What do ordinary citizens really think about issues of gender equality and gender roles? Combining data from both telephone surveys and in-depth focus groups, Ambition and Accommodation provides the most detailed portrait to date of how Americans, in particular American women, think they are faring in today's society.

By juxtaposing the voices of women and men from all walks of life, Sigel finds that women's perceptions of gender relations are complex and often contradictory. Although most women see gender discrimination pervading nearly all social interactions—private as well as public—they do not invariably feel that they personally have been its victims. They want to see discrimination ended, but believe that men do not necessarily share this goal. Women are torn, according to Sigel, between the desire to improve their positions relative to men and the desire to avoid open conflict with them. Their desire not to jeopardize their relations with men, Sigel holds, helps explain women's willingness to accommodate a less-than-egalitarian situation by, for example, taking on the second shift at home or by working harder than men on the job. Sigel concludes that, although men and women agree on the principle of gender equality, definitions as well as practice differ by gender.

This complex picture of how women, while not always content with the status quo, have chosen to accommodate to the world they must face every day is certain to provoke considerable debate.

Laura Levine Frader’s synthesis of labor history and gender history brings to the fore failures in realizing the French social model of equality for all citizens. Challenging previous scholarship, she argues that the male breadwinner ideal was stronger in France in the interwar years than scholars have typically recognized, and that it had negative consequences for women’s claims to the full benefits of citizenship. She describes how ideas about masculinity, femininity, family, and work affected post–World War I reconstruction, policies designed to address France’s postwar population deficit, and efforts to redefine citizenship in the 1920s and 1930s. She demonstrates that gender divisions and the male breadwinner ideal were reaffirmed through the policies and practices of labor, management, and government. The social model that France implemented in the 1920s and 1930s incorporated fundamental social inequalities.

Frader’s analysis moves between the everyday lives of ordinary working women and men and the actions of national policymakers, political parties, and political movements, including feminists, pro-natalists, and trade unionists. In the years following World War I, the many women and an increasing number of immigrant men in the labor force competed for employment and pay. Family policy was used not only to encourage reproduction but also to regulate wages and the size of the workforce. Policies to promote married women’s and immigrants’ departure from the labor force were more common when jobs were scarce, as they were during the Depression. Frader contends that gender and ethnicity exerted a powerful and unacknowledged influence on French social policy during the Depression era and for decades afterward.

Acclaimed since its original publication, Coming on Strong has become a much-cited touchstone in scholarship on women and sports. In this new edition, Susan K. Cahn updates her detailed history of women's sport and the struggles over gender, sexuality, race, class, and policy that have often defined it. A new chapter explores the impact of Title IX and how the opportunities and interest in sports it helped create reshaped women's lives even as the legislation itself came under sustained attack.

The last half-century has witnessed substantial change in the opportunities and rewards available to men and women in the workplace. While the gender pay gap narrowed and female labor force participation rose dramatically in recent decades, some dimensions of gender inequality—most notably the division of labor in the family—have been more resistant to change, or have changed more slowly in recent years than in the past. These trends suggest that one of two possible futures could lie ahead: an optimistic scenario in which gender inequalities continue to erode, or a pessimistic scenario where contemporary institutional arrangements persevere and the gender revolution stalls. In The Declining Significance of Gender?, editors Francine Blau, Mary Brinton, and David Grusky bring together top gender scholars in sociology and economics to make sense of the recent changes in gender inequality, and to judge whether the optimistic or pessimistic view better depicts the prospects and bottlenecks that lie ahead. It examines the economic, organizational, political, and cultural forces that have changed the status of women and men in the labor market. The contributors examine the economic assumption that discrimination in hiring is economically inefficient and will be weeded out eventually by market competition. They explore the effect that family-family organizational policies have had in drawing women into the workplace and giving them even footing in the organizational hierarchy. Several chapters ask whether political interventions might reduce or increase gender inequality, and others discuss whether a social ethos favoring egalitarianism is working to overcome generations of discriminatory treatment against women. Although there is much rhetoric about the future of gender inequality, The Declining Significance of Gender? provides a sustained attempt to consider analytically the forces that are shaping the gender revolution. Its wide-ranging analysis of contemporary gender disparities will stimulate readers to think more deeply and in new ways about the extent to which gender remains a major fault line of inequality.

