dimensions of feminist authors they thought they already knew. The bold, lucid introduction is a bonus." - Landon R. Y. Storrs, author, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left

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Book SynopsisHow do pious Shia Muslim women nurture and sustain their religious lives? How do their experiences and beliefs differ from or overlap with those of men? What do gender-based religious roles and interactions reveal about the Shia Muslim faith? In Partners of Zaynab, Diane D'Souza presents a rich ethnography of urban Shia women in India, exploring women's devotional lives through the lens of religious narrative, sacred space, ritual performance, leadership, and iconic symbols.Religious scholars have tended to devalue women's religious expressions, confining them to the periphery of a male-centered ritual world. This viewpoint often assumes that women's ritual behaviors are the unsophisticated product of limited education and experience and even a less developed female nature. By illuminating vibrant female narratives within Shia religious teachings, the fascinating history of a shrine led by women, the contemporary lives of dynamic female preachers, and women's popular prayers and rituals of petition, Partners of Zaynab demonstrates that the religious lives of women are not a flawed approximation of male-defined norms and behaviors, but a vigorous, authentic affirmation of faith within the religious mainstream.D'Souza questions the distinction between normative and popular religious behavior, arguing that such a categorization not only isolates and devalues female ritual expressions, but also weakens our understanding of religion as a whole. Partners of Zaynab offers a compelling glimpse of Muslim faith and practice and a more complete understanding of the interplay of gender within Shia Islam.

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Book SynopsisSince Pauline Konga’s breakthrough performance at the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, the world has become accustomed to seeing Kenyan women medal at major championships, sweep marathons, and set world records. Yet little is known about the pioneer generation of women who paved the way for Kenya’s reputation as an international powerhouse in women’s track and field. In Kenya’s Running Women: A History, historian and former professional runner Michelle M. Sikes details the triumphs and many challenges these women faced, from the advent of Kenya’s athletics program in the colonial era through the professionalization of running in the 1980s and 1990s. Sikes reveals how over time running became a vehicle for Kenyan women to expand the boundaries of acceptable female behavior. Kenya’s Running Women demonstrates the necessity of including women in histories of African sport, and of incorporating sport into studies of African gender and nation-building.

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Book SynopsisWomen, Nationalism, and Social Networks in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1918 focuses on the lives of women in Southeastern Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the intersection of gender and nationalism. By looking at a wide range of sources and employing rich historiography, this collection investigates the currents of women's emancipatory efforts in a climate of conflicting assumptions relating to nationhood and nationalization. This book sheds light on a time when both women and nations were working to assert themselves, and how women promoted the national cause in an attempt to assume stronger roles in the public sphere. The volume studies areas that were nationally mixed and linguistically plural, thus pointing to the dynamic role of peripheries and pluralism affecting women's approaches to and experience of nationalization. These essays speak to women's agency as individuals and members of the social networks, and their roles in cultural, ethnic, and political movements in pluralistic societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thereby arguing that they "enacted" borders and were not simply acted on by them, while also elucidating the ways they transgress the borders.

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Book SynopsisTraces the remarkable life of a feminist poet through the items and images that have have defined her experiences My Life in 100 Objects is a personal reflection on the events and moments that shaped the life and work of one extraordinary woman. With a masterful, poetic voice, Margaret Randall uses talismanic objects and photographs as launching points for her nonlinear narrative. Through each “object,” Randall uncovers another part of herself, starting in a museum in Amman, Jordan, and ending in the Latin American Studies Association in Boston. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit. As Randall’s adventures often coincide with important moments in history, many of her objects provide a transcontinental glimpse into social upheavals and transitions. She shares memories from her years in Cuba (1969 to 1980) and Nicaragua (1980 to 1984), as well as briefer periods in North Vietnam (immediately preceding the end of the war in 1975), and Peru (during the government of Velasco Alvarado). In her introduction, Randall states, “objects and places have always been alive to me.” Her history too is alive, as much of a means to consider our own present as it is to glimpse her vibrant past.Trade ReviewMy Life in 100 Objects is a nonlinear inventory of the self by beat-expressionist-become-revolutionary poet Margaret Randall. Her sense of objecthood is elastic: the expected possessions, yes, writing accoutrements, but also places, photographs, books, art, monuments, artifacts. A medal, a fake passport, a court brief from when the INS tried to deport her. An underused treadmill. She puts it all out there and lets it all in. Even as they stretch all the way back to her childhood in the ’40s, or her young adulthood in the ’60s, her stories have never been more of the moment: who gets to come to this country, who gets to love whom, and every other hard-won freedom still at stake today. -- Garrett Caples, Editor, City Lights SpotlightRandall’s hope was to show us ‘how the objects and places that move us breathe their life into ours.’ In this, she certainly succeeds. A heartwarming celebration of the author’s compelling life. * Kirkus Review *

