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2284 books match the query 'Women' and 117 start with b
Breaking into Baseball
Women and the National PastimeJean Hastings Ardell. Foreword by Ila Borders
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005
While baseball is traditionally perceived as a game to be played, enjoyed, and reported from a masculine perspective, it has long been beloved among women—more so than any other spectator sport. Breaking into Baseball: Women and the National Pastime upends baseball’s accepted history to at last reveal just how involved women are, and have always been, in the American game.
Through provocative interviews and deft research, Jean Hastings Ardell devotes a detailed chapter to each of the seven ways women participate in the game—from the stands as fans, on the field as professionals or as amateur players, behind the plate as umpires, in the front office as executives, in the press box as sportswriters and reporters, or in the shadows as Baseball Annies. From these revelatory vantage points, Ardell invites overdue appreciation for the affinity and talent women bring to baseball at all levels and shows us our national game anew.
From its ancient origins in spring fertility rituals through contemporary marketing efforts geared toward an ever-increasing female fan base, baseball has always had a feminine side, and generations of women have sought—and been sought after—to participate in the sport, even when doing so meant challenging the cultural mores of their era. In that regard, women have been breaking into baseball from the very beginning. But recent decades have witnessed great strides in legitimizing women’s roles on the diamond as players and umpires as well as in vital management and media roles. In her thoughtfully organized and engagingly written survey, Ardell offers a chance for sports enthusiasts and historians of both genders to better appreciate the storied and complex relationship women have so long shared with the game and to glimpse the future of women in baseball.
Breaking into Baseball is augmented by twenty-four illustrations and a foreword from Ila Borders, the first woman to play more than three seasons of men’s professional baseball.
Breaking the Barnyard Barrier
A Woman Veterinarian Paves the WayLinda Rhodes
University of Nevada Press, 2026
In Breaking the Barnyard Barrier, Linda Rhodes tells the story of how a woman, through grit and tears, made her way in a man’s world and blazed a path that prevailed against career stereotypes.
Breaking the Chains
Gender, Context, and the Politics of Writing in Modern ChinaDong Limin
Seagull Books, 2025
How has literature shaped gender politics in modern China? How has the concept of “woman” evolved within the shifting sociopolitical landscape? Old Chains and New delves into these questions by examining the dynamic interplay between literature, gender, and historical change. Drawing from literary studies, history, and sociology, this book reveals how women’s writing has not only reflected but also actively shaped cultural and national transformations.
From the late Qing era, when the “woman question” emerged as part of China’s response to imperialist pressures, to the ongoing evolution of feminist literary scholarship, this study argues that gender and literature are deeply interwoven. Women’s liberation in modern China was never solely about gender equality—it became a driving force for broader social change and national identity formation. Engaging with the complexities of women’s literature through a cultural-political lens, this book challenges static definitions and calls for a reevaluation of women’s literature not just as a literary category but as a key component in shaping China’s modern intellectual and cultural history.
By adopting the framework of “China as method,” Old Chains and New reimagines the role of literature in ideological and cultural shifts. It highlights women’s writing as a unique form of aesthetic politics—one with the power to intervene in and transform reality.
Breaking the Gender Code
Women and Urban Public Space in the Twentieth-Century United StatesGeorgina Hickey
University of Texas Press, 2023
A history of the activism that made public spaces in American cities more accessible to women.
From the closing years of the nineteenth century, women received subtle—and not so subtle—messages that they shouldn’t be in public. Or, if they were, that they were not safe. Breaking the Gender Code tells the story of both this danger narrative and the resistance to it.
Historian Georgina Hickey investigates challenges to the code of urban gender segregation in the twentieth century, focusing on organized advocacy to make the public spaces of American cities accessible to women. She traces waves of activism from the Progressive Era, with its calls for public restrooms, safe and accessible transportation, and public accommodations, through and beyond second-wave feminism, and its focus on the creation of alternative, women-only spaces and extensive anti-violence efforts. In doing so, Hickey explores how gender segregation intertwined with other systems of social control, as well as how class, race, and sexuality shaped activists' agendas and women's experiences of urban space. Drawing connections between the vulnerability of women in public spaces, real and presumed, and contemporary debates surrounding rape culture, bathroom bills, and domestic violence, Hickey unveils both the strikingly successful and the incomplete initiatives of activists who worked to open up public space to women.
