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22279 books match the query 'Social Science' and 963 start with w

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Women and Comedy

Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition

Susan Carlson

University of Michigan Press, 1991

The first comprehensive study of its kind, this book explores the contradictory connections between women and dramatic comedy. Women and Comedy shows how a genre that has been used historically to restrict women's behavior is being reconfigured to express women's triumphs. It thus redefines the assumptions with which both traditional comedy and contemporary women's plays are read and viewed. Challenging a critical consensus that has seen comedy as a haven for female power, Carlson argues that traditional comedy is deeply sexist, welcoming strong women characters only because it can contain their power. Through an analysis of a range of comedies by Shakespeare, Congreve, Maugham, Shaw, and Ayckbourn, the author shows that even in these plays self-consciously about liberated females, women gain only a limited freedom, a freedom that the endings of the plays work to negate. This negotiation is seen to result in part from the comic structure itself, which privileges a merely temporary inversion and an ultimate return to the status quo. Carlson then examines the transitional work of three writers – Aphra Behn, Henry James, and Ann Jellicoe – whose heroines follow an unorthodox trajectory through their comic worlds. While the work of these writers clearly remains within the mainstream comic tradition, the author notes in them a subtle departure, most notably in their description of the heroine as subject rather than object, which prefigures the full-scale transformations of women in comedy by contemporary women writers. The book then examines contemporary comedy that revises traditional comic structure at the same time as it explores fundamental social change. In making her case for the difference of contemporary comedy by women, Carlson examines the reformulations of structure and character and considers issues of community, self, and sexuality in a broad range of plays by individual playwrights and by the new women's theater collectives. Women and Comedy is an important work for students of British drama and will appeal to theater practitioners, critics, feminist scholars, and all those interested in the performing arts.

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Women and Deafness

Double Visions

Brenda Jo Brueggemann

Gallaudet University Press, 2006

This new collection bridges two dynamic academic fields: Women’s Studies and Deaf Studies. The 14 contributors to this interdisciplinary volume apply research and methodological approaches from sociology, ethnography, literary/film studies, history, rhetoric, education, and public health to open heretofore unexplored territory.

Part One: In and Out of the Community addresses female dynamics within deaf schools; Helen Keller’s identity as a deaf woman; deaf women’s role in Deaf organizations; and whether or not the inequity in education and employment opportunities for deaf women is bias against gender or disability. Part Two: (Women’s) Authority and Shaping Deafness explores the life of 19th-century teacher Marcelina Ruis Y Fernandez; the influence of single, hearing female instructors in deaf education; the extent of women’s authority over oralist educational dictates during the 1900s; and a deaf daughter’s relationship with her hearing mother in the late 20th century.

Part Three: Reading Deaf Women considers two deaf sisters’ exceptional creative freedom from 1885 to 1920; the depictions of deaf or mute women in two popular films; a Deaf woman’s account of blending the public-private, deaf-hearing, and religious-secular worlds; how five Deaf female ASL teachers define “gender,” “feminism,” “sex,” and “patriarchy” in ASL and English; and 20th-century American Deaf beauty pageants that emphasize physicality while denying Deaf identity, yet also challenge mainstream notions of “the perfect body.”

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Women and Dieting Culture

Inside a Commercial Weight Loss Group

Kandi Stinson

Rutgers University Press, 2001

American women invest millions of dollars, as well as much time and energy, in a quest for a body that meets our culture’s standard of beauty—slenderness. Since we define a woman’s sexual attractiveness as essential to her social worth, it is no wonder that “fat is a feminist issue.”

Commercial weight loss organizations have come under attack from feminist scholars for perpetuating the very social values that cause women to obsess about their weight. In Women and Dieting Culture, sociologist Kandi Stinson asks how these values are transmitted and how the women who join such organizations actually think about their bodies and weight loss. As part of her research, Stinson fully participated in a national, commercial weight-loss organization as a paying member. Her acute analysis and sensitive insider’s portrayal vividly illustrate the central roles dieting and body image play in women’s lives.

As she experiences the program and interviews other members, Stinson discovers that the women view the causes and cures of being overweight according to five distinct, though often overlapping, concepts: self-help, work, religion, addiction, and feminism. Drawing extensively on the dieters’ own words, Stinson explores each of these concepts and outlines how they form interrelated patterns which, when analyzed, yield an exciting new perspective on the transmission of cultural values.

Armed with fresh insights into how women feel about weight and their bodies, Stinson finally ponders the question: Can one be a feminist and still wish to lose weight?

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Women and Discourse in the Fiction of Marguerite Duras

Love, Legends, Language

Susan D. Cohen

University of Massachusetts Press, 1993

One of the most famous living French writers, Marguerite Duras is renowned for her provocative and hauntingly beautiful works of fiction, drama, and cinema. This book offers the first comprehensive study of the narrative and stylistic characteristics of Duras's fiction. Susan D. Cohen examines the entire range of Duras's works, combining close textual analyses with a more general discussion of narrativity and its connections with gender, class, and race. The focus throughout is on language, representation, and difference, which Duras explores on every structural level.

Cohen shows how Duras's writings, even the controversial “erotic” works, expose and subvert the repression of women in traditional, dominant discourse and at the same time present an alternative, nonrepressive discursive model. She formulates a concept of creative “ignorance,” which she identifies as the generative principle of Duras's textual production and the approach to language it proposes. Cohen also explores the distinctive features of Duras's prose, describing how the writer achieves the ritual, legendary aura that characterizes her work.

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Women and Experimental Filmmaking

Edited by Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman

University of Illinois Press, 2005

Acting as a corrective to the skewed avant-garde history that neglects women, Women and Experimental Filmmaking gathers essays by some of the top scholars in cinema studies dealing with women experimental filmmakers. Tracking the topic across racial, economic, geographic, and even temporal boundaries, Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wexman's selections reflect the deep diversity of methodologies and research.
The introduction sets out by addressing the basic difficulties of both historiography and definition before providing a historical overview of how these particular filmmakers have helped shape moviemaking traditions. The essays explore the major theoretical controversies that have arisen around the work of groundbreaking women such as Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Nina Menkes, and Faith Hubley. With the filmmakers re-presentations of women's subjectivity ranging across film, video, digital media, ethnography, animation, and collage, Women and Experimental Filmmaking represents the full spectrum of genres, techniques, and modes. Taken together, these essays comprise a sustained analysis of the conjunction of aesthetics and politics in the work of both pioneer and contemporary experimental women filmmakers.

