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As the coronavirus ravages the globe, its aftermaths have brought gender inequalities to the forefront of many conversations. Countries in the Middle East and North Africa have been slow to prepare for, adapt to, and mitigate the COVID-19 health crisis and its impacts on governance, economics, security, and rights. Women’s physical well-being, social safety nets, and economic participation have been disproportionately affected, and with widespread shutdowns and capricious social welfare programs, women are exiting the workplace and the classroom, carrying the caregiving burden.

With feminist foregrounding, Rita Stephan's collection COVID and Gender in the Middle East gathers an impressive group of local scholars, activists, and policy experts. The book examines a range of national and localized responses to gender-specific issues around COVID’s health impact and the economic fallout and resulting social vulnerabilities, including the magnified marginalization of Syrian refugees; the inequitable treatment of migrant workers in Bahrain; and the inadequate implementation of gender-based violence legislation in Morocco. An essential global resource, this book is the first to provide empirical evidence of COVID’s gendered effects.

A collection of essays grappling with the many, often overlooked, forms of unfree labor in the West.

When Americans think of unfree labor—coerced, extracted from workers unable to freely enter and exit contracts—what comes to mind is Black slavery and peonage in the South. But other forms of unfree labor also built the United States. Collecting a diverse range of sharply argued historical essays, Capturing Labor shares the story of unfree labor in the Southwest, affecting mainly Indigenous people, Mexican Americans, and people of color.

In Texas and elsewhere, state agents developed various methods for directing the movement of workers, seizing their time, and controlling the products of their efforts. Case studies highlight the detention during World War I of Indigenous children and unaccompanied women, who were placed in boarding schools, fined, and obligated to work off the resulting debt. Other essays expose authorities forcing workers to break strikes and jailing Americans who supported labor uprisings in rural Mexico and the United States. Prisons and asylums supplied coerced agricultural workers and musicians who were never compensated for their labor or by the labels that took their recordings.

Editors Jessica Pliley and John Mckiernan-González contend that unfree labor continues to shape American life, and is all around us today. Understanding its history aids us in recognizing and bringing attention to the grim realities of the present.

The rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and eighteenth-century London patent theatres even capitalized on their pregnancies. Carrying All Before Her uses the reproductive histories of six celebrity women (Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and Dorothy Jordan) to demonstrate that pregnancy affected celebrity identity, impacted audience reception and interpretation of performance, changed company repertory and altered company hierarchy, influenced the development and performance of new plays, and had substantial economic consequences for both women and the companies for which they worked. Deepening the fields of celebrity, theatre, and women's studies, as well as social and medical histories, Phillips reveals an untapped history whose relevance and impact persists today.

In the mid-twentieth century colleges' concerns about finances and enrollments, as well as ideological pressures to integrate formerly separate social groups, led men's colleges, and some women's colleges, to become coeducational. The admission of women to practically all men's colleges created a serious challenge for women's colleges. Most people no longer believed women's colleges were necessary since women had virtually unlimited access to higher education. Even though research spawned by the women's movement indicated the benefits to women of a "room of their own," few young women remained interested in applying to women's colleges.

Challenged by Coeducation details the responses of women's colleges to this latest wave of coeducation. Case studies written expressly for this volume include many types of women's colleges-Catholic and secular; Seven Sisters and less prestigious; private and state; liberal arts and more applied; northern, southern, and western; urban and rural; independent and coordinated with a coeducational institution. They demonstrate the principal ways women's colleges have adapted to the new coeducational era: some have been taken over or closed, but most have changed by admitting men and thereby becoming coeducational, or by offering new programs to different populations. Some women's colleges, mostly those that are in cities, connected to other colleges, and prestigious with a high endowment, still enjoy success.

Despite their dramatic drop in numbers, from 250 to fewer than 60 today, women's colleges are still important, editors Miller-Bernal and Poulson argue. With their commitment to enhancing women's lives, women's colleges and formerly women's colleges can serve as models of egalitarian coeducation.

