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2194 books match the query 'Women's Studies' and 222 start with w

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Wildcat Women

Narratives of Women Breaking Ground in Alaska's Oil and Gas Industry

Carla Williams

University of Alaska Press, 2018

Subzero temperatures, whiteout blizzards, and even the lack of restrooms didn’t deter them. Nor did sneers, harassment, and threats. Wildcat Women is the first book to document the life and labor of pioneering women in the oil fields of Alaska’s North Slope. It profiles fourteen women who worked in the fields, telling a little-known history of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. These trailblazers conquered their fears to face hazardous working and living conditions, performing and excelling at “a man’s job in a man’s world.” They faced down challenges on and off the job: they drove buses over ice roads through snowstorms; wrestled with massive pipes; and operated dangerous valves that put their lives literally in their hands; they also fought union hall red tape, challenged discriminatory practices, and fought for equal pay—and sometimes won. The women talk about the roads that brought them to this unusual career, where they often gave up comfort and convenience and felt isolated and alienated. They also tell of the lifelong friendships and sense of family that bonded these unlikely wildcats. The physical and emotional hardship detailed in these stories exemplifies their courage, tenacity, resilience, and leadership, and shows how their fight for recognition and respect benefited woman workers everywhere.

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Willing and Unable

Doctors' Constraints in Abortion Care

Lori R. Freedman

Vanderbilt University Press, 2010

Willing and Unable explores the social world where abortion politics and mainstream medicine collide. The author interviewed physicians of obstetrics and gynecology around the United States to find out why physicians rarely integrate abortion into their medical practice. While abortion stigma, violence, and political contention provide some explanation, her findings demonstrate that willing physicians are further encumbered by a variety of barriers within their practice environments.
Structural barriers to the mainstream practice of abortion effectively institutionalize the buck-passing of abortion patients to abortion clinics. As the author notes, "Public-health-minded HMOs and physician practices could significantly change the world of abortion care if they stopped outsourcing it."
Drawing from forty in-depth interviews, the book presents a challenge to a commonly held assumption that physicians decide whether or not to provide abortion based on personal ideology. Physician narratives demonstrate how their choices around learning, doing, and even having abortions themselves disrupt the pro-choice/pro-life moral and political binary.

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Winning Their Place

Arizona Women in Politics, 1883-1950

Heidi J. Osselaer

University of Arizona Press, 2009

In January 1999, five women were elected to the highest offices in Arizona, including governor, secretary of state, attorney general, treasurer, and superintendent of public instruction. The “Fab Five,” as they were dubbed by the media, were sworn in by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, herself a former member of the Arizona legislature. Some observers assumed that the success of women in Arizona politics was a result of the modern women’s movement, but Winning Their Place convincingly demonstrates that these recent political victories have a long and fascinating history.

This landmark book chronicles for the first time the participation of Arizona women in the state’s early politics. Incorporating impressive original research, Winning Their Place traces the roots of the political participation of women from the territorial period to after World War II. Although women in Arizona first entered politics for traditional reasons—to reform society and protect women and children—they quickly realized that male politicians were uninterested in their demands. Most suffrage activists were working professional women, who understood that the work place discriminated against them. In Arizona they won the vote because they demanded rights as working women and aligned with labor unions and third parties that sympathized with their cause. After winning the vote, the victorious suffragists ran for office because they believed men could not and would not represent their interests.

Through this process, these Arizona women became excellent politicians. Unlike women in many other states, women in Arizona quickly carved out a place for themselves in local and state politics, even without the support of the reigning Democratic Party, and challenged men for county office, the state legislature, state office, Congress, and even for governor. This fascinating book reveals how they shattered traditional notions about “a woman’s place” and paved the way for future female politicians, including the “Fab Five” and countless others who have changed the course of Arizona history.

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Wit, Virtue, and Emotion

British Women's Enlightenment Rhetoric

Elizabeth Tasker Davis

Southern Illinois University Press, 2022

Women’s persuasion and performance in the Age of Enlightenment

Over a century before first-wave feminism, British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric prefigured nineteenth-century feminist arguments for gender equality, women’s civil rights, professional opportunities, and standardized education. Author Elizabeth Tasker Davis rereads accepted histories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British rhetoric, claiming a greater variety and power of women’s rhetoric. This recovery of British women’s performative and written roles as speakers, spectators, authors, and readers in diverse venues counters the traditional masculine model of European Enlightenment rhetoric. Davis broadens women’s Enlightenment rhetorics to include highly public venues such as theaters, clubs, salons, and debating societies, as well as the mediated sites of the periodical essay, the treatise on rhetorical theory, and women’s written proposals, plans, defenses and arguments for education. Through these sites, women’s rhetorical postures diverged from patriarchal prescriptions rather to deliver protofeminist persuasive performances of wit, virtue, and emotion.

Davis examines context, the effects of memory and gendering, and the cultural sites and media of women’s rhetoric to reveal a fuller ecology of British Enlightenment rhetoric. Each chapter covers a cultural site of women’s rhetorical practice—the court, the stage, the salon, and the printed page. Applying feminist rhetorical theory, Davis documents how women grasped their rhetorical ability in this historical moment and staged a large-scale transformation of British women from subalterns to a vocal counterpublic in British society.

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With the Lapps in the High Mountains

A Woman among the Sami, 1907–1908

Emilie Demant Hatt; Edited and translated by Barbara Sjoholm; Foreword by Hugh Beach

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

With the Lapps in the High Mountains is an entrancing true account, a classic of travel literature, and a work that deserves wider recognition as an early contribution to ethnographic writing. Published in 1913 and available here in its first English translation, it is the narrative of Emilie Demant Hatt's nine-month stay in the tent of a Sami family in northern Sweden in 1907–8 and her participation in a dramatic reindeer migration over snow-packed mountains to Norway with another Sami community in 1908. A single woman in her thirties, Demant Hatt immersed herself in the Sami language and culture. She writes vividly of daily life, women's work, children's play, and the care of reindeer herds in Lapland a century ago.

