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The updated edition of Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition, an in-depth exploration of Lupino’s film and television directing work, provides close readings of the films and TV episodes Lupino directed and accounts for the history of Lupino’s reception, continuing into the mid-2020s, in media and film scholarship. The book gives readers a fuller understanding of Lupino’s major contribution to the history of American cinema and media. The revisions update this book, the first on Lupino’s directing, to address recent scholarship on Lupino’s work and reinforce her abiding relevance for cinephiles and film scholars. It incorporates scholarly and popular culture references to Lupino in the last seven years. Updates include a foreword by writer and film critic Imogen Sara Smith, whose work in film scholarship and the public arena has drawn attention to Lupino and the importance of gender to film noir. Authors Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman have added a complete list of the TV episodes Lupino directed in the 1950s and '60s, as well as an updated epilogue.  

This new edition addresses how our views of Lupino’s innovative cinema and her prodigious contributions to classic television have been taken up by others, proving that Lupino, whose reputation has waxed and waned since the middle of the twentieth century, is here to stay as a major figure in the history of American media.

Innovative and informed by a wealth of new evidence, In Search of Belonging answers important questions about the ways Latinas perform citizenship in today’s America.

Analyzing how 1980s visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualities

In 1982, the protests of antiporn feminists sparked the censorship of the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, a radical and sexually evocative image-text volume whose silencing became a symbol for the irresolvable feminist sex wars. In Visible Archives documents the community networks that produced this resonant artifact and others, analyzing how visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualities.

Margaret Galvan explores a number of feminist and cultural touchstones—the feminist sex wars, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the women in print movement, and countercultural grassroots periodical networks—and examines how visual culture interacts with these pivotal moments. She goes deep into the records to bring together a decade’s worth of research in grassroots and university archives that include comics, collages, photographs, drawings, and other image-text media produced by women, including Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson, Roberta Gregory, Lee Marrs, Alison Bechdel, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Nan Goldin.

The art highlighted in In Visible Archives demonstrates how women represented their bodies and sexualities on their own terms and created visibility for new, diverse identities, thus serving as blueprints for future activism and advocacy—work that is urgent now more than ever as LGBTQ+ and women’s rights face challenges and restrictions across the nation.

The home pregnancy test is a technology that can be purchased in drug stores, gas stations, and online, and the results are often casually posted to social media. But, as sociologist and attorney Joan Robinson argues, no technology is as simple as it appears. In Whose Hands traces this test from its origin story in a lab to its day-to-day existence in the hands of users, showing that mundane technologies matter, especially when they are used as tools of surveillance and self-surveillance. The book is the result of Robinson's fourteen-year exploration of the social life of the home pregnancy test, and it describes the breadth and beauty of people's messy reproductive lives today. Based on archival and legal research as well as interviews with home pregnancy test users, it shows how even those technologies that we use because they're convenient can be tools of shame, surveillance, and control. 
 

The first literary biography of a much-neglected American writer, this book explores the multiple tensions at the core of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's life and work. A prolific short story writer and novelist, Freeman (1852–1930) developed a reputation as a local colorist who depicted the peculiarities of her native New England. Yet as Leah Blatt Glasser shows, Freeman was one of the first American authors to write extensively about the relationships women form outside of marriage and motherhood, the role of work in women's lives, the complexity of women's sexuality, and the interior lives of women who rebel rather than conform to patriarchal strictures.

In a Closet Hidden traces Freeman's evolution as a writer, showing how her own inner conflicts repeatedly found expression in her art. As Glasser demonstrates, Freeman's work examined the competing claims of creativity and convention, self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice, spinsterhood and marriage, lesbianism and heterosexuality.

In 1869, at a moment when women were largely barred from public life and professional opportunities, Harriet Tenney stepped into Michigan’s State Capitol and made history. As the first woman to hold a full-time position in the State of Michigan’s government, she spent the next twenty-two years reshaping not only Michigan’s libraries, but the nation’s understanding of what women could achieve in public service.

Appointed and reappointed by seven governors from both political parties, Tenney built one of the country’s most respected state libraries. She dramatically expanded its collections, established professional standards that became models for libraries across the country, and mentored a generation of women librarians who followed in her path. She also founded Michigan’s first state museum, ensuring that historical artifacts, portraits, and documents would be preserved for future generations; today, tens of thousands of people each year visit and study the objects she collected and curated.

Tenney’s impact radiated far beyond the Capitol. Under her leadership, the state librarianship itself became recognized as a “woman’s position”—a remarkable shift in an era when women's work remained largely invisible. In Lansing, she founded the Woman’s Club as well as the Lansing Library and Literary Association, which evolved into the Capital Area District Library system.

