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2194 books match the query 'Women's Studies' and 132 start with c

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Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany

Andrew Lees

University of Michigan Press, 2002

Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany breaks new ground in the history of social thought and action in Imperial Germany, focusing on socially liberal efforts to counteract perceived problems in the area of moral behavior.
Thematically and methodologically wide-ranging and innovative, this volume considers a broad spectrum of responses not only to the supposed breakdown of social cohesion but also to specific forms of deviant behavior. It draws on large numbers of writings from the period by clergymen, jurists, medical doctors, educators, social workers, and others. This literature illuminates the histories not only of urbanization and cities but also of sexuality and Christianity, crime and criminology, leisure and education, youth and women, charity and social work, and the welfare state as well as local government.
Focusing on positive instead of escapist responses to the challenges that inhered in urban society, this work can be read as part of an ongoing reassessment of the German Empire that points away from the idea that Germans were traveling an antimodernist Sonderweg, or special path, that led inevitably to National Socialism and the Third Reich. Although intended primarily for scholars and students of modern Germany, this book should speak to a variety of readers, among them anyone who cares about the history of cities, deviant behavior, or social reform.
Andrew Lees is Professor of History, Rutgers University.

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Citizen, Invert, Queer

Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

Deborah Cohler

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? Citizen, Invert, Queer illustrates that the equation of female masculinity with female homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of changes in national and racial as well as sexual discourses in early twentieth-century public culture.

Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, Deborah Cohler maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. Cohler integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in her readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

By examining the shifting intersections of nationalism and sexuality before, during, and after the Great War, this book illuminates profound transformations in our ideas about female homosexuality.

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Citizenship, Faith, and Feminism

Jewish and Muslim Women Reclaim Their Rights

Jan Feldman

Brandeis University Press, 2011

Religious women in liberal democracies are “dual citizens” because of their contrasting status as members of both a civic community (in which their gender has no impact on their constitutional guarantee of equal rights) and a traditional religious community (which distributes roles and power based on gender). This book shows how these “dual citizens”—Orthodox Jewish women in Israel, Muslim women in Kuwait, and women of both those faiths in the U.S.—have increasingly deployed their civic citizenship rights in attempts to reform and not destroy their religions. For them, neither “exit” nor acquiescence to traditional religious gender norms is an option. Instead, they use the narrative of civic citizenship combined with a more authentic, if alternative reading of their faith tradition to improve their status.

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City of Dreadful Delight

Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London

Judith R. Walkowitz

University of Chicago Press, 1992

From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction.

Victorian London was a world where long-standing traditions of class and gender were challenged by a range of public spectacles, mass media scandals, new commercial spaces, and a proliferation of new sexual categories and identities. In the midst of this changing culture, women of many classes challenged the traditional privileges of elite males and
asserted their presence in the public domain.

An important catalyst in this conflict, argues Walkowitz, was W. T. Stead's widely read 1885 article about child prostitution. Capitalizing on the uproar caused by the piece and the volatile political climate of the time, women spoke of sexual danger, articulating their own grievances against men, inserting themselves into the public discussion of sex to an unprecedented extent, and gaining new entree to public spaces and journalistic practices. The ultimate manifestation of class anxiety and gender antagonism came in 1888 with the tabloid tales of Jack the Ripper. In between, there were quotidien stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure, and Walkowitz examines them all, showing how women were not simply figures in the imaginary landscape of male spectators, but also central actors in the stories of metropolotin life that reverberated in courtrooms, learned journals, drawing rooms, street corners, and in the letters columns of the daily press.

A model of cultural history, this ambitious book will stimulate and enlighten readers across a broad range of interests.

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City of Eves

Poems

Silvia Bonilla

University of Arizona Press, 2026

In City of Eves, Silvia Bonilla evokes the lives and longing of three young women who suspect the wider world is a ship on the verge of departure—and who are determined not to be stranded on shore.

Sonia and her two best friends grow up on the urban coast of Ecuador, sharing cigarettes, school uniforms, and a determination to overcome their circumstances even if the price to pay is exile. Full of fantasies and curiosity, the friends navigate hunger at home, absent parents, and religious pressures as they help each other through the pleasures and traumas of adolescence. As their desire for something greater changes from dreams into actions, they pursue escape routes that hover between choice and compulsion: forced marriages, early widowhood, and a death-haunted migration to the United States. Even in the throes of escape, the constraints of their reality always lie waiting.

