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2285 books match the query 'Women' and 115 start with c

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cover of Clouds Without Rain: An Amish Country Mystery

Clouds Without Rain

An Amish Country Mystery

P. L. Gaus

Ohio University Press, 2001

Written in the tradition of Tony Hillerman, in Clouds without Rain, P. L. Gaus once again provides compelling intrigue and insight into Amish culture and tradition alongside contemporary American life.

In the wake of a fatal accident involving an Amish buggy and an eighteen-wheeler, Professor Michael Branden, working with the Holmes County Sheriff’s Department, becomes suspicious about the true nature of the crash. His suspicions only grow when the trustee of the dead man’s estate disappears a few days later.

Faced with Amish teenagers in goat masks robbing buggies on dusty lanes, land swindles involving out-of-town developers, several mysterious deaths, and the disappearance of a bank official, Branden realizes that there is far more to the story than a buggy crash on a sleepy country road.

This new edition of Clouds without Rain  features an exclusive interview with the author, reading group materials, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.

cover of Clutch: An Education at Work

Clutch

An Education at Work

Linda Pawlenty

The Ohio State University Press, 2025

Driving a concrete mixer throughout graduate school, Linda Pawlenty became accustomed to being the odd one out: as a working-class laborer in academia and as a woman and an academic in the construction industry. But from the moment she became a truck driver, Pawlenty loved the satisfaction of proving herself, the thrill of coaxing large machines into place with precision and care. Similarly, when beginning a PhD program in literature, she maneuvered her way through the strange territory of the university, proud to be the first in her family to attempt the degree. In Clutch, she recounts her time shuttling between worlds, delivering with bracing clarity a rare perspective on gender, class, labor, and whiteness—and how the implications of each shift according to context. From enduring sexual harassment at construction sites and classist comments from professors to the joys of driving a truck and finding academic fulfillment, Pawlenty takes stock of her disparate experiences to ask hard questions about power and acceptance, providing a beacon for those fighting for presence in places they are not expected—and not always welcome—to be.

cover of Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left

Coed Revolution

The Female Student in the Japanese New Left

Chelsea Szendi Schieder

Duke University Press, 2021

In the 1960s, a new generation of university-educated youth in Japan challenged forms of capitalism and the state. In Coed Revolution Chelsea Szendi Schieder recounts the crucial stories of Japanese women's participation in these protest movements led by the New Left through the early 1970s. Women were involved in contentious politics to an unprecedented degree, but they and their concerns were frequently marginalized by men in the movement and the mass media, and the movement at large is often memorialized as male and masculine. Drawing on stories of individual women, Schieder outlines how the media and other activists portrayed these women as icons of vulnerability and victims of violence, making women central to discourses about legitimate forms of postwar political expression. Schieder disentangles the gendered patterns that obscured radical women's voices to construct a feminist genealogy of the Japanese New Left, demonstrating that student activism in 1960s Japan cannot be understood without considering the experiences and representations of these women.

cover of Coeds Ruining the Nation: Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media

Coeds Ruining the Nation

Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media

Julia C. Bullock

University of Michigan Press, 2019

In the late 1800s, Japan introduced a new, sex-segregated educational system. Boys would be prepared to enter a rapidly modernizing public sphere, while girls trained to become “good wives and wise mothers” who would contribute to the nation by supporting their husbands and nurturing the next generation of imperial subjects. When this system was replaced by a coeducational model during the American Occupation following World War II, adults raised with gender-specific standards were afraid coeducation would cause “moral problems”—even societal collapse. By contrast, young people generally greeted coeducation with greater composure.

This is the first book in English to explore the arguments for and against coeducation as presented in newspaper and magazine articles, cartoons, student-authored school newsletters, and roundtable discussions published in the Japanese press as these reforms were being implemented. It complicates the notion of the postwar years as a moment of rupture, highlighting prewar experiments with coeducation that belied objections that the practice was a foreign imposition and therefore “unnatural” for Japanese culture. It also illustrates a remarkable degree of continuity between prewar and postwar models of femininity, arguing that Occupation-era guarantees of equal educational opportunity were ultimately repurposed toward a gendered division of labor that underwrote the postwar project of economic recovery. Finally, it excavates discourses of gender and sexuality underlying the moral panic surrounding coeducation to demonstrate that claims of rampant sexual deviance and other concerns were employed as disciplinary mechanisms to reinforce an ideology of harmonious gender complementarity and to dissuade women from pursuing conventionally masculine prerogatives.

cover of Coin of the Realm: A Novel

Coin of the Realm

Zoe Zolbrod

Northwestern University Press, 2027

Can liberation be found in the unexpected corners of a Renaissance faire?

In a near-future United States, the government has just stripped away the protections of birthright citizenship, and eighteen-year-old Raven is facing deportation. Her best hope: finding her long-gone father, an off-the-grid Renaissance faire entrepreneur called Tom the Hunter. If Raven can convince Tom to affirm his paternity, she will be able to remain in the only country she has ever known.

But Tom is no easy man locate, let alone tell what to do. The charismatic leader of an underground resistance movement based at a Ren faire in Bristol, Wisconsin, he has spent his life agitating against the ever-increasing reach of corporate and government surveillance while avoiding its gaze. In a society overrun by drones, self-driving cars, and wearable devices that track mood and behavior, he sends messages by pigeon and trains hawks to attack invaders. The only thing from the “regular world” allowed to enter his self-contained realm has been Gwen, his new lover. Facing economic and emotional headwinds after losing her job, Gwen has fled her family and a home dangerously in need of remediation, and she dives headfirst into an affair with the passionate yet conniving Tom. But when Tom’s machinations threaten those around him, Gwen begins to question her choice to leave her children behind for a world that may not be as empowering as it seems.

As Raven and Gwen become enmeshed in the vibrant and insurgent community of Bristol’s Ren faire and Tom’s antics reach unsettling new heights, each must make a choice on where they stand—and with whom.

cover of Cold Spell

Cold Spell

Deb Vanasse

University of Alaska Press, 2014

With precise and evocative prose, Cold Spell tells the story of a mother who risks everything to start over and a daughter whose longings threaten to undo them both.
From the moment Ruth Sanders rips a glossy photo of a glacier from a magazine, she believes her fate is intertwined with the ice. Her unsettling fascination bewilders her daughter, sixteen-year-old Sylvie, still shaken by her father’s leaving. When Ruth uproots Sylvie and her sister from their small Midwestern town to follow her growing obsession—and a man—to Alaska, they soon find themselves entangled with an unfamiliar wilderness, a divided community, and one another. As passions cross and braid, the bond between mother and daughter threatens to erode from the pressures of icy compulsion and exposed secrets.
Inspired by her own experience arriving by bush plane to live on the Alaska tundra, Deb Vanasse vividly captures the reality of life in Alaska and the emotional impact of loving a remote and unforgiving land.

cover of Cold War Progressives: Women's Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom

Cold War Progressives

Women's Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom

Jacqueline Castledine

University of Illinois Press, 2012

In recognizing the relation between gender, race, and class oppression, American women of the postwar Progressive Party made the claim that peace required not merely the absence of violence, but also the presence of social and political equality. For progressive women, peace was the essential thread that connected the various aspects of their activist agendas. This study maps the routes taken by postwar popular front women activists into peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Historian Jacqueline Castledine tells the story of their decades-long effort to keep their intertwined social and political causes from unraveling and to maintain the connections among peace, feminism, and racial equality.

