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2194 books match the query 'Women's Studies' and 186 start with s

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Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories

Yamamoto, Hisaye

Rutgers University Press, 2001

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories brings together nineteen stories that span Hisaye Yamamoto's forty-year career. It was her first book to be published in the United States. Yamamoto's themes include the cultural conflicts between the first generation, the Issei, and their children, the Nisei; coping with prejudice; and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.

In addition to the contents of the original volume, this edition brings back into print the following works:
- Death Rides the Rails to Poston
- Eucalyptus
- A Fire in Fontana
- Florentine Gardens

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Sex Exposed

Sexuality and the Pornography Debate

McIntosh, Mary

Rutgers University Press, 1993

Over the past twenty years debates about pornography have raged within feminism and beyond. Throughout the 1970s feminists increasingly addressed the problem of men's sexual violence against women, and many women reduced the politics of men's power to questions about sexuality. By the 1980s these questions had become more and more focused on the issue of pornography--now a metaphor for the menace of male power. Collapsing feminist politics into sexuality and sexuality into pornography has not only caused some of the deepest splits between feminists, but made it harder to think clearly about either sexuality or pornography--indeed, about feminist politics more generally.

This provocative collection, by well-known feminists, surveys these arguments, and in particular asks why recent feminist debates about sexuality keep reducing to questions of pornography.

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Sex Exposed

Sexuality and the Pornography Debate

McIntosh, Mary

Rutgers University Press, 1993

Over the past twenty years debates about pornography have raged within feminism and beyond. Throughout the 1970s feminists increasingly addressed the problem of men's sexual violence against women, and many women reduced the politics of men's power over women to questions about sexuality. By the 1980s these questions had become more and more focused on the issue of pornography––now a metaphor for the menace of male power. Collapsing feminist politics into sexuality and sexuality into pornography has not only caused some of the deepest splits between feminists, but made it harder to think clearly about either sexuality or pornography––indeed, about feminist politics more generally.

This provocative collection, by well-known feminists on both sides of the Atlantic, surveys these arguments, and in particular asks why recent feminist debates about sexuality keep reducing to questions of pornography. The authors open up the debate by looking at such topics as the improbable alliance between the right and pro-censorship feminists, the displacement of heterosexual desire and its discontents onto pornography, Andrea Dworkin's novel Mercy, psychoanalytic reflections on fantasy, censorship in relation to AIDS work, the new lesbian and bisexual pornography, the controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe's supposed racism in his photos of black nudes, Mae West as sexual icon and her brushes with the law, and the female nude in "high" art.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Elizabeth Cowie, Harriett Gilbert, Robin Gorna, Marybeth Hamilton, Loretta Loach, Anne McClintock, Kobena Mercer, Jane Mills, Mandy Merck, Lynda Nead, Gillian Rodgerson, Carol Smart, Carole S. Vance, Linda Williams, and Elizabeth Wilson.

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Sex Goes to School

Girls and Sex Education before the 1960s

Susan K. Freeman

University of Illinois Press, 2007

When seeking approaches for sex education, few look to the past for guidance. But Susan K. Freeman's investigation of the classrooms of the 1940s and 1950s offers numerous insights into the potential for sex education to address adolescent challenges, particularly for girls. From rural Toms River, New Jersey, to urban San Diego and many places in between, the use of discussion-based classes fostered an environment that focused less on strictly biological matters of human reproduction and more on the social dimensions of the gendered and sexual worlds that the students inhabited. Although the classes reinforced normative heterosexual gender roles that could prove repressive, the discussion-based approach also emphasized a potentially liberating sense of personal choice and responsibility in young women's relationship decisions. In addition to the biological and psychological underpinnings of normative sexuality, teachers presented girls' sex lives and gendered behavior as critical to the success of American families and, by extension, the entire way of life of American democracy. The approaches of teachers and students were sometimes predictable and other times surprising, yet almost wholly without controversy in the two decades before the so-called Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. Sex Goes to School illuminates the tensions between and among adults and youth attempting to make sense of sex in a society that was then, as much as today, both sex-phobic and sex-saturated.

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Sex Itself

The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome

Sarah S. Richardson

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Human genomes are 99.9 percent identical—with one prominent exception. Instead of a matching pair of X chromosomes, men carry a single X, coupled with a tiny chromosome called the Y. Tracking the emergence of a new and distinctive way of thinking about sex represented by the unalterable, simple, and visually compelling binary of the X and Y chromosomes, Sex Itself examines the interaction between cultural gender norms and genetic theories of sex from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, postgenomic age.