While still an art student in Copenhagen in 1904, Demant Hatt had taken a vacation trip to northern Sweden, where she chanced to meet Sami wolf hunter Johan Turi. His dream of writing a book about his people sparked her interest in the culture, and she began to study the Sami language at the University of Copenhagen. Though not formally trained as an ethnographer, she had an eye for detail. The journals, photographs, sketches, and paintings she made during her travels with the Sami enriched her eventual book, and in With the Lapps in the High Mountains she memorably portrays people, dogs, reindeer, and the beauty of the landscape above the Arctic Circle. This English-language edition also includes photographs by Demant Hatt, an introduction by translator Barbara Sjoholm, and a foreword by Hugh Beach, author of A Year in Lapland: Guest of the Reindeer Herders.

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With the Weathermen

The Personal Journal of a Revolutionary Woman

Susan Stern and Edited and with an introduction by Laura Browder

Rutgers University Press, 2007

Drugs. Sex. Revolutionary violence. From its first pages, Susan Stern's memoir With the Weathermen provides a candid, first-hand look at the radical politics and the social and cultural environment of the New Left during the late 1960s.

The Weathermen--a U.S.-based, revolutionary splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society--advocated the overthrow of the government and capitalism, and toward that end, carried out a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots throughout the United States. In With the Weathermen Stern traces her involvement with this group, and her transformation from a shy, married graduate student into a go-go dancing, street-fighting "macho mama." In vivid and emotional language, she describes the attractions and difficulties of joining a collective radical group and in maintaining a position within it.

Stern's memoir offers a rich description of the raw and rough social dynamics of this community, from its strict demands to "smash monogamy," to its sometimes enforced orgies, and to the demeaning character assassination that was led by the group's top members. She provides a distinctly personal and female perspective on the destructive social functionality and frequently contradictory attitudes toward gender roles and women's rights within the New Left.

Laura Browder's masterful introduction situates Stern's memoir in its historical context, examines the circumstances of its writing and publication, and describes the book's somewhat controversial reception by the public and critics alike.

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Wives Not Slaves

Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions

Kirsten Sword

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Wives not Slaves begins with the story of John and Eunice Davis, a colonial American couple who, in 1762, advertised their marital difficulties in the New Hampshire Gazette—a more common practice for the time and place than contemporary readers might think. John Davis began the exchange after Eunice left him, with a notice resembling the ads about runaway slaves and servants that were a common feature of eighteenth-century newspapers. John warned neighbors against “entertaining her or harbouring her. . . or giving her credit.” Eunice defiantly replied, “If I am your wife, I am not your slave.” With this pointed but problematic analogy, Eunice connected her individual challenge to her husband’s authority with the broader critiques of patriarchal power found in the politics, religion, and literature of the British Atlantic world.

Kirsten Sword’s richly researched history reconstructs the stories of wives who fled their husbands between the mid-seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, comparing their plight with that of other runaway dependents. Wives not Slaves explores the links between local justice, the emerging press, and transatlantic political debates about marriage, slavery and imperial power. Sword traces the relationship between the distress of ordinary households, domestic unrest, and political unrest, shedding new light on the social changes imagined by eighteenth-century revolutionaries, and on the politics that determined which patriarchal forms and customs the new American nation would—and would not—abolish.

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Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace

Conservative Women and the Crusade against Communism

Mary Brennan

University Press of Colorado, 2027

In Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace, Mary Brennan examines conservative women's anti-communist activism in the years immediately after World War II.

Brennan details the actions and experiences of prominent anti-communists Jean Kerr McCarthy, Margaret Chase Smith, Freda Utley, Doloris Thauwald Bridges, Elizabeth Churchill Brown, and Phyllis Stewart Schlafly. She describes the Cold War context in which these women functioned and the ways in which women saw communism as a very real danger to domestic security and American families. Millions of women, Brennan notes, expanded their notions of household responsibilities to include the crusade against communism. From writing letters and hosting teas to publishing books and running for political office, they campaigned against communism and, incidentally, discovered the power they had to effect change through activism.

Brennan reveals how the willingness of these deeply conservative women to leave the domestic sphere and engage publicly in politics evinces the depth of America's postwar fear of communism. She further argues that these conservative, anti-communist women pushed the boundaries of traditional gender roles and challenged assumptions about women as political players by entering political life to publicly promote their ideals.Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace offers a fascinating analysis of gender and politics at a critical point in American history. Brennan's work will instigate discussions among historians, political scientists, and scholars of women's studies.

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Wives, Slaves, and Servant Girls

Advertisements for Female Runaways in American Newspapers, 1770–1783

Don N. Hagist

Westholme Publishing, 2007

A Surprising Source of Information About a Largely Forgotten Segment of the Colonial Population
In an age when individuals could be owned by others, people were lost and found just like other property. Indentured servants and slaves absconded from the custody of their masters, and their value prompted the masters to seek their return. Wives ran from abusive husbands or into the arms of another. Newspapers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries carried large numbers of advertisements offering rewards for the return of runaways or announcing the detention of fugitives. Each ad provided a description of the individual and often included some circumstances of their elopement. The overall effectiveness of these advertisements cannot be measured, but the sheer number of ads suggests they were perceived as useful tools by those who placed them. What could not have been known at the time was the substantial contribution to history that these ads make. The descriptive advertisements provide textual snapshots of thousands of individuals who would otherwise be lost to history, people whose names might not otherwise be recorded. In Wives, Slaves, and Servant Girls: Advertisements for Female Runaways in American Newspapers, 1770–1783, historian Don N. Hagist focuses on the American Revolutionary period to provide a striking portrait of a substantial but largely forgotten segment of the population. Comprised of four hundred advertisements presented chronologically, the volume provides invaluable descriptions of women’s clothes, footwear, jewelry, physical appearances, education, nationalities, occupations, and other details.

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Woman Walk the Line

How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives

By Holly Gleason

University of Texas Press, 2017

Full-tilt, hardcore, down-home, and groundbreaking, the women of country music speak volumes with every song. From Maybelle Carter to Dolly Parton, k.d. lang to Taylor Swift—these artists provided pivot points, truths, and doses of courage for women writers at every stage of their lives. Whether it’s Rosanne Cash eulogizing June Carter Cash or a seventeen-year-old Taylor Swift considering the golden glimmer of another precocious superstar, Brenda Lee, it’s the humanity beneath the music that resonates.

Here are deeply personal essays from award-winning writers on femme fatales, feminists, groundbreakers, and truth tellers. Acclaimed historian Holly George Warren captures the spark of the rockabilly sensation Wanda Jackson; Entertainment Weekly’s Madison Vain considers Loretta Lynn’s girl-power anthem “The Pill”; and rocker Grace Potter embraces Linda Ronstadt’s unabashed visual and musical influence. Patty Griffin acts like a balm on a post-9/11 survivor on the run; Emmylou Harris offers a gateway through paralyzing grief; and Lucinda Williams proves that greatness is where you find it.