Postwar progressive women and their allies often saw themselves as members of a popular front promoting the rights of workers, women, and African Americans under the banner of peace. However, the Cold War indelibly shaped the contours of their activism. Following the Progressive Party's demise in the 1950s, these activists reentered social and political movements in the early 1960s and met the inescapable reality that their agenda was a casualty of the left-liberal political division of the early Cold War era. Many Americans now viewed peace as a leftist concern associated with Soviet sympathizers and civil rights as the favored cause of liberals. Faced with the dilemma of working to reunite these movements or choosing between them, some progressive women chose to lead such New Left organizations as the Jeannette Rankin Brigade while others became leaders of liberal "second wave" feminist movements.

Whether they committed to affiliating with groups that emphasized one issue over others or attempted to found groups with broad popular-front type agendas, Progressive women brought to their later work an understanding of how race, class, and gender intersect in women's organizing. These women's stories demonstrate that the ultimate result of Cold War-era McCarthyism was not the defeat of women's activism, but rather its reconfiguration.

cover of Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist

Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist

Laura Cereta

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Renaissance writer Laura Cereta (1469–1499) presents feminist issues in a predominantly male venue—the humanist autobiography in the form of personal letters. Cereta's works circulated widely in Italy during the early modern era, but her complete letters have never before been published in English. In her public lectures and essays, Cereta explores the history of women's contributions to the intellectual and political life of Europe. She argues against the slavery of women in marriage and for the rights of women to higher education, the same issues that have occupied feminist thinkers of later centuries.

Yet these letters also furnish a detailed portrait of an early modern woman’s private experience, for Cereta addressed many letters to a close circle of family and friends, discussing highly personal concerns such as her difficult relationships with her mother and her husband. Taken together, these letters are a testament both to an individual woman and to enduring feminist concerns.

cover of College Women In The Nuclear Age: Cultural Literacy and Female Identity, 1940-1960

College Women In The Nuclear Age

Cultural Literacy and Female Identity, 1940-1960

Babette Faehmel

Rutgers University Press, 2011

In the popular imagination, American women during the time between the end of World War II and the 1960s—the era of the so-called “feminine mystique”—were ultraconservative and passive. College Women in the Nuclear Age takes a fresh look at these women, showing them actively searching for their place in the world while engaging with the larger intellectual and political movements of the times.

Drawing from the letters and diaries of young women in the Cold War era, Babette Faehmel seeks to restore their unique voices and to chronicle their collective ambitions. She also explores the shifting roles that higher education played in establishing these hopes and dreams, making the case that the GI Bill served to diminish the ambitions of many American women even as it opened opportunities for many American men. A treasure-trove of original research, the book should stimulate scholarly discussion and captivate any reader interested in the thoughts and lives of American women.

cover of Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru

Colonial Habits

Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru

Kathryn Burns

Duke University Press, 1999

In Colonial Habits Kathryn Burns transforms our view of nuns as marginal recluses, making them central actors on the colonial stage. Beginning with the 1558 founding of South America’s first convent, Burns shows that nuns in Cuzco played a vital part in subjugating Incas, creating a creole elite, and reproducing an Andean colonial order in which economic and spiritual interests were inextricably fused.
Based on unprecedented archival research, Colonial Habits demonstrates how nuns became leading guarantors of their city’s social order by making loans, managing property, containing “unruly” women, and raising girls. Coining the phrase “spiritual economy” to analyze the intricate investments and relationships that enabled Cuzco’s convents and their backers to thrive, Burns explains how, by the late 1700s, this economy had faltered badly, making convents an emblem of decay and a focal point for intense criticism of a failing colonial regime. By the nineteenth century, the nuns had retreated from their previous roles, marginalized in the construction of a new republican order.
Providing insight that can be extended well outside the Andes to the relationships articulated by convents across much of Europe, the Americas, and beyond, Colonial Habits will engage those interested in early modern economics, Latin American studies, women in religion, and the history of gender, class, and race.

cover of Colonial Harem

Colonial Harem

Malek Alloula

University of Minnesota Press, 1986

A collection of picture postcards of Algerian women exploited by the French, this “album” illustrates a powerful analysis of the distorting, denigrating effects of their presence on Algerian Society.

cover of Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Sex, and Class in Kenya

Colonial Inscriptions

Race, Sex, and Class in Kenya

Carolyn Martin Shaw

University of Minnesota Press, 1995

In Kenyan colonialist imagery, the Kikuyu were vilified as deceitful servants while the Maasai were romanticized as noble savages in a fashion similar to American representation of the Black slave and the "wild" Indian. Carolyn Martin Shaw examines this imagery in the works of historians and ethnographers, as well as in novels and films.

Through the works of Louis Leakey, Jomo Kenyatta, Elspeth Huxley, and Isak Dinesen, along with her own ethnographic research, Martin Shaw investigates the discourses that shaped inequalities, rivalries, and fantasies in colonial Kenya. She explores narratives of domination and subordination, arguing that Europeans brought to Africa long-established ideas of difference that influenced racial inequalities in the colonial situation. Including discussion of the controversial practice of female genital mutilation, Colonial Inscriptions presents an African American woman's views of how images of African colonialism have been influenced by European and American racism and sexual fantasies.

cover of Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology

Color of Violence

The INCITE! Anthology

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, editor

Duke University Press, 2016

The editors and contributors to Color of Violence ask: What would it take to end violence against women of color? Presenting the fierce and vital writing of organizers, lawyers, scholars, poets, and policy makers, Color of Violence radically repositions the antiviolence movement by putting women of color at its center. The contributors shift the focus from domestic violence and sexual assault and map innovative strategies of movement building and resistance used by women of color around the world. The volume's thirty pieces—which include poems, short essays, position papers, letters, and personal reflections—cover violence against women of color in its myriad forms, manifestations, and settings, while identifying the links between gender, militarism, reproductive and economic violence, prisons and policing, colonialism, and war. At a time of heightened state surveillance and repression of people of color, Color of Violence is an essential intervention.