Using methods from history, philosophy, and gender studies of science, Sarah S. Richardson uncovers how gender has helped to shape the research practices, questions asked, theories and models, and descriptive language used in sex chromosome research. From the earliest theories of chromosomal sex determination, to the mid-century hypothesis of the aggressive XYY supermale, to the debate about Y chromosome degeneration, to the recent claim that male and female genomes are more different than those of humans and chimpanzees, Richardson shows how cultural gender conceptions influence the genetic science of sex.

Richardson shows how sexual science of the past continues to resonate, in ways both subtle and explicit, in contemporary research on the genetics of sex and gender. With the completion of the Human Genome Project, genes and chromosomes are moving to the center of the biology of sex. Sex Itself offers a compelling argument for the importance of ongoing critical dialogue on how cultural conceptions of gender operate within the science of sex.

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Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality

Joanne E. Passet

University of Illinois Press, 2003

Questioning the commonplace view of the late nineteenth century as a period of passionless women and so-called Victorian sexuality, this study examines the spread of sex radical thought and notions of free love through American society in the second half of the nineteenth century. During this period a grass-roots movement of women and men, uncomfortable with the social, economic, and political inequalities they saw as inherent to the institution of marriage, participated in frank discussions about the relationship between sexuality and women’s rights.
In charting the growth of the sex radical movement, Joanne E. Passet draws on a host of documents from the period -- letters, periodicals, lectures, and pamphlets -- to establish a strong link between the rise of print culture and the freedom of citizens, especially women, to build geographically dispersed communities of ideas. She also advances models of sexuality that challenge the restrictive mores of society at large and shows that the majority of correspondents who participated in the sex radical movement resided in the Midwest and the Great Plains states, where ideas of individual freedom and sovereignty resonated particularly strongly.
Passet vividly demonstrates how this sex radical movement laid the foundations upon which later generations of women’s rights crusaders and feminists would build, placing discussions of sex and sexuality squarely in the public arena.

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Sex Testing

Gender Policing in Women's Sports

Lindsay Pieper

University of Illinois Press, 2016

In 1968, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) implemented sex testing for female athletes at that year's Games. When it became clear that testing regimes failed to delineate a sex divide, the IOC began to test for gender--a shift that allowed the organization to control the very idea of womanhood.

Ranging from Cold War tensions to gender anxiety to controversies around doping, Lindsay Parks Pieper explores sex testing in sport from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Pieper examines how the IOC in particular insisted on a misguided binary notion of gender that privileged Western norms. Testing evolved into a tool to identify--and eliminate--athletes the IOC deemed too strong, too fast, or too successful. Pieper shows how this system punished gifted women while hindering the development of women's athletics for decades. She also reveals how the flawed notions behind testing--ideas often sexist, racist, or ridiculous--degraded the very idea of female athleticism.

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Sex Tourism in Bahia

Ambiguous Entanglements

Erica Lorraine Williams

University of Illinois Press, 2013

For nearly a decade, Brazil has surpassed Thailand as the world's premier sex tourism destination. As the first full-length ethnography of sex tourism in Brazil, this pioneering study treats sex tourism as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon that involves a range of activities and erotic connections, from sex work to romantic transnational relationships. Erica Lorraine Williams explores sex tourism in the Brazilian state of Bahia from the perspectives of foreign tourists, tourism industry workers, sex workers who engage in liaisons with foreigners, and Afro-Brazilian men and women who contend with foreigners' stereotypical assumptions about their licentiousness. She shows how the Bahian state strategically exploits the touristic desire for exotic culture by appropriating an eroticized blackness and commodifying the Afro-Brazilian culture in order to sell Bahia to foreign travelers.

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Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885-1917

Gretchen Soderlund

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, Gretchen Soderlund offers a new way to understand sensationalism in both newspapers and reform movements. By tracing the history of high-profile print exposés on sex trafficking by journalists like William T. Stead and George Kibbe Turner, Soderlund demonstrates how controversies over gender, race, and sexuality were central to the shift from sensationalism to objectivity—and crucial to the development of journalism in the early twentieth century.