Part history, part confessional, and part celebration of country, Americana, and bluegrass and the women who make them, Woman Walk the Line is a very personal collection of essays from some of America’s most intriguing women writers. It speaks to the ways in which artists mark our lives at different ages and in various states of grace and imperfection—and ultimately how music transforms not just the person making it, but also the listener.

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Woman'S Place Is At The Typewriter

Margery W. Davies

Temple University Press, 1984

"Compelling. It serves as a lesson and a warning, for it might disabuse many women of their notion that the first step toward the executive ladder is at a typewriter. Certainly [it] suggests MBAs for aspiring women, rather than Smith-Coronas." --Boston Sunday Globe In most societies, a sexual division of labor is usually regarded as "natural." Thus, in the United States today not only does it seem proper that woman's place is at the stove, or with the children, or in the classroom, or at the typewriter, but it also seems "natural" it was always so. Looking at clerical workers, the author shows how work once performed by men became redefined as "women's work." She explores this shift in the context of patriarchal social relations and political-economic forces. The interaction of which determined woman's place in the office. Before 1900, male clerical workers, as apprentice capitalists, performed a wide variety of tasks that helped them learn the business. By 1930, the class position of clerical workers had changed, and autonomous male clerks were transformed into working class females--a "secretarial proletariat." Based on business histories, corporation records, correspondence. and even fiction. Dr. Davies' work demonstrates how the feminization of clerical work is historically specific rather than ordained by nature; how it reflects the peculiar forms which patriarchy have assumed in the United States; and how the working class status of contemporary office workers began to take shape at the end of the nineteenth century. From the time the first female office worker was hired by US Treasurer General Elias Spinner during the Civil War and it became apparent that female labor was cheaper than male, women became increasingly visible in the office. The author accounts for this by discussing the decrease in productive work in the home, the perceived higher status of office work, and the better working conditions in offices. She also looks at scientific office management, which crystallized labor specialization and helped eliminate worker control over work. Examining the role of the private secretary, she concludes this apparently more attractive position served to mask the realities of typical office work. Perhaps the most interesting conclusion reached in this book is that the degradation and the proletarianization of office work were disguised by the shift from male to female workers. The nineteenth-century clerk has not turned merely into a proletarian: he had turned into a woman. "One of the first books to tackle this important topic and as such admirably begins to fill the gap. . . . A critical contribution." --The Journal of American History "Lively reading. Davies' review of the impact of the typewriter proves a useful perspective for those trying to evaluate the impact of the word processor on social roles and labor markets in the 1980s." --Choice

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Woman's Legacy

Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History

Bettina Aptheker

University of Massachusetts Press, 1982

Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History is a groundbreaking collection of essays by prominent feminist scholar and historian Bettina Aptheker. Emerging from her dissertation research, this work examines the interconnected systems of racial, sexual, and class oppression that have shaped the experiences of women in American history. Through careful historical analysis and feminist scholarship, Aptheker explores how race, sex, and class work together to form complex systems of domination and resistance in the American historical context. The essays investigate women's community roles, activism, and agency while centering the lived experiences of women, particularly Black women, across different historical periods. This seminal work contributes to African American women's history and feminist historiography, bridging women's studies with critical analysis of historical structures and social movements. An essential text for those interested in intersectional approaches to American history and women's studies.

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Women Artists of the Great Basin

Mary Lee Fulkerson

University of Nevada Press, 2017

Thirty-two women artists scattered over 200,000 square miles introduce a powerhouse of three-dimensional art in Women Artists of the Great Basin. A wave of women’s art has begun to paint the land with a giant brush, and nowhere have the winds of change been more evident than in the Great Basin, where a sense of freedom and rugged individualism has swept across the playas and through cities and towns. This book is a stunning visual rendering of a wide range of visionary women artists of all ages and backgrounds, and readers will discover their dynamic works and get to know them on a personal level. Sculptors, painters, fabric artists, glassblowers, marble and stone workers, and even a renowned Twinkie artist are represented here, all producing artwork that is jam-packed with originality.

Fulkerson and Mantle, longtime artists and residents of the Great Basin themselves, offer a behind-the-scenes intimate glimpse into these women’s lives and artwork—showing not only what they create, but why they create it. Too often overlooked, the women covered here prove there is much richness, life, and creativity in what has often been dismissed as a barren desert. Their stories of overcoming great obstacles unfold right alongside images of their art. Many circle outside the conventional world of galleries, museums, and art publications and have created varied paths to their success. They are indeed true originals, rooted in a land of unique geography, a stew of cultures, and stories like no other.

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Women Artists on the Leading Edge

Visual Arts at Douglass College

Joan M. Marter

Rutgers University Press, 2020

How do students develop a personal style from their instruction in a visual arts program? Women Artists on the Leading Edge explores this question as it describes the emergence of an important group of young women artists from an innovative post-war visual arts program at Douglass College.

The women who studied with avant-garde artists at Douglas were among the first students in the nation to be introduced to performance art, conceptual art, Fluxus, and Pop Art. These young artists were among the first to experience new approaches to artmaking that rejected the predominant style of the 1950s: Abstract Expressionism. The New Art espoused by faculty including Robert Watts, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Geoffrey Hendricks, and others advocated that art should be based on everyday life. The phrase “anything can be art” was frequently repeated in the creation of Happenings, multi-media installations, and video art. Experimental approaches to methods of creation using a remarkable range of materials were investigated by these young women. Interdisciplinary aspects of the Douglass curriculum became the basis for performances, videos, photography, and constructions. Sculpture was created using new technologies and industrial materials. The Douglass women artists included in this book were among the first to implement the message and direction of their instructors.

Ultimately, the artistic careers of these young women have reflected the successful interaction of students with a cutting-edge faculty. From this BA and MFA program in the Visual Arts emerged women such as Alice Aycock. Rita Myers, Joan Snyder, Mimi Smith, and Jackie Winsor, who went on to become lifelong innovators. Camaraderie was important among the Douglass art students, and many continue to be instructors within a close circle of associates from their college years. Even before the inception of the women’s art movement of the 1970s, these women students were encouraged to pursue professional careers, and to remain independent in their approach to making art. The message of the New Art was to relate one’s art production to life itself and to personal experiences. From these directions emerged a “proto-feminist” art of great originality identified with women’s issues. The legacy of these artists can be found in radical changes in art instruction since the 1950s, the promotion of non-hierarchical approaches to media, and acceptance of conceptual art as a viable art form.

