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Gaming Masculinity
Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture
Megan Condis
University of Iowa Press, 2018

In 2016, a female videogame programmer and a female journalist were harassed viciously by anonymous male online users in what became known as GamerGate. Male gamers threatened to rape and kill both women, and the news soon made international headlines, exposing the level of abuse that many women and minorities face when participating in the predominantly male online culture.

Gaming Masculinity explains how the term “gamer” has been constructed in the popular imagination by a core group of male online users in an attempt to shore up an embattled form of geeky masculinity. This latest form of toxicity comes at a moment of upheaval in gaming culture, as women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals demand broader access and representation online. Paying close attention to the online practices of trolling and making memes, author Megan Condis demonstrates that, despite the supposedly disembodied nature of life online, performances of masculinity are still afforded privileged status in gamer culture. Even worse, she finds that these competing discourses are not just relegated to the gaming world but are creating rifts within the culture at large, as witnessed by the direct links between the GamerGate movement and the recent rise of the alt-right during the last presidential election.

Condis asks what this moment can teach us about the performative, collaborative, and sometimes combative ways that American culture enacts race, gender, and sexuality. She concludes by encouraging designers and those who work in the tech industry to think about how their work might have, purposefully or not, been developed in ways that are marked by gender.

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Gates of Freedom
Voltairine de Cleyre and the Revolution of the Mind
Eugenia C. DeLamotte
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"The question of souls is old; we demand our bodies, now." These words are not from a feminist manifesto of the late twentieth century, but from a fiery speech given a hundred years earlier by Voltairine de Cleyre, a leading anarchist and radical thinker. A contemporary of Emma Goldman---who called her "the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced"---de Cleyre was a significant force in a major social movement that sought to transform American society and culture at its root. But she belongs to a group of late-nineteenth-century freethinkers, anarchists, and sex-radicals whose writing continues to be excluded from the U.S. literary and historical canon.

Gates of Freedom considers de Cleyre's speeches, letters, and essays, including her most well known essay, "Sex Slavery." Part I brings current critical concerns to bear on de Cleyre's writings, exploring her contributions to the anarchist movement, her analyses of justice and violence, and her views on women, sexuality, and the body. Eugenia DeLamotte demonstrates both de Cleyre's literary significance and the importance of her work to feminist theory, women's studies, literary and cultural studies, U.S. history, and contemporary social and cultural analysis. Part II presents a thematically organized selection of de Cleyre's stirring writings, making Gates of Freedom appealing to scholars, students, and anyone interested in Voltairine de Cleyre's fascinating life and rousing work.
Eugenia C. DeLamotte is Associate Professor of English, Arizona State University.
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Gender and Agricultural Development
Surveying the Field
Edited by Helen K. Henderson
University of Arizona Press, 1995
Agricultural planning and development are crucial to human survival, but they usually proceed without any consideration of the importance of gender issues at the production level. Although women have long been prime movers in agriculture, their contribution to the world's food supply has been largely ignored, and consequently their stake in development has been undermined.

This book is both a resource guide and a review of major issues in gender and agriculture which demonstrates that recognizing the contribution of women to agricultural production is a necessary step in development planning. It presents relevant information and research literature regarding women's roles in agriculture in a consolidated and accessible format, offering insights into how the inclusion or exclusion of appropriate information at the planning stage can have an impact during implementation. It also provides guidelines for locating information on gender-related agricultural issues and incorporating it into development planning, research, and training. The literature reviewed not only calls attention to the work women do in order to improve their access to technology and training but also challenges existing development paradigms. The issues discussed present women's experiences and local knowledge and allude to gender and class inequities that farming women face. Each chapter is intended to help the reader address major gender issues in a specific subject in order to access relevant information and thereby better design and implement appropriate agricultural planning and policies.