Subtle and unsparing, Bonilla’s lyrical poems capture the wild inner horizons and vivid embodiment of youth as it shades into the reflective poignance of maturity marked by disappointment, compromise, and loss. Despite this, it is memories of deep friendship, bonded through shared understanding and aspiration, that lingers. Looking back on her life, Sonia recalls the courage and vitality of girls determined to shape their own futures: “We lifted Coca-Cola bottles to the / opened granadilla of our mouths.”

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City of Women

Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860

Christine Stansell

University of Illinois Press, 1987

Before the Civil War, a new idea of womanhood took shape in America in general and in the Northeast in particular. Women of the propertied classes assumed the mantle of moral guardians of their families and the nation. Laboring women, by contrast, continued to suffer from the oppressions of sex and class. In fact, their very existence troubled their more prosperous sisters, for the impoverished female worker violated dearly held genteel precepts of 'woman's nature' and 'woman's place.'

City of Women delves into the misfortunes that New York City's laboring women suffered and the problems that resulted. Looking at how and why a community of women workers came into existence, Christine Stansell analyzes the social conflicts surrounding laboring women and they social pressure these conflicts brought to bear on others. The result is a fascinating journey into economic relations and cultural forms that influenced working women's lives—one that reveals at last the female city concealed within America's first great metropolis.

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Civil Wars

Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism

George C. Rable

University of Illinois Press, 1989

Born into a male-dominated society, southern women often chose to support patriarchy and their own celebrated roles as mothers, wives, and guardians of the home and humane values. George C. Rable uncovers the details of how women fit into the South's complex social order and how Southern social assumptions shaped their attitudes toward themselves, their families, and society as a whole. He reveals a bafflingly intricate social order and the ways the South's surprisingly diverse women shaped their own lives and minds despite strict boundaries. Paying particular attention to women during the Civil War, Roble illuminates their thoughts on the conflict and the threats and challenges they faced and looks at their place in both the economy and politics of the Confederacy. He also ranges back to the antebellum era and forward to postwar South, when women quickly acquiesced to the old patriarchal system but nonetheless lived lives changed forever by the war.

Winner of the 1989 Jefferson Davis Award of the Museum of the Confederacy, 1989. Winner of the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize of the Southern Association of Women Historians, 1991.

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Claiming Place

On the Agency of Hmong Women

Chia Youyee Vang

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

Countering the idea of Hmong women as victims, the contributors to this pathbreaking volume demonstrate how the prevailing scholarly emphasis on Hmong culture and men as the primary culprits of women’s subjugation perpetuates the perception of a Hmong premodern status and renders unintelligible women’s nuanced responses to patriarchal strategies of domination both in the United States and in Southeast Asia.

Claiming Place expands knowledge about the Hmong lived reality while contributing to broader conversations on sexuality, diaspora, and agency. While these essays center on Hmong experiences, activism, and popular representations, they also underscore the complex gender dynamics between women and men and address the wider concerns of gendered status of the Hmong in historical and contemporary contexts, including deeply embedded notions around issues of masculinity.

Organized to highlight themes of history, memory, war, migration, sexuality, selfhood, and belonging, this book moves beyond a critique of Hmong patriarchy to argue that Hmong women have been and continue to be active agents not only in challenging oppressive societal practices within hierarchies of power but also in creating alternative forms of belonging.

Contributors: Geraldine Craig, Kansas State U; Leena N. Her, Santa Rosa Junior College; Julie Keown-Bomar, U of Wisconsin–Extension; Mai Na M. Lee, U of Minnesota; Prasit Leepreecha, Chiang Mai U; Aline Lo, Allegheny College; Kong Pha; Louisa Schein, Rutgers U; Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, U of Connecticut; Bruce Thao; Ka Vang, U of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.

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Claiming a Tradition

Italian American Women Writers

Mary Jo Bona

Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Mary Jo Bona reconstructs the literary history and examines the narrative techniques of eight Italian American women's novels from 1940 to the present. Largely neglected until recently, these women's family narratives compel a reconsideration of what it means to be a woman and an ethnic in America.

Bona discusses the novels in pairs according to their focus on Italian American life. She first examines the traditions of italianitá (a flavor of things Italian) that inform and enhance works of fiction. The novelists in that tradition were Mari Tomasi (Like Lesser Gods, 1949) and Marion Benasutti (No Steady Job for Papa, 1966).