Brightening Glance
Art and LifePat Lipsky
University of Iowa Press, 2025
Brightening Glance offers a stunningly self-revealing portrait of the struggles and sacrifices, joys and excitement inherent in a modern painter’s life, and captures the evergreen allure of New York’s art world between 1970 and 2010. In stripped down, elegant prose, Lipsky summons a New York that no longer exists and ponders why we love (and hate) the art world. Ultimately, it’s a story of a contemporary woman, a mother, and a painter, who dares a career in a field where only a handful of women have succeeded.
Bring Down the Little Birds
On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything ElseCarmen Giménez Smith
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Writing in fragmented yet coherent sections, the author shares with us her interior monologue, affording the reader a uniquely honest, insightful, and deeply personal glimpse into a woman’s first and second journeys into motherhood. Giménez Smith begins Bring Down the Little Birds by detailing the relationship with her own mother, from whom her own concept of motherhood originated, a conception the author continually reevaluates and questions over the course of the book.
Combining fragments of thought, daydreams, entries from notebooks both real and imaginary, and real-life experiences, Giménez Smith interrogates everything involved in becoming and being a mother for both the first and second times. She wonders what her children will one day know about her own “secret life,” meditates on the physical effects of pregnancy, and questions the myths about, nostalgia for, and glorification of motherhood.
While Giménez Smith incorporates universal experiences of motherhood that other authors have detailed throughout literature, what separates her book from these many others is that her reflections are captured in a style that establishes an intimacy and immediacy between author and reader through which we come to know the secret life of a mother and are made to question our own conception of what motherhood really means.
British Working-Class and Radical Writing Since 1700
Edited by John Goodridge and Adam Bridgen
University of London Press, 2025
At a time when working-class writing is gaining long-overdue recognition, British Working-Class and Radical Writing Since 1700 explores the intersection of class and literature over more than three centuries. This volume brings together leading scholars to examine the problems faced by working-class writers and the impact of class on themes such as feminism and anti-imperialism. Spanning from early laboring-class poets to contemporary memoirists, the collection revisits figures like John Clare and Ethel Carnie Holdsworth and also recovers overlooked voices and texts.
Covering poetry, fiction, drama, and political writing, the book investigates the relationship between class and literary production, offering fresh perspectives on how working-class and radical literature has shaped British cultural history. From the Romantic-era resistance of laboring poets to mid-century miners’ novels and the evolution of contemporary working-class memoirs, these essays reveal how literature has served as both a site of struggle and a tool of empowerment.
Broadway's Bravest Woman
Selected Writings of Sophie TreadwellEdited by Jerry Dickey and Miriam Lopez-Rodriguez
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006
This collection of plays, fiction, and journalistic essays by Sophie Treadwell provides an engaging portrait of one of America’s most innovative yet neglected feminists. Broadway’s Bravest Woman: Selected Writings of Sophie Treadwell is the first critical compilation of her prose and drama and highlights the most significant and formerly unavailable pieces of her work. Editors Jerry Dickey and Miriam López-Rodriguez place Treadwell within the context of the early twentieth century and outline four themes that infused her feminist ideology: the social positioning of women, ethnic identity in the United States, tensions between modern progressivism and conservatism, and the individual’s role in the face of social justice.
Treadwell’s critical reputation as a dramatist is largely based on the success of the 1928 expressionist drama Machinal, but little is known about her other dramas, much less her fiction and journalism. Drawing largely upon unpublished manuscripts, this volume documents the breadth of Treadwell’s work, from an investigative newspaper serial written in 1914 to selections from an autobiographical novel completed during World War II, which chronicled her development as a feminist.
In the introduction, Dickey and López-Rodriguez present a detailed portrait of Treadwell’s sensational but critically neglected journalistic career, from her 1915 serial on social welfare for prostitutes in San Francisco to her 1921 ground-breaking story on the Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. They also outline the personal and social factors that helped shape Treadwell’s feminist ideals.
