Every year, millions of healthy women undergo a variety of screening tests without understanding why or the meaning of the outcome. If you are among those women, overwhelmed by information and baffled by results, this is the book you've been waiting for. In straightforward, personable prose, A Woman's Concise Guide to Common Medical Tests surveys a wide variety of standard tests commonly suggested by doctors.

Using the recommendations of the U.S. Preventative Health Services Task Force as a starting point, physicians Michele C. Moore and Caroline M. de Costa describe and explain screening tests for STDs and other communicable diseases, diabetes, thyroid disease, bone loss, various genetic tests, pregnancy, and cancer (including breast, colon, and skin). A section on common blood tests demystifies the numerical results that can be virtually impossible to interpret for women outside the medical profession. The authors detail what is considered "normal" as well as what's not-to help women make sense of their results.

As practicing physicians, both authors have fielded patients' questions about standard screening tests and understand what women should know but often feel afraid to ask about. For each test, there is an explanation of why it may be ordered, how it is done, what sort of preparation may be involved, and what risks may be incurred.

As the health-care industry continues to evolve, the amount of medical information available to women about their health can be overwhelming and confusing. Without being encyclopedic or intimidating, A Woman's Concise Guide to Common Medical Tests offers all the facts you need about screening tests, all in one place.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, “hysteria” was a medical or psychiatric diagnosis applied primarily to women. In fact, the term itself comes from the Greek, meaning “wandering womb.” We have since learned, however, that this diagnosis evolved from certain assumptions about women’s social roles and mental characteristics, and is no longer in use.

The modern equivalent of hysteria, however, may be borderline personality disorder, defined as “a pervasive pattern of instability of self-image, interpersonal relationships, and mood, beginning in early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts.” This diagnosis is applied to women so much more often than to men that feminists have begun to raise important questions about the social, cultural, and even the medical assumptions underlying this “illness.” Women are said to be “unstable” when they may be trying to reconcile often contradictory and conflicting social expectations.

In Women and Borderline Personality Disorder, Janet Wirth-Cauchon presents a feminist cultural analysis of the notions of “unstable” selfhood found in case narratives of women diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. This exploration of contemporary post-Freudian psychoanalytic notions of the self as they apply to women’s identity conflicts is an important contribution to the literature on social constructions of mental illness in women and feminist critiques of psychiatry in general.

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?

This book "gathers together for the first time influential essays from the fields of psychoanalysis, anthropology, linguistics, and literary criticism and theory that have sparked the debate about language and gender since the turn of century."

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.

For generations, aspiring women scientists have looked to Marie Curie, the famed Nobel Prize–winning chemist, for inspiration. But what lesson, exactly, are they to draw from her example? Marie Curie was exceptional, but she was ordinary as well. She faced all the trials and tribulations shared by women of her time; furthermore, she had to contend with the barriers against women’s wider participation in educational institutions, in scientific practice, and professional attainments and rewards. Indeed, her struggles and failures tell us more about the fate of women in the sciences, historically, than her achievements ever will.

From Maria Winkelman’s discovery of the comet of 1702 to the Nobel Prize–winning work of twentieth-century scientist Barbara McClintock, women have played a central role in modern science. Their successes have not come easily, nor have they been consistently recognized. This important book examines the challenges and barriers women scientists have faced and chronicles their achievements as they struggled to attain recognition for their work in the male-dominated world of modern science. As the only comprehensive textbook to examine women’s participation in, and portrayal by, Western science from the scientific revolution to the present, Women and Science is an essential teaching and reference tool for students in both the history of science and women’s studies.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

This anthology contains nine stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) that dramatize the dilemmas and strategies of the first generation of American women writers to see themselves as artists. As the great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper and the intimate friend of Henry James, Woolson was acutely conscious of her situation as a woman writer. Her stories offer answers to her own urgent questions: "Why do literary women break down so?" At the same time, they demonstrate that women's struggles with patriarchal culture and with their own womanhood could be a source of distunctive female art.
Woolson's early stories are witty and incisive critiques of those conventions of literary Romanticism that encode women's marginality. Set in the wilderness that surrounded the Great Lakes, these stories revise male literary texts to clear a space where women's voices can be heard.
In a group of stories set in the post-Civil War south, women artists are shown as exiles both away from their homes and from themselves. One superb tale, "Felipa," pairs a repressed woman artist with a wild child who rejects both patriarchal religion and approved heterosexual behavior. Woolson here explores the possibility of a collaboration between female wildness and female form of control.
Stories written during Woolson's years in Europe confront woman artists with successful male writers and critics who resemble Henry James. These carefully crafted stories reflect James's mixed impact on women artists: as a model literary realist and as a subtle denigrator of women's talent.
Joan Weimar's introduction uses unpublished letters to reconstruct and interpret Wool's life and her probable suicide. It places Woolson in the male and female literary traditions of her time and offers extended analysis of the stories.