Bona then turns to later novels that highlight the Italian American belief in the family's honor and reputation. Conflicts between generations, specifically between autocratic fathers and their children, are central to Octavia Waldo's 1961 A Cup of the Sun and Josephine Gattuso Hendin's 1988 The Right Thing to Do.

Even when writers choose to steer away from the familial focus, Bona notes, their developmental narratives trace the reintegration of characters suffering from a crisis of cultural identity. Relating the characters' struggles to their relationship to the family, Bona examines Diana Cavallo's 1961 A Bridge of Leaves and Dorothy Bryant's 1978 Miss Giardino.

Bona then discusses two innovative novels— Helen Barolini's 1979 Umbertina and Tina De Rosa's 1980 Paper Fish— both of which feature a granddaughter who invokes her grandmother, a godparent figure. Through Barolini's feminist and De Rosa's modernist perspectives, both novels present a young girl developing artistically.

Closing with a discussion of the contemporary terrain Italian American women traverse, Bona examines such topics as sexual identity when it meets cultural identity and the inclusion of italianitá when Italian American identity is not central to the story. Italian American women writers, she concludes, continue in the 1980s and 1990s to focus on the interplay between cultural identity and women's development.

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Claiming the Bicycle

Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America

Sarah Hallenbeck

Southern Illinois University Press, 2016

Although the impact of the bicycle craze of the late nineteenth century on women’s lives has been well documented, rarely have writers considered the role of women’s rhetorical agency in the transformation of bicycle culture and the bicycle itself. In Claiming the Bicycle, Sarah Hallenbeck argues that through their collective rhetorical activities, women who were widely dispersed in space, genre, and intention negotiated what were considered socially acceptable uses of the bicycle, destabilizing cultural assumptions about femininity and gender differences.

Hallenbeck describes the masculine culture of the “Ordinary” bicycle of the 1880s and the ways women helped bring about changes in this culture; asserts that women contributed to bicycle design, helping to produce the more gender-neutral “Safety” bicycle in response to discourse about their needs; and analyzes women writers’ uses of the new venue of popular magazines to shape a “bicycle girl” ethos that prompted new identities for women. The author considers not only how technical documents written by women bicyclists encouraged new riders to understand their activity as transforming gender definitions but also how women used bicycling as a rhetorical resource to influence medical discourse about their bodies.

Making a significant contribution to studies of feminist rhetorical historiography, rhetorical agency, and technical communication, Claiming the Bicycle asserts the utility of a distributed model of rhetorical agency and accounts for the efforts of widely dispersed actors to harness technology in promoting social change.

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Clandestinas

Women in the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1955–1959

Carollee Bengelsdorf. With Photographs Curated by Susan Meiselas.

Duke University Press, 2025

In Clandestinas, Carollee Bengelsdorf challenges the silences surrounding women’s participation in the insurrection in Havana during the Cuban Revolution. The official narrative of the revolution emphasizes virtually exclusively the role of the guerrillas in the sierra in defeating the Batista dictatorship, thereby diminishing the centrality of the urban underground. Given that women insurrectionists were overwhelmingly concentrated in the cities, this inevitably meant that their presence was diminished as well. But even in the urban movements, women are portrayed as secondary, as enablers of the men who do the real fighting. Drawing on fieldwork and in-depth interviews with over thirty former clandestinas, Bengelsdorf surfaces a different narrative. She paints a portrait detailing the lives of women and the actions in which they were involved in the clandestinidad. She briefly examines the trauma each of her interviewees experienced to different degrees both during and after the dictatorship’s downfall. The book includes a visual essay with photographs curated by Susan Meiselas.

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Class Fictions

Shame and Resistance in the British Working Class Novel, 1890–1945

Pamela Fox

Duke University Press, 1994

Many recent discussions of working-class culture in literary and cultural studies have tended to present an oversimplified view of resistance. In this groundbreaking work, Pamela Fox offers a far more complex theory of working-class identity, particularly as reflected in British novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the concept of class shame, she produces a model of working-class subjectivity that understands resistance in a more accurate and useful way—as a complicated kind of refusal, directed at both dominated and dominant culture.

With a focus on certain classics in the working-class literary "canon," such as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Love on the Dole, as well as lesser-known texts by working-class women, Fox uncovers the anxieties that underlie representations of class and consciousness. Shame repeatedly emerges as a powerful counterforce in these works, continually unsettling the surface narrative of protest to reveal an ambivalent relation toward the working-class identities the novels apparently champion.