Doing Comparable Worth is the first empirical study of the actual process of attempting to translate into reality the idea of equal pay for work of equal value. This political ethnography documents a large project undertaken by the state of Oregon to evaluate 35,000 jobs of state employees, identify gender-based pay inequities, and remedy these inequities. The book details both the technical and political processes, showing how the technical was always political, how management manipulated and unions resisted wage redistribution, and how initial defeat was turned into partial victory for pay equity by labor union women and women's movement activists.

As a member of the legislative task force that was responsible for implementing the legislation requiring a pay equity study in Oregon, Joan Acker gives an insider's view of how job evaluation, job classification, and the formulation of an equity plan were carried out. She reveals many of the political and technical problems in doing comparable worth that are not evident to outsiders. She also places comparable worth within a feminist theoretical perspective.

In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.

Among liberal thinkers, there is an optimistic belief that men and women are on a cultural journey toward equality—in the workplace, on the street, and in the home. But observation and evidence both tell us that in many ways this progress has stopped and in some cases, even reversed.

In TheEnd of Equality, renowned feminist Beatrix Campbell argues that even as the patriarchy has lost some of its legitimacy, new inequalities are emerging in our culture. We are living, Campbell writes, in an era of neo-patriarchy in which violence has proliferated; body anxiety and self-hatred have flourished; rape is committed with impunity; sex trafficking thrives, and the struggle for equal pay is at an end. After four decades observing society, Campbell still speaks of the long-sought goal of gender equality. But now she calls for a new revolution.

One of the least-understood issues in federal sports policy, Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 reflects the nation's aspirational belief that girls and boys, women and men, deserve equal educational opportunities in athletics. Equal Play shows how this ideal has been implemented-and thwarted-by actions in every branch of the federal government.

This reader addresses issues in sports before Title IX and the backlash that has resulted from the policy being instituted. The editors have collected the best scholarly writing on the landmark events of the last four decades and couples these with new original essays, primary documents from court cases, administrative regulations, and relevant supporting sources. The result is the most comprehensive single-volume work on the subject.

Equal Play includes essays by many well-known sports journalists who discuss how government actions have shaped, supported, and hindered the goal of gender equality in school athletics. They discuss the history of women in sports, analyze the meaning of "equal opportunity" for female athletes, and examine shifts in arguments for and against Title IX. Equal Play will interest anyone who is concerned with gender issues in American athletics and the growth of college sports.

Contributors include: Susan Cahn, Donna de Varona, Julie Foudy, Jessica Gavora, Bil Gilbert, Christine Grant, Mariah Burton Nelson, Gary R. Roberts, Don Sabo, Larry Schwartz, Michael Sokolove, Welch Suggs, Nancy Williamson, and the editors.

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021***

In this sharp intervention, authors Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago defiantly develop a feminist understanding of debt, showing its impact on women and members of the LGBTQ+ community and examining the relationship between debt and social reproduction.

Exploring the link between financial activity and the rise of conservative forces in Latin America, the book demonstrates that debt is intimately linked to gendered violence and patriarchal notions of the family. Yet, rather than seeing these forces as insurmountable, the authors also show ways in which debt can be resisted, drawing on concrete experiences and practices from Latin America and around the world.

Featuring interviews with women in Argentina and Brazil, the book reveals the real-life impact of debt and how it falls mainly on the shoulders of women, from the household to the wider effects of national debt and austerity. However, through discussions around experiences of work, prisons, domestic labour, agriculture, family, abortion and housing, a narrative of resistance emerges.

Translated by Liz Mason-Deese.

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021***

"Of great value to those interested in the financialisation of everyday life and social reproduction."—LSE Review of Books
 
In this sharp evaluation and call to action, authors Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago defiantly develop a feminist understanding of debt, showing its impact on women and members of the LGBTQ+ community and examining the relationship between debt and social reproduction.
 
Exploring the link between financial activity and the rise of conservative forces in Latin America, the book demonstrates that debt is intimately linked to gendered violence and patriarchal notions of the family. Yet, rather than seeing these forces as insurmountable, the authors also show ways in which debt can be resisted, drawing on concrete experiences and practices from Latin America and around the world.  Chapters include:
 
*Debt and Social Reproduction
*Debt as a “Counter-revolution” of Everyday Life
*The writing on the Body of Women
*Neither Victims not Entrepreneurs
*Feminist Insubordination and Fascist Neoliberalism
*The Patriarchy Has My Missing Contributions
*Hunger and Gender Mandates
*Us Against Debt
 
The authors state in their Introduction, “Our investigations and activism show that there is an urgent need to develop a specifically feminist analysis of finance. Here we do so by bringing together methodological elements, political hypotheses, and narratives of practices elaborated by the feminist movement that are challenging finance.”
 