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.

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.

What attracts women to far-right movements that appear to denigrate their rights?

This question has vexed feminist scholars for decades and has led to many lively debates in the academy. In this context, during the 1980s, the study of women, gender, and fascism in twentieth-century Europe took off, pioneered by historians such as Claudia Koonz and Victoria de Grazia. This volume makes an exciting contribution to the evolving body of work based upon these earlier studies, bringing emerging scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe alongside that of more established Western European historiography on the topic.

Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 191945 features fourteen essays covering Serbia, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, and Poland in addition to Germany, Italy, France, Spain, and Britain, and a conclusion that pulls together a European-wide perspective. As a whole, the volume provides a compelling comparative examination of this important topic through current research, literature reviews, and dialogue with existing debates. The essays cast new light on questions such as womens responsibility for the collapse of democracy in interwar Europe, the interaction between the womens movement and the extreme right, and the relationships between conceptions of national identity and gender.

The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights expresses the credo that all human beings are created free and equal. But not until 1995 did the United Nations declare that women’s rights to be human rights, and bring gender issues into the global arena for the first time. The subordination of indigenous and minority women, ethnic cleansing, and the struggle for reproductive rights are some of the most pressing issues facing women worldwide.

Women, Gender, and Human Rights is the first collection of essays that encompass a global perspective on women and a wide range of issues, including political and domestic violence, education, literacy, and reproductive rights. Most of the articles were written expressly for this volume by internationally known experts in the fields of government, bioethics, medicine, public affairs, literature, history, anthropology, law, and psychology.

This work investigates women's economic, social, political and cultural history, encompassing all ethnic and racial groups and religions. It provides a general introduction to the history of women in industrializing America. Both a history of women and a history of the United States, its chronology is shaped by economic stages and political events.

Religious orders for women have existed for fifteen centuries, but their future in this century is bleak. In 1966, 180,000 women belonged to Catholic orders; by 1986 that number had decreased to 126,000. Helen Rose Ebaugh tells the story of the decline of these orders, set against the back drop of rapid social change and religious reform.
To illustrate the problem, Ebaugh takes us into a declining order, here named the Sisters of Service.  In 1990, only one candidate sought admission to the order, and the median age of members reached 70. While these demographic changes were occurring, the sisters adapted themselves to the reforms of Vatican II. The concept of a cloistered life faded. Nuns sought college degrees, gave up their habits, moved into apartments, and began to identify with the outside world. Vatican II further encouraged the nuns to democratize and decentralize.  Many nuns accepted jobs that paid poorly but were consistent with their goal of social service. They identified with the feminist movement and in turn influenced it.  
Ebaugh shows how declining orders have not followed the sociological model of organizational decline, one typically marked by centralized authority, a fear of risk taking, lack of direction, internal conflicts over turf, and low morale. Rather, they have established democratic structures, reduced internal positions in favor of committing resources to empowering the poor, abandoned security in favor of diversity in jobs and missions, minimized conflicts over scarce resources, and exhibited a sense of freedom rather than poor morale.   
Although Ebaugh is convinced that Catholic orders in the U.S. will not continue for long, non-canonical communities of women and associate programs are growing. Dedicated women can perpetuate the mission and spirit of the order without becoming vowed members.

This engaging ethnography is set in the remote district of Toledo in Belize, Central America, where three women weave personal stories about the events in their lives. Each describes her experiences of motherhood, marriage, family illness, emigration, separation, work, or domestic violence that led her to recognize gender inequality and then to do something about it. All three challenge the culture of gender at home and in the larger community.

Zola, an East Indian woman without primary school education, invents her own escape from a life of subordination by securing land, then marries the man she's lived with since the age of fourteen--but on her terms. Once she needed permission to buy a dress, now she advocates against domestic violence. Evelyn, a thirty-nine-year old Creole woman, has raised eight children virtually alone, yet she remains married "out of habit." A keen entrepreneur, she has run a restaurant, a store, and a sewing business, and she now owns a mini-mart attached to her home. Rose, a Garifuna woman, is a mother of two whose husband left when she would not accept his extra-marital affairs. While she ekes out a survival in the informal economy by making tamales, she gets spiritual comfort from her religious beliefs, love of music, and two children.

