Gender studies: women and girls Books

Book SynopsisINTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Inspired by her popular TED Talk, the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code urges women to embrace imperfection and live a bolder, more authentic life. “A timely message for women of all ages: Perfection isn’t just impossible but, worse, insidious.”—Angela Duckworth, bestselling author of Grit Imagine if you lived without the fear of not being good enough. If you didn’t care how your life looked on Instagram. If you could let go of the guilt and stop beating yourself up for making human mistakes. Imagine if, in every decision you faced, you took the bolder path? As women, too many of us feel crushed under the weight of our own expectations. We run ourselves ragged trying to please everyone, pass up opportunities that scare us, and avoid rejection at all costs. There’s a reason we act this way, Saujani says. As girls, we were taught to play it safe. Well-meaning parents and teachers praised us for being quiet and polite, urged us to be careful so we didn’t get hurt, and steered us to activities at which we could shine. As a result, we grew up to be women who are afraid to fail.  It’s time to stop letting our fears drown out our dreams and narrow our world, along with our chance at happiness. By choosing bravery over perfection, we can find the power to claim our voice, to leave behind what makes us unhappy, and to go for the things we genuinely, passionately want. Perfection may set us on a path that feels safe, but bravery leads us to the one we’re authentically meant to follow. In Brave, Not Perfect, Saujani shares powerful insights and practices to help us let go of our need for perfection and make bravery a lifelong habit. By being brave, not perfect, we can all become the authors of our best and most joyful life.

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAs a feminist rhetorician who has long worked at the intersection of silence and listening, I'm delighted with Arnold's study of women, silence/silencing, and leadership. For me, hers is an important cross-over book, one that beautifully transports academic research into workplace understandings--and applications! -- Cheryl Glenn, PhD, University Distinguished Professor of English, Penn State University, author of "Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope"

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Book SynopsisResearch indicates that adults aged 18-24 are the largest users of Facebook (25.7%), Instagram (32%), and TikTok (45%). The average adult consumes two and a half hours of social media per day, which continued to increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. College students utilize social media for entertainment and communication as well as news stories and current events, and as a result, social media, known for brief sound bites, video clips, and short blurbs of information, has increasingly become the way students interact with the world. While current gender textbooks provide the academic foundation to gender analysis, #Gender: Gendered Social Problems through a Social Media Lens leverages social media content to critically examine gendered social problems and further students' understanding and application of concepts. Chapter topics include toxic masculinity, sexual assault and #metoo, the gender pay gap, reproductive rights, intimate partner violence, and politics. The textbook begins with an introduction outlining terminology and ends with a conclusion discussing social change and feminism. Using this book, undergraduate students will learn practical ways in which gender informs their individual lives and wider societal structures. In addition, readers are provided talking points to help them become conversational in present day issues around gender and sexuality. Instructor ancillaries for the text include a test bank and videos links (such as TED Talks, media clips, and commercial examples to further illustrate concepts).

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Book SynopsisJ.E. Sumerau is an associate professor and the director of applied sociology at the University of Tampa. Their teaching, research, and writing interests focus on continuity and change in cultural forms including sexualities, gender, sports, religion, health, violence, music, and literature. They previously authored Violent Manhood and edited The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Transgender Studies. For more information, please visit www.jsumerau.com.Giuseppina Valle Holway is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Tampa. Her research interests include social demography, family, intimate relationships, health disparities, and sexual and reproductive health. Her recent work appears Annual Review of Sociology, Journal of Adolescent Health, Contraception, and Socius.