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Women Between Two Worlds

Midlife Reflections on Work and Family

Myra Dinnerstein

Temple University Press, 1992

Myra Dinnerstein examines the choices and compromises of a generation of women who came of age after World War II. Her in-depth study traces the experiences of twenty-two middle-class women from childhood to adulthood and their evolution from traditional wives and mothers to career women at midlife. Her richly detailed interviews explore the tensions of combining work, marriage, and family life and remind us of the significance of one's social and personal context with respect to the ability to make satisfying choices. Middle-class women born between 1936 and 1944 have been split between two worlds. As they were growing up, traditional expectations and limited opportunities seemed to make marriage and motherhood inevitable choices. When they reached their thirties, the Women's Movement and expanding opportunities in the workplace presented options for them that had not been available to their mothers. Now it was considered appropriate for women to have ambitions and to act on them--and the women described in this book were among those who did.

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Women Confronting Retirement

A Nontraditional Guide

Edited by Nan Bauer-Maglin and Alice Radosh

Rutgers University Press, 2003

Women Confronting Retirement showcases the voices of thirty-eight women from a wide range of professions, ages, and life situations as they confront the need to redefine who they are when they leave the workplace behind them. The women of the Baby Boom generation were the first to enter the professional world in large numbers, and the first to encounter the hazards of retirement. The contributors urge us to reach for new approaches to this major stage of life, to find new self-images, to balance meaningful work and creative play, and to work for the new public policies that support enhanced opportunities for retirement. Many of these women were involved in the key activist movements of the sixties and seventies, and their work often has been an extension of their social commitment. Defining themselves through their careers, they have challenged traditional models at every stage of their lives and are now being challenged by their own negative stereotypes about retirement.

The stories in this book compellingly chronicle the fears and hopes of women who have only begun to think about retirement, those who are in the process of retiring, some who have been retired for many years, and a few who have decided that retirement is not for them. They address issues such as identity, aging, creativity, family, and community. Unlike traditional “how-to” books, Women Confronting Retirement makes clear how individual the choices are, how there are no right and wrong answers to the many questions this uncharted stage of life poses for women of the Baby Boom generation, and those who follow. These women help us to explore the next steps with the same courage and questioning attitudes that they have brought to every aspect of their lives before they reached retirement age.

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Women Embracing Islam

Gender and Conversion in the West

Edited by Karin van Nieuwkerk

University of Texas Press, 2006

Many Westerners view Islam as a religion that restricts and subordinates women in both private and public life. Yet a surprising number of women in Western Europe and America are converting to Islam. What attracts these women to a belief system that is markedly different from both Western Christianity and Western secularism? What benefits do they gain by converting, and what are the costs? How do Western women converts live their new Islamic faith, and how does their conversion affect their families and communities? How do women converts transmit Islamic values to their children? These are some of the questions that Women Embracing Islam seeks to answer.

In this vanguard study of gender and conversion to Islam, leading historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and theologians investigate why non-Muslim women in the United States, several European countries, and South Africa are converting to Islam. Drawing on extensive interviews with female converts, the authors explore the life experiences that lead Western women to adopt Islam, as well as the appeal that various forms of Islam, as well as the Nation of Islam, have for women. The authors find that while no single set of factors can explain why Western women are embracing Islamic faith traditions, some common motivations emerge. These include an attraction to Islam's high regard for family and community, its strict moral and ethical standards, and the rationality and spirituality of its theology, as well as a disillusionment with Christianity and with the unrestrained sexuality of so much of Western culture.

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Women Escaping Violence

Empowerment through Narrative

Elaine J. Lawless

University of Missouri Press, 2001

The statistics are alarming. Some say that once every nine minutes a woman in the United States is beaten by her spouse or partner. Others claim that once every four minutes a woman in the world is beaten by her spouse or partner. More women go to emergency rooms in the United States for injuries sustained at the hands of their spouses and partners than for all other injuries combined.

Shelters for battered women are filled beyond capacity every single day of the year. Despite the overwhelming evidence that violence in our homes is a daily reality, most of us are not willing to acknowledge this private violence or talk about it openly. Women Escaping Violence brings women's stories to the attention of the academy as well as the reading public. While we may be unwilling or unable to talk about the issue of battered women, many of us are ready to read what women have to say about their endangered lives.

Considerable scholarship is emerging in the area of domestic violence, including many self-help books about how to identify and escape abuse. Women Escaping Violence offers the unique view of battered women's stories told in their own words, as well as a feminist analysis of how these women use the power of narrative to transform their sense of self and regain a place within the larger society.

Lawless shares with the reader the heart-wrenching experiences of battered women who have escaped violence by fleeing to shelters with little more than a few items hastily shoved into a plastic bag, and often with small children in tow. The book includes women's stories as they are told and retold within the shelter, in the presence of other battered women and of caregivers. It analyzes the uses made of these narratives by those seeking to counsel battered women as well as by the women themselves.

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Women Filmmakers of the African & Asian Diaspora

Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

Black women filmmakers not only deserve an audience, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster asserts, but it is also imperative that their voices be heard as they struggle against Hollywood’s constructions of spectatorship, ownership, and the creative and distribution aspects of filmmaking.

Foster provides a voice for Black and Asian women in the first detailed examination of the works of six contemporary Black and Asian women filmmakers. She also includes a detailed introduction and a chapter entitled "Other Voices," documenting the work of other Black and Asian filmmakers.

Foster analyzes the key films of Zeinabu irene Davis, "one of a growing number of independent Black women filmmakers who are actively constructing [in the words of bell hooks] ‘an oppositional gaze’"; British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah and Julie Dash, two filmmakers working with time and space; Pratibha Parmar, a Kenyan/Indian-born British Black filmmaker concerned with issues of representation, identity; cultural displacement, lesbianism, and racial identity; Trinh T. Minh-ha, a Vietnamese-born artist who revolutionized documentary filmmaking by displacing the "voyeuristic gaze of the ethnographic documentary filmmaker"; and Mira Nair, a Black Indian woman who concentrates on interracial identity.