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Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners

Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy

LaShawn Harris

University of Illinois Press, 2016

During the early twentieth century, a diverse group of African American women carved out unique niches for themselves within New York City's expansive informal economy. LaShawn Harris illuminates the labor patterns and economic activity of three perennials within this kaleidoscope of underground industry: sex work, numbers running for gambling enterprises, and the supernatural consulting business. Mining police and prison records, newspaper accounts, and period literature, Harris teases out answers to essential questions about these women and their working lives. She also offers a surprising revelation, arguing that the burgeoning underground economy served as a catalyst in working-class black women ™s creation of the employment opportunities, occupational identities, and survival strategies that provided them with financial stability and a sense of labor autonomy and mobility. At the same time, urban black women, all striving for economic and social prospects and pleasures, experienced the conspicuous and hidden dangers associated with newfound labor opportunities.

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Sex and Disability

Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow, eds.

Duke University Press, 2012

The title of this collection of essays, Sex and Disability, unites two terms that the popular imagination often regards as incongruous. The major texts in sexuality studies, including queer theory, rarely mention disability, and foundational texts in disability studies do not discuss sex in much detail. What if "sex" and "disability" were understood as intimately related concepts? And what if disabled people were seen as both subjects and objects of a range of erotic desires and practices? These are among the questions that this collection's contributors engage. From multiple perspectives—including literary analysis, ethnography, and autobiography—they consider how sex and disability come together and how disabled people negotiate sex and sexual identities in ableist and heteronormative culture. Queering disability studies, while also expanding the purview of queer and sexuality studies, these essays shake up notions about who and what is sexy and sexualizable, what counts as sex, and what desire is. At the same time, they challenge conceptions of disability in the dominant culture, queer studies, and disability studies.

Contributors. Chris Bell, Michael Davidson, Lennard J. Davis, Michel Desjardins, Lezlie Frye, Rachael Groner, Kristen Harmon, Michelle Jarman, Alison Kafer, Riva Lehrer, Nicole Markotić, Robert McRuer, Anna Mollow, Rachel O’Connell, Russell Shuttleworth, David Serlin, Tobin Siebers, Abby L. Wilkerson

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Sex and Scientific Inquiry

Edited by Sandra Harding and Jean F. O'Barr

University of Chicago Press, 1987

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Sex, Race, and Merit

Debating Affirmative Action in Education and Employment

Faye J. Crosby and Cheryl VanDeVeer, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Since its inception, affirmative action has been a controversial policy, and on all sides of the issue passions run high. Sometimes commentators have looked with clarity at the deep and complex issues surrounding affirmative action, but too often facts have been in shorter supply than misinformed opinions. Sex, Race, and Merit: Debating Affirmative Action in Education and Employment is designed to enhance intelligent discussion of the issues, presenting all sides of the controversy and working to separate fact from fiction. Sex, Race, and Merit brings together a rich array of material, including newspaper articles and essays by leading scholars. including William Bowen, Derek Bok, Barbara Bergmann, Christopher Edley, Barbara Reskin, Claude Steele, and Patricia Williams. Also featured are excerpts from primary sources, including the legislative documents that established affirmative action policy; the text of California Proposal 200, which ended such policy in that state; and excerpts from key legal cases, including the Bakke case and other recent cases. Sex, Race, and Merit is a useful tool in eliciting thoughtful, informed, and useful debate on the subject of affirmative action. It neither advocates in favor of affirmative action, nor does it speak against it. Rather, by including both factual and polemical materials, the book allows readers to explore the contours of the debate as well as the facts being debated. It is designed for an audience of nonspecialist readers, including students from secondary school through college, but will also be useful to scholars interested in the evolution and current status of this critical policy debate.

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Sexting Panic

Rethinking Criminalization, Privacy, and Consent

Amy Adele Hasinoff

University of Illinois Press, 2015

Sexting Panic illustrates how anxieties about technology and teen girls' sexuality distract from critical questions about how to adapt norms of privacy and consent for new media. Though mobile phones can be used to cause harm, Amy Adele Hasinoff notes that criminalization and abstinence policies meant to curb sexting often fail to account for the distinction between consensual sharing and the malicious distribution of a private image. Hasinoff challenges the idea that sexting inevitably victimizes young women. Instead, she encourages us to recognize young people's capacity for choice and recommends responses to sexting that are realistic and nuanced rather than based on misplaced fears about deviance, sexuality, and digital media.

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Sexual Exploitation of Teenagers

Adolescent Development, Discrimination, and Consent Law

Jennifer Ann Drobac

University of Chicago Press, 2016

When we consider the concept of sexual abuse and harassment, our minds tend to jump either towards adults caught in unhealthy relationships or criminals who take advantage of children. But the millions of maturing teenagers who also deal with sexual harassment can fall between the cracks.