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Book SynopsisRegency England is a world immortalized by Jane Austen and Lord Byron in their beloved novels and poems. The popular image of the Regency continues to be mythologized by the hundreds of romance novels set in the period, which focus almost exclusively on wealthy, white, Christian members of the upper classes. But there are hundreds of fascinating women who don't fit history books limited perception of what was historically accurate for early 19th century England. Women like Dido Elizabeth Belle, whose mother was a slave but was raised by her white father's family in England, Caroline Herschel, who acted as her brother's assistant as he hunted the heavens for comets, and ended up discovering eight on her own, Anne Lister, who lived on her own terms with her common-law wife at Shibden Hall, and Judith Montefiore, a Jewish woman who wrote the first English language Kosher cookbook.As one of the owners of the successful romance-only bookstore The Ripped Bodice, Bea Koch has had a front row seat to controversies surrounding what is accepted as "historically accurate" for the wildly popular Regency period. Following in the popular footsteps of books like Ann Shen's Bad Girls Throughout History, Koch takes the Regency, one of the most loved and idealized historical time periods and a huge inspiration for American pop culture, and reveals the independent-minded, standard-breaking real historical women who lived life on their terms. She also examines broader questions of culture in chapters that focus on the LGBTQ and Jewish communities, the lives of women of color in the Regency, and women who broke barriers in fields like astronomy and paleontology. In MAD AND BAD, we look beyond popular perception of the Regency into the even more vibrant, diverse, and fascinating historical truth.

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Book SynopsisThe Memo is the much-needed career advice guide for women of colour specifically, finally ending the one-size-fits-all approach of business books that lump together women across races and overlook the unique barriers to success for women of colour. In a charismatic and relatable voice, Minda Harts brings her entrepreneurial experience as CEO of The Memo to the page, as well as her past career life as a fundraising consultant to top colleges across the country. With wit and candour, Harts begins by acknowledging the "ugly truths" that keep women of colour from getting the proverbial seat at the table in corporate America: micro-aggressions, systemic racism, white privilege, etc. Harts validates that women aren't making up the discrimination they feel, even if it isn't always overt. From there, she gives straight talk on how to address these issues head on and provides a roadmap to help women of colour and their allies make real change to the system. With chapters on network-building, office politics, money and negotiation, The Memo covers all the basics that any good business book should but through the author's lens, it offers support and long-overdue advice particularly for women of colour.

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Book SynopsisDescribed by some as a "necropolis for babies," the province of Quebec in the early twentieth century recorded infant mortality rates, particularly among French-speaking Catholics, that were among the highest in the Western world. This "bleeding of the nation" gave birth to a vast movement for child welfare that paved the way for a medicalization of childbearing. In Babies for the Nation , basing her analysis on extensive documentary research and more than fifty interviews with mothers, Denyse Baillargeon sets out to understand how doctors were able to convince women to consult them, and why mothers chose to follow their advice. Her analysis considers the medical discourse of the time, the development of free services made available to mothers between 1910 and 1970, and how mothers used these services. Showing the variety of social actors involved in this process (doctors, nurses, women's groups, members of the clergy, private enterprise, the state, and the mothers themselves), this study delineates the alliances and the conflicts that arose between them in a complex phenomenon that profoundly changed the nature of childbearing in Quebec. Un Québec en mal d'enfants: La médicalisation de la maternité 1910â1970 was awarded the Clio-Québec Prize, the Lionel Groulx-Yves-Saint-Germain Prize, and the Jean-Charles-Falardeau Prize. This translation by W. Donald Wilson brings this important book to a new readership.Trade Review"Originally published in 2004, Denyse Baillargeon's Un Quibec en mal d'enfonu has finally been translated for an English-speaking audience. Babies for the Nation offers a riveting study of the medicalisation of maternity and maternal discourses in Quebec over the course of the twentieth century, bringing attention to an issue largely elided within existing studies of Quebec. Babies for the Nation is an indispensable resource for social historians interested in the growth of maternal and medical ideologies in French-Canada across the twentieth century, shedding light on an issue left largely unexplored until now. Similarly, Baillargeon's