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Women and Gender Equity in Development Theory and Practice

Institutions, Resources, and Mobilization

Jane S. Jaquette and Gale Summerfield, eds.

Duke University Press, 2006

Seeking to catalyze innovative thinking and practice within the field of women and gender in development, editors Jane S. Jaquette and Gale Summerfield have brought together scholars, policymakers, and development workers to reflect on where the field is today and where it is headed. The contributors draw from their experiences and research in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to illuminate the connections between women’s well-being and globalization, environmental conservation, land rights, access to information technology, employment, and poverty alleviation.

Highlighting key institutional issues, contributors analyze the two approaches that dominate the field: women in development (WID) and gender and development (GAD). They assess the results of gender mainstreaming, the difficulties that development agencies have translating gender rhetoric into equity in practice, and the conflicts between gender and the reassertion of indigenous cultural identities. Focusing on resource allocation, contributors explore the gendered effects of land privatization, the need to challenge cultural traditions that impede women’s ability to assert their legal rights, and women’s access to bureaucratic levers of power. Several essays consider women’s mobilizations, including a project to provide Internet access and communications strategies to African NGOs run by women. In the final essay, Irene Tinker, one of the field’s founders, reflects on the interactions between policy innovation and women’s organizing over the three decades since women became a focus of development work. Together the contributors bridge theory and practice to point toward productive new strategies for women and gender in development.

Contributors. Maruja Barrig, Sylvia Chant, Louise Fortmann, David Hirschmann, Jane S. Jaquette, Diana Lee-Smith, Audrey Lustgarten, Doe Mayer, Faranak Miraftab, Muadi Mukenge, Barbara Pillsbury, Amara Pongsapich, Elisabeth Prügl, Kirk R. Smith, Kathleen Staudt, Gale Summerfield, Irene Tinker, Catalina Hinchey Trujillo

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Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica

From East L.A. to Anahuac

Paloma Martinez-Cruz

University of Arizona Press, 2011

Paloma Martinez-Cruz argues that the medicine traditions of Mesoamerican women constitute a hemispheric intellectual lineage that continues to thrive despite the legacy of colonization. Martinez-Cruz asserts that indigenous and mestiza women healers are custodians of a knowledge base that remains virtually uncharted.

The few works looking at the knowledge of women in Mesoamerica generally examine only the written—even academic—world, accessible only to the most elite segments of (customarily male) society. These works have consistently excluded the essential repertoire and performed knowledge of women who think and work in ways other than the textual. And while two of the book’s chapters critique contemporary novels, Martinez-Cruz also calls for the exploration of non-textual knowledge transmission. In this regard, the book's goals and methods are close to those of performance scholarship and anthropology, and these methods reveal Mesoamerican women to be public intellectuals. In Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica, fieldwork and ethnography combine to reveal women healers as models of agency.

Her multidisciplinary approach allows Martinez-Cruz to disrupt Euro-based intellectual hegemony and to make a case for the epistemic authority of Native women. Written from a Chicana perspective, this study is learned, personal, and engaging for anyone who is interested in the wisdom that prevailing analytical cultures have deemed “unintelligible.” As it turns out, those who are unacquainted with the sometimes surprising extent and depth of wisdom of indigenous women healers simply haven’t been looking in the right places—outside the texts from which they have been consistently excluded.

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Women and Ledger Art

Four Contemporary Native American Artists

Richard Pearce

University of Arizona Press, 2013

Ledger art has traditionally been created by men to recount the lives of male warriors on the Plains. During the past forty years, this form has been adopted by Native female artists, who are turning previously untold stories of women’s lifestyles and achievements into ledger-style pictures. While there has been a resurgence of interest in ledger art, little has been written about these women ledger artists.
Women and Ledger Art calls attention to the extraordinary achievements of these strong women who have chosen to express themselves through ledger art. Author Richard Pearce foregrounds these contributions by focusing on four contemporary women ledger artists: Sharron Ahtone Harjo (Kiowa), Colleen Cutschall (Oglala Lakota), Linda Haukaas (Sicangu Lakota), and Dolores Purdy Corcoran (Caddo). Pearce spent six years in continual communication with the women, learning about their work and their lives. Women and Ledger Art examines the artists and explains how they expanded Plains Indian history.
With 46 stunning images of works in various mediums—from traditional forms on recovered ledger pages to simulated quillwork and sculpture, Women in Ledger Art reflects the new life these women have brought to an important transcultural form of expression.

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Women and Men in Late Eighteenth-Century Egypt

By Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot

University of Texas Press, 1995

In the late eighteenth century, decentralized and chaotic government in Egypt allowed women a freedom of action that has not been equaled until recent times. Delving extensively into archival sources, Afaf Marsot presents the first comprehensive picture of women's status and opportunities in this period.

Marsot makes important connections between forms of government, economic possibilities, and gender relations, showing how political instability allowed women to acquire property, independent of males, as a hedge against political uncertainty. She traces the linkages that women formed among themselves and with the ulama (non-Ottoman native elites) who aided and supported them. The book concludes with a comparison of women's status in the nineteenth century, when the introduction of European institutions that did not recognize their legal existence marginalized women, causing them to have to rely on men as major breadwinners. These important findings about the relationship between forms of government and the status of women will be of interest to a wide audience.

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Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

A Reader

Denise A. Segura and Patricia Zavella, eds.

Duke University Press, 2007

Women’s migration within Mexico and from Mexico to the United States is increasing; nearly as many women as men are migrating. This development gives rise to new social negotiations, which have not been well examined in migration studies until now. This pathbreaking reader analyzes how economically and politically displaced migrant women assert agency in everyday life. Scholars across diverse disciplines interrogate the socioeconomic forces that propel Mexican women into the migrant stream and shape their employment options; the changes that these women are making in homes, families, and communities; and the “structural violence” that they confront in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands broadly conceived—all within the economic, social, cultural, and political interstices of the two countries.

This reader includes twenty-three essays—two of which are translated from the Spanish—that illuminate women’s engagement with diverse social and cultural challenges. One contributor critiques the statistical fallacy of nativist discourses within the United States that portray Chicana and Mexican women’s fertility rates as “out of control.” Other contributors explore the relation between sexual violence and women’s migration from rural areas to urban centers within Mexico, the ways that undocumented migrant communities challenge conventional notions of citizenship, and young Latinas’ commemorations of the late, internationally renowned singer Selena. Several essays address workplace intimidation and violence, harassment and rape by U.S. border patrol agents and maquiladora managers, sexual violence, and the brutal murders of nearly two hundred young women near Ciudad Juárez. This rich collection highlights both the structural inequities faced by Mexican women in the borderlands and the creative ways they have responded to them.