When it comes to sexual relationships, adolescents pose a particular problem. Few teenagers possess all of the emotional and intellectual tools needed to navigate these threats, including the all too real advances made by supervisors, teachers, and mentors. In Sexual Exploitation of Teenagers, Jennifer Drobac explores the shockingly common problem of maturing adolescents who are harassed and exploited by adults in their lives. Reviewing the neuroscience and psychosocial evidence of adolescent development, she explains why teens are so vulnerable to adult harassers. Even today, in an age of increasing public awareness, criminal and civil law regarding the sexual abuse of minors remains tragically inept and irregular from state to state. Drobac uses six recent cases of teens suffering sexual harassment to illuminate the flaws and contradictions of this system, skillfully showing how our current laws fail to protect youths, and offering an array of imaginative legal reforms that could achieve increased justice for adolescent victims of sexual coercion.

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Sexual Fields

Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life

Edited by Adam Isaiah Green

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In the late modern period, an unprecedented expansion of specialized erotic worlds has transformed the domain of intimate life. Organized by appetites and dispositions related to race, ethnicity, class, gender, and age, these erotic worlds are arenas of sexual exploration but, also, sites of stratification and dominion wherein actors vie for partners, social significance, and esteem. These are what Adam Isaiah Green calls sexual fields, which represent a semblance of social life for which he offers a groundbreaking new framework.

To build on the sexual fields framework, Green has gathered a distinguished group of scholars who together make a strong case for sexual field theory as the first systematic theoretical innovation since queer theory in the sociology of sexuality. Expanding on the work of Bourdieu, Green and contributors develop this distinctively sociological approach for analyzing collective sexual life, where much of the sexual life of our society resides today. Coupling field theory with the ethnographic and theoretical expertise of some of the most important scholars of sexual life at work today, Sexual Fields offers a game-changing approach that will revolutionize how sociologists analyze and make sense of contemporary sexual life for years to come.

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Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust

Edited by Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel

Brandeis University Press, 2010

Using testimonies, Nazi documents, memoirs, and artistic representations, this volume broadens and deepens comprehension of Jewish women’s experiences of rape and other forms of sexual violence during the Holocaust. The book goes beyond previous studies, and challenges claims that Jewish women were not sexually violated during the Holocaust. This anthology by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars addresses topics such as rape, forced prostitution, assaults on childbearing, artistic representations of sexual violence, and psychological insights into survivor trauma. These subjects have been relegated to the edges or completely left out of Holocaust history, and this book aims to shift perceptions and promote new discourse.

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Sexuality and Abortion in Interwar Poland

Maternity in Times of Crisis

Elisa-Maria Hiemer

Central European University Press, 2026

Women’s rights activism and the reformation of the legal thought in early twentieth-century Poland were deeply intertwined—sometimes contradictory, yet mutually dependent—shaping debates around the 1932 abortion law and challenging traditional views on female sexuality and motherhood. Set against political transformation, economic hardship, and societal pressure, this book explores the clash between liberal “moral reform” ideas and the ideal of the “traditional” Polish family. Through individual stories from rural Suwalki county, it reveals how precarity, gender roles, and state expectations influenced women’s choices, with abortion often serving as necessary healthcare and survival. Rich in legal case studies, it offers scholars and readers a comprehensive overview of interwar sexuality debates and timely reflections on how these issues resonate today. This interdisciplinary work highlights the enduring impact of the male gaze in decisions affecting women’s lives.

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Shadow Bodies

Black Women, Ideology, Representation, and Politics

Jordan-Zachery, Julia S.

Rutgers University Press, 2018

What does it mean for Black women to organize in a political context that has generally ignored them or been unresponsive although Black women have shown themselves an important voting bloc? How for example, does #sayhername translate into a political agenda that manifests itself in specific policies? Shadow Bodies focuses on the positionality of the Black woman’s body, which serves as a springboard for helping us think through political and cultural representations. It does so by asking: How do discursive practices, both speech and silences, support and maintain hegemonic understandings of Black womanhood thereby rendering some Black women as shadow bodies, unseen and unremarked upon?

Grounded in Black feminist thought, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery looks at the functioning of scripts ascribed to Black women’s bodies in the framing of HIV/AIDS, domestic abuse, and mental illness and how such functioning renders some bodies invisible in Black politics in general and Black women’s politics specifically.