Contributors. Dena Al-Adeeb, Patricia Allard, Lina Baroudi, Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), Critical Resistance, Sarah Deer, Eman Desouky, Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo, Dana Erekat, Nirmala Erevelles, Sylvanna Falcón, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Emi Koyama, Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez, maina minahal, Nadine Naber, Stormy Ogden, Julia Chinyere Oparah, Beth Richie, Andrea J. Ritchie, Dorothy Roberts, Loretta J. Ross, s.r., Puneet Kaur Chawla Sahota, Renee Saucedo, Sista II Sista, Aishah Simmons, Andrea Smith, Neferti Tadiar, TransJustice, Haunani-Kay Trask, Traci C. West, Janelle White

cover of Colorado Women in World War II

Colorado Women in World War II

Gail M. Beaton

University Press of Colorado, 2023

Four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Mildred McClellan Melville, a member of the Denver Woman’s Press Club, predicted that war would come for the United States and that its long arm would reach into the lives of all Americans. And reach it did. Colorado women from every corner of the state enlisted in the military, joined the workforce, and volunteered on the home front. As military women, they served as nurses and in hundreds of noncombat positions. In defense plants they riveted steel, made bullets, inspected bombs, operated cranes, and stored projectiles. They hosted USO canteens, nursed in civilian hospitals, donated blood, drove Red Cross vehicles, and led scrap drives; and they processed hundreds of thousands of forms and reports. Whether or not they worked outside the home, they wholeheartedly participated in a kaleidoscope of activities to support the war effort.

In Colorado Women in World War II Gail M. Beaton interweaves nearly eighty oral histories—including interviews, historical studies, newspaper accounts, and organizational records—and historical photographs (many from the interviewees themselves) to shed light on women’s participation in the war, exploring the dangers and triumphs they felt, the nature of their work, and the lasting ways in which the war influenced their lives. Beaton offers a new perspective on World War II—views from field hospitals, small steel companies, ammunition plants, college classrooms, and sugar beet fields—giving a rare look at how the war profoundly transformed the women of this state and will be a compelling new resource for readers, scholars, and students interested in Colorado history and women’s roles in World War II.

cover of Colorado Women: A History

Colorado Women

Gail M. Beaton

University Press of Colorado, 2012

Colorado Women is the first full-length chronicle of the lives, roles, and contributions of women in Colorado from prehistory through the modern day. A national leader in women's rights, Colorado was one of the first states to approve suffrage and the first to elect a woman to its legislature. Nevertheless, only a small fraction of the literature on Colorado history is devoted to women and, of those, most focus on well-known individuals.

The experiences of Colorado women differed greatly across economic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. Marital status, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation colored their worlds and others' perceptions and expectations of them. Each chapter addresses the everyday lives of women in a certain period, placing them in historical context, and is followed by vignettes on women's organizations and notable individuals of the time.

Native American, Hispanic, African American, Asian and Anglo women's stories hail from across the state--from the Eastern Plains to the Front Range to the Western Slope--and in their telling a more complete history of Colorado emerges. Colorado Women makes a significant contribution to the discussion of women's presence in Colorado that will be of interest to historians, students, and the general reader interested in Colorado, women's and western history.

cover of Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C.

Colored No More

Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C.

Treva B. Lindsey

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Home to established African American institutions and communities, Washington, D.C., offered women in the New Negro movement a unique setting for the fight against racial and gender oppression. Colored No More traces how African American women of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century made significant strides toward making the nation's capital a more equal and dynamic urban center.

Treva B. Lindsey presents New Negro womanhood as a multidimensional space that included race women, blues women, mothers, white collar professionals, beauticians, fortune tellers, sex workers, same-gender couples, artists, activists, and innovators. Drawing from these differing but interconnected African American women's spaces, Lindsey excavates a multifaceted urban and cultural history of struggle toward a vision of equality that could emerge and sustain itself. Upward mobility to equal citizenship for African American women encompassed challenging racial, gender, class, and sexuality status quos. Lindsey maps the intersection of these challenges and their place at the core of New Negro womanhood.

cover of Comfort: A Novel of the Reverse Underground Railroad

Comfort

A Novel of the Reverse Underground Railroad

H.A. Maxson and Claudia H. Young

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2014

The year 1816 in Delaware and surrounding states was known as “the year without a summer” due to debris from the eruption of Mt. Tambora that tainted most of the Northern hemisphere with chill and darkness. This time of chill and darkness provides the setting for this ambitious tale of people divided by the institution of slavery, ignorance, greed and social isolation and the triumph of a few people of character over impossible odds. Historians H.A. Maxson and Claudia H. Young bring alive this little known time and place in America. Their collaboration results in a memorable tale of loyalty and betrayal, compassion and cruelty, and of dauntless courage and creativity. Comfort is a talented young seamstress who has worked to buy her freedom from slavery from her benevolent owner, an Irish immigrant and former indentured servant. Her husband Cuff is an unwise, irresponsible and weak man who sells his wife to pay his gambling debt. When Comfort falls into the hands of the reprehensible dealer of human flesh Joe Johnson, she is sold south to Virginia, to a cruel master and poor manager. Comfort’s stalwart friend Esther, is a slave whose skin is pale enough for her to pass as white. Esther possesses an extensive knowledge of “Roots”, the native art of using plants for therapeutic and not-so-therapeutic purposes. Esther pairs with Pompey, a mute freed slave who is clever and resourceful, to escape her sadistic owner, travel south to find Comfort and help her find her way back to freedom and her baby girl. Comfort tells the story of how shared morality and character can lead to unlikely partnerships in intrepid heroism. This extraordinary work by veteran authors sets a new standard for interpretation of the reverse underground railroad.

cover of Compelled to Act: Histories of Women's Activism in Western Canada

Compelled to Act

Histories of Women's Activism in Western Canada

Sarah Carter

University of Manitoba Press, 2020

cover of Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960

Competing Kingdoms

Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960

Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo, eds.

Duke University Press, 2010

Competing Kingdoms rethinks the importance of women and religion within U.S. imperial culture from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In an era when the United States was emerging as a world power to challenge the hegemony of European imperial powers, American women missionaries strove to create a new Kingdom of God. They did much to shape a Protestant empire based on American values and institutions. This book examines American women’s activism in a broad transnational context. It offers a complex array of engagements with their efforts to provide rich intercultural histories about the global expansion of American culture and American Protestantism.

An international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, the contributors bring under-utilized evidence from U.S. and non-U.S. sources to bear on the study of American women missionaries abroad and at home. Focusing on women from several denominations, they build on the insights of postcolonial scholarship to incorporate the agency of the people among whom missionaries lived. They explore how people in China, the Congo Free State, Egypt, India, Japan, Ndebeleland (colonial Rhodesia), Ottoman Bulgaria, and the Philippines perceived, experienced, and negotiated American cultural expansion. They also consider missionary work among people within the United States who were constructed as foreign, including African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants. By presenting multiple cultural perspectives, this important collection challenges simplistic notions about missionary cultural imperialism, revealing the complexity of American missionary attitudes toward race and the ways that ideas of domesticity were reworked and appropriated in various settings. It expands the field of U.S. women’s history into the international arena, increases understanding of the global spread of American culture, and offers new concepts for analyzing the history of American empire.