By synthesizing twenty years of international research, Gender and Agricultural Development provides an effective tool for development practitioners to use in training programs or surveys in order to ensure the appropriate collection of gender disaggregated data and for educators to integrate gender issues into courses dealing with social aspects of agricultural systems. Its findings are presented in such a way as to allow them to be easily incorporated into innovative planning for more sustainable and equitable agricultural policies.
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Gender and Violence in Haiti
Women’s Path from Victims to Agents
Benedetta Faedi Duramy
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Women in Haiti are frequent victims of sexual violence and armed assault. Yet an astonishing proportion of these victims also act as perpetrators of violent crime, often as part of armed groups. Award-winning legal scholar Benedetta Faedi Duramy visited Haiti to discover what causes these women to act in such destructive ways and what might be done to stop this tragic cycle of violence.

Gender and Violence in Haiti is the product of more than a year of extensive firsthand observations and interviews with the women who have been caught up in the widespread violence plaguing Haiti. Drawing from the experiences of a diverse group of Haitian women, Faedi Duramy finds that both the victims and perpetrators of violence share a common sense of anger and desperation. Untangling the many factors that cause these women to commit violence, from self-defense to revenge, she identifies concrete measures that can lead them to feel vindicated and protected by their communities.

Faedi Duramy vividly conveys the horrifying conditions pervading Haiti, even before the 2010 earthquake. But Gender and Violence in Haiti also carries a message of hope—and shows what local authorities and international relief agencies can do to help the women of Haiti.
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Gender at Work
The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II
Ruth Milkman
University of Illinois Press, 1987
Winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History, the American Historical Association, 1987. Winner of the SOCIALIST REVIEW Book Award

Women's entry into so-called men's work during World War II sparked conflicts at the time and when men returned at war's end. Ruth Milkman delves into the issues in play and the prewar origins of traditional patterns of gender segregation in the workplace. Ranging from the dynamics on the shop floor to hiring patterns, Milkman pays particular attention to automobile and electrical manufacturing. She analyzes a number of persistent questions, including management's decision to re-embrace gender segregation after the war; women's lack of protest; the failure of unions to protect women; and how related employer strategies helped control labor by maintaining women's place as workers paid less than men.
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Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage
Boy Heroines and Female Pages
Michael Shapiro
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Cross-dressing, sexual identity, and the performance of gender are among the most hotly discussed topics in contemporary cultural studies. A vital addition to the growing body of literature, this book is the most in-depth and historically contextual study to date of Shakespeare's uses of the heroine in male disguise--man-playing-woman-playing-man--in all its theatrical and social complexity.
Shapiro's study centers on the five plays in which Shakespeare employed the figure of the "female page": The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline. Combining theater and social history, Shapiro locates Shakespeare's work in relation to controversies over gender roles and cross-dressing in Elizabethan England.
The popularity of the "female page" is examined as a playful literary and theatrical way of confronting, avoiding, or merely exploiting issues such as the place of women in a patriarchal culture and the representation of women on stage. Looking beyond and behind the stage for the cultural anxieties that found their way into Shakespearean drama, Shapiro considers such cases as cross-dressing women in London being punished as prostitutes and the alleged homoerotic practices of the apprentices who played female roles in adult companies. Shapiro also traces other Elizabethan dramatists' varied uses of the cross-dressing motif, especially as they were influenced by Shakespeare's innovations.
"Shapiro's engaging study is distinguished by the scope of interrelated topics it draws together and the balance of critical perspectives it brings to bear on them." --Choice
Michael Shapiro is Professor of English, University of Illinois, Urbana.
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Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage
Boy Heroines and Female Pages
Michael Shapiro
University of Michigan Press
Cross-dressing, sexual identity, and the performance of gender are among the most hotly discussed topics in contemporary cultural studies. A vital addition to the growing body of literature, this book is the most in-depth and historically contextual study to date of Shakespeare's uses of the heroine in male disguise--man-playing-woman-playing-man--in all its theatrical and social complexity.
Shapiro's study centers on the five plays in which Shakespeare employed the figure of the "female page": The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline. Combining theater and social history, Shapiro locates Shakespeare's work in relation to controversies over gender roles and cross-dressing in Elizabethan England.
The popularity of the "female page" is examined as a playful literary and theatrical way of confronting, avoiding, or merely exploiting issues such as the place of women in a patriarchal culture and the representation of women on stage. Looking beyond and behind the stage for the cultural anxieties that found their way into Shakespearean drama, Shapiro considers such cases as cross-dressing women in London being punished as prostitutes and the alleged homoerotic practices of the apprentices who played female roles in adult companies. Shapiro also traces other Elizabethan dramatists' varied uses of the cross-dressing motif, especially as they were influenced by Shakespeare's innovations.
"Shapiro's engaging study is distinguished by the scope of interrelated topics it draws together and the balance of critical perspectives it brings to bear on them." --Choice
Michael Shapiro is Professor of English, University of Illinois, Urbana.
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The Gender Knot
Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy
Allan Johnson
Temple University Press, 2014
New Third Edition!