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Shall Not Be Denied

Women Fight for the Vote

Library of Library of Congress

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Official Companion to the Library of Congress Exhibition.

The campaign for women’s suffrage—considered the largest reform movement in American history—lasted more than seven decades. The struggle was not for the fainthearted. For years, determined women organized, lobbied, paraded, petitioned, lectured, picketed, and faced imprisonment in pursuit of the right to vote. Drawing from the Library’s extensive collections of photographs, personal papers, and the organizational records of such figures as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Church Terrell, Carrie Chapman Catt, the National Woman’s Party, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Shall Not Be Denied traces the movement leading to the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, the contributions of suffragists who worked to persuade women that they deserved the same rights as men, the divergent political strategies and internal divisions they overcame, the push for a federal women’s suffrage amendment, and the legacy of the movement.

A companion to the exhibition staged by the Library of Congress, which opened on June 4, 2019—the 100th anniversary of the US Senate’s passage of the suffrage amendment that would become the 19th amendment—Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote is part of the national commemoration of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.

Published by Rutgers University Press in association with the Library of Congress.

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Shapeshifters

Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship

Aimee Meredith Cox

Duke University Press, 2015

In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter's residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women's experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit's history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.

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Shaping Global Cultures through Screenwriting

Women Who Write Our Worlds

Edited by Rose Ferrell and Rosanne Welch

Intellect Books, 2025

The voices of women changing the world one script at a time speak to how screenwriting is more than a craft—it’s activism, education, and revolution.

Shaping Global Culture through Screenwriting is a powerful testament to the undeniable impact of an international collection of female screenwriters. Spanning film, television, virtual reality, games, and digital media, these case studies showcase instances when women filmmakers used screenwriting to challenge injustice and give voice to communities around the world.

Divided into sections that seek to overcome global disparities in wealth and power, the book views screenwriting as activism, shifting attitudes, and altering lived experiences. Whether about gender and race or war and colonization, each chapter exposes the deep connections between storytelling and social change. More than just a study of the craft, this book is a celebration of the women writers who use their artistic lens to educate and empower others. Geared toward readers interested in screenwriting, media studies, sociology, women’s studies, and a wide range of humanities subjects, including history and population studies, Shaping Global Culture through Screenwriting brings long-overdue attention to the vital role women take in shaping the global cultural landscape.

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Shaping Tradition

Women's Roles in Ceremonial Rituals of the Agwagune

David Uru Iyam

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

Agwagune women in southeastern Nigeria contribute to the cultural construction of their societies in deep and systematic ways. This reality is often concealed, misrepresented, or unexamined in studies that do not consciously set out to address female agency and authority. Most recently women have reshaped traditional male-centered village practices behind the scenes, such as when they updated the premarital ritual of fattening prospective brides, and when they ended female circumcision. Women use their status to direct and influence male leadership on matters of war, finance, education, and political stability.

Using this community as a case study, David Uru Iyam asserts that these women are not stereotypically submissive, oppressed, or passive. Agwagune women participate in male ceremonies by pretending to be unaware of them, concealing their authority under a veneer of secrecy. Instead of focusing on obvious male political power, Iyam highlights the overlooked domestic and public contributions of women that uphold—and change—entire social systems.

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Shaw's Daughters

Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender

J. Ellen Gainor

University of Michigan Press, 1992

This book provides a vital intervention in theater history by systematically deconstructing the long-held assumption that George Bernard Shaw was an exceptionally progressive, early feminist playwright. Examining three central character tropes, Gainor introduces previously unexamined reviews and essays written by Shaw’s female contemporaries, revealing a distinct resistance to his depictions of women. She argues that Shaw’s "unwomanly women" were not truly liberated; rather, Shaw anchored his concepts of female equality strictly in masculine attributes, striping his independent female characters of their sexuality to make them fit patriarchal molds. By situating his dramaturgy firmly within the dominant social, psychological, and medical ideologies of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the book proves that Shaw’s gender constructions were deeply bound to the traditional constraints of his time.

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She Devils at the Door

Eliza Smith Brown

Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2023

The true story of the Gilded Age’s “political twins” who brought women’s suffrage and political reform to the city of Pittsburgh.

Sometimes troublemakers emerge from the most unlikely of places. This true story follows the lives of two daughters of the Gilded Age—Lucy and Eliza Kennedy—who were educated at Vassar College and became leaders of the suffrage movement. Then, after the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920, they spent the next forty years fighting corruption in politics and government.