Contributors: Beth Baron, Betty Bergland, Mary Kupiec Cayton, Derek Chang, Sue Gronewold, Jane Hunter, Sylvia Jacobs, Susan Haskell Khan, Rui Kohiyama, Laura Prieto, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Mary Renda, Connie A. Shemo, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Ian Tyrrell, Wendy Urban-Mead

cover of Complete Writings: Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations

Complete Writings

Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations

Isotta Nogarola

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Renowned in her day for her scholarship and eloquence, Isotta Nogarola (1418-66) remained one of the most famous women of the Italian Renaissance for centuries after her death. And because she was one of the first women to carve out a place for herself in the male-dominated republic of letters, Nogarola served as a crucial role model for generations of aspiring female artists and writers.

This volume presents English translations of all of Nogarola's extant works and highlights just how daring and original her convictions were. In her letters and orations, Nogarola elegantly synthesized Greco-Roman thought with biblical teachings. And striding across the stage in public, she lectured the Veronese citizenry on everything from history and religion to politics and morality. But the most influential of Nogarola's works was a performance piece, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, in which she discussed the relative sinfulness of Adam and Eve—thereby opening up a centuries-long debate in Europe on gender and the nature of woman and establishing herself as an important figure in Western intellectual history. This book will be a must read for teachers and students of Women's Studies as well as of Renaissance literature and history.

cover of Composing Feminist Interventions: Activism, Engagement, Praxis

Composing Feminist Interventions

Activism, Engagement, Praxis

Kristine L. Blair

University Press of Colorado, 2018

This edited collection offers self-reflexive, critical accounts of how feminist writing studies scholars variously situated within rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies plan, implement, examine, and represent community-based inquiry and pedagogy. Readers will gain insight into the hows and whys involved with this important disciplinary work. Sharing a commitment to social change, the twenty-one chapter discussions and five course designs complicate and continue to evolve possibilities for how we conceptualize writing research and teaching as deeply collaborative, inclusive, and reciprocal practices.

cover of Comrade or Brother?: A History of the British Labour Movement

Comrade or Brother?

A History of the British Labour Movement

Mary Davis

Pluto Press, 2009

Critical and iconoclastic, Comrade or Brother? traces the history of the British Labour Movement from its beginnings at the onset of industrialisation through its development within a capitalist society, up to the end of the twentieth-century. Written by a leading activist in the labour movement, the book redresses the balance in much labour history writing. It examines the place of women and the influence of racism and sexism as well as providing a critical analysis of the rival ideologies which played a role in the uneven development of the labour movement.

cover of Comstock Women: The Making Of A Mining Community

Comstock Women

The Making Of A Mining Community

Ronald M. James

University of Nevada Press, 1997

When it comes to Nevada history, men get most of the ink. Comstock Women is a collection of 14 historical studies that helps to rectify that reality. The authors of these essays, who include some of Nevada’s most prominent historians, demographers, and archaeologists, explore such topics as women and politics, jobs, and ethnic groups. Their work goes far in refuting the exaggerated popular images of women in early mining towns as dance hall girls or prostitutes. Relying primarily on newspapers, court decisions, census records, as well as sparse personal diaries and records left by the woman, the essayists have resurrected the lives of the women who lived on the Comstock during the boom years.

cover of Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era

Conceiving Cuba

Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era

Andaya, Elise

Rutgers University Press, 2014

Received an Honorable Mention for the 2015 First Michelle Rosaldo Prize for a First Book in Feminist Anthropology from the Association for Feminist Anthropology

Winner of the Adele E. Clarke Book Award from ReproNetwork

After Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the Castro government sought to instill a new social order. Hoping to achieve a new and egalitarian society, the state invested in policies designed to promote the well-being of women and children. Yet once the Soviet Union fell and Cuba’s economic troubles worsened, these programs began to collapse, with serious results for Cuban families.

Conceiving Cuba offers an intimate look at how, with the island’s political and economic future in question, reproduction has become the subject of heated public debates and agonizing private decisions. Drawing from several years of first-hand observations and interviews, anthropologist Elise Andaya takes us inside Cuba’s households and medical systems. Along the way, she introduces us to the women who wrestle with the difficult question of whether they can afford a child, as well as the doctors who, with only meager resources at their disposal, struggle to balance the needs of their patients with the mandates of the state.

Andaya’s groundbreaking research considers not only how socialist policies have profoundly affected the ways Cuban families imagine the future, but also how the current crisis in reproduction has deeply influenced ordinary Cubans’ views on socialism and the future of the revolution. Casting a sympathetic eye upon a troubled state, Conceiving Cuba gives new life to the notion that the personal is always political.

cover of Concubines And Power: Five Hundred Years In A Northern Nigerian Palace

Concubines And Power

Five Hundred Years In A Northern Nigerian Palace

Heidi J. Nast

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

African Studies Association Women’s Caucus’s Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize winner

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title

The monumental palace of Kano, Nigeria, was built circa 1500 and is today inhabited by more than one thousand persons. Historically, its secluded interior housed hundreds of concubines whose role in the politics, economics, and culture of Kano city-state has been largely overlooked. In this pioneering work, Heidi J. Nast demonstrates how human-geographical methods can tell us much about a site like the palace, a place bereft of archaeological work or relevant primary sources.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic work and mapping data, Concubines and Power presents new evidence that palace concubines controlled the production of indigo-dyed cloth centuries before men did. The women were also key players in the assessment and collection of the state's earliest grain taxes, forming a complex and powerful administrative hierarchy that used the taxes for palace community needs. In addition, royal concubines served as representatives of their places of origin, their freeborn children providing the king with additional human capital to cement territorial alliances through marriage.

Social forces undoubtedly shaped and changed concubinage for hundreds of years, but Nast shows how the women’s reach extended far beyond the palace walls to the formation of the state itself.

cover of Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War

Confederate Daughters

Coming of Age during the Civil War

Victoria E. Ott

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War explores gender, age, and Confederate identity by examining the lives of teenage daughters of Southern slaveholding, secessionist families. These young women clung tenaciously to the gender ideals that upheld marriage and motherhood as the fulfillment of female duty and to the racial order of the slaveholding South, an institution that defined their status and afforded them material privileges. Author Victoria E. Ott discusses how the loyalty of young Southern women to the fledgling nation, born out of a conservative movement to preserve the status quo, brought them into new areas of work, new types of civic activism, and new rituals of courtship during the Civil War.

Social norms for daughters of the elite, their preparation for their roles as Southern women, and their material and emotional connections to the slaveholding class changed drastically during the Civil War. When differences between the North and South proved irreconcilable, Southern daughters demonstrated extraordinary agency in seeking to protect their futures as wives, mothers, and slaveholders.

From a position of young womanhood and privilege, they threw their support behind the movement to create a Confederate identity, which was in turn shaped by their participation in the secession movement and the war effort. Their political engagement is evident from their knowledge of military battles, and was expressed through their clothing, social activities, relationships with peers, and interactions with Union soldiers.

Confederate Daughters also reveals how these young women, in an effort to sustain their families throughout the war, adjusted to new domestic duties, confronting the loss of slaves and other financial hardships by seeking paid work outside their homes.