Expanding the awareness of the feminist writer’s accomplishments, Broadway’s Bravest Woman is critical resource for students, scholars, and theatre artists. The collection, enhanced by six illustrations, not only offers the most complete portrait of Treadwell to date as a significant feminist voice in modern America but also provides a glimpse into the social life and international relations of the United States in the interwar period of the twentieth century.
Broken Silences
Interviews with Black and White Women WritersEdited by Shirley M Jordan
Rutgers University Press, 1993
In these 20 interviews with women writers of fiction, Jordan, who teaches at Hampton University in Virginia, attempts to plumb the relations between black and white women in fiction and in life, and to explore the creative process. Although the book suffers from lengthy discussions of somewhat obscure work, the interviewees, most of whom have portrayed female characters of a race other than their own, offer intriguing, often conflicting observations about the primacy of race, gender or class. Kaye Gibbons ( Ellen Foster ) suggests that rural locations offer commonality to black and white Southern women; Marita Golden ( Long Distance Life ) observes that white writers emphasize female beauty while black writers focus on character. This book may be a useful supplement to literature courses.
From Library Journal
The message derived from the candid and articulate women interviewed here is, as Belva Plain states, "you learn as you live together." Editor Jordan (Hampton Univ., Virginia) has opened a dialog on writing and race relations by publishing these interviews with 20 significant contemporary black and white women writers, from Alice Childress and Joyce Carol Oates to Mildred Pitts Walker. The substance of these writers' thoughts is that the commonality of women's experience informs the genuine portrayal of a character as much as does the writer's understanding of her blackness or whiteness. This special book, so different from others that examine the writing process, is likely to stimulate dialog among women and to provoke serious study of many excellent women writers working today. Recommended for all collections supporting the study of literature, women's studies, and race relations.
Brooke at the Bar
Inside Our Legal SystemBrooke Wunnicke
University Press of Colorado, 2023
Brooke shares vignettes of her early life—California in the Great Depression, college at Stanford, law school in Colorado during World War II, and the 1946 opening of her Cheyenne law office, a precedent for women in law. She vividly describes memorable and amusing experiences with clients, witnesses, lawyers, juries, and judges and explains some significant cases. She recounts important and dynamic events from her twelve years as Denver’s chief appellate deputy district attorney, an era during which she was an inestimable mentor to many young lawyers who became prominent in the private and public sectors.
Brooke passionately believed “the law has been and will continue to be civilization’s hope.” In her book’s final part, she demystifies many legal terms and procedures and describes the parts of a civil jury trial—including information for jurors and witnesses—and provides an enthusiastic and clear refresher on the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Brooke at the Bar is a unique and historically important contribution that will be of interest to general readers, scholars, and students interested in US law, political science, government, women’s history, twentieth-century western history, civil rights, and legal communities, including those in Wyoming and Colorado, where Brooke was “at the Bar.”
Brown Girls, Grown Up
StoriesSima Qadeer
Northwestern University Press, 2026
A poignant and graceful story collection about the clash and harmony of finding one’s place in an adult world that feels “other”
Brown Girls, Grown Up shines a light on the nuances of modern womanhood with grace, honesty, and charm. The stories in Qadeer’s debut collection delve into the subtleties and blatant struggles of navigating shifting identities as one matures, into the joys and challenges of intimacy and aging, and into the changing tides of motherhood. Middle-aged Amira takes radical action after meeting a new friend who lulls her into feeling safe and accepted; Hanna enrolls her biracial children in a local Sunday school after worrying they have no real connection to her Muslim heritage; betrayals and secrets come to light when a group of college friends reunite to take stock and compare achievements. Filled with humor and heartache, this collection offers a fresh and profoundly relatable perspective on the lifelong search for belonging in a world shaped by tradition, modernity, and individual ambition.
Bubbles and Machines
Gender, Information and Financial CrisesMicky Lee
University of Westminster Press, 2019
Buckeye Women
The History of Ohio’s DaughtersStephane Elise Booth
Ohio University Press, 2001
By the last two decades of the twentieth century, Ohio women had held positions as university presidents, chief executive officers, judges, superintendents of schools, and lieutenant governor. They had won Pulitzer Prizes and, in one case, the Nobel Prize for Literature.