The voices of these ordinary Belizean women fill the pages of this book. Irma McClaurin reveals the historical circumstances, cultural beliefs, and institutional structures that have rendered women in Belize politically and socially disenfranchised and economically dependent upon men. She shows how some ordinary women, through their participation in women's grassroots groups, have found the courage to change their lives. Drawing upon her own experiences as a black woman in the United States, and relying upon cross-cultural data about the Caribbean and Latin America, she explains the specific way gender is constructed in Belize.

Honorable Mention for the Robert K. Martin Prize 2019

Media portrayals of Orthodox Jewish women frequently depict powerless, silent individuals who are at best naive to live an Orthodox lifestyle, and who are at worst, coerced into it. Karen E. H. Skinazi delves beyond this stereotype in Women of Valor to identify a powerful tradition of feminist literary portrayals of Orthodox women, often created by Orthodox women themselves. She examines Orthodox women as they appear in memoirs, comics, novels, and movies, and speaks with the authors, filmmakers, and musicians who create these representations. Throughout the work, Skinazi threads lines from the poem “Eshes Chayil,” the Biblical description of an Orthodox “Woman of Valor.” This proverb unites Orthodoxy and feminism in a complex relationship, where Orthodox women continuously question, challenge, and negotiate Orthodox and feminist values. Ultimately, these women create paths that unite their work, passions, and families under the framework of an “Eshes Chayil,” a woman who situates religious conviction within her own power.

 2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Methamphetamine (ice, speed, crystal, shard) has been called epidemic in the United States. Yet few communities were ready for increased use of methamphetamine by suburban women. Women on Ice is the first book to study exclusively the lives of women who use the drug and its effects on their families.

In-depth interviews with women in the suburban counties of one of the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. chronicle the details of their initiation into methamphetamine, the turning points into problematic drug use, and for a few, their escape from lives veering out of control. Their life course and drug careers are analyzed in relation to the intersecting influences of social roles, relationships, social/political structures, and political trends. Examining the effects of punitive drug policy, inadequate social services, and looming public health risks, including HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C, the book gives voice to women silenced by shame.

Boeri introduces new and developing concepts in the field of addiction studies and proposes policy changes to more broadly implement initiatives that address the problems these women face. She asserts that if we are concerned that the war on drugs is a war on drug users, this book will alert us that it is also a war on suburban families.

Despite what would seem some apparent likenesses, single men and single women are perceived in very different ways. Bachelors are rarely considered "lonely" or aberrant. They are not pitied. Rather, they are seen as having chosen to be "footloose and fancy free" to have sports cars, boats, and enjoy a series of unrestrictive relationships. Single women, however, do not enjoy such an esteemed reputation. Instead they have been viewed as abnormal, neurotic, or simply undesirable-attitudes that result in part from the long-standing belief that single women would not have chosen her life. Even the single career-woman is seldom viewed as enjoying the success she has achieved. No one believes she is truly fulfilled.

Modern American culture has raised generations of women who believed that their true and most important role in society was to get married and have children. Anything short of this role was considered abnormal, unfulfilling, and suspect. This female stereotype has been exploited and perpetuated by some key films in the late 40's and early 50's. But more recently we have seen a shift in the cultural view of the spinster. The erosion of the traditional nuclear family, as well as a larger range of acceptable life choices, has caused our perceptions of unmarried women to change. The film industry has reflected this shift with updated stereotypes that depict this cultural trend. The shift in the way we perceive spinsters is the subject of current academic research which shows that a person's perception of particular societal roles influences the amount of stress or depression they experience when in that specific role. Further, although the way our culture perceives spinsters and the way the film industry portrays them may be evolving, we still are still left with a negative stereotype.

Themes of choice and power have informed the lives of single women in all times and places. When considered at all in a scholarly context, single women have often been portrayed as victims, unhappily subjected to forces beyond their control. This collection of essays about "women on their own" attempts to correct that bias, by presenting a more complex view of single women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States and Europe.

Topics covered in this book include the complex and ambiguous roles that society assigns to widows, and the greater social and financial independence that widows have often enjoyed; widow culture after major wars; the plight of homeless, middle-class single women during the Great Depression; and comparative sociological studies of contemporary single women in the United States, Britain, Ireland, and Cuba.