Class Fictions offers an equally rigorous analysis of cultural studies itself, which has historically sought to defend and value the radical difference of working-class culture. Fox also brings to her analysis a strong feminist perspective that devotes considerable attention to the often overlooked role of gender in working-class fiction. She demonstrates that working-class novels not only expose master narratives of middle-class culture that must be resisted, but that they also reveal to us a need to create counter narratives or formulas of working-class life. In doing so, this book provides a more subtle sense of the role of resistance in working class culture. While of interest to scholars of Victorian and working-class fiction, Pamela Fox’s argument has far-reaching implications for the way literary and cultural studies will be defined and practiced.

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Classic Hollywood

Lifestyles and Film Styles of American Cinema, 1930-1960

Veronica Pravadelli

University of Illinois Press, 2015

Studies of "Classic Hollywood" typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. Veronica Pravadelli complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, she breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases that follow Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the "Transition Era" and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films.

Pravadelli sets her analysis apart by paying particular attention to the gendered desires and identities exemplified in the films. Availing herself of the significant advances in film theory and modernity studies that have taken place since similar surveys first saw publication, she views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency.

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Cleansing the Nation

India, the Hindu Modern, and Mediations of Gender

Raka Shome

Duke University Press, 2025

In Cleansing the Nation, Raka Shome explores the logics of governmentality of contemporary Hindu nationalism in India by advancing the concept of the “Hindu modern.” Analyzing a national cleanliness program and other development projects, Shome shows how the Hindu modern—a form of national governmentality that disciplines and regulates individual subjects to create desirable “clean” citizens—inscribes Hindu nationalism in India. Focused on security, progress, and development while celebrating and protecting the figure of the upper-caste Hindu woman, the Hindu modern works toward a religious and casteist cleansing of the nation that rewrites Indian modernity as a purified and cleansed Hindu modernity. It shores up caste and religious inequalities around who is authentically Indian, reproducing historical violence against and exclusions of caste, gender, and religion, especially toward Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis. By outlining how the Hindu modern sutures Hindu-ness to the contemporary Indian national project of modernity, Shome helps us further understand projects of national purification and cleanliness within global populist authoritarian movements.

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Clio's Southern Sisters

Interviews with Leaders of the Southern Association for Women Historians

Edited by Constance B. Schulz & Elizabeth Hayes Turner

University of Missouri Press, 2004

It is no accident that the Southern Association for Women Historians enjoys the founding date of 1970. After extended and often bitter engagement with entrenched sexism in the decades following World War II, women historians found their voices and crafted a means by which to be heard. The years between 1970 and 1980 represented a decade of optimism for women who sought equality in the workplace. Professional women, professors of history most especially, found hope in organizations such as the SAWH, created to address issues of visibility, legitimacy, and equality in historical associations and in employment.

In Clio’s Southern Sisters, Constance B. Schulz and Elizabeth Hayes Turner collect the stories of the women who helped to found and lead the organization during its first twenty years. These women give evidence, in strong and effective language, of the experiences that shaped their entrée into the profession. They vividly describe the point at which they experienced the shift in their lives and in the lives of those around them that led toward a new day for women in the history profession.

Some found that discrimination followed them like a shadow, and the pain of those days still remains with them. Others sought their graduate education in institutions where women were welcomed and where professors valued their work and encouraged their success. Yet when they entered the job market, they found that some employers flatly refused to consider them because they were women. Lost job opportunities for women were linked in tangled ways to the prevailing image of women as less desirable as colleagues, or as intellectually weaker than their male counterparts.

Through the SAWH, these women were able to make changes from within the profession. They felt an obligation to help the next generation of women scholars. In the midst of a national movement to end sex discrimination through legislation, to increase women’s consciousness-raising efforts, and to acknowledge the economic realities of women in the workforce, these women came together to form an organization that could enable them to have the careers they deserved. This timely volume will be appreciated by all those who reaped the benefits for which these “southern sisters” fought so hard.

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Co-wives and Calabashes

Sally Price

University of Michigan Press, 1984

A fascinating exploration into the world of the Saramaka Maroons of the Suriname rain forest, Co-wives and Calabashes examines the status of women in this polygynous and matrilineal society as reflected in its social structure and in its art. The product of seventeen years of research, the book draws upon a rich variety of resources — from bawdy popular songs to dusty museum artifacts, from animated gossip sessions to comprehensive social statistics — to reveal the complex ways in which notions of gender, patterns of marriage, and the cultural definition of art are interrelated.