Drawing on their personal and published recollections of the war, slavery, and the Old South, Ott argues that young women created a unique female identity different from that of older Southern women, the Confederate bellehood. This transformative female identity was an important aspect of the Lost Cause mythology—the version of the conflict that focused on Southern nationalism—and bridged the cultural gap between the antebellum and postbellum periods.

Augmented by twelve illustrations, this book offers a generational understanding of the transitional nature of wartime and its effects on women’s self-perceptions. Confederate Daughters identifies the experiences of these teenage daughters as making a significant contribution to the new woman in the New South.

cover of Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation

Conferencing on the Edge

A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation

Rachel Corbman

Duke University Press, 2027

Rachel Corbman’s Conferencing on the Edge tells the story of how feminism and queer liberation became academic pursuits. Corbman centers five academic conferences with notable afterlives in feminist and queer studies, from the West Coast Women’s Studies conference at Sacramento State in 1973 to the 1989 Outside/Inside conference at Yale. Each of these conferences is cited for its role in bringing a conflict in the field—over race, sexuality, or professionalization—to a head. Corbman’s detailed oral and archival histories of these conferences, from their planning to the events themselves to their mythologizing in feminist and queer scholarship, expand a conventional narrative premised on turning points: from social movement to university discipline, from white to intersectional, from feminist to queer. Both a social movement history and a study of feminist and queer field formation, Conferencing on the Edge helps make sense of the profound entanglements of these fields and the administrative dangers they face today.

cover of Confidence Culture

Confidence Culture

Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill

Duke University Press, 2022

In Confidence Culture, Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill argue that imperatives directed at women to “love your body” and “believe in yourself” imply that psychological blocks rather than entrenched social injustices hold women back. Interrogating the prominence of confidence in contemporary discourse about body image, workplace, relationships, motherhood, and international development, Orgad and Gill draw on Foucault’s notion of technologies of self to demonstrate how “confidence culture” demands of women near-constant introspection and vigilance in the service of self-improvement. They argue that while confidence messaging may feel good, it does not address structural and systemic oppression. Rather, confidence culture suggests that women—along with people of color, the disabled, and other marginalized groups—are responsible for their own conditions. Rejecting confidence culture’s remaking of feminism along individualistic and neoliberal lines, Orgad and Gill explore alternative articulations of feminism that go beyond the confidence imperative.

cover of Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa

Congo's Dancers

Women and Work in Kinshasa

Lesley Nicole Braun

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

Dance music plays a central role in the cultural, social, religious, and family lives of the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Among the various genres popular in the capital city of Kinshasa, Congolese rumba occupies a special place and can be counted as one of the DRC’s most well-known cultural exports. The public image of rumba was historically dominated by male bandleaders, singers, and musicians. However, with the introduction of the danseuse (professional concert dancer) in the late 1970s, the role of women as cultural, moral, and economic actors came into public prominence and helped further raise Congolese rumba’s international profile.

In Congo’s Dancers, Lesley Nicole Braun uses the prism of the Congolese danseuse to examine the politics of control and the ways in which notions of visibility, virtue, and socio-economic opportunity are interlinked in this urban African context. The work of the danseuse highlights the fact that public visibility is necessary to build the social networks required for economic independence, even as this visibility invites social opprobrium for women. The concert dancer therefore exemplifies many of the challenges that women face in Kinshasa as they navigate the public sphere, and she illustrates the gendered differences of local patronage politics that shape public morality. As an ethnographer, Braun had unusual access to the world she documents, having been invited to participate as a concert dancer herself.

cover of Conquering Heroines: How Women Fought Sex Bias at Michigan and Paved the Way for Title IX

Conquering Heroines

How Women Fought Sex Bias at Michigan and Paved the Way for Title IX

Sara Fitzgerald

University of Michigan Press, 2020

In 1970, a group of women in Ann Arbor launched a crusade with an objective that seemed beyond reach at the time—force the University of Michigan to treat women the same as men. Sex discrimination was then rampant at U-M. The school’s admissions officials sought to maintain a ratio of 55:45 between male and female undergraduate entrants, turning away more qualified female applicants and arguing, among other things, that men needed help because they were less mature and posted lower grades. Women comprised less than seven percent of the University’s faculty members and their salaries trailed their male peers by substantial amounts. As one administrator put it when pressed about the disparity, “Men have better use for the extra money.”

Galvanized by their shared experiences with sex discrimination, the Ann Arbor women organized a group called FOCUS on Equal Employment for Women, led by activist Jean Ledwith King. Working with Bernice Sandler of the Women’s Equity Action League, they developed a strategy to unleash the power of another powerful institution—the federal government—to demand change at U-M and, they hoped, across the world of higher education. Prompted by a complaint filed by FOCUS, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare soon documented egregious examples of discrimination in Michigan’s practices toward women and threatened to withhold millions of dollars in contracts unless the school adopted remedies. Among the hundreds of similar complaints filed against U.S. colleges in 1970–1971, the one brought by the Michigan women achieved the breakthrough that provided the historic template for settlements with other institutions.

Drawing on oral histories from archives as well as new interviews with living participants, Conquering Heroines chronicles this pivotal period in the histories of the University of Michigan and the women’s movement. An incredible story of grassroots activism and courageous women, the book highlights the kind of relentless effort that has helped make inclusivity an ongoing goal at U-M.

cover of Constituting Workers, Protecting Women: Gender, Law and Labor in the Progressive Era and New Deal Years

Constituting Workers, Protecting Women

Gender, Law and Labor in the Progressive Era and New Deal Years

Julie Novkov

University of Michigan Press, 2001

Constitutional considerations of protective laws for women were the analytical battlefield on which the legal community reworked the balance between private liberty and the state's authority to regulate. Julie Novkov focuses on the importance of gender as an analytical category for the legal system.
During the Progressive Era and New Deal, courts often invalidated generalized protective legislation, but frequently upheld measures that limited women's terms and conditions of labor. The book explores the reasoning in such cases that were decided between 1873 and 1937. By analyzing all reported opinion on the state and federal level, as well as materials from the women's movement and briefs filed in the U.S. Supreme Court, the study demonstrates that considerations of cases involving women's measures ultimately came to drive the development of doctrine.
The study combines historical institutionalism and feminism to address constitutional interpretation, showing that an analysis of conflict over the meaning of legal categories provides a deeper understanding of constitutional development. In doing so, it rejects purely political interpretations of the so-called Lochner era, in which the courts invalidated many legislative efforts to ameliorate the worst effects of capitalism. By addressing the dynamic interactions among interested laypersons, attorneys, and judges, it demonstrates that no individuals or institutions have complete control over the generation of constitutional meaning.
Julie Novkov is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Oregon

cover of Contented among Strangers: Rural German-Speaking Women and Their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest

Contented among Strangers

Rural German-Speaking Women and Their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest

Linda Schelbitzki Pickle

University of Illinois Press, 1995

German-Americans make up one of the largest ethnic groups in the United States, yet their very success at assimilating has also made them one of the least visible. Contented among Strangers examines the central role German-speaking women in rural areas of the Midwest played in preserving their ethnic and cultural identity. Even while living far from their original homelands, these women applied traditional European patterns of rural family life and values to their new homes in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. As a result they were more content with their modest lives than were their Anglo-American counterparts. Through personal recollections--including interesting diary material translated by the author, church and community documents, and migration and census data--Pickle reveals the diversity and richness of the women's experiences.

cover of Contested Terrain: Reflections with Afghan Women Leaders

Contested Terrain

Reflections with Afghan Women Leaders

Sally L Kitch

University of Illinois Press, 2014

Sally L. Kitch explores the crisis in contemporary Afghan women’s lives by focusing on two remarkable Afghan professional women working on behalf of their Afghan sisters. Kitch's compelling narrative follows the stories of Judge Marzia Basel and Jamila Afghani from 2005 through 2013, providing an oft-ignored perspective on the personal and professional lives of Afghanistan's women. Contending with the complex dynamics of a society both undergoing and resisting change, Basel and Afghani speak candidly--and critically--of matters like international intervention and patriarchal Afghan culture, capturing the ways in which immense possibility alternates and vies with utter hopelessness. Strongly rooted in feminist theory and interdisciplinary historical and geopolitical analysis, Contested Terrain sheds new light on the struggle against the powerful forces that affect Afghan women's education, health, political participation, livelihoods, and quality of life. The book also suggests how a new dialogue might be started--in which women from across geopolitical boundaries might find common cause for change and rewrite their collective stories.

cover of Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources

Contesting Archives

Finding Women in the Sources

Edited by Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry

University of Illinois Press, 2010

The contributors of Contesting Archives challenge the assumption that an archive is a neutral, immutable, and a historical repository of information. Instead, these historians view it as a place where decisions are made about whose documents--and therefore whose history--is important. Finding that women's voices and their texts were often obscured or lost altogether, they have developed many new methodologies for creating unique archives and uncovering more evidence by reading documents "against the grain," weaving together many layers of information to reveal complexities and working collectively to reconstruct the lives of women in the past.

Global in scope, this volume demonstrates innovative research on diverse women from the sixteenth century to the present in Spain, Mexico, Tunisia, India, Iran, Poland, Mozambique, and the United States. Addressing gender, race, class, nationalism, transnationalism, and migration, these essays' subjects include indigenous women of colonial Mexico, Muslim slave women, African American women of the early twentieth century, Bengali women activists of pre-independence India, wives and daughters of Qajar rulers in Iran, women industrial workers in communist Poland and socialist Mozambique, and women club owners in modern Las Vegas. A foreword by Antoinette Burton adroitly synthesizes the disparate themes woven throughout the book.

Contributors are Janet Afary, Maryam Ameli-Rezai, Antoinette Burton, Nupur Chaudhuri, Julia Clancy-Smith, Mansoureh Ettehadieh, Malgorzata Fidelis, Joanne L. Goodwin, Kali Nicole Gross, Daniel S. Haworth, Sherry J. Katz, Elham Malekzadeh, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Kathleen Sheldon, Lisa Sousa, and Ula Y. Taylor.

cover of Contesting Publics: Feminism, Activism, Ethnography

Contesting Publics

Feminism, Activism, Ethnography

Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole

Pluto Press, 2014

Through ethnographic cases and activists’ narratives, Contesting Publics analyses the challenges feminists face as they seek to engage with new spaces of participatory democracy in Latin America.

Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole analyse how new silences, exclusions and re-inscriptions of inequalities have emerged alongside these new spaces of participation. The book re-examines the relationship between public and private and speaks to a larger theoretical question: what is the meaning of 'the public' within democracy projects?

Contesting Publics considers current debates among feminists from different generations on the merits of a variety of strategies, goals and issues, drawing out vital lessons for students, researchers and activists in anthropology, gender studies and Latin American studies.

cover of Contingent Maps: Rethinking Western Women's History and the North American West

Contingent Maps

Rethinking Western Women's History and the North American West

Edited by Susan E. Gray and Gayle Gullett

University of Arizona Press, 2014

Contingent Maps is an appeal to all who read, write, and care about the history of women in the North American West. Susan E. Gray and Gayle Gullett, former co-editors of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, argue that the discipline of Western women’s history, despite its many years of accomplishment, remains “the stepsister to both U.S. women’s history and the New Western history.” The problem, they assert, is one of place. Western women’s history remains unhappily chained to one place, Frederick Jackson Turner’s mythical frontier, where white civilization vanquished Indigenous savagery. Drawing on the work of feminist geographers, Gray and Gullett contend that the West is better understood as a place of many places.

Contingent Maps demonstrates how employing place as an analytical tool transforms Western women’s history. Gray and Gullett depict place as not only a physical location but as a way of understanding, as the spatial configuration of power relations that are always in flux. As a place and many places, the West is therefore always being constructed. All maps are contingent, as Gray and Gullett’s reading of the articles in this collection attest. Contingent Maps offers histories of Wests ranging from the nineteenth century to the near present. This synthesis of feminist history and geography has the potential to revitalize the field of Western women’s history.

cover of Continually Working: Black Women, Community Intellectualism, and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee

Continually Working

Black Women, Community Intellectualism, and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee

Crystal Marie Moten

Vanderbilt University Press, 2023

Continually Working tells the stories of Black working women who resisted employment inequality in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from the 1940s to the 1970s. The book explores the job-related activism of Black Midwestern working women and uncovers the political and intellectual strategies they used to critique and resist employment discrimination, dismantle unjust structures, and transform their lives and the lives of those in their community.

Moten emphasizes the ways in which Black women transformed the urban landscape by simultaneously occupying spaces from which they had been historically excluded and creating their own spaces. Black women refused to be marginalized within the historically white and middle‑class Milwaukee Young Women's Christian Association (MYWCA), an association whose mission centered on supporting women in urban areas. Black women forged interracial relationships within this organization and made it, not without much conflict and struggle, one of the most socially progressive organizations in the city. When Black women could not integrate historically white institutions, they created their own. They established financial and educational institutions, such as Pressley School of Beauty Culture, which beautician Mattie Pressley DeWese opened in 1946 as a result of segregation in the beauty training industry. This school served economic, educational, and community development purposes as well as created economic opportunities for Black women. Historically and contemporarily, Milwaukee has been and is still known as one of the most segregated cities in the nation. Black women have always contested urban inequality, by making space for themselves and others on the margins. In so doing, they have transformed both the urban landscape and urban history.

cover of Contours of Change: Muslim Courts, Women, and Islamic Society in Colonial Bathurst, the Gambia, 1905-1965

Contours of Change

Muslim Courts, Women, and Islamic Society in Colonial Bathurst, the Gambia, 1905-1965