Works of Distinction, LDEI M.F.K. Fisher Prize for Excellence in Culinary Media Content, 2022

A rare woman’s-eye-view of working in the professional French kitchen

Though women enter France’s culinary professions at higher rates than ever, men still receive the lion’s share of the major awards and Michelin stars. Rachel E. Black looks at the experiences of women in Lyon to examine issues of gender inequality in France’s culinary industry. Known for its female-led kitchens, Lyon provides a unique setting for understanding the gender divide, as Lyonnais women have played a major role in maintaining the city’s culinary heritage and its status as a center for innovation. Voices from history combine with present-day interviews and participant observation to reveal the strategies women use to navigate male-dominated workplaces or, in many cases, avoid men in kitchens altogether. Black also charts how constraints imposed by French culture minimize the impact of #MeToo and other reform-minded movements. 

Evocative and original, Cheffes de Cuisine celebrates the successes of women inside the professional French kitchen and reveals the obstacles women face in the culinary industry and other male-dominated professions.

Mexican American women reached across generations to develop a bridging activism that drew on different methods and ideologies to pursue their goals. Marisela R. Chávez uses a wealth of untapped oral histories to reveal the diverse ways activist Mexican American women in Los Angeles claimed their own voices and space while seeking to leverage power. Chávez tells the stories of the people who honed beliefs and practices before the advent of the Chicano movement and the participants in the movement after its launch in the late 1960s. As she shows, Chicanas across generations challenged societal traditions that at first assumed their place on the sidelines and then assigned them second-class status within political structures built on their work. Fueled by a surging pride in their Mexican heritage and indigenous roots, these activists created spaces for themselves that acknowledged their lives as Mexicans and women.

Vivid and compelling, Chicana Liberation reveals the remarkable range of political beliefs and life experiences behind a new activism and feminism shaped by Mexican American women.

When Edward Tamlin disappears while writing his memoir, Jane Tamlin (his wife and the mother of his young children) begins to write a secret, corrective “counter-memoir” of her own. Calling the book Choke Box, she reveals intimate, often irreverent, details about her family and marriage, rejecting—and occasionally celebrating—her suspected role in her husband's disappearance.

Choke Box isn't Jane's first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. But the stories we tell may help us survive—if they don't kill us first.

It was like a remake of The Cowboy and the Lady, except that this time they weren't friends. The 1990 Texas governor's race pitted Republican Clayton Williams, a politically conservative rancher and oil millionaire, against Democrat Ann Richards, an experienced progressive politician noted for her toughness and quick wit. Their differences offered voters a choice not only of policies and programs but also of stereotypes and myths of men's and women's proper roles.

Claytie and the Lady is the first in-depth look at how gender affected the 1990 governor's race. The authors' analysis reveals that Ann Richards' victory was a result of a unique combination of characteristics. She was simultaneously tough enough to convince voters that she could lead and feminine enough to put them at ease. At the same time, she remained committed to the progressive and women's issues that had won her the early support of feminists and progressives. The authors also show how Clayton Williams' appeal to the Texas cowboy myth backfired when he broke the cowboy code of chivalry to women.

The authors set their discussion within the historical context of twentieth-century Texas politics and the theoretical context of gender politics in order to pose a number of thought-provoking questions about the effects of women's participation in political life. Interviews with key players in the 1990 election, including Governor Ann Richards, add a lively and insightful counterpoint to the text.

The significant archive of writing that came out of the women’s liberation movement in the United States, from 1965 to 1980, speaks to the value activists placed on reading as an act that is at once personal and yet also about the collective good. Yung-Hsing Wu examines the importance of reading—personal, professional, vocational, aesthetic, and always political—and how the act itself brought a host of women, each with their own history with the movement, into relation, and into a belief in that relation. The value given to reading can be seen in the ways feminists pursued media representation; in consciousness-raising (CR) groups including shared reading in their meetings; in women opening bookstores, developing newsletters, establishing journals, and starting presses; and in corporate publishers pursuing feminist fiction.

Closely and Consciously crisscrosses distinct print spheres, including newsletters and periodicals produced by feminist cells and consciousness-raising groups, feminist presses seeking to articulate their visions for women’s writing, the emergence of feminist literary criticism in first-time monographs and newly established journals, personal and editorial correspondence, press records, and the publishing histories of bestsellers that testified to the increasingly broad popularity of women’s writing. Uniting all these disparate activists and media outlets, and providing crucial relationality, was reading. With a mix of close readings and archival research, Wu unpacks and interprets this central act of reading and why it matters during a crucial moment of feminist history.