focus on the political movements and welfare groups that arose to help Structure and safeguard new procedures and discourses also make this an interesting read for political historians concerned with the rise of state intervention in the home." - Sarah Galletly, University of Strathclyde, British Journal of Canadian Studies, Volume 23 (Number 2), 2010"This is an academically ambitious book, broad in scope and thoroughly researched [yet] it manages to be quite readable.... [I]s it relevant to a contemporary readership in Canada where infant mortality is much decreased, and the notion of a dictatorial and male-dominated medical system is increasingly archaic? The answer is yes: Baillargeon's book depicts the conflicts among the groups involved in public health and politics that is likely no different today." -- Paul Moorehead MD, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario -- Canadian Medical Association Journal, 182 (11), 201009"Originally published in 2004, Denyse Baillargeon's Un Quèbec en mal d'enfants has been carefully translated by D. Donald Wilson and republished as Babies for the Nation. It is a welcome translation and will ensure that the work of Baillargeon gets a wider reading.... The book is full of rich themes. While much of the literature on women and the medicalization of birth and motherhood addresses the issue of control by physicians, Baillargeon is more interested in how the discourses of medicalization created self-regulation within the women themselves.... [The book's] appendices are quite wonderful--among them a Timeline of Infant Feeeding in Canada, a listing of the various editions of The Canadian Mother's Book with author/editor and distribution figures, a listing of National Surveys of Breastfeeding Practices and summaries of each of them, and the Evolution of Canadian Infant Feeding Guidelines (1923--2004). Each tells us much about the infant feeding habits of women and the advice given to them and how both changed over time." -- Wendy Mitchinson, University of Waterloo -- Scientia Canadensis, Vol 35, no. 1-2, 201305"Babies for the Nation is a book of extraordinary historical detail and fine analytic insight. Through remarkably thorough historical research, Denyse Baillargeon has effectively opened to newcomers the empirical field of the history of maternity in Quebec. English-speaking Canadian historians are lucky to have the translation available. The writing in the book is smooth and elegant, and attribute for which we owe the translator, W. Donald Wilson, as much as we owe the original author. The book demonstrates Baillargeon's mastery not only of the field and its analysis but also of the writer's craft." -- Robyn Braun, University of Alberta -- H-Canada, 201002``In 1927, Canadian Child Welfare News reported that 'Canada enjoys the apparently unenviable distinction of attaining the highest infant mortality rate in recent years.' The journal placed the blame for this shameful achievement entirely on the province of Quebec, whose startlingly high rate of infant deaths had been added to the national registry of births and deaths for the first time, raising the national average of infant mortality from 78.6 to 101.9 per one thousand live births (p. 17). Denyse Baillargeon's absorbing Babies for the Nation: The Medicalization of Motherhood in Quebec, 1910-1970 uses extensive archival research and oral history to interrogate the reasons for Quebec's notorious ranking and how this changed the way pregnancy, childcare, and motherhood were conceptualized. Building on previous work in the history of health, children, and women by Wendy Mitchson, Cynthia Comacchio, and Andrée Lévesque, Babies for the Nation offers a complex analysis of the constellation of stakeholders--physicians and nurses, the government, insurance agents, women's groups, and mothers--dedicated to solving Quebec's infant mortality crisis for the sake of children and their families and, by proxy, for improving the province's reputation as a vital nation.... What is really remarkable about Baillargeon's study is that she does not only pay attention to the prescriptive side of how the 'experts' thought mothers should act. Through extensive oral history, she shows how women digested and adapted the medical advice and services offered to them and contributed in their own ways to raising health children.... Babies for the Nation is a multifaceted analysis of the ways Quebec confronted infant mortality throughout the twentieth century. Baillargeon's study would appeal to anyone interested in understanding the role child welfare plays in characterizing not only the role and responsibility of women, but also the destiny of an entire province.'' -- Tarah Brookfield, Wilfrid Laurier University -- Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Vol. 4, no. 2, Spring 2011, 201207"[A] passionate work of social history.... It also has particular relevance at a time when many women are turning to midwives and choosing to have their babies at home--a modern-day challenge to the now hegemonic status of medicalized childbirth." -- Kate Forrest -- Montreal Review of Books, 200910"An indispensable work for scholars and students at the graduate level.... This dense and scholarly work, based on exhaustive original