Contributors. Ernestine Avila, Xóchitl Castañeda, Sylvia Chant, Leo R. Chavez, Cynthia Cranford, Adelaida R. Del Castillo, Sylvanna M. Falcón, Gloria González-López, Maria de la Luz Ibarra, Jonathan Xavier Inda, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Jennifer S. Hirsch, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Eithne Luibheid, Victoria Malkin, Faranak Miraftab, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Norma Ojeda de la Peña, Deborah Paredez, Leslie Salzinger, Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel, Denise A. Segura, Laura Velasco Ortiz, Melissa W. Wright, Patricia Zavella

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Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Edited by Ellen Koskoff

University of Illinois Press, 1989

"The past fifteen years have been a time of intense scholarly interest in women, resulting in an explosion of literature that has begun to reveal the overriding effects of gender on other cultural domains. Affecting all aspects of culture, issues of sexuality, gender-related behaviors, and inter-gender relations also have profound implications for music performance. This volume represents an introduction to the field of women, music, and culture and in no way attempts to be comprehensive in its coverage nor conclusive in its implications. For example, Western classical music is not discussed here, many large world areas are not covered, nor does this volume present a comprehensive survey of all recent developments in feminist-oriented anthropology. What these essays do share is a focus on women's culture identity and musical activity, either in socially isolated performance environments or within the public arenas shared by their male counterparts."--From the preface

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Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment

Rebecca Cypess

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A study of musical salons in Europe and North America between 1760 and 1800 and the salon hostesses who shaped their musical worlds.

In eighteenth-century Europe and America, musical salons—and the women who hosted and made music in them—played a crucial role in shaping their cultural environments. Musical salons served as a testing ground for new styles, genres, and aesthetic ideals, and they acted as a mediating force, bringing together professional musicians and their audiences of patrons, listeners, and performers. For the salonnière, the musical salon offered a space between the public and private spheres that allowed her to exercise cultural agency.

In this book, musicologist and historical keyboardist Rebecca Cypess offers a broad overview of musical salons between 1760 and 1800, placing the figure of the salonnière at its center. Cypess then presents a series of in-depth case studies that meet the salonnière on her own terms. Women such as Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy in Paris, Marianna Martines in Vienna, Sara Levy in Berlin, Angelica Kauffman in Rome, and Elizabeth Graeme in Philadelphia come to life in multidimensional ways. Crucially, Cypess uses performance as a tool for research, and her interpretations draw on her experience with the instruments and performance practices used in eighteenth-century salons. In this accessible, interdisciplinary book, Cypess explores women’s agency and authorship, reason and sentiment, and the roles of performing, collecting, listening, and conversing in the formation of eighteenth-century musical life.

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Women and New Hollywood

Gender, Creative Labor, and 1970s American Cinema

Aaron Hunter

Rutgers University Press, 2023

The 1970s has often been hailed as a great moment for American film, as a generation of “New Hollywood” directors like Scorsese, Coppola, and Altman offered idiosyncratic visions of what movies could be. Yet the auteurist discourse hailing these directors as the sole authors of their films has obscured the important creative roles women played in the 1970s American film industry.

Women and New Hollywood revises our understanding of this important era in American film by examining the contributions that women made not only as directors, but also as screenwriters, editors, actors, producers, and critics. Including essays on film history, film texts, and the decade’s film theory and criticism, this collection showcases the rich and varied cinematic products of women’s creative labor, as well as the considerable barriers they faced. It considers both women working within and beyond the Hollywood film industry, reconceptualizing New Hollywood by bringing it into dialogue with other American cinemas of the 1970s. By valuing the many forms of creative labor involved in film production, this collection offers exciting alternatives to the auteurist model and new ways of appreciating the themes and aesthetics of 1970s American film.

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Women and Politics in Latin America

Craske, Nikki

Rutgers University Press, 1999

This book provides a comprehensive view of women's political participation in Latin America. Focusing on the latter half of the twentieth century, it examines five different arenas of action and debate: political institutions, workplaces, social movements, revolutions, and feminisms. Nikki Craske explores the ways in which women have become more effective in the public arena as the context of politics has altered.

Craske demonstrates how gender relations shape political institutions and practices while simultaneously being shaped by them. She examines the moments when women's action has challenged received ideas, and had a significant impact on the political life of Latin American nations. Women remain heavily underrepresented in political lie, despite their important role in popular movements against authoritarianism, Craske states, and posits that the economy is a substantial constraint on women's political participation. This powerful book analyzes the gains made since the 1950s while scrutinizing the challenges and difficulties which still constrain women's political participation.

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Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution

Harriet B. Applewhite and Darline G. Levy, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1993

Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution is a groundbreaking collection that challenges traditional narratives of eighteenth-century political upheaval by centering the experience and agency of women across Europe and North America. Edited by Harriet B. Applewhite and Darline G. Levy, this volume gathers leading historians to explore how gender shaped and was shaped by the processes of revolution and democratization from the 1760s through the early nineteenth century.Bridging comparative and interdisciplinary scholarship, the collection examines the diverse ways that women engaged with, contributed to, and contested revolutionary politics in France, England, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United States. Essays range from analyses of women’s participation in bread riots, neighborhood activism, and political clubs, to their presence in national insurrections and their influence as writers, petitioners, and public intellectuals. The contributors reveal the ways that women negotiated—and sometimes redefined—the boundaries of citizenship, civic virtue, and political rights during times of extraordinary change.The book also interrogates the limitations of the era’s revolutionary ideals, revealing how promises of liberty and equality were often circumscribed by gendered exclusions from formal political life. Yet, even as new constitutions, legislatures, and parties sidelined women as citizens, these essays show how women’s collective and individual actions laid groundwork for later struggles for suffrage, legal equality, and social reform.Richly documented and theoretically innovative, Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution is essential reading for anyone interested in gender, democracy, and the ongoing project of political inclusion. It offers a nuanced portrait not just of women’s defeats and exclusions, but of the complex legacies of empowerment, mobilization, and the reimagining of citizenship that continue to shape modern political cultures.