Featuring interviews with women in Argentina and Brazil, the book reveals the real-life impact of debt and how it falls mainly on the shoulders of women, from the household to the wider effects of national debt and austerity. However, through discussions around experiences of work, prisons, domestic labor, agriculture, family, abortion and housing, a narrative of resistance emerges.
 

'A robust, decolonial challenge to carceral feminism' - Angela Y. Davis

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2022***

The mainstream conversation surrounding gender equality is a repertoire of violence: harassment, rape, abuse, femicide. These words suggest a cruel reality. But they also hide another reality: that of gendered violence committed with the complicity of the State.

In this book, Françoise Vergès denounces the carceral turn in the fight against sexism. By focusing on 'violent men', we fail to question the sources of their violence. There is no doubt as to the underlying causes: racial capitalism, ultra-conservative populism, the crushing of the Global South by wars and imperialist looting, the exile of millions and the proliferation of prisons - these all put masculinity in the service of a policy of death.

Against the spirit of the times, Françoise Vergès refuses the punitive obsession of the State in favour of restorative justice.

 In this shocking study, Anne M. Butler shows that the distinct gender disadvantages already faced by women within western society erupted into intense physical and mental violence when they became prisoners in male penitentiaries. 
 
Drawing on prison records and the words of the women themselves, Gendered Justice in the American West places the injustices women prisoners endured in the context of the structures of male authority and female powerlessness that pervaded all of American society. Butler's poignant cross-cultural account explores how nineteenth-century criminologists constructed the "criminal woman"; how the women's age, race, class, and gender influenced their court proceedings; and what kinds of violence women inmates encountered. She also examines the prisoners' diet, illnesses, and experiences with pregnancy and child-bearing, as well as their survival strategies.
 

Gendered Vulnerability examines the factors that make women politicians more electorally vulnerable than their male counterparts. These factors combine to convince women that they must work harder to win elections—a phenomenon that Jeffrey Lazarus and Amy Steigerwalt term “gendered vulnerability.” Since women feel constant pressure to make sure they can win reelection, they devote more of their time and energy to winning their constituents’ favor. Lazarus and Steigerwalt examine different facets of legislative behavior, finding that female members do a better job of representing their constituents than male members.

Before Rosa Parks and the March on Washington, four African American women risked their careers and freedom to defy the United States Army over segregation. Women Army Corps (WAC) privates Mary Green, Anna Morrison, Johnnie Murphy, and Alice Young enlisted to serve their country, improve their lives, and claim the privileges of citizenship long denied them. Promised a chance at training and skilled positions, they saw white WACs assigned to those better jobs and found themselves relegated to work as orderlies. In 1945, their strike alongside fifty other WACs captured the nation's attention and ignited passionate debates on racism, women in the military, and patriotism. Glory in Their Spirit presents the powerful story of their persistence and the public uproar that ensued. Newspapers chose sides. Civil rights activists coalesced to wield a new power. The military, meanwhile, found itself increasingly unable to justify its policies. In the end, Green, Morrison, Murphy, and Young chose court-martial over a return to menial duties. But their courage pushed the segregated military to the breaking point ”and helped steer one of American's most powerful institutions onto a new road toward progress and justice.

Is it "just words" when a lawyer cross-examines a rape victim in the hopes of getting her to admit an interest in her attacker? Is it "just words" when the Supreme Court hands down a decision or when business people draw up a contract? In tackling the question of how an abstract entity exerts concrete power, Just Words focuses on what has become the central issue in law and language research: what language reveals about the nature of legal power.

Conley and O'Barr show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic that will be welcomed by students and specialists alike.

Belonging to a union can bring higher wages, fringe benefits, greater job security and, sometimes, training. But unions—still known as "brotherhoods"—often remain rigidly segregated by gender, despite the fact that sexual harassment and discrimination in employment are illegal. Live Wire is an in-depth case study of Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, arguably the most powerful and influential building trades local in the United States. Francine Moccio brings to life forty years of public policy failure that has resulted in restricted opportunities for women in skilled blue-collar jobs.