research, will probably remain the definitive work on the topic. It makes a contribution not only to the history of health and of women, but also to Quebec political history." -- Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française, 200804Table of ContentsTable of Contents for Babies for the Nation: The Medicalization of Motherhood in Quebec, 1910â1970 by Denyse Baillargeon List of Tables List of Acronyms Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: A âBad Motherâ Called Quebec An Early Death Dying While Giving Life Chapter 2: A Very National Infant Mortality Rate The Nation in Peril, 1910â1940 A National Dearth of Children, 1940â1970 Chapter 3: Let Us Have the Mother and the Child Is Ours The Ignorance of Mothers Teach Over and Over Chapter 4: A School for Mothers Clinics for Newborns Home Care The Victorian Order of Nurses The Nurses from the âMetâ The Assistance maternelle Services for Mothers Outside the Major Cities Prenatal Clinics Public Lectures and the Distribution of Documents Chapter 5: Bitter Struggles All for One General Practitioners and Public Health Officials General Practitioners and the Assistance maternelle de Montréal Doctors and Nurses Physicians and âMaternalistâ Feminists Church and State Chapter 6: The Quebec Mother and Child Care for Expectant Women Care for Babies To Read While Caring for Baby Relations with Doctors and Nurses Epilogue: To Have or Not To Have Appendix 1: Sources Appendix 2: Infant Mortality Rates, Canada and the Provinces, 1926â1965 Notes Bibliography Index

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Book Synopsis Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts focuses on mothers as subjects and as writers who produce auto/biography, fiction, and poetry about maternity. International contributors examine the mother without child, with child, and in her multiple identities as grandmother, mother, and daughter. The collection examines how authors use textual spaces to accept, negotiate, resist, or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering and maternal roles, and how these texts offer alternative practices and visions for mothers. Further, it illuminates how textual representations both reflect and help to define or (re)shape the realities of women and families by examining how mothering and being a mother are political, personal, and creative narratives unfolding within both the pages of a book and the spaces of a life. The range of chapters maps a shift from the daughter-centric stories that have dominated the maternal tradition to the matrilineal and matrifocal perspectives that have emerged over the last few decades as the mother's voice moved from silence to speech. Contributors make aesthetic, cultural, and political claims and critiques about mothering and motherhood, illuminating in new and diverse ways how authors and the protagonists of the texts ""read"" their own maternal identities as well as the maternal scripts of their families, cultures, and nations in their quest for self-knowledge, agency, and artistic expression. Table of Contents Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Literatures edited by Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O'Reilly Acknowledgments Introduction: Maternal Literatures in Text and Tradition: Daughter-Centric, Matrilineal, and Matrifocal Perspectives Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O'Reilly Part 1: Maternal Absence 1. Aberrant, Absent, Alienated: Reading the Maternal in Jane Urquhart's First Two Novels, The Whirlpool and Changing Heaven Myrl Coulter 2. Motherless Daughters: The Absent Mothers in Margaret Atwood Nancy Peled 3. Writing about Abusive Mothers: Ethics and Auto/biography Kate Douglas 4. ""Red Mother"": The Missing Mother Plot as Double Mystery in Louise Erdrich's Fiction Sheila Hassell Hughes 5. ""This was her punishment"": Jew, Whore, Mother in the Fiction of Adele Wiseman and Lilian Nattel Ruth Panofsky Part 2: Maternal Ambivalence 6. Eden Robinson's ""Dogs in Winter"": Parodic Extremes of Mothering Nathalie Foy 7. Subverting the Saintly Mother: The Novels of Gabrielle Poulin Kathleen Kellett-Betsos 8. ""Opaque with confusion and shame"": Maternal Ambivalence in Rita Dove's Poetry Elizabeth Beaulieu 9. Maternal Blitz: Harriet Lovatt as Postpartum Sufferer in Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child Denys Landry 10. We Need to Talk about Gender: Mothering and Masculinity in Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk about Kevin Emily Jeremiah Part 3: Maternal Agency 11. Narrating Maternal Subjectivity: Memoirs from Motherhood Joanne S. Frye 12. The Motherhood Memoir and the ""New Momism"": Biting the Hand That Feeds You Andrea O'Reilly 13. ""I had to make a future, willful, voluble, lascivious"": Minnie Bruce Pratt's Disruptive Lesbian Maternal Narratives Susan Driver 14. Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature Gill Rye 15. But She's a Mom! Sex, Motherhood, and the Poetry of Sharon Olds Rita Jones 16. (Grand)mothering ""Children of the Apocalypse"": A Post-postmodern Ecopoetic Reading of Margaret Laurence's The Diviners Di Brandt Part 4: Maternal Communication 17. Colonialism's Impact on Mothering: Jamaica Kincaid's Rendering of the Mother--Daughter Split in Annie John Nicole Willey 18. Mother to Daughter: Muted Maternal Feminism in the Fiction of Sandra Cisneros Rita Bode 19. Cracking (Mother) India Tanja Stampfl 20. Asian American Mothering in the Absence of Talk Story: Obasan and Chorus of Mushrooms Anne-Marie Lee-Loy 21. Baby, Boo-Boo, and Bobs: The Matrilineal Auto/biographies of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, and Eleanor Lanahan Elizabeth Podnieks 22. Revelations and Representations: Birth Stories and Motherhood on the Internet Kim Hensley Owens Coda: ""Stories to Live By"": Maternal Literatures and Motherhood Studies Andrea O'Reilly Notes on the Contributors Index About the Contributors Elizabeth Beaulieu (PhD) is dean of the Core Division at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, where she oversees the design and implementation of a new interdisciplinary curriculum. She is the author or editor of Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered (1999), The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia (2003), and Writing African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and about Women of Color (2006). Rita Bode is associate professor of English literature at Trent University in Oshawa, where she is currently serving as associate dean. Her main area of research is nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American and British literature. She has published on the maternal presence/absence in Melville's Moby-Dick and in the writings of L. M. Montgomery. Di Brandt holds a Canada Research Chair in Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at Brandon University, Manitoba. She is the author of numerous award-winning books of poetry, essays, an opera, and a novel. Her books on mothers and mothering include: questions I asked my mother (1987), mother, not mother (1992), Wild Mother Dancing: Maternal Narrative in Canadian Literature (1993), and So This Is the World & Here I Am in It (1997). Her website address is www.dibrandt.ca. Myrl Coulter (BA, MA, PhD University of Alberta) specializes in Canadian literature and writing practices. Her writing and research interests are feminism, maternal theory, literary nonfiction, and popular culture. Her work explores writing as a highly complex process influenced by social, cultural, political, and environmental forces. Kate Douglas is a senior lecturer in the Department of English, Creative Writing and Australian Studies at Flinders University (South Australia). She is the author of Trauma Texts (with Professor Gillian Whitlock) and Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory. Susan Driver is an assistant professor in communication studies at York University. She has written Queer Girls and Popular Culture and edited the collection Queer Youth Cultures. Nathalie Foy teaches Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. Her most recent project is an examination of motherhood in contemporary Canadian fiction. Joanne S. Frye is professor emerita of English and women's studies at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Author of Living Stories, Telling Lives and Tillie Olsen: A Study of the Short Fiction, she has recently completed a memoir about her experiences as a single mother, titled Biting the Moon. Sheila Hassell Hughes is associate professor and Chair of English at the University of Dayton, Ohio. Born and raised in British Columbia, she earned her MA (English) from the University of Toronto and PhD (women's studies) from Emory University. Her research focuses on gender and religion in Louise Erdrich's work. Emily Jeremiah is a lecturer in German at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Troubling Maternity: Mothering, Agency, and Ethics in Women's Writing in German of the 1970s and 1980s. Her research interests include mothering, migration, gender, and sexuality. Rita M. Jones (PhD, Washington State University) is the director of the women's centre and affiliate faculty in women's studies at Lehigh University. She was formerly the director of women's studies at the University of Northern Colorado. Her research interests include motherhood in America and connections between feminist movement and literature. Kathleen Kellet-Betsos is associate professor in the Department of French and Spanish Languages and Literatures at Ryerson University, specializing in Franco-Canadian literature. She has published articles on authors such as Louise Maheux-Forcier, Anne Hébert, and Daniel Poliquin in various journals including Québec Studies and Studies in Canadian Literature. Denys Landry is a PhD candidate at the University of Montreal, where he also teaches English composition. His dissertation focuses on prostitution in the work of Tennessee Williams. His fields of interest include drama, American literature, gender studies, and popular culture (with special emphasis on Madonna). Anne-Marie Lee-Loy is assistant professor in the English Department at Ryerson University. Currently she is exploring how Asian Caribbean and Asian American experiences intersect. Her articles and essays have appeared in Asian Studies Review, Anthurium, The Arts Journal, and the collection The Chinese in the Caribbean. Her book Searching for Mr. Chin: Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in West Indian Literature is