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Women and Politics

An International Perspective

Vicky Randall

University of Chicago Press, 1988

Since the 1960s, the increasing involvement of women in mainstream politics and the impact of the "second wave" of feminism have given rise to an enormous volume of writing on women and politics. Drawing on material from a wide range of capitalist, state-socialist, and Third World countries, Women and Politics provides a comprehensive introduction to, summary, and analysis of this body of writing. This second edition has been greatly expanded and revised in light of recent debates and changes in women's political situation in the economic recession of the 1980s. Randall examines the increasingly extensive data available on women's political participation and the chief factors that obstruct or encourage it. An entirely new section on women in the Third World has been added. Finally, Randall provides an up-to-date analysis of contemporary feminism as a political movement, its impact on policy in the 1970s, and the changing prospects for both in the 1980s.

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Women and Power in Zimbabwe

Promises of Feminism

Carolyn Martin Shaw

University of Illinois Press, 2015

The revolt against white rule in Rhodesia nurtured incipient local feminisms in women who imagined independence as a road to gender equity and economic justice. But the country's rebirth as Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe's rise to power dashed these hopes.

Using history, literature, participant observation, and interviews, Carolyn Martin Shaw surveys Zimbabwean feminisms from the colonial era to today. She examines how actions as clearly disparate as baking scones for self-protection, carrying guns in the liberation, and feeling morally superior to men represent sources of female empowerment. She also presents the ways women across Zimbabwean society--rural and urban, professional and domestic--accommodated or confronted post-independence setbacks. Finally, Shaw offers perspectives on the ways contemporary Zimbabwean women depart from the prevailing view that feminism is a Western imposition having little to do with African women.

The result of thirty years of experience, Women and Power in Zimbabwe addresses the promises of feminism and femininity for generations of African women.

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Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan

The Development of the Feminist Movement

Mara Patessio

University of Michigan Press, 2011

Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan focuses on women’s activities in the new public spaces of Meiji Japan. With chapters on public, private, and missionary schools for girls, their students, and teachers, on social and political groups women created, on female employment, and on women’s participation in print media, this book offers a new perspective on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese history. Women’s founding of and participation in conflicting discourses over the value of women in Meiji public life demonstrate that during this period active and vocal women were everywhere, that they did not meekly submit to the dictates of the government and intellectuals over what women could or should do, and that they were fully integrated in the production of Meiji culture.

Mara Patessio shows that the study of women is fundamental not only in order to understand fully the transformations of the Meiji period, but also to understand how later generations of women could successfully move the battle forward. Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan is essential reading for all students and teachers of 19th- and early 20th-century Japanese history and is of interest to scholars of women’s history more generally.

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Women and Regulation

Challenging the Status Quo

Edited by Sara R. Rinfret and Michelle C. Pautz

Temple University Press, 2026

Are female food safety inspectors treated differently than men? What do women contribute to the creation and implementation of public policy in the United States? The editors of and contributors to Women in Regulation, all experts in public policy and public administration, analyze the role women (and stakeholders) play in bureaucracies in environmental, budgetary, and other sectors of the U.S. federal, state, and local governments, plus relevant examples from around the world.

Women in Regulation examines the impact of regulatory policy delegation, as well as the actors and processes involved in administrative rulemaking, compliance, and implementation. The book considers representative bureaucracy, organizational stereotypes, emotional labor, and advancement barriers to argue why studying women and regulation is of value. Regulatory case studies focus on topics ranging from water and energy to executive leadership. Chapters also include reflective exercises and prompts for classroom engagement that challenge readers to consider implications for regulatory policy in the future.

Amplifying the underheard voices in policy and implementation, Women in Regulation provides a more holistic picture of regulatory practices.

Contributors: Saman Afshan, Ashley English, Katherine Hoener, Nicole Humphrey, Ekaterina Levintova, Li-Yin Liu, Sean McCandless, Bruce D. McDonald III, Denise Scheberle, Natalie L. Smith, Manuel P. Teodoro, and the editors

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Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

Edited by Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, women assumed public roles of unprecedented prominence in Italian religious culture. Legally subordinated, politically excluded, socially limited, and ideologically disdained, women's active participation in religious life offered them access to power in all its forms.

These essays explore the involvement of women in religious life throughout northern and central Italy and trace the evolution of communities of pious women as they tried to achieve their devotional goals despite the strictures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The contributors examine relations between holy women, their devout followers, and society at large.

Including contributions from leading figures in a new generation of Italian historians of religion, this book shows how women were able to carve out broad areas of influence by carefully exploiting the institutional church and by astutely manipulating religious percepts.

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Women and Rhetoric between the Wars

Ann George, M. Elizabeth Weiser, and Janet Zepernick

Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

In Women and Rhetoric between the Wars, editors Ann George, M. Elizabeth Weiser, and Janet Zepernick have gathered together insightful essays from major scholars on women whose practices and theories helped shape the field of modern rhetoric. Examining the period between World War I and World War II, this volume sheds light on the forgotten rhetorical work done by the women of that time. It also goes beyond recovery to develop new methodologies for future research in the field.

Collected within are analyses of familiar figures such as Jane Addams, Amelia Earhart, Helen Keller, and Bessie Smith, as well as explorations of less well known, yet nevertheless influential, women such as Zitkala-Ša, Jovita González, and Florence Sabin. Contributors evaluate the forces in the civic, entertainment, and academic scenes that influenced the rhetorical praxis of these women. Each essay presents examples of women’s rhetoric that move us away from the “waves” model toward a more accurate understanding of women’s multiple, diverse rhetorical interventions in public discourse. The collection thus creates a new understanding of historiography, the rise of modern rhetorical theory, and the role of women professionals after suffrage. From celebrities to scientists, suffragettes to academics, the dynamic women of this volume speak eloquently to the field of rhetoric studies today.

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Women and Slavery in America

A Documentary History

Catherine M. Lewis

University of Arkansas Press, 2011

Women and Slavery offers readers an opportunity to examine the establishment, growth, and evolution of slavery in the United States as it impacted women-enslaved and free, African American and white, wealthy and poor, northern and southern. The primary documents-including newspaper articles, broadsides, cartoons, pamphlets, speeches, photographs, memoirs, and editorials-are organized thematically and represent cultural, political, religious, economic, and social perspectives on this dark and complex period in American history.