Composed of papers presented to the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis project on single women, this collection incorporates the work of specialists in anthropology, art history, history, and sociology. It is deeply connected with the emerging field of singleness studies (to which the RCHA has contributed an Internet-based bibliography of more than 800 items). All of the essays are new and have not been previously published.

What does it mean to look like a lesbian? Though it remains impossible to conjure a definitive image that captures the breadth of this highly nuanced term, today at least we are able to consider an array of visual representations that have been put into circulation by lesbians themselves over the last six or seven decades. In the early twentieth century, though, no notion of lesbianism as a coherent social or cultural identity yet existed.

In Women Together/Women Apart, Tirza True Latimer explores the revolutionary period between World War I and World War II when lesbian artists working in Paris began to shape the first visual models that gave lesbians a collective sense of identity and allowed them to recognize each other. Flocking to Paris from around the world, artists and performers such as Romaine Brooks, Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, and Suzy Solidor used portraiture to theorize and visualize a "new breed" of feminine subject. The book focuses on problems of feminine and lesbian self-representation at a time and place where the rights of women to political, professional, economic, domestic, and sexual autonomy had yet to be acknowledged by the law. Under such circumstances, same-sex solidarity and relative independence from men held important political implications.

Combining gender theory with visual, cultural, and historical analysis, Latimer draws a vivid picture of the impact of sexual politics on the cultural life of Paris during this key period. The book also illuminates the far-reaching consequences of lesbian portraiture on contemporary constructions of lesbian identity.

Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean brings together a group of interdisciplinary scholars who analyze and document the diversity, vibrancy, and effectiveness of women's experiences and organizing in Latin America and the Caribbean during the past four decades. Most of the expressions of collective agency are analyzed in this book within the context of the neoliberal model of globalization that has seriously affected most Latin American and Caribbean women's lives in multiple ways. Contributors explore the emergence of the area's feminist movement, dictatorships of the 1970s, the Central American uprisings, the urban, grassroots organizing for better living conditions, and finally, the turn toward public policy and formal political involvement and the alternative globalization movement. Geared toward bridging cultural realities, this volume represents women's transformations, challenges, and hopes, while considering the analytical tools needed to dissect the realities, understand the alternatives, and promote gender democracy.

Globalization is not a new phenomenon; women throughout the world have been dealing with the circumstances and consequences of an international economy long before the advent of the transnational corporate conglomerate. However, in a mercenary example of the tried clich "the more things change, the more they stay the same," women-particularly those of color-continue to be relegated to the lowest rung of the occupational ladder, where their indispensable contributions to global market capitalism are downplayed or invalidated completely through the perpetuation of stereotypes and the denial of access to better job opportunities and resources.

How women of color around the world adapt and challenge the economic, political, and social effects of globalization is the subject of this broad-minded and incisive anthology. From Mexico, Jamaica, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka, to immigrant and non-immigrant communities in the United States-the women documented in these essays are agricultural and factory workers, artists and entrepreneurs, mothers and activists. Their stories bear stark witness to how globalization continues to develop new sites and forms of exploitation, while its apparent victims continue to be women, men, and children of color.

Steven Buecheler has written a comparative sociological analysis of the woman suffrage movement (1840s-1920) and the contemporary women’s movement (1960s to the present). His identification of similarities and differences between these movements reveals persistent feminist issues over time as well as the distinctive concerns of each movement in the sociohistorical context. Buecheler compares these two movements in terms of their origins, organizations, ideologies, class and racial diversities, countermovement’s, and outcomes. He uses resource mobilization theory.

                Buecheler explains why women’s movements arise, the forms of organization they adopt, the diversity of ideologies they espouse, and the class and racial composition of women’s movements. He also helps us to understand the roots of countermovements, as well as the mixture of successes and failures that has characterized both past and present women’s movements. While recognizing both the setbacks and the victories of the contemporary movement, Buecheler identifies grounds for relative optimism about the lasting consequences of this ongoing mobilization.

Buechler also explores the complex relationship between social change and social movements. Rapid change both enables and constricts the potential for collective action, which in turn reshapes social structure, By studying long-lived moments in a comparative framework, Buechler sheds light on the broader dialectical relation between agency and structure that is embodied in movement efforts at social change.

Established as an academic field in the 1970s, women’s studies is a relatively young but rapidly growing area of study. Not only has the number of scholars working in this subject expanded exponentially, but women’s studies has become institutionalized, offering graduate degrees and taking on departmental status in many colleges and universities. At the same time, this field—formed in the wake of the feminist movement—is finding itself in a precarious position in what is now often called a “post-feminist” society. This raises challenging issues for faculty, students, and administrators. How must the field adjust its goals and methods to continue to affect change in the future?