forthcoming with Temple University Press. Andrea O'Reilly is associate professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University. She is editor of more than 12 books, including Feminist Mothering. O'Reilly is author of Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart and Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism, and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering. O'Reilly is director of the Association for Research on Mothering, the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, and Demeter Press. She is editor of the first ever encyclopedia on motherhood, forthcoming 2010. Kim Hensley Owens is assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Rhode Island. She recently developed and taught a graduate seminar entitled Rhetorics of/and Reproduction. Her writing appears in such journals as Written Communication and Pedagogy. Kim is currently at work on a book project focusing on the rhetorics of childbirth. Ruth Panofsky is professor of English at Ryerson University, where she specializes in Canadian literature and culture. She is the author of The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman and At Odds in the World: Essays on Jewish Canadian Women Writers. Her volume of poetry, Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices, received the 2008 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Nancy Peled PhD, teaches literature at Haifa University and coordinates the academic English program at Oranim Academic College in northern Israel. Her research interests include modern female authors and stereotypic paradigms of expression in contemporary narratives. A former Canadian, she lives on a kibbutz where she raised her four children. Elizabeth Podnieks is an associate professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University. Her teaching and research interests include mothering, life writing, modernism, and popular/celebrity culture. She is the author of Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaï Nin and the co-editor of Hayford Hall: Hangovers, Erotics, and Modernist Aesthetics. Gill Rye (Phd, University College, London) is Reader at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, and director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing. Publications include Reading for Change, Women's Writing in Contemporary France (co-edited), and Narratives of Mothering: Women's Writing in Contemporary France. Tanja Stampfl, a native of Italy, is assistant professor in the English Department at the University of the Incarnate Word. Her research and teaching centre on the convergence of race, gender, and identity in twentieth-century postcolonial and world literature. Nicole Willey is an associate professor of English at Kent State University Tuscarawas, where she teaches African American and other literatures. Her research interests include mothering, memoir, nineteenth-century American literature, and slave narratives. She wrote Creating a New Ideal of Masculinity for American Men: The Achievement of Sentimental Women Writers in the Mid-Nineteenth Century and is currently working on a collection about motherhood memoirs.

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Book SynopsisOffers an intriguing glimpse into the daily life of an average Toronto woman in the mid-nineteenth century. Mary Armstrong's diaries are a window into the daily life of a middle-class woman in a new and changing land, and a revealing account of life in early Toronto just before and after confederation. Her journals are one of very few published by Canadian women, especially women outside the upper classes, in the decades surrounding the mid-nineteenth century. Mary Armstrong was the wife of a butcher / farmer who lived in what is now the Yorkville and Deer Park area of Toronto from the 1830s to the 1880s. She had immigrated with her parents and siblings from England in 1834. Her diaries, which cover five months in 1859 and eight months in 1869, reflect her multiplicity of interests and concerns including family, women's work, faith, status and class, occupation and trade, community networks, and local and national identity. Jackson W. Armstrong's introduction examines who Mary was, what her world was like, and how she saw her own place in it; it also explains the origin and history of the diaries. His extensive primary research supports the well-annotated diaries, and gives contextual information on the events, people, and places that Mary mentions. Seven Eggs Today offers new information and a new perspective on mid-Victorian English Canada, and will be welcomed by general readers and scholars interested in colonial life, biography, immigrant experiences, family or local history, or women's studies.Trade Review"Both text and commentary are a worthwhile contribution to the publisher's Life Writing series." -- British Journal of Canadian Studies, 200604"This explains the literary and historical significance of Seven Eggs Today. Jackson Armstrong's publication of his great-great-great grandmother's diaries from the years 1859 and 1869 provides a rare glimpse into the life of a middle-class woman living in Victorian-era Toronto around the time of Canada's Confederation. Armstrong has done an excellent job editing