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Women and Slavery, Volume One

Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic

Gwyn Campbell

Ohio University Press, 2007

The literature on women enslaved around the world has grown rapidly in the last ten years, evidencing strong interest in the subject across a range of academic disciplines. Until Women and Slavery, no single collection has focused on female slaves who—as these two volumes reveal—probably constituted the considerable majority of those enslaved in Africa, Asia, and Europe over several millennia and who accounted for a greater proportion of the enslaved in the Americas than is customarily acknowledged.

Women enslaved in the Americas came to bear highly gendered reputations among whites—as “scheming Jezebels,” ample and devoted “mammies,” or suffering victims of white male brutality and sexual abuse—that revealed more about the psychology of enslaving than about the courage and creativity of the women enslaved. These strong images of modern New World slavery contrast with the equally expressive virtual invisibility of the women enslaved in the Old—concealed in harems, represented to meddling colonial rulers as “wives” and “nieces,” taken into African families and kin-groups in subtlely nuanced fashion.

Women and Slavery presents papers developed from an international conference organized by Gwyn Campbell.

Volume 1 Contributors: Sharifa Ahjum, Richard B. Allen, Katrin Bromber, Gwyn Campbell, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Jan-Georg Deutsch, Timothy Fernyhough, Philip J. Havik, Elizabeth Grzymala Jordan, Martin A. Klein, George Michael La Rue, Paul E. Lovejoy, Fred Morton, Richard Roberts, Kirsten A. Seaver

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Women and Slavery, Volume Two

The Modern Atlantic

Gwyn Campbell

Ohio University Press, 2008

The literature on women enslaved around the world has grown rapidly in the last ten years, evidencing strong interest in the subject across a range of academic disciplines. Until Women and Slavery, no single collection has focused on female slaves who—as these two volumes reveal—probably constituted the considerable majority of those enslaved in Africa, Asia, and Europe over several millennia and who accounted for a greater proportion of the enslaved in the Americas than is customarily acknowledged.

Women enslaved in the Americas came to bear highly gendered reputations among whites—as “scheming Jezebels,” ample and devoted “mammies,” or suffering victims of white male brutality and sexual abuse—that revealed more about the psychology of enslaving than about the courage and creativity of the women enslaved. These strong images of modern New World slavery contrast with the equally expressive virtual invisibility of the women enslaved in the Old—concealed in harems, represented to meddling colonial rulers as “wives” and “nieces,” taken into African families and kin-groups in subtlely nuanced fashion.

Volume 2 Contributors: Henrice Altin,k Laurence Brown, Myriam Cottias, Laura F. Edwards, Richard Follett, Tara Inniss, Barbara Krauthamer, Joseph C. Miller, Bernard Moitt, Kenneth Morgan, Claire Robertson, Marsha Robinson, Felipe Smith, and Mariza de Carvalho Soares.

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Women and Social Movements in Latin America

Power from Below

By Lynn Stephen

University of Texas Press, 1997

Women's grassroots activism in Latin America combines a commitment to basic survival for women and their children with a challenge to women's subordination to men. Women activists insist that issues such as rape, battering, and reproductive control cannot be divorced from women's concerns about housing, food, land, and medical care.

This innovative, comparative study explores six cases of women's grassroots activism in Mexico, El Salvador, Brazil, and Chile. Lynn Stephen communicates the ideas, experiences, and perceptions of women who participate in collective action, while she explains the structural conditions and ideological discourses that set the context within which women act and interpret their experiences. She includes revealing interviews with activists, detailed histories of organizations and movements, and a theoretical discussion of gender, collective identity, and feminist anthropology and methods.

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Women and Sports in the United States

A Documentary Reader

Edited by Jaime Schultz, Jean O’Reilly, and Susan K. Cahn

Dartmouth College Press, 2018

A spectacular transformation in women’s sports has occurred over the past century. The assimilation of feminist principles into the broader popular culture solidified the belief that sport plays a positive role in the lives of girls and women. Political activists for women’s rights codified this attitude with the passage of Title IX of the 1972 Federal Education Amendments, a law banning gender discrimination in educational settings, thus guaranteeing women’s legal right to an equitable share of athletic opportunities and resources. This updated, expanded second edition of Women and Sports in the United States brings together scholarly articles, journalism, political and legal documents, and first-person accounts that collectively explore women’s sports in America, with an emphasis on the new millennium. Topics covered range from the many benefits of physical activity to the successes of aging women athletes, from hijabs on the playing field to the emergence of transgender athletes, from the sexism faced by female athletes to USA Gymnastics and the biggest sex abuse scandal in American history.

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Women and Stepfamilies

Voices of Anger and Love

edited by Nan Bauer Maglin and Nancy Schniedewind

Temple University Press, 1990

"This text richly captures people making use of and growing with the intricacies of bi-nuclear families." --Journal of Marital and Family Therapy This is the first book to describe the unique and varied experiences and perspectives of women in stepfamilies as told by the women themselves. Through letters, journal entries, poetry, fiction, personal narratives, interviews, and analytic essays, this anthology brings a feminist perspective to the experience of millions of women now involved in stepfamilies. "Women and Stepfamilies confronts these myths head-on. Through political theory, fiction and poetry, a wide range of contributors look at living arrangements that are considered atypical. Particularly moving is the fact that the book includes a variety of perspectives: that of stepmother, stepgrandmother, stepsister and stepdaughter . [The book] helps, both in a personal sense and in terms of analyzing family norms. As the first book to focus on the unique, varied perspectives of women, told in their own words, it goes a long way toward addressing the myriad issues raised when people come together out of love and try to forge cohesive living units out of disparate, non-biologically related parts. Equally important, the editors deserve kudos for the inclusivity of the volume. It is multinational, multiclass and reflects the perspectives of both lesbian and heterosexual stepmothers and stepdaughters.... I read it with glee, putting it down only to answer a call, or break up a fight between siblings not of my loins." --Eleanor J. Bader, New Directions for Women

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Women and Their Warlords

Domesticating Militarism in Modern China

Kate Merkel-Hess

University of Chicago Press, 2024

Explores the complex history and legacy of elite wives, concubines, and daughters of warlords in twentieth-century China.