Bringing together essays by newcomers as well as veterans to the field, this essential volume addresses timely questions including:

• Without a unitary understanding of the subject, woman, what is the focus of women’s studies?
• How can women’s studies fulfill the promise of interdisciplinarity?
•  What is the continuing place of activism in women’s studies?
•  What are the best ways to think about, teach, and act upon the intersections of race, class, gender, disability, nation, and sexuality?

Offering innovative models for research and teaching and compelling new directions for action, Women’s Studies for the Future ensures the continued relevance and influence of this developing field.

Imagine a stage full of black cats emitting electrical sparks, a man catching bullets with his teeth, or an evangelist jumping on a transformer to shoot bolts of lightning through his fingertips. These and other wild schemes were part of the repertoire of showmen who traveled from city to city, making presentations that blended science with myth and magic.

In Wonder Shows, Fred Nadis offers a colorful history of these traveling magicians, inventors, popular science lecturers, and other presenters of “miracle science” who revealed science and technology to the public in awe-inspiring fashion. The book provides an innovative synthesis of the history of performance with a wider study of culture, science, and religion from the antebellum period to the present.

It features a lively cast of characters, including electrical “wizards” Nikola Tesla and Thomas Alva Edison, vaudeville performers such as Harry Houdini, mind readers, UFO cultists, and practitioners of New Age science. All of these performers developed strategies for invoking cultural authority to back their visions of science and progress. The pseudo-science in their wonder shows helped promote a romantic worldview that called into question the absolute authority of scientific materialism while reaffirming the importance of human spirituality. Nadis argues that the sensation that these entertainers provided became an antidote to the alienation and dehumanization that accompanied the rise of modern America.

Although most recent defenders of science are prone to reject wonder, considering it an ally of ignorance and superstition, Wonder Shows demonstrates that the public’s passion for magic and meaning is still very much alive. Today, sales continue to be made and allegiances won based on illusions that products are unique, singular, and at best, miraculous. Nadis establishes that contemporary showmen, corporate publicists, advertisers, and popular science lecturers are not that unlike the magicians and mesmerists of years ago.

 

William Marston was an unusual man—a psychologist, a soft-porn pulp novelist, more than a bit of a carny, and the (self-declared) inventor of the lie detector. He was also the creator of Wonder Woman, the comic that he used to express two of his greatest passions: feminism and women in bondage.

Comics expert Noah Berlatsky takes us on a wild ride through the Wonder Woman comics of the 1940s, vividly illustrating how Marston’s many quirks and contradictions, along with the odd disproportionate composition created by illustrator Harry Peter, produced a comic that was radically ahead of its time in terms of its bold presentation of female power and sexuality. Himself a committed polyamorist, Marston created a universe that was friendly to queer sexualities and lifestyles, from kink to lesbianism to cross-dressing. Written with a deep affection for the fantastically pulpy elements of the early Wonder Woman comics, from invisible jets to giant multi-lunged space kangaroos, the book also reveals how the comic addressed serious, even taboo issues like rape and incest.

Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics 1941-1948 reveals how illustrator and writer came together to create a unique, visionary work of art, filled with bizarre ambition, revolutionary fervor, and love, far different from the action hero symbol of the feminist movement many of us recall from television.

Here isa unique collection of documents that spans the history of New Jersey, from the arrival of Dutch traders in the 1600s to the present. The materials touch on a range of subjects such as slavery and abolitionism, the labor movement, race and ethnic relations, and economic and environmental issues. The documents include letters, journals, pamphlets, petitions, artwork, and songs created not only by those who exercised power, but also by men and women of more humble station. Their lively accounts range from descriptions of Native Americans in the seventeenth century to Bruce Springsteen’s lament about a declining factory town.

            New to this expanded edition is the text of former governor James McGreevey’s “I am a Gay American” speech, as well as entries about the Abbott v. Burke court ruling mandating that New Jersey equalize funding of urban and suburban schools districts, sprawl and its effects on water supply, and the state’s economic boom in the 1990s.

            A balanced survey of New Jersey’s history in the context of a changing nation, this book is ideal for general readers who want to explore the primary sources of the state’s past, and to U.S. history students at the high school and college levels.