In the Charge of a Woman not only tells the story of Tenney’s achievements in expanding the role of women in the workforce; it also illuminates domestic and political life in nineteenth-century Michigan, revealing how one woman navigated, and transformed, a world built to exclude her.

Recovering the bold voices and audacious lives of women who confronted capitalist society’s failures and injustices in the 1930s—a decade unnervingly similar to our own
 

In the Company of Radical Women Writers rediscovers the political commitments and passionate advocacy of seven writers—Black, Jewish, and white—who as young women turned to communism around the Great Depression and, over decades of national crisis, spoke to issues of labor, land, and love in ways that provide urgent, thought-provoking guidance for today. Rosemary Hennessy spotlights the courageous lives of women who confronted similar challenges to those we still face: exhausting and unfair labor practices, unrelenting racial injustice, and environmental devastation.

As Hennessy brilliantly shows, the documentary journalism and creative and biographical writings of Marvel Cooke, Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, Alice Childress, Josephine Herbst, Meridel Le Sueur, and Muriel Rukeyser recognized that life is sustained across a web of dependencies that we each have a duty to maintain. Their work brought into sharp focus the value and dignity of Black women’s domestic work, confronted the destructive myths of land exploitation and white supremacy, and explored ways of knowing attuned to a life-giving erotic energy that spans bodies and relations. In doing so, they also expanded the scope of American communism.

By tracing the attention these seven women pay to “life-making” as the relations supporting survival and wellbeing—from Harlem to the American South and Midwest—In the Company of Radical Women Writers reveals their groundbreaking reconceptions of the political and provides bracing inspiration in the ongoing fight for justice.

This book explores the way in which literature can be used to reinforce social power. Through rigorous readings of a series of antebellum plantation novels, Susan J. Tracy shows how the narrative strategies employed by proslavery Southern writers served to justify and perpetuate the oppression of women, blacks, and poor whites.

Tracy focuses on the historical romances of six authors: George Tucker, James Ewell Heath, William Alexander Caruthers, John Pendleton Kennedy, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and William Gilmore Simms. Using variations on a recurring plot—in which a young planter/hero rescues a planter's daughter from an “enemy” of her class—each of these novelists reinforced an idealized vision of a Southern civilization based on male superiority, white supremacy, and class inequality. It is a world in which white men are represented as the natural leaders of loyal and dependent women, grateful and docile slaves, and inferior poor whites. According to Tracy, the interweaving of these themes reveals the extent to which the Southern defense of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War was an argument not only about race relations but about gender and class relations as well.

Winner of the 2018 Early American Literature Book Prize

In this compelling and original book, Caroline Wigginton reshapes our understanding of early American literary history. Overturning long-standing connections between the male-dominated print culture of pamphlets, broadsides, and newspapers and the transformative ideas that instigated the American Revolution, Wigginton explores how women's “relational publications”—circulated texts, objects, and performances—transformed their public and intimate worlds. She argues that Native, black, and white women's interpersonal "publications" revolutionized the dynamics of power and connection in public and private spaces, whether those spaces were Quaker meeting houses, Creek talwas, trading posts, burial grounds, or the women's own "neighborhoods."

Informed by deep and rich archival research, Wigginton's case studies explore specific instances of “relational publication.” The book begins with a pairing of examples—the statement a grieving Lenape mother made through a wampum belt and the political affiliations created when a salon hostess shared her poetry. Subsequent chapters trace a history of women's publication practice, including a Creek woman's diplomatic and legal procession-spectacles in the colonial Southeast, a black mother's expression of protest in Newport, Rhode Island, and the resulting evangelical revival, Phillis Wheatley's elegies that refigured neighborhoods of enslaved and free Bostonians, and a Quaker woman's pious and political commonplace book in Revolutionary Philadelphia.

One of the most memorable images of the British women’s suffrage movement occurred on June 4, Derby Day, 1913. As the field of horses approached a turning at Epsom, militant suffragette Emily Wilding Davison ducked out from under the railing and ran onto the track, reaching for the bridle of the King’s horse, and was killed in the collision. While her death transformed her into a heroine, it all but erased her identity. To identify what impelled Davison to suffer multiple imprisonments, to experience the torture of force-feedings and the insults of hostile members of the crowds who came to hear her speak, Carolyn P. Collette explores a largely ignored source—the writing to which Davison dedicated so much time and effort during the years from 1908 to 1913. Davison’s writing is an implicit apologia for why she lived the life of a militant suffragette and where she continually revisits and restates the principles that guided her: that woman suffrage was necessary to improve the lives of men, women, and children; that the freedom and justice women sought was sanctioned by God and unjustly withheld by humans whose opposition constituted a tyranny that had to be opposed; and that the evolution of human progress demanded that women become fully equal citizens of their nation in every respect— politically, economically, and culturally.