The Gender Knot, Allan Johnson's response to the pain and confusion that men and women experience by living with gender inequality, explains what patriarchy is and isn't, how it works, and what gets in the way of understanding and doing something about it. Johnson's simple yet powerful approach avoids the paralyzing trap of guilt, blame, anger, and defensive denial that often results from conversations about gender.
 
This edition features:
• Updated references, data, resources, and examples, especially in relation to issues of sexual orientation and gender identity (e.g., gay marriage, transgender/cisgender)
• A glossary of terms
• A new chapter, "What Changes and What Does Not: Manhood and Violence," that provides an extended analysis of the causes of men's violence as a patriarchal phenomenon 
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Gender Matters
Rereading Michelle Z. Rosaldo
Alejandro Lugo and Bill Maurer, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2000
For the past twenty years, the work of Michelle Z. Rosaldo has had a profound impact on feminism and anthropology. Gender Matters commemorates her central role in shaping anthropological work and points toward new directions for critical inquiry based on a reconsideration of Rosaldo's theoretical and political interventions.
With the publication of Woman, Culture, and Society in 1974, Michelle Rosaldo initiated nothing less than a reconstruction of anthropology that placed feminist analysis at the center of the discipline. Through a rereading of Rosaldo's ideas and arguments, this collection provides in-depth analysis of Rosaldo's many contributions to anthropology and feminism. Each of the essays derives theoretically and politically useful insights from Rosaldo's work and sets them in motion for new intellectual and political practices. The authors do not always share Rosaldo's perspectives, nor do they necessarily agree with each other. But, together, they point to exciting syntheses of old and new feminist theory and practice.
Alejandro Lugo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Latina/o Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Bill Maurer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Irvine.
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Gender on Campus
Issues for College Women
Gmelch, Sharon B
Rutgers University Press, 1998

Gender on Campus is the first book to combine solid analyses of the broad range of gender issues for women in college with realistic approaches to heighten awareness and alleviate problems. Written for students, the book first clarifies the concept of feminism and then examines gender dynamics in a variety of settings and contexts-from the classroom to the sports field and from language to social life. Sharon Gmelch probes sexism, racism, and homophobia on campus and surveys the special issues facing diverse women students. The book also addresses issues relating to body image and sexuality. Its final chapters analyze the role gender continues to play after college-in the media, workplace, and politics.

After a thorough discussion of a topic, each chapter concludes with possibilities for action ("What You Can Do") as well as a selected bibliography of books, videos, and organizations that students can consult. Gender on Campus is an invaluable resource for students, parents, and administrators, as well as an excellent text for women's studies courses.

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Gender Play
Girls and Boys in School
Thorne, Barrie
Rutgers University Press, 1993
You see it in every schoolyard: the girls play only with the girls, the boys play only with the boys. Why? And what do the kids think about this? Breaking with familiar conventions for thinking about children and gender, Gender Play develops fresh insights into the everyday social worlds of kids in elementary schools in the United States. Barrie Thorne draws on her daily observations in the classroom and on the playground to show how children construct and experience gender in school. With rich detail,she looks at the "play of gender" in the organization of groups of kids and activities - activities such as "chase-and-kiss," "cooties," "goin' with" and teasing.