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Coded Encounters

Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America

Francisco Javier Cevallos

University of Massachusetts Press, 1994

Much has been written about the ways in which Columbus's "discovery" of America began a process of inventing a new world in European consciousness. But far less has been published about those on the margins of the dominant European discourse--Amerindians, Africans, and women--whose experience is reflected in documents written during the early years of European rule in Latin America. This volume brings together essays by leading scholars of colonial Latin America who address a series of topics relating to both the marginal and European-dominant discourses. The book is divided into five sections: "Representing the New World," "The Institutionalization of the Colony," "Amerindian Texts," "Women in Colonial Latin America," and "The Later Colony and the Caribbean Experience." The essays range from a consideration of Amerindian codes of mapmaking to the career of a transvestite nun, from confessional "sin lists" used by priests to examine the transgressions of their American charges to a new view of colonial women's lives based on birth records, dowry agreements, and wills. Contributors include Walter Mignolo, Maureen Ahern, Abel Alves, Rolena Adorno, Lúcia Helena Santiago Costigan, Pedro Lasarte, Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, Regina Harrison, Asunción Lavrin, Stephanie Merrim, Nina M. Scott, Antonio Carreño, Julie Greer Johnson, Karen Stolley, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo.

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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.

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Cold War Anthropologist

Isabel Kelly and Rural Development in Mexico

Stephanie Baker Opperman

University of Arizona Press, 2024

As an archaeologist, anthropologist, scholar, educator, and program evaluator for the U.S. State Department during the early Cold War era, Dr. Isabel T. Kelly’s (1906–1983) career presents a distinctive vantage point on the evolving landscape of U.S. foreign policy, Mexican rural welfare initiatives, and the discipline of anthropology. Her trajectory illuminates a shift toward pragmatic, culturally sensitive approaches in technical assistance programs for Mexico’s rural areas, departing from traditional U.S.-centric developmental paradigms.

Kelly’s transition from a prominent archaeologist to a key figure in applied anthropology is meticulously chronicled, unveiling her pivotal role in shaping rural development strategies in Mexico amidst the geopolitical context of the Cold War. Through an extensive examination of her correspondence, archival material, and scholarly output, Kelly’s evolving viewpoints offer profound insights into the intricate dynamics of U.S.-Mexico relations and the challenges encountered by female academics during this era.

Organized chronologically, each chapter of this work delves into distinct facets of Kelly’s international journey, with a particular emphasis on her involvement in cooperative programs aimed at fostering diplomatic relations with Mexico. Through this narrative framework, readers are immersed in a compelling exploration of Kelly’s enduring impact on both the field of anthropology and the realm of international diplomacy.

This book is indispensable for historians, anthropologists, and individuals intrigued by the nuanced complexities of Cold War politics, presenting pioneering research at the intersection of history and anthropology. Opperman skillfully brings to light the previously untold narratives of Isabel Kelly, unveiling her influence on mid-twentieth-century Mexico.

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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.

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Cold Warriors

Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West

Suzanne Clark

Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West returns to familiar cultural forces—the West, anticommunism, and manliness—to show how they combined to suppress dissent and dominate the unruliness of literature in the name of a national identity after World War II. Few realize how much the domination of a “white male” American literary canon was a product not of long history, but of the Cold War. Suzanne Clark describes here how the Cold War excluded women writers on several levels, together with others—African American, Native American, poor, men as well as women—who were ignored in the struggle over white male identity.

Clark first shows how defining national/individual/American identity in the Cold War involved a brand new configuration of cultural history. At the same time, it called upon the nostalgia for the old discourses of the West (the national manliness asserted by Theodore Roosevelt) to claim that there was and always had been only one real American identity.

By subverting the claims of a national identity, Clark finds, many male writers risked falling outside the boundaries not only of public rhetoric but also of the literary world: men as different from one another as the determinedly masculine Ernest Hemingway and the antiheroic storyteller of the everyday, Bernard Malamud. Equally vocal and contentious, Cold War women writers were unwilling to be silenced, as Clark demonstrates in her discussion of the work of Mari Sandoz and Ursula Le Guin.

The book concludes with a discussion of how the silencing of gender, race, and class in Cold War writing maintained its discipline until the eruptions of the sixties. By questioning the identity politics of manliness in the Cold War context of persecution and trial, Clark finds that the involvement of men in identity politics set the stage for our subsequent cultural history.