Tenacious, smart, and witty, they captivated crowds, disarmed their opponents, and instilled particular dread among the corrupt politicians who were the unfortunate targets of their nonpartisan crusade. Their entry across the threshold of Pittsburgh’s City-County Building would reportedly invoke a flurry of hushed warnings through the halls: “The She Devils are at the door!” Together, Lucy and Eliza fought for the vote, empowered women to use it wisely, forced a mayor out of office in disgrace, took control of the city budget, exposed a series of scandals, spearheaded police reform, and launched a campaign that would eventually clear Pittsburgh of its smoky veil.

Featuring the true story of two powerful women, this book comes at a propitious time, reminding us how far women have come and how vigilant we must remain.

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She's Got a Gun

Nancy Floyd

Temple University Press, 2008

In 1991 Nancy Floyd bought her first handgun. Soon she was participating in Ladies Day at her local shooting range and reading Women & Guns magazine. In 1993 she began interviewing and photographing women who were fellow gun owners. In 1997 she started researching "gun women" from the past to see how they were represented in the popular imagination. Now she has brought her work together in a riveting new book, filled with remarkable photographs and candid first-person stories, accompanied by an eye-opening illustrated history of female gun ownership in America.

Sympathetic but unsentimental, Floyd presents gun-toting women young and old, including an eleven-year-old girl competing in her first gun competition, a woman whose grandmother was killed by an intruder, and a war veteran who experienced firefights while stationed in Iraq. Whatever you might think about gun-toting women before you open this book, your preconceptions are sure to be shattered by the end.

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Shelf Life

Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview

Thom Gunn

University of Michigan Press, 1993

Born and raised in Britain, Thom Gunn has lived in the United States since 1954. He is well known as a poet and is increasingly gaining recognition as a literary critic. Gunn’s main concern in Shelf Life is with twentieth-century American poets, both the famous and the obscure; he also discusses other matters, including the Elizabethans, Christopher Isherwood as man and stylist, and Gunn’s own poetry, which he touches on indirectly in the first two sections of the book and directly in the last.

Gunn’s criticism communicates his own enthusiasm for poetry. He tries to show his readers how to get a first foothold into the work of some of his favorite poets, whether Wyatt or Whitman, Mina Loy or Robert Creeley.

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Shifting The Blame

How Victimization Became a Criminal Defense

Westervelt, Saundra D

Rutgers University Press, 1998

More than just a study of legal history, Shifting the Blame looks at the "abuse excuse" defense as an indicator of broad social change in cultural understandings of victimization, responsibility, and womanhood. The introduction of victimization as an exculpatory condition within the context of a criminal defense tells the story of a society that has accepted victimization as a new way of explaining and excusing misbehavior.

Through case law analysis, the book documents the initial development of the strategy in three different types of cases in the 1970s - "rotten social background", brainwashing, and battered women's self-defense cases. Since its initial acceptance in battered women's cases in the early 1980s, the use of the strategy has expanded to a variety of offenders in different types of relationships arguing different defenses. In lively, readable prose, Westervelt examines each form of expansion, revealing that while the expansion of the strategy has been fairly extensive, it has also been limited in some important ways. Her research shows readers that only certain types of "victims," particularly victims of physical abuse, have successfully used this defense. Shifting the Blame exposes the ways in which the acceptance of this new defense strategy illuminates a cultural shift in understandings of individual responsibility and shows how the law plays a role in defining who can be an acceptable victim.

Saundra D. Westervelt is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

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Shifting The Blame

How Victimization Became a Criminal Defense

Westervelt, Saundra D

Rutgers University Press, 1996

Saundra D. Westervelt is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

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Shooting Women

Behind the Camera, Around the World

Harriet Margolis, Alexis Krasilovsky and Julia Stein

Intellect Books, 2015

Shooting Women takes readers around the world to explore the lives of camerawomen working in features, TV news, and documentaries. From first-world pioneers like African American camerawoman Jessie Maple Patton—who got her job only after suing the union—to China’s first camerawomen who traveled with Mao, to rural India where poor women have learned camerawork as a means of empowerment, Shooting Women reveals a world of women working with courage and skill in what has long been seen as a male field.