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Women Have Always Worked

A Concise History

Alice Kessler-Harris

University of Illinois Press, 2018

A classic since its original publication, Women Have Always Worked brought much-needed insight into the ways work has shaped female lives and sensibilities. Beginning in the colonial era, Alice Kessler-Harris looks at the public and private work spheres of diverse groups of women—housewives and trade unionists, immigrants and African Americans, professionals and menial laborers, and women from across the class spectrum. She delves into issues ranging from the gendered nature of the success ethic to the social activism and the meaning of citizenship for female wage workers. This second edition adds artwork and features significant updates. A new chapter by Kessler-Harris follows women into the early twenty-first century as they confront barriers of race, sex, and class to earn positions in the new information society.

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Women Lawyers and the Origins of Professional Identity in America

The Letters of the Equity Club, 1886 to 1890

Virginia G. Drachman

University of Michigan Press, 1993

The first women lawyers in America, like many of their twentieth-century counterparts, had to reconcile the traditional roles assigned to women with their roles as lawyers. In 1886, a group of women students and recent alumnae of the University of Michigan Law School founded the Equity Club, a correspondence club for women lawyers and law students across the country who were trying to overcome geographic isolation. The Equity Club became the first organization in the United States to forge professional links between women lawyers, and its founding marks the origins of a collective identity among these new professionals. The letters reprinted in Women Lawyers and the Origins of Professional Identity in America reveal the challenges the first women lawyers faced and reflect the diverse opinions they held on the common issues confronting them. Some contended that women should be lawyers on the same terms as men, while others argued that they could bring something special to the profession—like morality, purity, ethics, and humanity—in contrast to the purely business and commercial qualities of law as practiced by men. The discovery and publication of these letters fill a void in the documentary history of the legal profession and the history of women in America. The introductory essay and the biographical information provided about the lives of the members of the Equity Club help to place the letters in the larger contexts of those histories. Women Lawyers and the Origins of Professional Identity in America will prove enlightening to practicing lawyers, who will find that even a hundred years later, many of the letters have remarkable relevance. Scholars and students in women's history, American studies, sociology, and legal history will also find it a valuable resource.

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Women Living With Self-Injury

Jane Wegscheider Hyman

Temple University Press, 1999

They cut their arms and legs with knives and razors; scratch at their skin; burn, bruise, or stick themselves with cigarettes, hammers, pins, and other objects; bang their heads and limbs; and break their own bones. Although women who live with self-injury have recently gained recognition in the media, they have, as a result, become even more stigmatized.

In this book, author Jane Wegschneider sheds light on this misunderstood condition. Fifteen women talk about their battle with self-injury and explain how and why they repeatedly and deliberately injure themselves. Most admit they do it because it makes them feel high or safe. They also describe living with ceaseless shame, secrecy, and fear of discovery which could make them unemployable and ostracized. Candidly discussing their attempted and successful recoveries, they reveal the impact living with self-injury has on their day-to-day lives -- where they are competent workers, partners, friends, and mothers.

Hear the voices of these women as they speak to a public that generally sees self-injury as frightening, senseless, and repulsive. Concealing scars or other signs of injury is crucial for them and partly dictates their daily routines, choice of clothes, and the lies they tell to excuse any traces of injury. For these productive women who work outside of the home and often raise children, hiding self-injury is of paramount importance during their workdays and in their relationships with partners, families, and friends.

Hyman's approach is unique in that she not only talked to these women but also really listened to their stories -- something rare in the misunderstood realm of self-injury. Professionals, perplexed by self-injury, have not always tolerated its complexity. As a result those who injure themselves have remained shrouded in secrecy, isolation, and shame -- until now.

This book offers compassion as well as encouragement for recovery by making available the emotional experiences of sufferers in their own words. It is an important book for those who self-injure, their loved ones, anyone who knows of or suspects self-injury in a friend, and mental care professionals.

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Women Make Horror

Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre

Alison Peirse

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Winner of the the 2021 Best Edited Collection Award from BAFTSS
Winner of the 2021 British Fantasy Award in Best Non-Fiction
Finalist for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction
Runner-Up for Book of the Year in the 19th Annual Rondo Halton Classic Horror Awards

“But women were never out there making horror films, that’s why they are not written about – you can’t include what doesn’t exist.”
“Women are just not that interested in making horror films.”

This is what you get when you are a woman working in horror, whether as a writer, academic, festival programmer, or filmmaker. These assumptions are based on decades of flawed scholarly, critical, and industrial thinking about the genre. Women Make Horror sets right these misconceptions. Women have always made horror. They have always been an audience for the genre, and today, as this book reveals, women academics, critics, and filmmakers alike remain committed to a film genre that offers almost unlimited opportunities for exploring and deconstructing social and cultural constructions of gender, femininity, sexuality, and the body.

Women Make Horror explores narrative and experimental cinema; short, anthology, and feature filmmaking; and offers case studies of North American, Latin American, European, East Asian, and Australian filmmakers, films, and festivals. With this book we can transform how we think about women filmmakers and genre.

[more]

Women Making Music

The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950

Edited by Jane Bowers and Judith Tick

University of Illinois Press, 1986

"Do look after my music!" Irene Wienawska Polowski exclaimed before her death in 1932. And from the urgency of that sentiment the authors here have taken their cue to reveal and "look after" the previously neglected contributions of women throughout the history of Western art music.

The first work of its kind, Women Making Music presents biographies of outstanding performers and composers, as well as analyses of women musicians as a class, and provides examples of music from all periods including medieval chant, Renaissance song, Baroque opera, German lieder, and twentieth-century composition. Unlike most standard historical surveys, the book not only sheds light upon the musical achievements of women, it also illuminates the historical contexts that shaped and defined those achievements.

[more]

Women Making War

Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice

Thomas F. Curran

Southern Illinois University Press, 2020

Partisan activities of disloyal women and the Union army’s reaction

During the American Civil War, more than four hundred women were arrested and imprisoned by the Union Army in the St. Louis area. The majority of these women were fully aware of the political nature of their actions and had made conscious decisions to assist Confederate soldiers in armed rebellion against the U.S. government. Their crimes included offering aid to Confederate soldiers, smuggling, spying, sabotaging, and, rarely, serving in the Confederate army. Historian Thomas F. Curran’s extensive research highlights for the first time the female Confederate prisoners in the St. Louis area, and his thoughtful analysis shows how their activities affected Federal military policy.