But these women stood on the shoulders of those who came before: the pioneering women who helped tame the Ohio frontier, who filled the breach, who worked for reform, and who struggled for their own rights as citizens of one of the most prosperous states in the Union.
Buckeye Women is an accessible and comprehensive account of the role Ohio women have assumed in the history of the state and a narrative of their hardships and of the victories that have been won in the past two hundred years.
In this timely contribution to the Ohio Bicentennial Series, Professor Stephane Booth has written a rich and well-researched volume, providing for the first time a record of the vast and pivotal accomplishments shared by the women of Ohio over the last two centuries and documenting their contribution to the state’s remarkable heritage.
Building Financial Empowerment for Survivors of Domestic Violence
A Path to Hope and FreedomJudy L. Postmus
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Curiously, little of the research on domestic violence has sought to either fully understand the impact of financial abuse or to determine which intervention strategies are most effective for the financial empowerment of survivors. Building Financial Empowerment for Survivors of Domestic Violence aims to address this critical knowledge gap by providing those who work with survivors of domestic violence with practical knowledge on how to empower the financial well-being and stability of survivors. Specifically, every practitioner, human service provider, criminal justice practitioner, financial manager, and corporate supervisor should be screening the women they encounter for economic abuse, and when such abuse is found, they should work with the women toward developing financial safety plans and refer survivors to financial empowerment programs to assist survivors to become free from abuse.
Butter Road
A NovelJaclyn Gilbert
Acre Books, 2026
A searing novel about a community irrevocably transformed by gun violence.
In 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, taking the students hostage and shooting ten girls before turning his weapon on himself. Set twelve years after this event, largely in the village of Nickel Mines, Butter Road explores the long-reaching ramifications of tragedy through the imagined lives of three women: Emma Walsh, an eighteen-year-old survivor of the shooting; her mother, Ruth, who lost her eldest daughter to the violence; and Sara Caldwell, an “English” outsider and wife of a doctor researching genetic disorders in the Amish population.
At the novel's outset, Sara enlists young Emma for housework and gardening to help the Walshes alleviate the debt they’ve accumulated caring for Emma’s disabled brother, who has the rare condition Sara’s husband is studying. Over the course of several months, Sara and Emma form a bond, and as Emma explores Sara's library, she begins writing fragments of memory on the backs of old feed calendars—a process that leads her to grapple with the devastating deaths of her sister and friends, and the insularity of Amish forgiveness. The more Emma writes, the more she questions her upbringing and ingrained beliefs, ultimately seeing her relationship to Isaac Ames, the man she is destined to marry, in a new light. The story culminates with the characters making breathtaking, self-searching decisions that alter the lives of others as well as their own.
Emotionally acute and lyrically spare, Butter Road centers on living with what we can’t control, on understanding trauma and collective grief, and on following one’s heart.
Buying the Night Flight
The Autobiography of a Woman Foreign CorrespondentGeorgie Anne Geyer
University of Chicago Press, 2001
By the Time You Read This
StoriesYannick Murphy
University of Alabama Press, 2021
WINNER OF FC2’s CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE
A gathering of luminescent stories that illustrates how fraught and contingent the simplest of lives can be, and the often unexpected means available to each of us for our own salvation
The truths revealed and the lives upended in the 13 stories that make up Yannick Murphy’s By the Time You Read This are at once singularly foreign and uncannily familiar. A wife pens a series of suicide notes to her family that verge on the comic, hovering between the tyrannical and the absurd. A mother obsesses over what her child eats. A young girl left with caretakers in New York draws on her potent imagination with consequences in real life that are both liberating and disastrous. In a college application essay a young woman finally begins to make sense of the troubling vicissitudes of her existence. A young French girl departs for America with her reprehensible beau to find she’s as much a stranger to herself abroad as she was at home. As with her previous novels and story collections, Murphy’s keen rendering of these disparate, complex lives illuminate in ways both quiet and startling our capacity for deliverance and devastation through daring acts of self-invention.