the diaries. While the value in such documents lies in their recital of everyday events (`two eggs yesterday, three today') and personal reflections (`Father is once more himself'), nonetheless such mundane items can provide a wealth of information concerning not only Mary's family background, and the history of the family, but also relevant issues such as the importance of social position and status within Victorian Canada, the role of women in the family and society, and the impact of faith and religion in colonial society. Nonetheless, it is Mary herself who holds the reader's attention as she tells her own story of life in the young colony in her own words, bringing to life a bygone era and society. This volume will be of interest not only to scholars, but also to general readers who are interested in discovering a new perspective on a historical period." -- Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray -- Canadian Book Review Annual 2006, 200702"The diaries reflect the changing economic, political, and social temper of the times....But in 1869, the idea of being 'Canadian' was, in Jackson Armstrong's estimation, still largely unformed....With a fine eye for detail...Armstrong isolates and discusses in...his introduction...the importance of women's work, changing understandings of class and status, and the role of religion and community networks in colonists' lives." -- The Canadian Historical Review, 200507"These accounts of a...woman's life in Toronto around the time of Confederation do provide insight into what a middle-class woman's life must have been like." -- Globe and Mail, 20040814"Seven Eggs Today: The Diaries of Mary Armstrong, 1859 and 1869 [is] a well-edited, well-researched treasure from Victorian Canada....These kinds of diaries are an often overlooked source of information about women's lives and labours....The editor thoughtfully includes seemingly unimportant household accounts in the published version....He leaves in gaps, stricken mistakes, odd punctuation, underlining; in short, he has done as much as he can to transmit in printed text the idiosyncratic presentation of the diary manuscripts...Armstrong...is adept at making [the diaries'] relevance clear in historical and literary contexts. It stands as a useful template to anyone else editing a nineteenth-century diary and offers its readers unusual insight into the life of a middle-class woman in mid-century Canada." -- Kathryn Carter -- University of Toronto Quarterly, Letters in Canada 2004, 200606Table of ContentsTable of Contents for Seven Eggs Today: The Diaries of Mary Armstrong, 1859 and 1869 edited by Jackson W. Armstrong List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Editor's Note List of Abbreviations Introduction I. A Canadian's Story II. A Diarist's World Illustrations and Family Trees Diary of Mary Armstrong, 1859 Diary of Mary Armstrong, 1869 List of Individuals Notes Bibliography Index List of Illustrations Walworth and Camberwell Jane Tuesman Wickson John Wickson Eliza Chilver Wickson John Rusby Wickson Whitefield lithograph, Toronto, Canada West Wickson business calendar Yorkville map Thomas Armstrong business card Philip Armstrong Thomas and Fidelia Armstrong Fidelia and Thomas Norman Armstrong Sarah Wickson Hamilton, sketch of Paris, Ontario Wickson painting, Portrait of Arthur Wickson Paul Giovanni Wickson Family Trees Descendants of James and Jane Wickson (abridged) Descendants of Philip Armstrong (abridged)

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Book Synopsis Cold War Comforts examines Canadian women's efforts to protect children's health and safety between the dropping of the first atomic bomb in Hiroshima in 1945 and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Amid this global insecurity, many women participated in civil defence or joined the disarmament movement as means to protect their families from the consequences of nuclear war. To help children affected by conflicts in Europe and Asia, women also organized foreign relief and international adoptions. In Canada, women pursued different paths to peace and security. From all walks of life, and from all parts of the country, they dedicated themselves to finding ways to survive the hottest periods of the Cold War. What united these women was their shared concern for children's survival amid Cold War fears and dangers. Acting on their identities as Canadian citizens and mothers, they characterized with their activism the genuine interest many women had in protecting children's health and safety. In addition, their activities offered them a legitimate space to operate in the traditionally male realms of defence and diplomacy. Their efforts had a direct impact on the lives of children in Canada and abroad and influenced changes in Canada's education curriculum, immigration laws, welfare practices, defence policy, and international relations. Cold War Comforts offers insight into how women employed maternalism, nationalism, and internationalism in their work, and examines shifting constructions of family and gender in Cold War Canada. It will appeal to scholars of history, child and family studies, and social policy. Trade Review"Cold War Comforts is a fascinating account of Canadian women's international activism