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Book SynopsisTraces the remarkable life of a feminist poet through the items and images that have have defined her experiences My Life in 100 Objects is a personal reflection on the events and moments that shaped the life and work of one extraordinary woman. With a masterful, poetic voice, Margaret Randall uses talismanic objects and photographs as launching points for her nonlinear narrative. Through each “object,” Randall uncovers another part of herself, starting in a museum in Amman, Jordan, and ending in the Latin American Studies Association in Boston. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit. As Randall’s adventures often coincide with important moments in history, many of her objects provide a transcontinental glimpse into social upheavals and transitions. She shares memories from her years in Cuba (1969 to 1980) and Nicaragua (1980 to 1984), as well as briefer periods in North Vietnam (immediately preceding the end of the war in 1975), and Peru (during the government of Velasco Alvarado). In her introduction, Randall states, “objects and places have always been alive to me.” Her history too is alive, as much of a means to consider our own present as it is to glimpse her vibrant past.Trade Review"My Life in 100 Objects is a nonlinear inventory of the self by beat-expressionist-become-revolutionary poet Margaret Randall. Her sense of objecthood is elastic: the expected possessions, yes, writing accoutrements, but also places, photographs, books, art, monuments, artifacts. A medal, a fake passport, a court brief from when the INS tried to deport her. An underused treadmill. She puts it all out there and lets it all in. Even as they stretch all the way back to her childhood in the ’40s, or her young adulthood in the ’60s, her stories have never been more of the moment: who gets to come to this country, who gets to love whom, and every other hard-won freedom still at stake today." -- Garrett Caples, Editor, City Lights Spotlight"Randall’s hope was to show us ‘how the objects and places that move us breathe their life into ours.’ In this, she certainly succeeds. A heartwarming celebration of the author’s compelling life." * Kirkus Review *

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Book SynopsisCandid and intimate accounts of the factory-worker tragedy that shaped American labor rights On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, New York. The top three floors housed the Triangle Waist Company, a factory where approximately 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women and girls, labored to produce fashionable cotton blouses, known as “waists.” The fire killed 146 workers in a mere 15 minutes but pierced the perpetual conscience of citizens everywhere. The Asch Building had been considered a modern fireproof structure, but inadequate fire safety regulations left the workers inside unprotected. The tragedy of the fire, and the resulting movements for change, were pivotal in shaping workers' rights and unions. A powerful collection of diverse voices, Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Fire brings together stories from writers, artists, activists, scholars, and family members of the Triangle workers. Nineteen contributors from across the globe speak of a singular event with remarkable impact. One hundred and eleven years after the tragic incident, Talking to the Girls articulates a story of contemporary global relevance and stands as an act of collective testimony: a written memorial to the Triangle victims.Trade Review"This work brings labor's history to life with stories and voices that have echoed down through generations. Apropos in these times as we are reminded of the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire that fueled union organizing and union demands for enforceable occupational safety standards. As we learned then and painfully know now, workplace safety doesn’t just happen. The essays create a rich, unique view of our past while calling us to stand in solidarity today." -- Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO"This deeply moving and poignant anthology reminds us that the past is not over. By feeling the truth of the Triangle Fire—the trauma, the loss, and the fury—each essay invites us to remember the beauty of workers and organizers then and today who fight for a world where the wellbeing of workers is not sacrificed for capitalist greed. " -- Jennifer Guglielmo, Associate Professor of History, Smith College, author of Living the Revolution, and co-director, "Putting History in Domestic Workers' Hands""Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Fire, is the first anthology of personal essays about this landmark tragedy—and spur for change—in American life. As such, these stories by survivors, family members, descendants, scholars, and activists are as sharp and sad and enraging and resolute as the fire itself was in galvanizing us to justice. Editors Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti do more than edit here, they know how to listen, and let these many varied voices bear witness." -- Kevin Baker, author of Dreamland"As co-editors Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti explain in the introduction, one of the collection’s goals is to “explore the combination of intimate and political that permeates Triangle activism” by allowing the authors to interrogate their own relationships with the tragedy and contribute to the ongoing conversation about what is owed to those who came before... provide[s] valuable insight into what it takes to change the world — or the workplace — when the odds are stacked against you." -- Kim Kelly * Teen Vogue *

