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Since the late 1960s, Jane Fonda has identified as an activist first and an actor second, using her celebrity as a vehicle to convey her views and her advocacy. Few stars of her stature have been as simultaneously acclaimed and vilified as Fonda. Even as she won two Academy Awards and was a major box office draw of the 1970s and 1980s, she received reams of hate mail for her political activism and antiwar stances. This book explores Fonda’s devotion to movement politics—sometimes at the expense of her career and her personal safety.

Digging deep into rare material from cinema archives and Fonda’s own personal papers, journalist Marilyn Greenwald tells the story of how Fonda came to view acting as a “side gig” that gives her a worldwide platform to convey her personal and political views. Charting the evolution of her activism and the merging of her acting and producing with her advocacy, Greenwald focuses on the years from 1968—when she was jarred out of complacency by the Vietnam War—to 1980, after the release of The China Syndrome and the advent of the Three Mile Island nuclear crisis, which brought to light the possible dangers of nuclear energy. Greenwald details how three of her films—Klute (1971), Coming Home (1978), and The China Syndrome (1979)—were designed to further her personal beliefs. She also considers how Fonda has weathered changes in the entertainment industry and public tastes to produce and star in decades' worth of socially conscious projects. Charting Fonda’s personal and professional growth while offering a candid account of her struggles, this book shows how Fonda viewed movies as an influential storytelling tool that can influence public opinion, change minds, and trigger social change. 

Pleasure-loving, sarcastic, stubborn, determined, erotic, deeply sad--Jane Kenyon’s complexity and contradictions found expression in luminous poems that continue to attract a passionate following. Dana Greene draws on a wealth of personal correspondence and other newly available materials to delve into the origins, achievement, and legacy of Kenyon’s poetry and separate the artist’s life story from that of her husband, the award-winning poet Donald Hall.

Impacted by relatives’ depression during her isolated childhood, Kenyon found poetry at college, where writers like Robert Bly encouraged her development. Her graduate school marriage to the middle-aged Hall and subsequent move to New Hampshire had an enormous impact on her life, moods, and creativity. Immersed in poetry, Kenyon wrote about women’s lives, nature, death, mystical experiences, and melancholy--becoming, in her own words, an “advocate of the inner life.” Her breakthrough in the 1980s brought acclaim as “a born poet” and appearances in the New Yorker and elsewhere. Yet her ongoing success and artistic growth exacerbated strains in her marriage and failed to stave off depressive episodes that sometimes left her non-functional. Refusing to live out the stereotype of the mad woman poet, Kenyon sought treatment and confronted her illness in her work and in public while redoubling her personal dedication to finding pleasure in every fleeting moment. Prestigious fellowships, high-profile events, residencies, and media interviews had propelled her career to new heights when leukemia cut her life short and left her husband the loving but flawed curator of her memory and legacy.

Revelatory and insightful, Jane Kenyon offers the first full-length biography of the elusive poet and the unquiet life that shaped her art.

Films like The Eternal Daughter and the diptych The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II have cemented Joanna Hogg’s reputation as an original voice in contemporary cinema. Her rigorous and quiet style draws on the histories of film and art to tell stories that weave autobiography with studies in human opacity.

Shonni Enelow analyzes Hogg’s six feature films around the concepts of turning away, the reality effect, and the impossible encounter. Throughout, Enelow explores the tension between absorption, in which characters are immersed in a diegetic fiction, and self-reflexivity, as the filmmaker comments on her techniques of representation. An in-depth interview with Hogg delves into the director’s process, approach to creating character, and use of artistic and literary references.

Sophisticated and innovative, Joanna Hogg illuminates the work of one of today’s most original filmmakers.

Judith Resnik didn’t grow up dreaming of space, but when NASA opened its doors to women astronauts in the late 1970s, she stepped forward—and soared. One of the first six women ever accepted into NASA’s space shuttle astronaut-training program, Resnik brought her sharp mind, determination, and creativity to a field that had long been closed to women. Although she wasn’t the first American woman in space, she became one of the most accomplished astronauts of her time.

Resnik’s journey wasn’t easy. She faced challenges at home and in school, but she never let obstacles stop her. A gifted student, she excelled in math, science, and music—she even considered becoming a concert pianist before choosing a career in engineering. Her hard work paid off: She earned multiple degrees and helped design improvements for the space shuttle itself. She proved that astronauts aren’t just pilots—they’re problem solvers, inventors, and explorers.