Early in the war, Union officials felt reluctant to arrest women and waited to do so until their conduct could no longer be tolerated. The war progressed, the women’s disloyal activities escalated, and Federal response grew stronger. Some Confederate partisan women were banished to the South, while others were held at Alton Military Prison and other sites. The guerilla war in Missouri resulted in more arrests of women, and the task of incarcerating them became more complicated.

The women’s offenses were seen as treasonous by the Federal government. By determining that women—who were excluded from the politics of the male public sphere—were capable of treason, Federal authorities implicitly acknowledged that women acted in ways that had serious political meaning. Nearly six decades before U.S. women had the right to vote, Federal officials who dealt with Confederate partisan women routinely referred to them as citizens. Federal officials created a policy that conferred on female citizens the same obligations male citizens had during time of war and rebellion, and they prosecuted disloyal women in the same way they did disloyal men.

The women arrested in the St. Louis area are only a fraction of the total number of female southern partisans who found ways to advance the Confederate military cause. More significant than their numbers, however, is what the fragmentary records of these women reveal about the activities that led to their arrests, the reactions women partisans evoked from the Federal authorities who confronted them, the impact that women’s partisan activities had on Federal military policy and military prisons, and how these women’s experiences were subsumed to comport with a Lost Cause myth—the need for valorous men to safeguard the homes of defenseless women.

[more]

Women Musicians of Uzbekistan

From Courtyard to Conservatory

Tanya Merchant

University of Illinois Press, 2015

Fascinated by women's distinct influence on Uzbekistan's music, Tanya Merchant ventures into Tashkent's post-Soviet music scene to place women musicians within the nation's evolving artistic and political arenas.

Drawing on fieldwork and music study carried out between 2001 and 2014, Merchant challenges the Western idea of Central Asian women as sequestered and oppressed. Instead, she notes, Uzbekistan's women stand at the forefront of four prominent genres: maqom, folk music, Western art music, and popular music. Merchant's recounting of the women's experiences, stories, and memories underscores the complex role that these musicians and vocalists play in educational institutions and concert halls, street kiosks and the culturally essential sphere of wedding music. Throughout the book, Merchant ties nationalism and femininity to performances and reveals how the music of these women is linked to a burgeoning national identity.

Important and revelatory, Women Musicians of Uzbekistan looks into music's part in constructing gendered national identity and the complicated role of femininity in a former Soviet republic's national project.

[more]

Women Of Japan & Korea

Continuity and Change

edited by Joyce Gelb and Marian Lief Palley

Temple University Press, 1994

This collection presents new research on the changing roles of women in Japan and Korea. At a time when women in these two countries are becoming more politically and socially prominent, these essays provide insight into the clashes that have arisen between tradition and change. The contributors compare similarities and differences in the two cultures, considering family life, education, health care, work, reproductive and legal rights, and political participation, including the rise of women's movements in Asia and the battle against sexism and gender stereotyping. Essays written by Japanese and Korean women, leading social scientists and practitioners, illuminate the current political, economic, and social status of women in Japan and Korea.

[more]

Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America

Carolyn Skinner

Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

Women physicians in nineteenth-century America faced a unique challenge in gaining acceptance to the medical field as it began its transformation into a professional institution. The profession had begun to increasingly insist on masculine traits as signs of competency. Not only were these traits inaccessible to women according to nineteenth-century gender ideology, but showing competence as a medical professional was not enough. Whether women could or should be physicians hinged mostly on maintaining their femininity while displaying the newly established standard traits of successful practitioners of medicine.

Women Physicians and Professional Ethos provides a unique example of how women influenced both popular and medical discourse. This volume is especially notable because it considers the work of African American and American Indian women professionals. Drawing on a range of books, articles, and speeches, Carolyn Skinner analyzes the rhetorical practices of nineteenth-century American women physicians. She redefines ethos in a way that reflects the persuasive efforts of women who claimed the authority and expertise of the physician with great difficulty.

Descriptions of ethos have traditionally been based on masculine communication and behavior, leaving women’s rhetorical situations largely unaccounted for. Skinner’s feminist model considers the constraints imposed by material resources and social position, the reciprocity between speaker and audience, the effect of one rhetor’s choices on the options available to others, the connections between ethos and genre, the potential for ethos to be developed and used collectively by similarly situated people, and the role ethos plays in promoting social change. Extending recent theorizations of ethos as a spatial, ecological, and potentially communal concept, Skinneridentifies nineteenth-century women physicians’ rhetorical strategies and outlines a feminist model of ethos that gives readers a more nuanced understanding of how this mode of persuasion operates for all speakers and writers.

[more]

Women Politics And Empowerment

Ann Bookman

Temple University Press, 1987

"Women and the Politics of Empowerment is filled with pictures of women whose lives the masculinist ideology of our disciplines has said are not worthy of our interest. Bookman, Morgen, and their colleagues awaken all kinds of ideas about where to go from here." --Women & Politics According to popular conception, working-class women in the United States are part of the "silent majority." But during the 1970s and early 1980s these women have been far from silent. Speaking out both individually and collectively, they have staked new political ground for themselves and their families. Drawing on case studies of community and workplace organizing, these original essays redefine our notions of "the political" and address a wide range of topics, including the creation and reform of unions, domestic service, street vending, working-class education, health care, and social services. The contributors have focused on working-class women from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds employed in a wide variety of jobs. Women and the Politics of Empowerment documents the story of women learning about the sources of their powerlessness and mobilizing to increase their power. "Drawing together an excellent compilation of case studies of community and workplace organizing, Bookman and Morgen redefine the political arena and process. They focus on the statuses of working-class and low-income women from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, thereby giving attention to women who have been largely ignored as actors in the political arenaâ€¦. These rich and varied case materials are useful for the scholar-researcher, the activist, and for the teacher in women's studies, social work, public policy, education, and public health." --Contemporary Sociology "Don't let the titleâ€¦scare youâ€¦. The book is devoted to bridging the gap between theory and practice, between feminism and working-class women. And it succeeds, through fourteen widely disparate, yet complementary essays about working-class women, Black, Latina and white, struggling on the job and in their communities for social change." --New Directions for Women

[more]

Women Resisting AIDS

Feminist Strategies of Empowerment

edited by Beth E. Schneider and Nancy E. Stoller

Temple University Press, 1995

This collection of original essays discusses the increasingly rapid spread of AIDS among women, considering the varying experiences and responses of women of color, lesbians, and economically impoverished women. The essays range widely from policy assessments to case studies, focusing on women as sufferers, caretakers, policy activists, community organizers, and educators.