Words That Make New Jersey History is a book-length collection of documents that spans the history of New Jersey, from the arrival of Dutch traders in the 1600s to the present. The materials touch on a range of subjects such as factories and farms, cities and suburbs, slavery and abolitionism, the temperance and woman suffrage campaigns, race and ethnic relations, the labor movement, and economic and environmental issues. The documents include letters, journals, pamphlets, petitions, artwork, and songs created not only by those who exercised power, but also by men and women of more humble station--immigrants, workers, slaves, foreign travelers, and civil servants. Their lively accounts range from descriptions of Native Americans in the seventeenth century to Bruce Springsteen's recent lament about a declining factory town.
   
New to this expanded edition is the text of James McGreevey's "I am a Gay American" speech, as well as entries about the Abbott v. Burke court ruling mandating that New Jersey equalize funding of urban and suburban schools districts, sprawl and its effects on water supply, and the state's economic boom in the 1990s.

A balanced survey of New Jersey's history presented in the context of a changing nation, this volume is well suited to general readers who want to explore the primary sources of the state's past, and to U.S. history students at the high school and college levels.

Can the welfare system  in the United States accord people dignity? That question is often left out of the current debates over welfare and workfare. In this provocative book, Nancy Rose argues that the United States has been successful in the past––notably during the New Deal and in the 1970s––at shaping programs that gave people “fair work.”           
However, as Rose documents, those innovative job creation programs were voluntary and were mainly directed at putting men back to work. Women on welfare, and especially women of color,  continue to be forced into a very different kind of program: mandatory, punitive, and demeaning. Such workfare programs are set up for failure. They rarely train women for jobs with futures, they ignore the needs of the women’s families, and they do not pay an honest wage. They perpetuate poverty rather than prevent it.           

Rose uses the history of U.S. job creation programs to show alternatives to mandatory workfare. Any effort to redesign welfare in America needs to pay close attention to the lessons drawn from this perceptive analysis of the history of women, welfare, and work. This is an indispensable book for students, scholars, policymakers, politicians, and activists––for everyone who knows the system is broken and wants to fix it.

 

William Penn was an instrumental and controversial figure in the early modern transatlantic world, known both as a leader in the movement for religious toleration in England and as a founder of two American colonies, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. As such, his career was marked by controversy and contention in both England and America. This volume looks at William Penn with fresh eyes, bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines to assess his multifaceted life and career. Contributors analyze the worlds that shaped Penn and the worlds that he shaped: Irish, English, American, Quaker, and imperial. The eighteen chapters in The Worlds of William Penn shed critical new light on Penn’s life and legacy, examining his early and often-overlooked time in Ireland; the literary, political, and theological legacies of his public career during the Restoration and after the 1688 Revolution; his role as proprietor of Pennsylvania; his religious leadership in the Quaker movement, and as a loyal lieutenant to George Fox, and his important role in the broader British imperial project. Coinciding with the 300th anniversary of Penn’s death the time is right for this examination of Penn’s importance both in his own time and to the ongoing campaign for political and religious liberty

You can find a Starbucks coffeehouse almost anywhere, from Paris, France to Paducah, Kentucky, from the crowded streets of Thailand to shopping malls in Qatar. With nearly 200 of them in New York City alone, this coffee retail giant with humble beginnings has become an actor and icon in the global economy. As we sip our cappuccinos, frappuccinos, and our double half-caf venti low-fat mochaccinos, many of us wonder if Starbucks is a haven of civilization or a cultural predator, a good or bad employer, a fair trader or a global menace. In this entertaining and provocative ramble through Starbucks's ethos and actions, Kim Fellner asks how a coffeehouse chain with a liberal reputation came to symbolize, for some, the ills of globalization.

Armed with an open mind and a sense of humor, Fellner takes readers on an expedition into the muscle and soul of the coffee company. She finds a corporation filled with contradictions: between employee-friendly processes and anti-union practices; between an internationalist vision and a longing for global dominance; between community individuality and cultural hegemony. On a daily basis Starbucks walks a fine line. It must be profitable enough to please Wall Street and principled enough to please social justice advocates. Although observers might argue that the company has done well at achieving a balance, Starbucks's leaders run the risk of satisfying neither constituency and must constantly justify themselves to both.

Through the voices of Central American coffee farmers, officers at corporate headquarters, independent café owners, unionists, baristas, traders, global justice activists, and consumers, Fellner explores the forces that affect Starbucks's worth and worthiness. Along the way, she subjects her own unabashedly progressive perspective to scrutiny and emerges with a compelling and unexpected look at Starbucks, the global economy, our economic convictions, and the values behind our morning cup of joe.