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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.

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Colonial Angels

Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580-1750

By Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela

University of Texas Press, 2000

Spain's attempt to establish a "New Spain" in Mexico never fully succeeded, for Spanish institutions and cultural practices inevitably mutated as they came in contact with indigenous American outlooks and ways of life. This original, interdisciplinary book explores how writing by and about colonial religious women participated in this transformation, as it illuminates the role that gender played in imposing the Spanish empire in Mexico.

The author argues that the New World context necessitated the creation of a new kind of writing. Drawing on previously unpublished writings by and about nuns in the convents of Mexico City, she investigates such topics as the relationship between hagiography and travel narratives, male visions of the feminine that emerge from the reworking of a nun's letters to her confessor into a hagiography, the discourse surrounding a convent's trial for heresy by the Inquisition, and the reports of Spanish priests who ministered to noble Indian women. This research rounds out colonial Mexican history by revealing how tensions between Spain and its colonies played out in the local, daily lives of women.

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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.

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Colonial Strangers

Women Writing the End of the British Empire

Lassner, Phyllis

Rutgers University Press, 2004

Colonial Strangers revolutionizes modern British literary studies by showing how our interpretations of the postcolonial must confront World War II and the Holocaust. Phyllis Lassner’s analysis reveals how writers such as Muriel Spark, Olivia Manning, Rumer Godden, Phyllis Bottome, Elspeth Huxley, and Zadie Smith insist that World War II is critical to understanding how and why the British Empire had to end.

Drawing on memoirs, fiction, reportage, and film adaptations, Colonial Strangers explores the critical perspectives of writers who correct prevailing stereotypes of British women as agents of imperialism. They also question their own participation in British claims of moral righteousness and British politics of cultural exploitation. These authors take center stage in debates about connections between the racist ideologies of the Third Reich and the British Empire.

Colonial Strangers reveals how the literary responses of key artists represent not only compelling reading, but also a necessary intervention in colonial and postcolonial debates and the canons of modern British fiction.

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Color of Privilege

Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism

Aida Hurtado

University of Michigan Press, 1996

This groundbreaking and important book explores how women of different ethnic/racial groups conceive of feminism. Aída Hurtado advances the theory of relational privilege to explain those differing conceptions. Previous theories about feminism have predominantly emphasized the lives and experiences of middle-class white women. Aída Hurtado argues that the different responses to feminism by women of color are not so much the result of personality or cultural differences between white women and women of color, but of their differing relationship to white men. For Hurtado, subordination and privilege must be conceived as relational in nature, and gender subordination and political solidarity must be examined in the framework of culture and socioeconomic context. Hurtado's analysis of gender oppression is written from an interdisciplinary, multicultural standpoint and is enriched by selections from poems by Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Elba Sanchez, and from plays by El Teatro Campesino, the United Farm Workers theater group. A final chapter proposes that progressive scholarship, and especially feminist scholarship, must have at its core a reflexive theory of gender oppression that allows writers to simultaneously document oppression while taking into account the writer's own privilege, to analyze the observed as well as the observer. Aída Hurtado is Associate Professor of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz.

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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

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Colored Amazons

Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910

Kali N. Gross

Duke University Press, 2006

Colored Amazons is a groundbreaking historical analysis of the crimes, prosecution, and incarceration of black women in Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century. Kali N. Gross reconstructs black women’s crimes and their representations in popular press accounts and within the discourses of urban and penal reform. Most importantly, she considers what these crimes signified about the experiences, ambitions, and frustrations of the marginalized women who committed them. Gross argues that the perpetrators and the state jointly constructed black female crime. For some women, crime functioned as a means to attain personal and social autonomy. For the state, black female crime and its representations effectively galvanized and justified a host of urban reform initiatives that reaffirmed white, middle-class authority.

Gross draws on prison records, trial transcripts, news accounts, and rare mug shot photographs. Providing an overview of Philadelphia’s black women criminals, she describes the women’s work, housing, and leisure activities and their social position in relation to the city’s native-born whites, European immigrants, and elite and middle-class African Americans. She relates how news accounts exaggerated black female crime, trading in sensationalistic portraits of threatening “colored Amazons,” and she considers criminologists’ interpretations of the women’s criminal acts, interpretations largely based on notions of hereditary criminality. Ultimately, Gross contends that the history of black female criminals is in many ways a history of the rift between the political rhetoric of democracy and the legal and social realities of those marginalized by its shortcomings.