Thorne observes children in schools in working-class communities, emphasizing the experiences of fourth and fifth graders. Most of the children she observed were white, but a sizable minority were Latino, Chicano, or African American. Thorne argues that the organization and meaning of gender are influenced by age, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and social class, and that they shift with social context. She sees gender identity not through the lens of individual socialization or difference, but rather as a social process involving groups of children. Thorne takes us on a fascinating journey of discovery, provides new insights about children, and offers teachers practical suggestions for increasing cooperative mixed-gender interaction.
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Gender, Politics, and Islam
Edited by Therese Saliba, Carolyn Allen, and Judith A. Howard
University of Chicago Press, 2002
This collection extends the boundaries of global feminism to include Islamic women. Challenging Orientalist assumptions of Muslim women as victims of Islam, these essays focus on women's negotiations for identity, power, and agency as participants in religious, cultural and nationalist movements. This book gathers Signs essays on women in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Diaspora to explore how women negotiate identities and attempt to gain political, economic, and legal rights.

This collection shows Islam to be a diverse set of variable practices and beliefs shaped by region, nation, ethnicity, sect, and class, as well as by responses to many cultural and economic processes. In examining women's participation in religious and nationalist projects, these critics debate controversial issues: Does Islamic feminism provide an alternative, revolutionary paradigm to Eurocentric liberal humanism and western feminism? Is Islam more oppressive to women than the modern secular state? How are the lives and texts of Arab and Muslim women constructed for local or western consumption? These essays expose the shortcomings of the secularist assumptions of many recent feminist analyses, which continue to treat religion in general and fundamentalism in particular as a tool of oppression used against women, rather than as a viable form of feminist agency producing contradictory effects for its participants.

The essays in this book first appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

Contributors:

S. M. Shamsul Alam
Amal Amireh
Mary Elaine Heglund
Shahnaz Khan
Anouar Majid
Val Moghadam
Julia Peteet
Elora Shehabbudin
Gabriele vom Bruck.
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Gender Politics And MTV
Voicing the Difference
Lisa Lewis
Temple University Press, 1991

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Gender Power, Leadership, and Governance
Georgia Duerst-Lahti and Rita Mae Kelly, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1995
This groundbreaking collection introduces the concept of gender power as a pervasive but overlooked force within institutions, particularly U.S. politics. It examines the ideological dimensions of masculinity--masculinism--and its pervasive and reinforcing effects. The essays examine gender as a property of institutions, something with deep symbolic meaning, as well as an analytic category importantly distinctive from sex. Theoretically rich, Gender Power, Leadership and Governance contributes to understandings of power and leadership as it provides a new perspective on men, women, and their relationships to governance.
Essays reveal the multiplicity of ways "compulsory masculinity" is imposed upon female leaders who wish to succeed in a man's world, and analyzes the use of interpersonal means to ensure masculine advantage. For example, only one woman in Congress was able to have a direct effect on any reproductive policy; other women experienced sexual harassment by offensive men, which resulted in their being distracted from performing as leaders.
Until now, studies of gender within the field of political science have focused centrally on women. Men have been studied as gendered beings whose thinking has shaped politics in ways advantageous to them, but this volume is unique in crossing multiple levels of analysis and demonstrating the interactive and reinforcing effects of gender power. The book is required reading for political scientists who have frequently been blind to masculinist assumptions and cultural belief systems when gender roles collide with leadership demands for women. It will also appeal to those in public administration and policy, sociology, and business studies.
"An important book that challenges the ways empirical research is done and the ways social scientists think about gender."--Nancy Hartsock, University of Washington
"A very useful book on gender and political leadership that weaves together scholarly research with practical applications and suggestions for change."--Virginia Sapiro, University of Wisconsin, Madison
"A very ambitious book, attempting no less than a paradigm shift in social science thinking."--Marcia Lynn Whicker, Rutgers University
Georgia Duerst-Lahti is Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Government, Beloit College. Rita Mae Kelly is Director and Chair of the School of Justice Studies, and Professor of Justice Studies, Political Science, and Women's Studies, Arizona State University.
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Gender, Religion, and Family Law
Theorizing Conflicts between Women’s Rights and Cultural Traditions
Edited by Lisa Fishbayn Joffe and Sylvia Neil
Brandeis University Press, 2012
In many regions of the world, rights guaranteed under the civil law, including rights to gender equality within marriage and rights in the distribution of family property and child custody upon divorce, are in conflict with the principles of religious law. Women’s rights issues are often at the heart of these tensions, which present pressing challenges for theorists, lawyers, and policymakers. This anthology brings together leading scholars and activists doing innovative work in Jewish law, Muslim law, Christian law, and African customary law. Using examples drawn from a variety of nations and religions, they interrogate the utility of recent theoretical models for engaging with gender and multicultural conflicts, explore contextual differences, and analyze and celebrate stories of successful initiatives that have transformed legal and cultural norms to improve women’s lives.
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Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon
Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué
University of Michigan Press, 2019

Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women’s everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author’s sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women’s newspaper advice columns, Cameroon’s first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman.

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Gender, State, and Medicine in Highland Ecuador
Modernizing Women, Modernizing the State, 1895-1950
A. Kim Clark
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012
In 1921 Matilde Hidalgo became the first woman physician to graduate from the Universidad Central in Quito, Ecuador. Hidalgo was also the first woman to vote in a national election and the first to hold public office.

Author Kim Clark relates the stories of Matilde Hidalgo and other women who successfully challenged newly instituted Ecuadorian state programs in the wake of the Liberal Revolution of 1895. New laws, while they did not specifically outline women’s rights, left loopholes wherein women could contest entry into education systems and certain professions and vote in elections. As Clark demonstrates, many of those who seized these opportunities were unattached women who were socially and economically disenfranchised.

Political and social changes during the liberal period drew new groups into the workforce. Women found novel opportunities to pursue professions where they did not compete directly with men. Training women for work meant expanding secular education systems and normal schools. Healthcare initiatives were also introduced that employed and targeted women to reduce infant mortality, eradicate venereal diseases, and regulate prostitution.

Many of these state programs attempted to control women’s behavior under the guise of morality and honor. Yet highland Ecuadorian women used them to better their lives and to gain professional training, health care, employment, and political rights. As they engaged state programs and used them for their own purposes, these women became modernizers and agents of change, winning freedoms for themselves and future generations.


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Gender Struggles
Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan
Christopher Gerteis
Harvard University Press, 2009

In the formative years of the Japanese labor movement after World War II, the socialist unions affiliated with the General Council of Trade Unions (the labor federation known colloquially as Sohyo) formally endorsed the principles of women’s equality in the workforce and put in place measures to promote women’s active participation in union activities. However, union leaders did not embrace the legal framework for gender equality mandated by their American occupiers; rather, they pressured thousands of women labor activists to assume supportive roles that privileged a male-centered social agenda. By the late 1950s, even Japan’s radical socialist unions had reestablished the primacy of conservative gender norms, channeling women’s labor activism to support political campaigns that advantaged a male-headed household and that relegated women’s wage-earning value to the periphery of the household economy.

By showing how unions raised the wages of male workers in part by transforming working-class women into middle-class housewives, Christopher Gerteis demonstrates that organized labor’s discourse on womanhood not only undermined women’s status within the labor movement but also prevented unions from linking with the emerging woman-led, neighborhood-centered organizations that typified social movements in the 1960s—a misstep that contributed to the decline of the socialist labor movement in subsequent decades.