In Women and Their Warlords, historian Kate Merkel-Hess examines the lives and personalities of the female relatives of the military rulers who governed regions of China from 1916 to 1949. Posing for candid photographs and sitting for interviews, these women did not merely advance male rulers’ agendas. They advocated for social and political changes, gave voice to feminist ideas, and shaped how the public perceived them. As the first publicly political partners in modern China, the wives and concubines of Republican-era warlords changed how people viewed elite women’s engagement in politics. Drawing on popular media sources, including magazine profiles and gossip column items, Merkel-Hess draws unexpected connections between militarism, domestic life, and state power in this insightful new account of gender and authority in twentieth-century China.

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Women and War

Jean Bethke Elshtain

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Jean Elshtain examines how the myths of Man as "Just Warrior" and Woman as "Beautiful Soul" serve to recreate and secure women's social position as noncombatants and men's identity as warriors. Elshtain demonstrates how these myths are undermined by the reality of female bellicosity and sacrificial male love, as well as the moral imperatives of just wars.

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Women and Water

Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law

Edited by Rahel Wasserfall

Brandeis University Press, 1999

The term Niddah means separation. During her menstrual flow and for several days thereafter, a Jewish woman is considered Niddah -- separate from her husband and unable to practice the sacred rituals of Judaism. Purification in a miqveh (a ritual bath) following her period restores full status as a wife and member of the Jewish community. In the contemporary world, debates about Niddah focus less on the literal exclusion of menstruating women from the synagogue, instead emphasizing relations between husband and wife and the general role of Jewish women in Judaism. Although this has been the law since ancient times, the meaning and practice of Niddah has been widely contested. Women and Water explores how these purity rituals have affected Jewish women across time and place, and shows how their own interpretation of Niddah often conflicted with rabbinic views. These essays also speak to contemporary feminist issues such as shaping women's identity, power relations between women and men, and the role of women in the sacred.

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Women and Welfare

Theory and Practice in the United States and Europe

Hirschmann, Nancy J

Rutgers University Press, 2001

The social welfare state is believed by many to be one of the great achievements of Western democracy in the twentieth century. It institutionalized for the first time a collective commitment to improving individual life chances and social well-being. However, as we move into a new century, the social welfare state everywhere has come under increasing pressure, raising serious doubts about its survival.

Featuring essays by experts from a variety of fields, including law, comparative politics, sociology, economics, cultural studies, philosophy, and political theory, Women and Welfare represents an interdisciplinary, multimethodological and multicultural feminist approach to recent changes in the welfare system of Western industrialized nations. The broad perspective, from the philosophical to the quantitative, provides an excellent overview of the subject and the most recent scholarly literature. The volume offers a crosscultural analysis of welfare “reform” in the 1990s, visions of what a “woman-friendly” welfare state requires, and an examination of theoretical and policy questions feminists and concerned others should be asking.

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Women and Work

A Reader

Edited by Paula J. Dubeck and Kathryn Borman

Rutgers University Press, 1997

Despite benefiting from the struggles of previous generations, working women today still face a dismaying gauntlet of sexual discrimination. This encyclopedic collection of 150 original articles by top scholars takes an inter-disciplinary look at the issues faced by women of all ages, races, ethnic backgrounds, and nationalities in a spectrum of diverse occupations, from doctors to journalists, from nuns to soldiers.

A variety of perspectives are used to investigate women's work experience at individual, organizational, and societal levels. Some of the essays focus on how women fare in a variety of occupations, summarizing women's representation in different jobs, and discussing the unique problems they face. Others examine the influences of religious and educational institutions on women's career choices. Women and Work also reviews the history of protective legislation.

The contributors consider current research on women's work interests, commitment, and satisfaction, and examine sexual discrimination, harassment and coercion, as well as gender bias in job evaluations and personnel decisions. They also explore various strategies for reducing or eliminating discrimination, harassment, and wage discrimination.

Issues surrounding the work/family intersection are addressed, including when to have children, the difficulties that arise from the competing demands of work and child care, the consequences for women's careers, research examining the effects of mothers' employment on children's development, and issues surrounding eldercare.

The volume surveys the status of women in an international framework, analyzing women and work in selected countries, arranged to reflect the varying levels of development. Women and Work is a valuable reference book, providing a thoughtful overview of the issues facing working women.

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Women and Work

Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction

Susan Ferguson

Pluto Press, 2019

"A masterful analysis of three centuries of feminist deliberations on work, carefully tracing how the fault lines of social-reproduction theory emerged."—Historical Materialism

Feminism is once again on the political agenda. Across the world women are taking to the streets to protest unfair working conditions, abortion laws, and sexual violence. They are demanding decent wages, better schools and free childcare.

But why do some feminists choose to fight for more women CEOs, while others fight for a world without CEOs?

To understand these divergent approaches, Susan Ferguson looks at the ideas that have inspired women to protest, exploring the ways in which feminists have placed work at the center of their struggle for emancipation. Two distinct trajectories emerge: “equality feminism” and “social reproduction feminism.” Ferguson argues that socialists have too often embraced the “liberal” tendencies of equality feminism, while neglecting the insights of social reproduction feminism. Engaging with feminist anti-work critiques, She proposes that women's emancipation depends upon a radical reimagining of all labor and advocates for a renewed social reproduction framework as a powerful basis for an inclusive feminist politics. Chapters here include;

*The Rational-Humanist Roots of Equality Feminism
*Socialist Feminism: Two Approaches to Understanding Women's Work
*Equal Work for and against Capital
*Anti-Racist Feminism and Women's Work
*A Political Economy of 'Women's Work': Producing Patriarchal Capitalism
*Renewing Social Reproduction Feminism
*The Social Reproduction Strike: Life-Making Beyond Capitalism

Women and Work offers a timely and important look at the intersectionality of feminism and workers rights. Scholars and students will both find valuable insights into the history of feminist theory and social movement.

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Women and Workplace Discrimination

Overcoming Barriers to Gender Equality

Gregory, Raymond F

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Attorney Raymond F. Gregory addresses the millions of women who think they might be facing sexual discrimination and explains federal measures enacted to assist workers in contesting unlawful employer conduct. He presents actual court cases to demonstrate the ways that women have challenged their employers. The cases illustrate legal principles in real-life experiences. Many of the cases relate compelling stories of workers caught up in a web of employer discriminatory conduct. Gregory has eliminated legal jargon, ensuring that all concepts are clear to his readers. Individuals will turn to this book again and again to obtain authoritative background on this important topic.