Featuring in-depth interviews with over fifty writers—including Mel Brooks, Norman Lear, Carl Reiner, and Frank Pierson—The Writers delivers a compelling, behind-the-scenes look at the role and rights of writers in Hollywood and New York over the past century. Granted unprecedented access to the archives of the Writers Guild Foundation, Miranda J. Banks also mines over 100 never-before-published oral histories with legends such as Nora Ephron and Ring Lardner Jr., whose insight and humor provide a window onto the enduring priorities, policies, and practices of the Writers Guild.

With an ear for the language of storytellers, Banks deftly analyzes watershed moments in the industry: the advent of sound, World War II, the blacklist, ascension of television, the American New Wave, the rise and fall of VHS and DVD, and the boom of streaming media. The Writers spans historical and contemporary moments, and draws upon American cultural history, film and television scholarship and the passionate politics of labor and management. Published on the sixtieth anniversary of the formation of the Writers Guild of America, this book tells the story of the triumphs and struggles of these vociferous and contentious hero-makers.

Winner of the John S. Tuckey 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award for Mark Twain Scholarship from The Center for Mark Twain Studies

American novelist E.L. Doctorow once observed that literature “endows places with meaning.” Yet, as this wide-ranging new book vividly illustrates, understanding the places that shaped American writers’ lives and their art can provide deep insight into what makes their literature truly meaningful.
 
Published on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Historic Preservation Act, Writing America is a unique, passionate, and eclectic series of meditations on literature and history, covering over 150 important National Register historic sites, all pivotal to the stories that make up America, from chapels to battlefields; from plantations to immigration stations; and from theaters to internment camps. The book considers not only the traditional sites for literary tourism, such as Mark Twain’s sumptuous Connecticut home and the peaceful woods surrounding Walden Pond, but also locations that highlight the diversity of American literature, from the New York tenements that spawned Abraham Cahan’s fiction to the Texas pump house that irrigated the fields in which the farm workers central to Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetry picked produce. Rather than just providing a cursory overview of these authors’ achievements, acclaimed literary scholar and cultural historian Shelley Fisher Fishkin offers a deep and personal reflection on how key sites bore witness to the struggles of American writers and inspired their dreams. She probes the global impact of American writers’ innovative art and also examines the distinctive contributions to American culture by American writers who wrote in languages other than English, including Yiddish, Chinese, and Spanish.   
 
Only a scholar with as wide-ranging interests as Shelley Fisher Fishkin would dare to bring together in one book writers as diverse as Gloria Anzaldúa, Nicholas Black Elk, David Bradley, Abraham Cahan, S. Alice Callahan, Raymond Chandler, Frank Chin, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Countee Cullen, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jessie Fauset, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Allen Ginsberg, Jovita González, Rolando Hinojosa, Langston Hughes,  Zora Neale Hurston, Lawson Fusao Inada,  James Weldon Johnson,  Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Irena Klepfisz, Nella Larsen, Emma Lazarus, Sinclair Lewis, Genny Lim, Claude McKay, Herman Melville, N. Scott Momaday, William Northup, John Okada, Miné Okubo, Simon Ortiz, Américo Paredes, John P. Parker, Ann Petry, Tomás Rivera, Wendy Rose, Morris Rosenfeld, John Steinbeck, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Yoshiko Uchida, Tino Villanueva, Nathanael West, Walt Whitman, Richard Wright, Hisaye Yamamoto, Anzia Yezierska, and Zitkala-Ša.
 
Leading readers on an enticing journey across the borders of physical places and imaginative terrains, the book includes over 60 images, and extended excerpts from a variety of literary works. Each chapter ends with resources for further exploration. Writing America reveals the alchemy though which American writers have transformed the world around them into art, changing their world and ours in the process.

Winner of the 2001 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Awards | Winner of the Theatre Library Association Award

Writing Himself Into History is an eagerly anticipated analysis of the career and artistry surrounding the legendary Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. With the exception of Spike Lee, Micheaux is the most famous—and prolific—African American film director. Between 1918 and 1948 he made more than 40 “race pictures,” movies made for and about African Americans. A man of immense creativity, he also wrote seven novels.

Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence concentrate here on the first decade of Micheaux’s career, when Micheaux produced and directed more than twenty silent features and built a reputation as a controversial and maverick entrepreneur. Placing his work firmly within his social and cultural milieu, they also examine Micheaeux’s family and life. The authors provide a close textual analysis of his surviving films (including The Symbol of the Unconquered, Within Our Gates, and Body and Soul), and highlight the rivalry between studios, dilemmas of assimilation versus separatism, gender issues, and class. In Search of Oscar Micheaux also analyzes Micheaux’s career as a novelist in relation to his work as a filmmaker.