In 1984, Resnik launched into space for the first time aboard the shuttle Discovery. Two years later, she joined the crew of Challenger. Tragically, that mission ended in disaster, cutting her life short. While the world focused on the loss of teacher Christa McAuliffe, who was a passenger on that flight, Resnik’s story was often overlooked. Yet her contributions to science and space exploration live on through programs, schools, and scholarships that bear her name.

This inspiring biography brings Resnik’s remarkable life to light. Readers will discover how a girl from Ohio became a trailblazer in space and how her courage and brilliance continue to inspire new generations. Her story reminds us that even if you’re not first, you can still make history—and that reaching for the stars starts with believing in yourself.

This collection profiles women in American politics who have demonstrated true leadership over the past 150 years—though this leadership has not always been recognized as such. These women have defied stereotypical caricatures and modeled effective ways to lead, even when they have not enjoyed formal access to voting or party politics, lost campaigns, or suffered scrutiny and harassment as public figures. Many of them have championed people and causes that their male counterparts have neglected, lending their lived experiences as women to fight for political action for underrepresented groups, and showing time and again that the personal really is political. Here we assess their political careers, not in terms of wins and losses, but rather in their ability to negotiate identity politics and shift conventional rules about how politicians lead. 

This collection profiles such varied women as Jeannette Rankin, Shirley Chrisholm, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Stacy Abrams, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others. Whether they have recast gendered meanings around political ambition, broadened access to the political process, privileged principles over party loyalty, or prioritized issues over incumbency, each woman profiled here has wisdom to impart to new generations of American women who aspire to run for office or be involved in American politics. 

"So this is where the brain starts to shut down and that which we treasure most, our personal identities, begins to slip away....I suppose I should be thankful; it's a paycheck." With this disturbing sentiment, Kevin Henson begins a voyage into the world of "the temp." For several years while a graduate student, Henson logged in thousands of hours as a temporary worker in offices throughout Chicago's Loop. Those experiences, and numerous interviews with other temps and temporary counselors, create a vivid and often disheartening picture of working 9 to 5 behind the receptionist's desk, telephone console, or data-entry terminal.

In their own voices, the temps in this book lament the frequently demeaning and mundane nature of many assignments:

"You're not paid to think."

"Temps don't have names; they are just 'the temp.'"

"They always harass me...because I just wear a sweater and slacks."

"The worst part is telling people what you do. They always ask 'When are you going to get a real job?'"

Where the temporary service industry is quick to extol the virtues of temp work—mainly its flexibility—Henson and his cast of temps reveal the tacit pressure to persevere through an unpleasant assignment, to accept every assignment offered, and to readjust personal lives to do so. Outsiders to the established office culture and hierarchy, most temps are asked to do low-skill work and leave more detailed or complicated tasks for the return of the permanent employee.

Whether temp life is a preferred choice or grudgingly accepted as the last option when "real" or permanent work is unavailable, all temps must confront issues of gender, identity, and self-esteem. Henson examines these issues, documenting the concerns and interpretations of temp workers about their own work lives.

When a Texas debutante bows her forehead to the floor in the famous "Texas dip," society columnists all across the country speculate interminably over what it is that sets Texas women apart. But really, how could they know? Even women born and bred in Texas can't always answer that question.

Prudence Mackintosh comes very close to an answer, though, in this endlessly entertaining book. Writing with both a wry sense of humor and an insider's compassion, she offers us a fascinating look into the world of privileged, educated, well-married, well-connected, and mostly wealthy white Texas women.

What really sets these women apart, Ms. Mackintosh tells us, is the comfortable yet demanding path they follow from their idyllic girlhoods to prominent positions in society. In thirteen essays, some of which originally appeared in Texas Monthly magazine, she charts the way stations that mark this path: summer camps in the Texas Hill Country, exclusive private schools like Dallas' Hockaday, sorority membership, and acceptance into the Junior League.

Prudence Mackintosh has been both an outsider and an insider in this privileged world, and her observations are shot through with wit and real insight. Just As We Were may not be the final word on elite Texas women, but no other book has described their world with greater irony or accuracy.