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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.

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Come Buy, Come Buy

Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing

Krista Lysack

Ohio University Press, 2008

From the 1860s through the early twentieth century, Great Britain saw the rise of the department store and the institutionalization of a gendered sphere of consumption. Come Buy, Come Buy considers representations of the female shopper in British women’s writing and demonstrates how women’s shopping practices are materialized as forms of narrative, poetic, and cultural inscription, showing how women writers emphasize consumerism as productive of pleasure rather than the condition of seduction or loss. Krista Lysack examines works by Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Michael Field, as well as the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, in order to challenge the dominant construction of Victorian femininity as characterized by self-renunciation and the regulation of appetite.

Come Buy, Come Buy considers not only literary works, but also a variety of archival sources (shopping guides, women’s fashion magazines, household management guides, newspapers, and advertisements) and cultural practices (department store shopping, shoplifting and kleptomania, domestic economy, and suffragette shopkeeping). With this wealth of sources, Lysack traces a genealogy of the woman shopper from dissident domestic spender to aesthetic connoisseur, from curious shop-gazer to political radical.

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Comfort Women

Colonialism, War, and Sex, Volume 5

Chungmoo Choi, ed.

Duke University Press, 0

This special issue explores the devastated terrain where the peculiar form of East Asian colonial modernity and militarism intersects with gender and sexuality. The contributors suggest that in building the modern nation-state, through the inversion of public and domestic space, Japan created a state-administered system of licensed prostitution within itself and its colonies. The “Comfort Women” system that drafted over 200,000 Asian women into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during the Pacific War, is a testimony of the racial and gender contradictions of the Japanese Empire. While the essays in the issue attempt to untangle this grotesque history—repressed and misrepresented in the name of nationalism in both Japan and its former colonies—they also question the nationalistic inclination of the movement that aims to reaudit this history.
Extending its interrogation to the Cold War power dynamics and contingent economic development that have contributed to the silencing of the colonial past in East Asia, these essays also examine “the Tokyo Trials” and the discourses of postwar compensation and apology. They not only reveal the capitalistic incentives behind the nominalism of compensation but also unmask the Janus face of humanism, which claims to be universal while excluding Asian women from the category of humanity.
This exceptional collection includes artwork by two Korean comfort women, Tok-kyong Kang and Sun-dok Kim, as well as pieces by Japanese artists and Korean American artists. Other features include a narrative composed of several interviews with comfort women and a conversation between the Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe of Japan and South Korean dissident poet Chi-ha Kim.

Contributors. Chungmoo Choi, Chin Sung Chung, Norma Field, Yuki Fujime, Tok-kyong Kang, Chi-ha Kim, Hyun Sook Kim, Daisil Kim-Gibson, Jin Kyung Lee, Sasha Y. Lee, Yong Soon Min, Kenzaburo Oe, Kerry Ross, Yoshiko Shimada, Youn Ok Song, Won Soon Park, Kyung sik Suh, Taeko Tomiyama, Melissa Wender, Hyanah Yang

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Coming On Strong

Gender and Sexuality in Women's Sport

Susan K. Cahn

University of Illinois Press, 2015

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

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Coming to Light

American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century

Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1985

This collection of 16 essays discusses the broad relationship of women poets to the American literary tradition

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Coming to My Senses

One Woman's Cochlear Implant Journey

Claire H. Blatchford

Gallaudet University Press, 2014

Deafened at the age of six, Claire Blatchford was educated orally with speech lessons, speechreading, and hearing aids. Though successful both professionally and domestically, at the age of 67 Blatchford decided to undergo a cochlear implantation. In this memoir, she describes in prose and verse living with a cochlear implant for the past three years.

At first, Blatchford feared losing the last of her hearing through the surgical process. Her audiologist explained that her hearing was worsening and that soon she would move from profound deafness into a state called “cosmic deafness.” Blatchford decided upon the surgery in hope of meeting her hearing family on their turf, and of again hearing the wind, rain, rivers, and crickets. After being implanted, however, she realized that amplification and comprehension were two different things: at first, all she heard was a soup of sound, a condition known as being brain deaf.

Blatchford soon learned, however, that regaining her hearing was a journey of discovery. Gradually, the sound soup gave way to the ability to hear some sentences without speechreading. The sound of her own voice surprised her, and she could hear her grandchildren speak. The thrill of new things heard on one car trip to a friend’s house moved her to “try my first yodel as I pass by your house.” When asked by others if they should receive an implant, she cautions that it is an individual decision that each deaf person must make. For her, it was the right decision.