In the Thick of the Fight makes available for the first time the archive of published and unpublished writings of Emily Wilding Davison. Collette reorients both scholarly and public attention away from a single, defining event to the complexity of Davison’s contributions to modern feminist discourse, giving the reader a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of Davison’s suffrage writings.

Bringing to light an often-ignored aspect of Hollywood studio system history, this book focuses on female stars who broke the mold of a male-dominated, often manipulative industry to dictate the path of their own careers through freelancing.

Runner-up, Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association, 2016

During the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system, stars were carefully cultivated and promoted, but at the price of their independence. This familiar narrative of Hollywood stardom receives a long-overdue shakeup in Emily Carman’s new book. Far from passive victims of coercive seven-year contracts, a number of classic Hollywood’s best-known actresses worked on a freelance basis within the restrictive studio system. In leveraging their stardom to play an active role in shaping their careers, female stars including Irene Dunne, Janet Gaynor, Miriam Hopkins, Carole Lombard, and Barbara Stanwyck challenged Hollywood’s patriarchal structure.

Through extensive, original archival research, Independent Stardom uncovers this hidden history of women’s labor and celebrity in studio-era Hollywood. Carman weaves a compelling narrative that reveals the risks these women took in deciding to work autonomously. Additionally, she looks at actresses of color, such as Anna May Wong and Lupe Vélez, whose careers suffered from the enforced independence that resulted from being denied long-term studio contracts. Tracing the freelance phenomenon among American motion picture talent in the 1930s, Independent Stardom rethinks standard histories of Hollywood to recognize female stars as creative artists, sophisticated businesswomen, and active players in the then (as now) male-dominated film industry.

Following the stories of twenty women connected to Oregon breweries before Prohibition, Inherited Work recognizes the overlooked contributions of the women who inherited, managed, and navigated Oregon’s brewing industry. At a time when recordkeeping and historical memory obscured their authority, these women were negotiating debt, managing workers, protecting property, arranging sales, supporting family wealth, and making strategic decisions about the future of their businesses.

Drawing on census records, probate files, property records, newspapers, court documents, and oral histories, Tiah Edmunson-Morton traces the legal and economic landscape of the time, demonstrating the conditions and decisions these women faced in managing their personal lives and livelihoods. From widows like Victoria Bauerlin, Johanna Behrens, and Mary Meller—who inherited not only property but also the financial terms that shaped what they could do next—to the matriarch of a brewing dynasty, Louisa Weinhard, Inherited Work reveals how their influence endured.

Today, women can be found throughout the industry as brewers and owners, as well as chemists, restaurant managers, bookkeepers, educators, graphic designers, and hop brokers. While their roles are more visible than they once were, the history of women in brewing remains incomplete. Who were these women? What did it mean to be part of the brewing industry at the turn of the century? And what changes when we bring their stories into the history of brewing?

Examining the evolving reach of the #MeToo Movement

In this timely and important collection, editors Jason D. Spraitz and Kendra N. Bowen bring together the work of contributors in the fields of criminal justice and criminology, sociology, journalism, and communications. These chapters show #MeToo is not only a support network of victims’ voices and testimonies but also a revolutionary interrogation of policies, power imbalances, and ethical failures that resulted in decades-long cover-ups and institutions  structured to ensure continued abuse. This book reveals #MeToo as so much more than a hashtag.

Contributors discuss how #MeToo has altered the landscape of higher education; detail a political history of sexual abuse in the United States and the UK; discuss a recent grand jury report about religious institutions; and address the foster care and correctional systems. Hollywood instances are noted for their fear of retaliation among victims and continued accolades for alleged abusers. In sports, contributors examine the Jerry Sandusky scandal and the abuse by Larry Nassar. Advertising and journalism are scrutinized for covering the #MeToo disclosures while dealing with their own scandals. Finally, social media platforms are investigated for harassment and threats of violent victimization.

Drawing on the general framework of the #MeToo Movement, contributors look at complex and very different institutions—athletics, academia, religion, politics, justice, childcare, social media, and entertainment. Contributors include revelatory case studies to ensure we hear the victims’ voices; bring to light the complicity and negligence of social institutions; and advocate for systemic solutions to institutional sexual abuse, violence, and harassment.