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Book SynopsisCandid and intimate accounts of the factory-worker tragedy that shaped American labor rights On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, New York. The top three floors housed the Triangle Waist Company, a factory where approximately 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women and girls, labored to produce fashionable cotton blouses, known as “waists.” The fire killed 146 workers in a mere 15 minutes but pierced the perpetual conscience of citizens everywhere. The Asch Building had been considered a modern fireproof structure, but inadequate fire safety regulations left the workers inside unprotected. The tragedy of the fire, and the resulting movements for change, were pivotal in shaping workers' rights and unions. A powerful collection of diverse voices, Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Fire brings together stories from writers, artists, activists, scholars, and family members of the Triangle workers. Nineteen contributors from across the globe speak of a singular event with remarkable impact. One hundred and eleven years after the tragic incident, Talking to the Girls articulates a story of contemporary global relevance and stands as an act of collective testimony: a written memorial to the Triangle victims.Trade Review"This work brings labor's history to life with stories and voices that have echoed down through generations. Apropos in these times as we are reminded of the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire that fueled union organizing and union demands for enforceable occupational safety standards. As we learned then and painfully know now, workplace safety doesn’t just happen. The essays create a rich, unique view of our past while calling us to stand in solidarity today." -- Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO"This deeply moving and poignant anthology reminds us that the past is not over. By feeling the truth of the Triangle Fire—the trauma, the loss, and the fury—each essay invites us to remember the beauty of workers and organizers then and today who fight for a world where the wellbeing of workers is not sacrificed for capitalist greed. " -- Jennifer Guglielmo, Associate Professor of History, Smith College, author of Living the Revolution, and co-director, "Putting History in Domestic Workers' Hands""Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Fire, is the first anthology of personal essays about this landmark tragedy—and spur for change—in American life. As such, these stories by survivors, family members, descendants, scholars, and activists are as sharp and sad and enraging and resolute as the fire itself was in galvanizing us to justice. Editors Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti do more than edit here, they know how to listen, and let these many varied voices bear witness." -- Kevin Baker, author of Dreamland"As co-editors Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti explain in the introduction, one of the collection’s goals is to “explore the combination of intimate and political that permeates Triangle activism” by allowing the authors to interrogate their own relationships with the tragedy and contribute to the ongoing conversation about what is owed to those who came before... provide[s] valuable insight into what it takes to change the world — or the workplace — when the odds are stacked against you." -- Kim Kelly * Teen Vogue *