This is a much-awaited book that is especially timely as interest in Micheaux’s work increases.

In the fall of 1959, Harper’s Magazine published a special supplement on the state of writing and the American literary scene. The supplement was greeted with a broadside of commendation and a fusillade of cavil, and has since become recognized as the most useful brief survey of the contemporary state of the American writing arts and of their fellow travelers, the spoken word, the typescript word, the filmed and televised word, and the publishing memorandum. 

In this newly reissued volume in the Rutgers University Press Classics Imprint, Writing in America proves to be as stimulating as it was in 1960. Here, writers including Robert Brustein, Stanley Kunitz, and C.P. Snow examine the state of writing in American novels, films, and television candidly and critically. The result is a collection of essays that showcase a first-rate and highly entertaining piece of reporting on the American literary scene that resonate in 2017.   

In the United States, perhaps no minority group is considered as "model" or successful as the Asian American community. Rather than living in ominous "ghettoes," Asian Americans are described as residing in positive-sounding "ethnic enclaves." Writing the Ghetto helps clarify the hidden or unspoken class inequalities faced by Asian Americans, while insightfully analyzing the effect such notions have had on their literary voices.



Yoonmee Chang examines the class structure of Chinatowns, Koreatowns, Little Tokyos, and Little Indias, arguing that ghettoization in these spaces is disguised. She maintains that Asian American literature both contributes to and challenges this masking through its marginalization by what she calls the "ethnographic imperative." Chang discusses texts from the late nineteenth century to the present, including those of Sui Sin Far, Winnifred Eaton, Monica Sone, Fae Myenne Ng, Chang-rae Lee, S. Mitra Kalita, and Nam Le. These texts are situated in the contexts of the Chinese Exclusion Era, Japanese American internment during World War II, the globalization of Chinatown in the late twentieth century, the Vietnam War, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the contemporary emergence of the "ethnoburb."

Writing Under the Raj is the first study to challenge the long-held critical assumption that the rape of colonizing women by colonized men was the first, or the only, rape script in British colonial literature.  Nancy Paxton asks why rape disappears in British literature about English domestic life in the 1790s and charts its reappearance in British literature about India written between 1830 and 1947. Paxton displays the hybrid qualities of familiar novels like Kipling’s Kim and Forster’s A Passage to India by situating them in a richly detailed cultural context that reveals the dynamic relationship between metropolitan British literature and novels written by men and women who lived in the colonial contact zone of British India throughout this period.

Drawing on current feminist and gender theory as well as a wide range of historical and cultural sources, Paxton identifies four different “scripts” about interracial and intraracial rape that appear in novels about India during the period of British rule.  Surveying more than thirty canonized and popular Anglo-Indian novels, Paxton shows how the treatment of rape reflects basic conflicts in the social and sexual contracts defining British and Indian women’s relationship to the nation state throughout the period.  This study reveals how and why novels written after the Indian Uprising of 1857 popularized the theme of English women victimized by Indian men.  Paxton demonstrates how all these novels reflect unresolved ideological and symbolic conflicts in British ideas about sex, violence, and power. 

The American criminal justice system contains numerous safeguards to prevent the conviction of innocent persons. The Bill of Rights provides nineteen separate rights for the alleged criminal offender, including the right to effective legal representation and the right to be judged without regard to race or creed. Despite these safeguards, wrongful convictions persist, and the issue has reverberated in the national debate over capital punishment.

The essays in this volume are written from a cross-disciplinary perspective by some of the most eminent lawyers, criminologists, and social scientists in the field today. The articles are divided into four sections: the causes of wrongful convictions, the social characteristics of the wrongly convicted, case studies and personal histories, and suggestions for changes in the criminal justice system to prevent wrongful convictions. Contributors examine a broad range of issues, including the fallibility of eyewitness testimony, particularly in cross-racial identifications; the disadvantages faced by racial and ethnic minorities in the criminal justice system; and the impact of new technologies, especially DNA evidence, in freeing the innocent and bringing the guilty to justice. The book also asks such questions as: What legal characteristics do wrongful convictions share? What are the mechanisms that defendants and their attorneys use to overturn wrongful convictions? The book also provides case studies that offer specific examples of what can and does go wrong in the criminal justice system.