[more]

Women Shaping Islam

Reading the Qu'ran in Indonesia

Pieternella van Doorn-Harder

University of Illinois Press, 2006

In the United States, precious little is known about the active role Muslim women have played for nearly a century in the religious culture of Indonesia, the largest majority-Muslim country in the world. While much of the Muslim world excludes women from the domain of religious authority, the country's two leading Muslim organizations--Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU)--have created enormous networks led by women who interpret sacred texts and exercise powerful religious influence.
In Women Shaping Islam, Pieternella van Doorn-Harder explores the work of these contemporary women leaders, examining their attitudes toward the rise of radical Islamists; the actions of the authoritarian Soeharto regime; women's education and employment; birth control and family planning; and sexual morality. Ultimately, van Doorn-Harder reveals the many ways in which Muslim women leaders understand and utilize Islam as a significant force for societal change; one that ultimately improves the economic, social, and psychological condition of women in Indonesian society.

[more]

Women Shaping the South

Creating and Confronting Change

Edited by Angela Boswell & Judith N. McArthur

University of Missouri Press, 2006

Events in southern history have often been recounted from the top down, relying on political and economic models to explain historical changes. Thus, the key players have usually been men who dominated politics, shaped economic development, and led armies. However, history is also made from the bottom up by those who confront change and shape it through their actions. In this collection of essays, the contributors reexamine major transformative events of southern history from the late eighteenth century through the civil rights era.

Shifting the focus to the local level, the authors demonstrate how women participated in creating change, even as they confronted conditions over which they had little power. In addition to exploring southern women’s lives, this collection shows how women shaped southern history. Using new and extensive primary research, each of these authors presents a new perspective on the important roles that women of different races and classes have played in transforming the South at some of its most crucial turning points, including post-Revolution, Civil War, Jim Crow era, World War I, and the civil rights movement.

Expanded from papers presented at the Sixth Southern Conference on Women’s History in Athens, Georgia, these essays reflect the depth and breadth of current vibrant research in southern women’s history and contribute exciting and important new scholarship to the field. Just as significant, the volume highlights the trends in southern women’s historical scholarship and points toward new directions for future scholars.

[more]

Women Singers in Global Contexts

Music, Biography, Identity

Edited by Ruth Hellier: Afterword by Ellen Koskoff

University of Illinois Press, 2016

Exploring and celebrating individual lives in diverse situations, Women Singers in Global Contexts is a new departure in the study of women's worldwide music-making. Ten unique women constitute the heart of this volume: each one has engaged her singing voice as a central element in her life, experiencing various opportunities, tensions, and choices through her vocality. These biographical and poetic narratives demonstrate how the act of vocalizing embodies dynamics of representation, power, agency, activism, and risk-taking.

Engaging with performance practice, politics, and constructions of gender through vocality and vocal aesthetics, this collection offers valuable insights into the experiences of specific women singers in a range of sociocultural contexts. Contributors trace themes and threads that include childhood, families, motherhood, migration, fame, training, transmission, technology, and the interface of private lives and public identities.

[more]

Women Strike for Peace

Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s

Amy Swerdlow

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Women Strike for Peace is the only historical account of this ground-breaking women's movement. Amy Swerdlow, a founding member of WSP, restores to the historical record a significant chapter on American politics and women's studies. Weaving together narrative and analysis, she traces WSP's triumphs, problems, and legacy for the women's movement and American society.

Women Strike for Peace began on November 1, 1961, when thousands of white, middle-class women walked out of their kitchens and off their jobs in a one-day protest against Soviet and American nuclear policies. The protest led to a national organization of women who fought against nuclear arms and U.S. intervention in Vietnam. While maintaining traditional maternal and feminine roles, members of WSP effectively challenged national policies—defeating a proposal for a NATO nuclear fleet, withstanding an investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and sending one of its leaders to Congress as a peace candidate.

As a study of a dissident group grounded in prescribed female culture, and the struggle of its members to avoid being trapped within that culture, this book adds a crucial new dimension to women's studies. In addition, this account of WSP's success as a grass roots, nonhierarchical movement will be of great interest to historians, political scientists, and anyone interested in peace studies or conflict resolution.

"Swerdlow has re-created a unique piece of American political history, a chapter of the international peace movement, and an origin of the modern feminist movement. No historian, activist, or self-respecting woman should be without Women Strike for Peace. It shows not only how one group of women created change, but also how they inevitably changed themselves."—Gloria Steinem

[more]

Women Take Their Place in State Legislatures

The Creation of Women's Caucuses

Anna Mitchell Mahoney

Temple University Press, 2019

How do women strategically make their mark on state legislatures? Anna Mitchell Mahoney’s book traces the development of women’s state legislative caucuses and the influence both gender and party have on women’s ability to organize collectively. She provides a comprehensive analysis of how and why women organize around their gender identity in state legislatures—or why they do not.

Women Take Their Place in State Legislatures includes a quantitative analysis of institutional-level variables and caucus existence in all 50 states. Case studies of caucus attempts in New Jersey, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Iowa between 2006 and 2010 examine attempts at creating women’s caucuses that succeeded or failed, and why. Mahoney’s interviews with 180 state legislators and their staff explore the motivations of caucus creators and participants. Ultimately, she finds that women’s organizing is contextual; it demonstrates the dynamic nature of gender.

Mahoney also provides insights into broad questions regarding gendered institutions, collective action, and political party governance. Women Take Their Place in State Legislatures fills a lacuna in the evaluation of women in government.