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Book SynopsisManal Hamzeh’s book, Pedagogies of deveiling: Muslim girls & the hijab discourse, presents an exploration of a gendering discourse, the hijab (veil) discourse, and how it was negotiated by four girls who self-identified as Muslims. Pedagogies of deveiling emerged over a period of three years writing up a 14 months long study in which Hamzeh collaborated with four Muslim girls in two US southwestern border towns between October 2005 and December 2006. This book stems from the stories of these four Muslim girls weaved with Hamzeh’s stories and perspectives as arabyyah-muslimah, the main researcher in the study—an “insider/in-betweener” educator/researcher who is literate in the cultural/linguistic/historical nuances critical in working with Muslim girls and their communities. Pedagogies of deveiling offers an alternative approach to research and pedagogy with Muslim girls in which the taken-for-granted hijabs in the sacred text and their inscriptions on the bodies of these girls are deveiled, or problematised, rethought, questioned, and countered. As such, what this book offers is first critical to Muslim girls themselves because it shatters the phobia and the impossibility of reinterpreting of some canonical Islamic sacred texts in relation to the hijabs and gender. Finally, in this book, Dr. Manal Hamzeh offers a vision for how the sacred text reinterpreted by critical feminist epistemologies may represent a curriculum that is open to critique and holds potential for change towards justice. With this, Dr. Hamzeh calls upon researchers and educators to open spaces for creativity and collaborate with Muslim girls in order to, 1) navigate the multiplicity and fluidity of their subjectivities implicated by intersecting discourses in their lives, and 2) honour their choices while supporting them to negotiate the thought-of as fixed Islamic values that may jeopardise their chances of any learning opportunity. This a call to work with Muslim girls as theorisers of possibilities and as the main agents of change in their own lives. This is a call to open with Muslim girls opportunities to practice their agency in unpacking and challenging normative discourses in their lives, not exclusive to the hijab discourse This is a call for opening spaces of struggle and uprising and cultivating moments of meaning and shifts of consciousness.

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Book SynopsisHow is history represented? As just a record of the past, as a part of a present identity or as future goals? This book explores how historical contents and narratives are presented in school textbooks and other cultural productions (museums, monuments, etc) and also how they are understood by students, in the context of increasing globalisation. In these contemporary conditions, the relation between history learning processes, in and out of school, and the construction of national identities presents an ever more important topic. It is being studied by looking at the appropriation of historical narratives, which are frequently based on the official history of a nation state. Most of the chapters in this volume are educational studies about how the learning of history takes place in school settings of different countries such as Canada, France, Germany, Latin America, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. Covering such a broad sample of cultural and national contexts, they provide a rich reflection on history as a subject related to patriotism, cosmopolitanism, both or neither.

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Book SynopsisDuring and after the Civil War, southern women played a critical role in shaping the South’s evolving collective memory by penning journals and diaries, historical accounts, memoirs, and literary interpretations of the war. While a few of these writings—most notably Mary Chesnut’s diaries and Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind—have been studied in depth by numerous scholars, until now there has been no comprehensive examination of Civil War novels by southern women. In this welcome study, Sharon Talley explores works by fifteen such writers, illuminating the role that southern women played in fashioning cultural identity in the region.Beginning with Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria and Sallie Rochester Ford’s Raids and Romance of Morgan and His Men, which were published as the war still raged, Talley offers a chronological consideration of the novels with informative introductions for each time period. She examines Reconstruction works by Marion Harland, Mary Ann Cruse, and Rebecca Harding Davis, novels of the “Redeemed” South and the turn of the century by Mary Noailles Murfree, Ellen Glasgow, and Mary Johnston, and narratives by Evelyn Scott, Margaret Mitchell, and Caroline Gordon from the Modern period that spanned the two World Wars. Analysis of Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), the first critically acclaimed Civil War novel by an African American woman of the South, as well as other post–World War II works by Kaye Gibbons, Josephine Humphreys, and Alice Randall, offers a fitting conclusion to Talley’s study by addressing the inaccuracies in the romantic myth of the Old South that Gone with the Wind most famously engraved on the nation’s consciousness.Informed by feminist, poststructural, and cultural studies theory, Talley’s close readings of these various novels ultimately refute the notion of a monolithic interpretation of the Civil War, presenting instead unique and diverse approaches to balancing “fact” and “fiction” in the long period of artistic production concerning this singular traumatic event in American history.

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