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Short Leash

A Memoir of Dog Walking and Deliverance

Janice Gary

Michigan State University Press, 2013

Janice Gary never walked alone without a dog - a big dog. Once, she was an adventurer, a girl who ran off to California with big dreams and hopes of leaving her past behind. But after a brutal rape, her youthful bravado vanished, replaced by a crippling need for safety. When she rescues a gangly Lab-Rottweiler pup,Gary is sure she’s found her biggest protector yet. But after Barney is attacked by a vicious dog, he becomes a clone of his attacker, trying to kill any dog that comes near him. Walking with Barney is impossible. Yet walking without him is unthinkable.
After years of being exiled by her terror and Barney’s defensiveness, Janice risks taking her dog to a park near the Chesapeake Bay. There, she begins the messy, lurching process of walking into her greatest fears. As the leash of the past unravels, Barney sheds the defensive behaviors that once shackled him and Gary steps out of the self-imposed isolation that held her captive for three decades. Beautifully written, Short Leash is much more than a “dog story” or a book about recovering from trauma. It is a moving tale of love and loss, the journey of a broken soul finding itsway toward wholeness.

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Showing Our Colors

Afro-German Women Speak Out

May Optiz

University of Massachusetts Press, 1992

Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out is an English translation of the German book Farbe bekennen, edited by author May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz. It is the first published book by Afro-Germans. It is the first written use of the term Afro-German.

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Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty

Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers

M. Murphy

Duke University Press, 2006

Before 1980, sick building syndrome did not exist. By the 1990s, it was among the most commonly investigated occupational health problems in the United States. Afflicted by headaches, rashes, and immune system disorders, office workers—mostly women—protested that their workplaces were filled with toxic hazards; yet federal investigators could detect no chemical cause. This richly detailed history tells the story of how sick building syndrome came into being: how indoor exposures to chemicals wafting from synthetic carpet, ink, adhesive, solvents, and so on became something that relatively privileged Americans worried over, felt, and ultimately sought to do something about. As M. Murphy shows, sick building syndrome provides a window into how environmental politics moved indoors.

Sick building syndrome embodied a politics of uncertainty that continues to characterize contemporary American environmental debates. Murphy explores the production of uncertainty by juxtaposing multiple histories, each of which explains how an expert or lay tradition made chemical exposures perceptible or imperceptible, existent or nonexistent. They show how uncertainty emerged from a complex confluence of feminist activism, office worker protests, ventilation engineering, toxicology, popular epidemiology, corporate science, and ecology. In an illuminating case study, she reflects on EPA scientists’ efforts to have their headquarters recognized as a sick building. Murphy brings all of these histories together in what is not only a thorough account of an environmental health problem but also a much deeper exploration of the relationship between history, materiality, and uncertainty.

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Sick Work

Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness

Emily Lim Rogers

Duke University Press, 2026

In Sick Work, Emily Lim Rogers shows the unpaid labor it takes to be recognized as sick in the United States. Through a historical and ethnographic account of myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)—a disease defined by disproportionate exhaustion after any form of exertion, which has no cure or treatment—she reveals how changing formations of labor decide what counts as disability and what does not. Sickness, she writes, is not work’s opposite. Rather, the frequent dismissal of their disease leaves people with ME/CFS to do their own labor of disease advocacy, or “sick work,” even as their symptoms prevent many from working paid jobs. Rogers presents a history of the discursive construction of chronic fatigue and demonstrates its development alongside capitalism since the dawn of industrial management science in the late nineteenth century. These histories, she argues, echo through to the present day, shaping the denial of me/cfs and the stigma that surrounds it. Examining the everyday lives of people with ME/CFS and their activist movements, Sick Work describes how they swim upstream against strong tides of disbelief and demands a radical transformation of how work is defined and valued.

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Side Dishes

Latina American Women, Sex, and Cultural Production

Fitch, Melissa A

Rutgers University Press, 2009

Moving beyond the "main dishes" of traditional literary works, Side Dishes offers a provocative and delicious new understanding of Latin American women's authorship and activism. The book illuminates a wealth of creative and intellectual work by Latin American women—editors, directors, cartoonists, academics, performance artists, and comedians—and explores them in light of their treatment of women's sexuality.

Side Dishes considers feminist pornography and literary representations of masturbation, bisexuality, lesbianism, and sexual fantasies; the treatment of lust in stand-up comedy and science fiction; critical issues in leading feminist journals; and portrayals of sexuality in four contemporary Latin American films. Melissa A. Fitch concludes with a look at the rise of women's and gender studies programs in Latin America.

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