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Communities and Law

Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities

Gad Barzilai

University of Michigan Press, 2005

"Relying on theories of politics, law, and society, Barzilai offers a 'critical communitarian' solution that views non-ruling communities as cultural foci of mobilization. His thoughtful analysis contributes to key theoretical discussions of the relationship between communitarianism and national minorities: feminism and religious fundamentalism. This insightful book explores the continuum of litigation to violence in the broader context of politics of identity. . . . Highly recommended."
--Choice

"A remarkable achievement."
--Malcolm Feeley, University of California, Berkeley

"A rich, subtle, and wide-ranging analysis of the complex interaction between law and culture in Israeli society."
--Pnina Lahav, Boston University School of Law

"Barzilai makes a major contribution to thinking about state-society relations, pointing researchers to the plurality of communities harboring different sorts of legal identities, consciousness, and practices."
--Joel Migdal, University of Washington

Communities and Law examines the intersection of communities, cultures, and laws in public life, asking important questions about how nonruling communities confront the law in their efforts to achieve political goals.

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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

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Complaint!

Sara Ahmed

Duke University Press, 2021

In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.

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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.

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Complete in All Its Parts

Nursing Education at the University of Iowa, 1898-1998

Lee Anderson and Kathy Penningroth

University of Michigan Press, 1998

This narrative history of nursing education is a case study of a single institution set within the context of trends in the nursing profession, nursing education, and health care practices in the Midwest and the United States. The detailed research and analysis in this work make a fundamental contribution not only to the history of nursing but also to the broader history of women's work, the history of women in higher education, and the history of the health care professions. The Midwestern focus of Complete in All Its Parts and its emphasis on the post-World War II emergence of the University of Iowa College of Nursing provide a fresh perspective on the education of nurses, especially the education of nurses within a major teaching-research university. In doing so, this book pushes nursing historiography beyond the profession's early development, details the struggles involved in establishing nursing as a legitimate academic endeavor in the university environment, and provides groundwork for a comparison with other such institutions across the nation. Its core audience includes health care professionals and educators as well as institutional historians, perhaps especially those involved in the history of American health care institutions.

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Compositional Subjects

Enfiguring Asian/American Women

Laura Hyun Yi Kang

Duke University Press, 2002

In Compositional Subjects Laura Hyun Yi Kang explores the ways that Asian/American women have been figured by mutually imbricated modes of identity formation, representation, and knowledge production. Kang’s project is simultaneously interdisciplinary scholarship at its best and a critique of the very disciplinary formations she draws upon.
The book opens by tracking the jagged emergence of “Asian American women” as a distinct social identity over the past three decades. Kang then directs critical attention to how the attempts to compose them as discrete subjects of consciousness, visibility, and action demonstrate a broader, ongoing tension between socially particularized subjects and disciplinary knowledges. In addition to the shifting meanings and alignments of “Asian,” “American,” and “women,” the book examines the discourses, political and economic conditions, and institutional formations that have produced Asian/American women as generic authors, as visibly desirable and desiring bodies, as excludable aliens and admissible citizens of the United States, and as the proper labor for transnational capitalism. In analyzing how these enfigurations are constructed and apprehended through a range of modes including autobiography, cinematography, historiography, photography, and ethnography, Kang directs comparative attention to the very terms of their emergence as Asian/American women in specific disciplines.
Finally, Kang concludes with a detailed examination of selected literary and visual works by Korean women artists located in the United States and Canada, works that creatively and critically contend with the problematics of identification and representation that are explored throughout the book. By underscoring the forceful and contentious struggles that animate all of these compositional gestures, Kang proffers Asian/American women as a vexing and productive figure for cultural, political and epistemological critique.

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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.

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Conceiving Cultures

Reproducing People and Places on Nuakata, Papua New Guinea

Shelley Mallett

University of Michigan Press, 2003

Conceiving Cultures critically reflects on the ways anthropologists come to understand and represent the people and cultures that they study. These ideas are developed through an ethnographic study that explores notions of the gendered person through knowledge and practices relating to reproductive health on the Massim island of Nuakata in Papua New Guinea. Conceiving Cultures makes explicit anthropology's implicit project to understand the self by way of the other.
Shelley Mallett is Research Fellow at the Key Centre for Women's Health in Society at Melbourne University.

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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.

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