Topics covered include:

The increasing incidence of sexual harassment in the workplace
Common forms of sex discrimination
Discrimination against older women
Discrimination against women of color
Discrimination against women in the professions
Discrimination against pregnant women
Discrimination against women with children
Sex discrimination in hiring, promotion, termination
Employer liability for workplace sexual harassment
Employer retaliation against workers
Proving sex discrimination in the courtroom
Compensatory and punitive damages
Back pay, front pay, and other remedies

[more]

Women and Workplace Discrimination

Overcoming Barriers to Gender Equality

Gregory, Raymond F

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Topics covered include:

The increasing incidence of sexual harassment in the workplace
Common forms of sex discrimination
Discrimination against older women
Discrimination against women of color
Discrimination against women in the professions
Discrimination against pregnant women
Discrimination against women with children
Sex discrimination in hiring, promotion, termination
Employer liability for workplace sexual harassment
Employer retaliation against workers
Proving sex discrimination in the courtroom
Compensatory and punitive damages
Back pay, front pay, and other remedies

[more]

Women and the Ancestors

BLACK CARIB KINSHIP AND RITUAL

Virginia Kerns

University of Illinois Press, 1997

     This classic study of Black
        Carib culture and its preservation through ancestral rituals organized
        by older women now includes a foreword by Constance R. Sutton and an afterword
        by the author.
      "One of the outstanding
        studies of this genre. . . . Refreshingly, the book has good photographs,
        as well as strong endnotes and bibliography, and very useful tables, figures,
        maps, and index." -- Choice
      "An outstanding contribution
        to the literature on female-centered bilateral kinship and residence."

        -- Grant D. Jones, American Ethnologist
      "A richly detailed account
        of a contemporary culture in which older women are important, valued,
        and self-respecting."
        -- Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly
      "A combination of competent
        research, interwoven themes, and an easily readable, sometimes beautifully
        evocative, prose style." -- Heather Strange, The Gerontologist

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Women and the Animal Rights Movement

Emily Gaarder

Rutgers University Press, 2011

Animal rights is one of the fastest growing social movements today. Women greatly outnumber men as activists, yet surprisingly, little has been written about the importance and impact of gender on the movement. Women and the Animal Rights Movement combats stereotypes of women activists as mere sentimentalists by exploring the political and moral character of their advocacy on behalf of animals.

Emily Gaarder analyzes the politics of gender in the movement, incorporating in-depth interviews with women and participant observation of animal rights organizations, conferences, and protests to describe struggles over divisions of labor and leadership. Controversies over PETA advertising campaigns that rely on women's sexuality to "sell" animal rights illustrate how female crusaders are asked to prioritize the cause of animals above all else. Gaarder underscores the importance of a paradigm shift in the animal liberation movement, one that seeks a more integrated vision of animal rights that connects universally to other issues--gender, race, economics, and the environment--highlighting that many women activists recognize and are motivated by the connection between the oppression of animals and other social injustices.

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Women and the Conquest of California, 1542-1840

Codes of Silence

Virginia M. Bouvier

University of Arizona Press, 2001

Studies of the Spanish conquest in the Americas traditionally have explained European-Indian encounters in terms of such factors as geography, timing, and the charisma of individual conquistadores. Yet by reconsidering this history from the perspective of gender roles and relations, we see that gender ideology was a key ingredient in the glue that held the conquest together and in turn shaped indigenous behavior toward the conquerors.This book tells the hidden story of women during the missionization of California. It shows what it was like for women to live and work on that frontier—and how race, religion, age, and ethnicity shaped female experiences. It explores the suppression of women's experiences and cultural resistance to domination, and reveals the many codes of silence regarding the use of force at the missions, the treatment of women, indigenous ceremonies, sexuality, and dreams.Virginia Bouvier has combed a vast array of sources— including mission records, journals of explorers and missionaries, novels of chivalry, and oral histories— and has discovered that female participation in the colonization of California was greater and earlier than most historians have recognized. Viewing the conquest through the prism of gender, Bouvier gives new meaning to the settling of new lands and attempts to convert indigenous peoples.By analyzing the participation of women— both Hispanic and Indian— in the maintenance of or resistance to the mission system, Bouvier restores them to the narrative of the conquest, colonization, and evangelization of California. And by bringing these voices into the chorus of history, she creates new harmonies and dissonances that alter and enhance our understanding of both the experience and meaning of conquest.

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Women and the Everyday City

Public Space in San Francisco, 1890–1915

Jessica Ellen Sewell

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

In Women and the Everyday City, Jessica Ellen Sewell explores the lives of women in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. A period of transformation of both gender roles and American cities, she shows how changes in the city affected women's ability to negotiate shifting gender norms as well as how women's increasing use of the city played a critical role in the campaign for women's suffrage.

Focusing on women's everyday use of streetcars, shops, restaurants, and theaters, Sewell reveals the impact of women on these public places-what women did there, which women went there, and how these places were changed in response to women's presence. Using the diaries of three women in San Francisco-Annie Haskell, Ella Lees Leigh, and Mary Eugenia Pierce, who wrote extensively on their everyday experiences-Sewell studies their accounts of day trips to the city and combines them with memoirs, newspapers, maps, photographs, and her own observations of the buildings that exist today to build a sense of life in San Francisco at this pivotal point in history.

Working at the nexus of urban history, architectural history, and cultural geography, Women and the Everyday City offers a revealing portrait of both a major American city during its early years and the women who shaped it-and the country-for generations to come.

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Women and the Holocaust

New Perspectives and Challenges

Andrea Pető

Central European University Press, 2015

Women and Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges expands the existing scholarship on women and the Holocaust adopting current approaches to gender studies and focusing on the texts and context from Central-Eastern Europe. The authors complicate earlier approaches by considering the intersections of gender, region, nationa, and sexuality, often within specifically delineated national settings, including the Czech/German, Hungarian, Hungarian/Austrian, Lithuanian, Polish/Israeli, Romanian/US-American, and Slovak. In these essays, the communist regimes after WWII often provide a productive framework for studying women and the Holocaust. This truly international volume features contributions by eminent authors, including pioneers in the field, as well as upcoming literary scholars and historians who delve into previously unmapped archives, explore cinematic representations and digital testimonies.

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Women and the Law

Susan Atkins and Brenda Hoggett

University of London Press, 2018

Women and the Law is a pioneering study of the way in which the law has treated women – at work, in the family, in matters of sexuality and fertility, and in public life. It was first published in 1984 by Susan Atkins and Brenda Hoggett, then University teachers. The authors examine the origins of British law’s attitude to women, trace the development of the law and ways in which it reflects the influence of economic, social and political forces and the dominance of men. They illustrate the tendency, despite formal equality, for deep-rooted problems of encoded gender inequality to remain. Since 1984 the authors have achieved distinguished careers in law and public service. This 2018 Open Access edition provides a timely opportunity to revisit their ground-breaking analysis and reflect on how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same.