Live Wire is a unique foray into the gender dynamics of one trade and one union in historical depth, based on extensive primary, secondary, and archival research. It contributes much-needed research about sex segregation in blue-collar occupations, particularly in unions and fraternal organizations. And it provides important insights into complex interactions of work, union, and family life.

Using a unique data set comparing mothers and daughters who attended Douglass College—the women's college of Rutgers University—twenty-five years apart, Krista Jenkins perceptively observes the changes in how women acquire their attitudes toward gender roles and behaviors in the post-women's movement years.

Mothers, Daughters, and Political Socialization examines the role of intergenerational transmission—the maternal influences on younger women—while also looking at differences among women in attitudes and behaviors relative to gender roles that might be attributed to the nature of the times during their formative years. How do daughters coming of age in an era when the women's movement is far less visible deal with gendered expectations compared to their mothers? Do they accept the contemporary status quo their feminist mothers fought so hard to achieve? Or, do they press forward with new goals?

Jenkins shows how contemporary women are socialized to accept or reject traditional gender roles that serve to undermine their equality.

After decades of research by the author and her colleagues into what women do in positions such as bank teller, secretary, waitress, nurse, factory worker, and poultry processor, Karen Messing is astonished to find that for many policy-makers, researchers, and activists, the topic of women's occupational health doesn't exist.

Messing investigates different types of occupational health issues for women, notably the controversial topics of male/female differences in jobs, health, and basic biology. The pain and suffering of women workers is illustrated in vivid case studies of research into health risks for women in the workplace, including musculoskeletal disease, the hazards of office work, emotional stress, and reproductive hazards.

No longer can employers, administrators, and health professionals ignore the very real problems women encounter in their jobs. Throughout the book, Messing captures the everyday reality of workplace tasks and stress -- from lifting boxes to juggling mental tasks under pressure to the emotional labor of caring for upset or abusive people -- by combining on-site observing with listening to the workers' descriptions of their work lives.

Responding to the tough question, why are scientists so unresponsive to the needs of women workers, Messing describes long-standing difficulties in gaining attention for the occupational health of women, ranging from the structure of the grant process and the conferences crucial to the professional life of researchers to the basic assumptions of scientific practice. Messing laments the separation of even most feminist health researchers from workplace concerns and asserts that it is time to develop a science that can prevent women workers' pain and suffering.

Blacks and Whites. Men and Women. Historically, each group has held very different types of jobs. The divide between these jobs was stark—clean or dirty, steady or inconsistent, skilled or unskilled. In such a rigidly segregated occupational landscape, race and gender radically limited labor opportunities, relegating Black women to the least desirable jobs. Opportunity Denied is the first comprehensive look at changes in race, gender, and women’s work across time, comparing the labor force experiences of Black women to White women, Black men and White men. Enobong Hannah Branch merges empirical data with rich historical detail, offering an original overview of the evolution of Black women’s work.

From free Black women in 1860 to Black women in 2008, the experience of discrimination in seeking and keeping a job has been determinedly constant. Branch focuses on occupational segregation before 1970 and situates the findings of contemporary studies in a broad historical context, illustrating how inequality can grow and become entrenched over time through the institution of work.

Telling to Live embodies the vision that compelled Latina feminists to engage their differences and find common ground. Its contributors reflect varied class, religious, ethnic, racial, linguistic, sexual, and national backgrounds. Yet in one way or another they are all professional producers of testimonios—or life stories—whether as poets, oral historians, literary scholars, ethnographers, or psychologists. Through coalitional politics, these women have forged feminist political stances about generating knowledge through experience. Reclaiming testimonio as a tool for understanding the complexities of Latina identity, they compare how each made the journey to become credentialed creative thinkers and writers. Telling to Live unleashes the clarifying power of sharing these stories.
The complex and rich tapestry of narratives that comprises this book introduces us to an intergenerational group of Latina women who negotiate their place in U.S. society at the cusp of the twenty-first century. These are the stories of women who struggled to reach the echelons of higher education, often against great odds, and constructed relationships of sustenance and creativity along the way. The stories, poetry, memoirs, and reflections of this diverse group of Puerto Rican, Chicana, Native American, Mexican, Cuban, Dominican, Sephardic, mixed-heritage, and Central American women provide new perspectives on feminist theorizing, perspectives located in the borderlands of Latino cultures.
This often heart wrenching, sometimes playful, yet always insightful collection will interest those who wish to understand the challenges U.S. society poses for women of complex cultural heritages who strive to carve out their own spaces in the ivory tower.