during the Cold War." - Kevin Brushett, Royal Military College of Canada, British Journal of Canadian Studies, Volume 27. Number 1"Building wonderfully on the work of the Cold War historians who precede her, Brookfield uses her own research to provide new voices that deepen our understanding of this precarious time in Canadian history. Cold War Comforts is an engaging look at the many women who navigated new waters to ensure a peaceful future for their children, and for our country." -- Joanna Dawson -- Canada's History, 201306"Most innovative in this study is Brookfield's juxtaposing women's disarmament and peace initiatives with foster parent and international adoption schemes. She shows how women as activists and individuals operated both at home and abroad, traveling to such Cold War hotspots as Greece, Korea, and Vietnam in an effort to carry out child protection work.... Importantly, although her focus is on women's activism, she writes children into that activist history, showing how the Cold War infiltrated schools and fundraising and perhaps shaped children's consciousness concerning their place in the emergent global village. It's here that the reader searches for more; although it is a sign of a good book that it points so clearly to subsequent research questions.... This lively and rewarding book helps us reconceptualize important twentieth-century developments, confirming the place of women and children in the history of the Cold War." -- Tamara Myers, Department of History, University of British Columbia -- H-Net"The years 1945 to 1975 take on a certain "golden era" hue in collective memory, even while the domestic security this suggests belies the consistent, at times intense, Cold War anxieties of the larger global setting. In this study, Tarah Brookfield explores the historic complexities so deftly captured in her book's title: the "Cold War comforts" that the women at her story's centre were so intent to bring about on behalf of children, ever the globe's most vulnerable citizens. She offers a masterful analysis of the ways in which the period's interwoven concerns about gender, family, class, "race," age, national identity and international security coalesced on the children who embody the future. In a lively and engaging manner, Dr. Brookfield draws upon the fascinating oral histories of the female historical actors and their families, to show how Canadian women faced the challenges of protecting and enhancing the welfare of children-our own and those of less fortunate nations-by vigorously taking up the cause of peace, security and human rights, at home and across the globe. As she demonstrates, although infused by "traditional" commitments to maternalism, nationalism and internationalism, their courageous activism played a vital role in the reconfiguration of ideas and practices about gender, family, children's rights and women's roles that unfolded in this rapidly-changing postwar world. Tarah Brookfield's Cold War Comforts: Canadian Women, Child Safety, and Global Insecurity, 1945-1975 , is quite simply an inaugural study. It breaks new ground in our historical understanding of postwar Canadian society and culture, and national and international social policy formation, within shifting contexts of peace, war, and the persistent threat of global annihilation. We are delighted to welcome this important addition to Wilfrid Laurier University Press's multidisciplinary Studies in Childhood and Family in Canada series." -- Cynthia Comacchio, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier University, series editor,Studies in Childhood and Family in Canada"If you wish to understand how the Cold War actually affected most Canadians, this is the book to read. Quite properly it directs our attention to women's individual and collective efforts to ensure safety for children at home and abroad. Men might have supplied the Cold War's military face, as with Dr. Strangelove, but the other not-so-gentle sex supplied many of the key strategists for peace. Tarah Brookfield does a wonderful job in telling us just how this happened. Her discussion of bomb shelters, disarmament campaigns, and support for the United Nations, foster parenting, and international adoption is lively and thoughtful and ought to help revitalize Canadian discussion of the relations between foreign policy and domestic affairs." -- Veronica Strong-Boag, University of British Columbia, author of Fostering Nation? Canada Confronts Its History of Childhood Disadvantage (WLU Press, 2011)Table of Contents Cold War Comforts: Canadian Women, Child Safety, and Global Insecurity, by Tarah Brookfield List of Acronyms and Initialisms Acknowledgements Introduction Part I: At Home 1. Cold War Canada: Mobilizing Women for a New War 2. The Home Front Becomes the Frontline: Fallout Shelter Madness 3. In the Name of Children: The Disarmament Movement Part II: Abroad 4. Seeds of Destiny: The United Nations and Child Welfare 5. Long-Distance Mothers: Foster Parent Plan Programs 6. A Change in Direction: Starving, Knitting, and Caring for Vietnam 7. The Politics of Orphans: Origins of International Adoption and Operation Babylift Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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