[more]

Women Under Suspicion

Fraternization, Espionage, and Punishment in the Soviet Union During World War II

Regina Kazyulina

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

Officially, women in the Soviet Union enjoyed a degree of equality unknown elsewhere in Allied countries at the time. However, long-standing norms of gendered behavior and stereotypes that cast women as morally weak, politically fallible, and sexually tempting meant that women in the army or living behind enemy lines were viewed with skepticism, seen as weak points easily exploited by the enemy. Concerned about sabotage, espionage, and ideological corruption, authorities categorized women who fraternized with the enemy—or who were suspected of doing so—as “socially dangerous,” a uniquely Soviet legal designation that exposed the accused to prosecution, imprisonment, and exile. Even without official sanction, women rumored to be involved with German occupiers were reviled, and treated accordingly, by their neighbors. By reading official reports against the grain and incorporating rare personal documents, Kazyulina provides a multifaceted study of the realities for non-Jewish Soviet women—in the army or resistance, or at home in occupied territories—during and after Nazi occupation.

[more]

Women Who Make a Fuss

The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf

Isabelle Stengers

University of Minnesota Press, 2014

Virginia Woolf, to whom university admittance had been forbidden, watched the universities open their doors. Though she was happy that her sisters could study in university libraries, she cautioned women against joining the procession of educated men and being co-opted into protecting a “civilization” with values alien to women. Now, as Woolf’s disloyal (unfaithful) daughters, who have professional positions in Belgian universities, Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret, along with a collective of women scholars in Belgium and France, question their academic careers and reexamine the place of women and their role in thinking, both inside and outside the university. They urge women to heed Woolf’s cry—Think We Must—and to always make a fuss about injustice, cruelty, and arrogance.

[more]

Women Working Longer

Increased Employment at Older Ages

Edited by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Today, more American women than ever before stay in the workforce into their sixties and seventies. This trend emerged in the 1980s, and has persisted during the past three decades, despite substantial changes in macroeconomic conditions. Why is this so? Today’s older American women work full-time jobs at greater rates than women in other developed countries.
In Women Working Longer, editors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz assemble new research that presents fresh insights on the phenomenon of working longer. Their findings suggest that education and work experience earlier in life are connected to women’s later-in-life work. Other contributors to the volume investigate additional factors that may play a role in late-life labor supply, such as marital disruption, household finances, and access to retirement benefits. A pioneering study of recent trends in older women’s labor force participation, this collection offers insights valuable to a wide array of social scientists, employers, and policy makers.

[more]

Women against Abortion

Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century

Karissa Haugeberg

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Women from remarkably diverse religious, social, and political backgrounds made up the rank-and-file of anti-abortion activism. Empowered by--yet in many cases scared of--the changes wrought by feminism, they founded grassroots groups, developed now-familiar strategies and tactics, and gave voice to the movement's moral and political dimensions. Drawing on oral histories and interviews with prominent figures, Karissa Haugeberg examines American women 's fight against abortion. Beginning in the 1960s, she looks at Marjory Mecklenburg's attempt to shift the attention of anti-abortion leaders from the rights of fetuses to the needs of pregnant women. Moving forward she traces the grassroots work of Catholic women, including Juli Loesch and Joan Andrews, and their encounters with the influx of evangelicals into the movement. She also looks at the activism of evangelical Protestant Shelley Shannon, a prominent pro-life extremist of the 1990s. Throughout, Haugeberg explores important questions such as the ways people fused religious conviction with partisan politics, activists' rationalizations for lethal violence, and how women claimed space within an unshakably patriarchal movement.

[more]

Women among Women

Anthropological Perspectives on Female Age Hierarchies

Edited by Jeanette Dickerson-Putman and Judith K. Brown: Foreword by Nancy Foner

University of Illinois Press, 1994

Are the prerogatives of age universal? This first-ever anthropological exploration of relationships between older and younger women suggests that this may be the case. Cross-cultural in nature, the volume looks at relationships between women of different age groups in a village in Taiwan, a town in central Sudan, a rural setting in western Kenya, an Andean peasant community, a horticultural village in Melanesia, and an Aboriginal community in Australia. Adding an interspecies perspective is a study of two age groups of Japanese Macaques. Included is an ethnographic bibliography that lists books with a wealth of information on women in sixty societies. The volume will appeal not only to anthropologists but also to readers interested in women's issues, gender studies, life course studies, gerontology, and intergenerational relations.

[more]

Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920

Mari Jo Buhle

University of Illinois Press, 1981

Socialist women faced the often thorny dilemma of fitting their concern with women's rights into their commitment to socialism. Mari Jo Buhle examines women's efforts to agitate for suffrage, sexual and economic emancipation, and other issues and the political and intellectual conflicts that arose in response. In particular, she analyzes the clash between a nativist socialism influence by ideas of individual rights and the class-based socialism championed by German American immigrants. As she shows, the two sides diverged, often greatly, in their approaches and their definitions of women's emancipation. Their differing tactics and goals undermined unity and in time cost women their independence within the larger movement.

[more]

Women and Change at the U.S.–Mexico Border

Mobility, Labor, and Activism

Edited by Doreen J. Mattingly and Ellen R. Hansen

University of Arizona Press, 2006

There’s no denying that the U.S.–Mexico border region has changed in the past twenty years. With the emergence of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the curtailment of welfare programs, and more aggressive efforts by the United States to seal the border against undocumented migrants, the prospect of seeking a livelihood—particularly for women—has become more tenuous in the twenty-first century. In the face of the ironic juxtaposition of free trade and limited mobility, this book takes a new look at women on both sides of the border to portray them as active participants in the changing structures of life, often engaging in political struggles. The contributions—including several chapters by Mexican as well as U.S. scholars—examine environmental and socioeconomic conditions on the border as they shape and are shaped by both daily life at the local level and the global economy. The contributors focus on issues related to migration, both short- and long-term; empowerment, especially reflecting shifts in women’s consciousness in the workplace; and political and social activism in border communities. The chapters consider a broad range of topics, such as the changing gender composition of the maquiladora work force over the past decade and border women’s non-governmental organizations and political activism.In most of the studies, both sides of the border are considered to provide insights into differences created by an international boundary and similarities produced by cross-border interactions. Together, these chapters show the border region to be a dynamic social, economic, cultural, and political context in which women face both obstacles and opportunities for change—and make clear the vital role that women play in shaping the border region and their own lives. This collection builds on Susan Tiano and Vicki Ruiz’s groundbreaking volume Women on the U.S.–Mexico Border by continuing to show the human face of changes wrought by manufacturing and militarization. By illustrating the current state of social science research on gender and women’s lives in the region, it offers fresh perspectives on the material reality of women’s daily lives in this culturally and historically rich region.

[more]

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.

[more]

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.”

[more]

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?

[more]

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.

[more]

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.

[more]

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

[more]

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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