Contributors. Luz del Alba Acevedo, Norma Alarcón, Celia Alvarez, Ruth Behar, Rina Benmayor, Norma E. Cantú, Daisy Cocco De Filippis, Gloria Holguín Cuádraz, Liza Fiol-Matta, Yvette Flores-Ortiz, Inés Hernández-Avila, Aurora Levins Morales, Clara Lomas, Iris Ofelia López, Mirtha N. Quintanales, Eliana Rivero, Caridad Souza, Patricia Zavella

Subzero temperatures, whiteout blizzards, and even the lack of restrooms didn’t deter them. Nor did sneers, harassment, and threats. Wildcat Women is the first book to document the life and labor of pioneering women in the oil fields of Alaska’s North Slope. It profiles fourteen women who worked in the fields, telling a little-known history of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. These trailblazers conquered their fears to face hazardous working and living conditions, performing and excelling at “a man’s job in a man’s world.” They faced down challenges on and off the job: they drove buses over ice roads through snowstorms; wrestled with massive pipes; and operated dangerous valves that put their lives literally in their hands; they also fought union hall red tape, challenged discriminatory practices, and fought for equal pay—and sometimes won. The women talk about the roads that brought them to this unusual career, where they often gave up comfort and convenience and felt isolated and alienated. They also tell of the lifelong friendships and sense of family that bonded these unlikely wildcats. The physical and emotional hardship detailed in these stories exemplifies their courage, tenacity, resilience, and leadership, and shows how their fight for recognition and respect benefited woman workers everywhere.

Women and the Law is a pioneering study of the way in which the law has treated women – at work, in the family, in matters of sexuality and fertility, and in public life. It was first published in 1984 by Susan Atkins and Brenda Hoggett, then University teachers. The authors examine the origins of British law’s attitude to women, trace the development of the law and ways in which it reflects the influence of economic, social and political forces and the dominance of men. They illustrate the tendency, despite formal equality, for deep-rooted problems of encoded gender inequality to remain. Since 1984 the authors have achieved distinguished careers in law and public service. This 2018 Open Access edition provides a timely opportunity to revisit their ground-breaking analysis and reflect on how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same. 

Attorney Raymond F. Gregory addresses the millions of women who think they might be facing sexual discrimination and explains federal measures enacted to assist workers in contesting unlawful employer conduct. He presents actual court cases to demonstrate the ways that women have challenged their employers. The cases illustrate legal principles in real-life experiences. Many of the cases relate compelling stories of workers caught up in a web of employer discriminatory conduct. Gregory has eliminated legal jargon, ensuring that all concepts are clear to his readers. Individuals will turn to this book again and again to obtain authoritative background on this important topic.

Topics covered include:

• The increasing incidence of sexual harassment in the workplace
• Common forms of sex discrimination
• Discrimination against older women
• Discrimination against women of color
• Discrimination against women in the professions
• Discrimination against pregnant women
• Discrimination against women with children
• Sex discrimination in hiring, promotion, termination
• Employer liability for workplace sexual harassment
• Employer retaliation against workers
• Proving sex discrimination in the courtroom
• Compensatory and punitive damages
• Back pay, front pay, and other remedies

Women with disabilities are women first, sharing the dreams and disappointments common to women in a male-dominated society. But because society persists in viewing disability as an emblem of passivity and incompetence, disabled women occupy a devalued status in the social hierarchy. This book represents the intersection of the feminist and disability rights perspectives; it analyzes the forces that push disabled women towards the margins of social life, and it considers the resources that enable these women to resist the stereotype.

Drawing on law, social science, folklore, literature, psychoanalytic theory, and political activism, this book describes the experience of women with disabilities. The essays consider the impact of social class, race, the age at which disability occurs, and sexual orientation on the disabled woman's self esteem as well as on her life options. The contributors focus their inquiry on the self perceptions of disabled women and ask: From what sources do these women draw positive self images? How do they resist the culture's power to label them as deviant? The essays describe the ways in which disabled women face discrimination in the workplace and the failure of the mainstream women's movement to address their concerns.

In the series Health, Society, and Policy, edited by Sheryl Ruzek and Irving Kenneth Zola.