Bala Saho

Michigan State University Press, 2018

Based on a previously unexamined body of qadi court records as well as two hundred oral interviews in Wolof and Mandinka, Contours of Change: Muslim Courts, Women, and Islamic Society in Colonial Bathurst, the Gambia, 1905–1965, offers a new perspective on the impact of British rule in West Africa. It focuses on the formation of present-day Banjul and the role of law, religion, and gender relations. Specifically, this volume explores how colonization affected the evolution of women’s understanding of the importance of law in securing their rights, and how urban women used the new qadi court system to fight for greater rights in the domestic sphere. The fascinating cases discussed in the text show that male Muslim judges often were sympathetic to women’s claims, and that, as a result, the qadi court created opportunities for women to acquire property rights and negotiate patriarchal relationships. Contours of Change sheds light on African subjectivities and the broader social, economic, and political changes taking place in colonial Gambian society during the first half of the twentieth century. This text breaks new ground in Senegambian history and makes a significant contribution to British colonial studies, African legal studies, Islam in Africa studies, and women’s history studies.

cover of Control and Subversion: Gender Relations in Tajikistan

Control and Subversion

Gender Relations in Tajikistan

Colette Harris

Pluto Press, 2004

Control and Subversion makes an important contribution to the study of Muslim societies in general, while also being a unique study of a neglected area – post-Soviet Tajikistan – a country gaining increasing importance in the international arena of Central Asia. The book presents an intimate view of this society, told through ethnographically collected life histories, unusually including men’s as well as women’s. Despite developing significant gender theories (notably reframing work of Judith Butler), and maintaining high academic standards, it remains as readable as a popular novel.
Control and Subversion investigates the relationship of gender to the inner workings of social control, such as exposing ways in which Tajik society threatens men’s masculinity, thereby bringing them to force family members into conformity, irrespective of the suffering this may cause. It examines how masculine and feminine gender characteristics influence personal relationships and explores gender relations at their most intimate – from the secret musings of adolescent girls, through the painful experiences of young men, to the trauma of sexual initiation. Although largely concentrating on contemporary life, the book also discusses historical materials and Soviet influence on Tajik society. Control and Subversion is essential reading for anyone interested in Central Asia, Muslim societies, the lives of Muslim women, or gender in a Muslim context.

cover of Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice

Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice

Jutta Gisela Sperling

University of Chicago Press, 2000

In late sixteenth-century Venice, nearly 60 percent of all patrician women joined convents, and only a minority of these women did so voluntarily. In trying to explain why unprecedented numbers of patrician women did not marry, historians have claimed that dowries became too expensive. However, Jutta Gisela Sperling debunks this myth and argues that the rise of forced vocations happened within the context of aristocratic culture and society.

Sperling explains how women were not allowed to marry beneath their social status while men could, especially if their brides were wealthy. Faced with a shortage of suitable partners, patrician women were forced to offer themselves as "a gift not only to God, but to their fatherland," as Patriarch Giovanni Tiepolo told the Senate of Venice in 1619. Noting the declining birth rate among patrician women, Sperling explores the paradox of a marriage system that preserved the nobility at the price of its physical extinction. And on a more individual level, she tells the fascinating stories of these women. Some became scholars or advocates of women's rights, some took lovers, and others escaped only to survive as servants, prostitutes, or thieves.

cover of Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600-1900

Conversational Rhetoric

The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600-1900

Jane Donawerth

Southern Illinois University Press, 2011

Much of the scholarly exchange regarding the history of women in rhetoric has emphasized women’s rhetorical practices. In Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900, Jane Donawerth traces the historical development of rhetorical theory by women for women, studying the moments when women produced theory about the arts of communication in alternative genres—humanist treatises and dialogues, defenses of women’s preaching, conduct books, and elocution handbooks. She examines the relationship between communication and gender and between theory and pedagogy and argues that women constructed a theory of rhetoric based on conversation, not public speaking, as a model for all discourse.

Donawerth traces the development of women’s rhetorical theory through the voices of English and American women (and one much-translated French woman) over three centuries. She demonstrates how they cultivated theories of rhetoric centered on conversation that faded once women began writing composition textbooks for mixed-gender audiences in the latter part of the nineteenth century. She recovers and elucidates the importance of the theories in dialogues and defenses of women’s education by Bathsua Makin, Mary Astell, and Madeleine de Scudéry; in conduct books by Hannah More, Lydia Sigourney, and Eliza Farrar; in defenses of women’s preaching by Ellen Stewart, Lucretia Mott, Catherine Booth, and Frances Willard; and in elocution handbooks by Anna Morgan, Hallie Quinn Brown, Genevieve Stebbins, and Emily Bishop. In each genre, Donawerth explores facets of women’s rhetorical theory, such as the recognition of the gendered nature of communication in conduct books, the incorporation of the language of women’s rights in the defenses of women’s preaching, and the adaptation of sentimental culture to the cultivation of women’s bodies as tools of communication in elocution books.

Rather than a linear history, Conversational Rhetoric follows the starts, stops, and starting over in women’s rhetorical theory. It covers a broad range of women’s rhetorical theory in the Anglo-American world and places them in their social, rhetorical, and gendered historical contexts. This study adds women’s rhetorical theory to the rhetorical tradition, advances our understanding of women’s theories and their use of rhetoric, and offers a paradigm for analyzing the differences between men’s and women’s rhetoric from 1600 to 1900.

cover of Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India

Cookstove Chronicles

Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India

Meena R. Khandelwal

University of Arizona Press, 2024

Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options?

Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology.

Meena Khandelwal, a feminist anthropologist, describes her collaboration with engineers, archaeologists, and others. She employs critical social theory and reflections from fieldwork to bring together research from a range of fields, including history, geography, anthropology, energy and environmental studies, public health, and science and technology studies (STS). In so doing she not only demystifies multidisciplinary research but also highlights the messy reality of actual behavior.

Cookstove Chronicles critically examines why, despite extensive development efforts, use of the chulha persists. It offers an important new framework for looking at development, technology, environmental change, and human behavior.

cover of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture

Coolie Woman

The Odyssey of Indenture

Gaiutra Bahadur

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie”—the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. In Coolie Woman—shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize—her great-granddaughter Gaiutra Bahadur embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives.

Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were either runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many of them left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages—traumatic “middle passages”—only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and, especially, sexual exploitation. As Bahadur explains, however, it is precisely their sexuality that makes coolie women stand out as figures in history. Greatly outnumbered by men, they were able to use sex with their overseers to gain various advantages, an act that often incited fatal retaliations from coolie men and sometimes larger uprisings of laborers against their overlords. Complex and unpredictable, sex was nevertheless a powerful tool.