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Women and the Press

The Struggle for Equality

Patricia Bradley

Northwestern University Press, 2005

When Abigail Adams made her famous plea to John Adams to "remember the ladies," the role of advocacy on behalf of U.S. gender equality began its rocky and still uncompleted journey. In Women and the Press, Patricia Bradley examines the tensions that have arisen over the course of this journey as they relate to women in journalism. From their first entrance into the commercial press as sentimental writers, to the present day, the call for gender equality has had special meaning for female journalists. Is there a role, a responsibility, for advocacy, even subversion, in a newsroom setting? This is an account of how women in journalism sought to integrate the need for gender equality with the realities of the journalistic workplace.

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Women as Healers

Cross-Cultural Perspectives

McClain, Carol Shepherd

Rutgers University Press, 1989

In Women as Healers, thirteen contributors explore the intersection of feminist anthropology and medical anthropology in eleven case studies of women in traditional and emergent healing roles in diverse parts of the world. In a spectrum of healing roles ranging from family healers to shamans, diviner-mediums, and midwives, women throughout the world pursue strategic ends through healing, manipulate cultural images to effect cures and explain misfortune, and shape and are shaped by the social and political contexts in which they work. In an introductory chapter, Carol Shepherd McClain traces the evolution of ideas in medical anthropology and in the anthropology of women that have both constrained and expanded our understanding of the significance of gender to healing-one of the most fundamental and universal of human activities.

The contributors include Carol Shepherd McClain, Ruthbeth Finerman, Carolyn Nordstrom, Carole H. Browner, William Wedenoja, Marjery Foz, Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern, Laurel Kendall, Merrill Signer, Roberto Garcia, Edward C. Green, Carolyn Sargent, and Margaret Reid.

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Women at Michigan

The "Dangerous Experiment," 1870s to the Present

Ruth Bordin

University of Michigan Press, 2001

Women at Michigan traces the fascinating history of women at at the University of Michigan, from the first reluctant admission of women students in the 1870s (which one male administrator referred to as "the dangerous experiment") to the tumultuous post-World War II period and from the radical changes of the 1960s and 1970s to the present. The hurdles that women who pursued higher education at Michigan and elsewhere faced may surprise those who observe the relative freedom of women on college campuses today.

Women at Michigan was written by well respected historian Ruth Bordin, whose own career was impeded by the gender inequality of the era and who unfortunately died before seeing this book in print. Her study is grounded in historical detail. While drawing upon the larger historiography of women's higher education to round out its story, the book shows Michigan to be one case among many. Women at Michigan is richly illustrated with archival photographs depicting women's experience at the University of Michigan--as students, faculty, administrators, and staff--through the years.

Historian Ruth Bordin was author of A Pictorial History of The University of Michigan; Frances Willard: A Biography; and Alice Freeman Palmer: The Evolution of a New Woman. Martha Vicinus is Professor of English and History, University of Michigan. Kathryn Kish Sklar is Distinguished Professor of History, Binghamton University. Lynn Weiner is a historian and Associate Dean, Roosevelt University.

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Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema

Barbara Mennel

University of Illinois Press, 2019

From hairdressers and caregivers to reproductive workers and power-suited executives, images of women's labor have powered a fascinating new movement within twenty-first-century European cinema. Social realist dramas capture precarious working conditions. Comedies exaggerate the habits of the global managerial class. Stories from countries battered by the global financial crisis emphasize the patriarchal family, debt, and unemployment.

Barbara Mennel delves into the ways these films about female labor capture the tension between feminist advances and their appropriation by capitalism in a time of ongoing transformation. Looking at independent and genre films from a cross-section of European nations, Mennel sees a focus on economics and work adapted to the continent's varied kinds of capitalism and influenced by concepts in second-wave feminism. More than ever, narratives of work put female characters front and center--and female directors behind the camera. Yet her analysis shows that each film remains a complex mix of progressive and retrogressive dynamics as it addresses the changing nature of work in Europe.

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Women for President

Media Bias in Eight Campaigns

Erika Falk

University of Illinois Press, 2007

When Hillary Clinton announced her 2008 bid for president she was the Democratic front-runner. Despite this, she received less coverage than Barack Obama, who trailed her in the polls. Such a disparity is indicative of the gender bias the media has demonstrated in covering women candidates since the first woman ran for America’s highest office in 1872. Tracing the campaigns of eight women who ran for president through 2004--Victoria Woodhull, Belva Lockwood, Margaret Chase Smith, Shirley Chisholm, Patricia Schroeder, Lenora Fulani, Elizabeth Dole, and Carol Moseley Braun--Erika Falk finds little progress in the fair treatment of women candidates. A thorough comparison of the women’s campaigns to those of their male opponents reveals a worrisome trend of sexism in press coverage--a trend that still persists today.

While women have been elected to the highest offices in countries such as England, Germany, and India, the idea that a woman could be president of the United States provokes scoffs and ridicule. The press portrays female candidates as unviable, unnatural, and incompetent, and often ignores or belittles women instead of reporting their ideas and intent. Since voters learn most details about presidential candidates through media outlets, Falk asserts that this prevailing bias calls into question the modern democratic assumption that men and women have comparable access to positions of power.

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Women for President

Media Bias in Nine Campaigns

Erika Falk

University of Illinois Press, 2010

Newly updated to examine Hillary Clinton's formidable 2008 presidential campaign, Women for President analyzes the gender bias the media has demonstrated in covering women candidates since the first woman ran for America's highest office in 1872. Tracing the campaigns of nine women who ran for president through 2008--Victoria Woodhull, Belva Lockwood, Margaret Chase Smith, Shirley Chisholm, Patricia Schroeder, Lenora Fulani, Elizabeth Dole, Carol Moseley Braun, and Hillary Clinton--Erika Falk finds little progress in the fair treatment of women candidates. The press portrays female candidates as unviable, unnatural, and incompetent, and often ignores or belittles women instead of reporting their ideas and intent. This thorough comparison of men's and women's campaigns reveals a worrisome trend of sexism in press coverage--a trend that still persists today.

[more]