Examining this and many other facets of these remarkable women’s lives, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora—from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next—that is at once a search for one’s roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.

cover of Cordelia Harvey: Civil War Angel

Cordelia Harvey

Civil War Angel

Bob Kann

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2011

Cordelia Harvey: Civil War Angel tells the story of an iconic figure from Wisconsin’s Civil War history. As the wife of a promising young governor, Cordelia Harvey seemed destined for great things. Then tragedy struck: her husband, Louis Harvey, drowned, and Cordelia found herself widowed and alone. Like Louis had, Cordelia cared deeply about the Wisconsin soldiers fighting in the Civil War, and she jumped at a job offer from the new governor: working as the sanitary agent for Wisconsin. In this position, Cordelia could fight for the well-being of the state’s men and boys wounded in battle.

Young readers will follow Cordelia on her travels up and down the Mississippi to visit Wisconsin soldiers in military hospitals. In her efforts to make sure soldiers were well cared for, Cordelia wrote to the governor about their need for wholesome food, clean supplies, and fresh air. Eventually, she would travel to Washington to plead with President Lincoln for a Soldier’s Home hospital in Wisconsin. When Cordelia returned home after the war, she continued her humanitarian work by starting an orphanage for the children of fallen Civil War soldiers.

Cordelia Harvey: Civil War Angel includes sidebars on medical care, early nursing, and military prisons. A timeline, glossary of terms, and suggestions for activities and discussion round out this spirited narrative.

cover of Country Place: A Novel

Country Place

Ann Petry, foreword by Farah Jasmine Griffin

Northwestern University Press, 1947

A 1947 novel by best-selling African American author Ann Petry, Country Place opens with a soldier returning from World War II and his effort to rescue his failing marriage.

cover of Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez: Challenges to Militarization

Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez

Challenges to Militarization

By Kathleen Staudt and Zulma Y. Méndez

University of Texas Press, 2015

Ciudad Juárez has recently become infamous for its murder rate, which topped 3,000 in 2010 as competing drug cartels grew increasingly violent and the military responded with violence as well. Despite the atmosphere of intimidation by troops, police, and organized criminals, women have led the way in civil society activism, spurring the Juárez Resistance and forging powerful alliances with anti-militarization activists.

An in-depth examination of la Resistencia Juarense, Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez draws on ethnographic research to analyze the resistance’s focus on violence against women, as well as its clash with the war against drugs championed by Mexican President Felipe Calderón with the support of the United States. Through grounded insights, the authors trace the transformation of hidden discourses into public discourses that openly challenge the militarized border regimes. The authors also explore the advocacy carried on by social media, faith-based organizations, and peace-and-justice activist Javier Sicilia while Calderón faced U.S. political schisms over the role of border trade in this global manufacturing site.

Bringing to light on-the-ground strategies as well as current theories from the fields of sociology, political anthropology, and human rights, this illuminating study is particularly significant because of its emphasis on the role of women in local and transnational attempts to extinguish a hot zone. As they overcome intimidation to become game-changing activists, the figures featured in Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez offer the possibility of peace and justice in the wake of seemingly irreconcilable conflict.

cover of Crafting Gender: Women and Folk Art in Latin America and the Caribbean

Crafting Gender

Women and Folk Art in Latin America and the Caribbean

Eli Bartra, ed.

Duke University Press, 2003

This volume initiates a gender-based framework for analyzing the folk art of Latin America and the Caribbean. Defined here broadly as the "art of the people" and as having a primarily decorative, rather than utilitarian, purpose, folk art is not solely the province of women, but folk art by women in Latin America has received little sustained attention. Crafting Gender begins to redress this gap in scholarship. From a feminist perspective, the contributors examine not only twentieth-century and contemporary art by women, but also its production, distribution, and consumption. Exploring the roles of women as artists and consumers in specific cultural contexts, they look at a range of artistic forms across Latin America, including Panamanian molas (blouses), Andean weavings, Mexican ceramics, and Mayan hipiles (dresses).

Art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States discuss artwork from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Suriname, and Puerto Rico, and many of their essays focus on indigenous artists. They highlight the complex webs of social relations from which folk art emerges. For instance, while several pieces describe the similar creative and technical processes of indigenous pottery-making communities of the Amazon and of mestiza potters in Mexico and Colombia, they also reveal the widely varying functions of the ceramics and meanings of the iconography. Integrating the social, historical, political, geographical, and economic factors that shape folk art in Latin America and the Caribbean, Crafting Gender sheds much-needed light on a rich body of art and the women who create it.

Contributors
Eli Bartra
Ronald J. Duncan
Dolores Juliano
Betty LaDuke
Lourdes Rejón Patrón
Sally Price
María de Jesús Rodríguez-Shadow
Mari Lyn Salvador
Norma Valle
Dorothea Scott Whitten

cover of Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace

Crafting Selves

Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace

Dorinne K. Kondo

University of Chicago Press, 1990

"The ethnography of Japan is currently being reshaped by a new generation of Japanologists, and the present work certainly deserves a place in this body of literature. . . . The combination of utility with beauty makes Kondo's book required reading, for those with an interest not only in Japan but also in reflexive anthropology, women's studies, field methods, the anthropology of work, social psychology, Asian Americans, and even modern literature."—Paul H. Noguchi, American Anthropologist

"Kondo's work is significant because she goes beyond disharmony, insisting on complexity. Kondo shows that inequalities are not simply oppressive-they are meaningful ways to establish identities."—Nancy Rosenberger, Journal of Asian Studies

cover of Crafting Womanhood: Needlework, Gender, and Politics in the United States, 1810-1920

Crafting Womanhood

Needlework, Gender, and Politics in the United States, 1810-1920

Mariah Kupfner

University of Delaware Press, 2027

Decorative needlework was a key medium through which American women constructed femininity and its relationship to public and political concerns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through samplers, needlecases, lace coats, silk sofas, cotton scraps, banners, and other textile things, scholars can see the ways in which women and girls related to education, property-holding, slavery and freedom, labor, and women’s right to vote. Needlework’s durable association with “traditional” notions about womanhood made it a potent resource through which to make gender in expansive and meaningful ways that had profound public, political implications as educational opportunities for girls and women were expanding, and the antislavery and women's suffrage movements were growing. Indeed, needlework's very conventionality and relationship to the past made it a useful tool for crafting womanhood anew.

cover of Creating the New Woman: The Rise of Southern Women's Progressive Culture in Texas, 1893-1918

Creating the New Woman

The Rise of Southern Women's Progressive Culture in Texas, 1893-1918

Judith N. McArthur

University of Illinois Press, 1998

Regionally distinct yet influenced by national trends, women's progressive culture in Texas offers a valuable opportunity to analyze the evolution of women's voluntary associations, their challenges to southern conventions of race and class, and their quest for social change and political power.

Judith McArthur traces how general concerns of national progressive organizations about pure food, prostitution, and education reform shaped programs at the state and local levels. Southern women differed from their Northern counterparts by devising new approaches to settlement work and taking advantage of World War I to challenge southern gender and racial norms. McArthur's original analysis details how women in Texas succeeded in securing partial voting rights before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. She also provides valuable comparisons between North and South, among various southern states, and between black and white, and male and female, progressives.

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