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Gender Violence and the Transnational Politics of the Honor Crime
Dana M. Olwan
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
In Gender Violence and the Transnational Politics of the Honor Crime, Dana M. Olwan examines how certain forms of violence become known, recognized, and contested across multiple geopolitical contexts—looking specifically at a particular form of gender-based violence known as the “honor crime” and tracing how a range of legal, political, and literary texts inform normative and critical understandings of this term. Although a number of studies now acknowledge the complicated mobilizations of honor crime discourses, the ways in which these discourses move across and in between different geographies and contexts remain relatively unexplored. This book fills that void by providing a transnational feminist examination of the disparate—yet interconnected—sites of the US, Canada, Jordan, and Palestine, showing how the concept travels across nations and is deployed to promote hegemonic agendas—becoming intertwined in notions of modernity, citizenship, and belonging.
More specifically, Olwan traces the term’s appearance in public and popular works that allow for its continued mass acceptance and circulation—from media depictions in Canada and beyond, to how it is taken up in national registers about migration and belonging in the US, to activism in Palestine that reveal the fault lines between activist and academic critiques of the honor crime, and finally to feminist efforts in Jordan and the wider Middle East to confront legal codes used to sanction gender-related violence. Through these cases, Olwan demonstrates how the honor crime functions as a signifier that governs and manages populations and how its meanings travel and circulate across and between separate and interconnected circuits of power and knowledge.
 
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Gendered Agents
Women and Institutional Knowledge
Silvestra Mariniello and Paul A. Bové, eds.
Duke University Press, 1998
Gendered Agents, edited by Silvestra Mariniello andPaul A. Bové, presents essays by influential feminist theorists who challenge traditional Western epistemology and suggest new directions for feminism. By examining both literary and historical discourses, such critics as Gayatri Spivak, Hortense Spillers, and Lauren Berlant assess questions of sexuality, ethics, race, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and identity.
Gathered from various issues of the journal boundary 2, the essays in Gendered Agents seek to transform the model of Western academic knowledge by restructuring its priorities and values. In the introduction, Mariniello urges feminists to begin anew but take as their starting place the achievements of feminism and feminist theory: an understanding of language that considers the implications of silence, the motivation to decompartmentalize experience, and the acknowledgement that everything is political. Challenging both a canonical organization of knowledge and the persistently self-referential "ghettoization" of feminism, contributors subsequently tackle subjects as diverse as pre-Marxist France, the American fetus, black intellectuals, queer nationality, and the art of literary interpretation.

Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Karen Brennan, Margaret Cohen, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Freeman, Carol Jacobs, Silvestra Mariniello, Larysa Mykyta, Laura Rice, Ivy Schweitzer, Doris Sommer, Hortense J. Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Wilt

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Gendered Asylum
Race and Violence in U.S. Law and Politics
Sara L. McKinnon
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Women filing gender-based asylum claims long faced skepticism and outright rejection within the United States immigration system. Despite erratic progress, the United States still fails to recognize gender as an established category for experiencing persecution. Gender exists in a sort of limbo segregated from other aspects of identity and experience.

Sara L. McKinnon exposes racialized rhetorics of violence in politics and charts the development of gender as a category in American asylum law. Starting with the late 1980s, when gender-based requests first emerged in case law, McKinnon analyzes gender- and sexuality-related cases against the backdrop of national and transnational politics. Her focus falls on cases as diverse as Guatemalan and Salvadoran women sexually abused during the Dirty Wars and transgender asylum seekers from around the world fleeing brutally violent situations. She reviews the claims, evidence, testimony, and message strategies that unfolded in these legal arguments and decisions, and illuminates how legal decisions turned gender into a political construct vulnerable to American national and global interests. She also explores myriad related aspects of the process, including how subjects are racialized and the effects of that racialization, and the consequences of policies that position gender as a signifier for women via normative assumptions about sex and heterosexuality.

Wide-ranging and rich with human detail, Gendered Asylum uses feminist, immigration, and legal studies to engage one of the hotly debated issues of our time.

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Gendered Justice in the American West
Women Prisoners in Men's Penitentiaries
Anne M. Butler
University of Illinois Press, 1997
 In this shocking study, Anne M. Butler shows that the distinct gender disadvantages already faced by women within western society erupted into intense physical and mental violence when they became prisoners in male penitentiaries. 
 
Drawing on prison records and the words of the women themselves, Gendered Justice in the American West places the injustices women prisoners endured in the context of the structures of male authority and female powerlessness that pervaded all of American society. Butler's poignant cross-cultural account explores how nineteenth-century criminologists constructed the "criminal woman"; how the women's age, race, class, and gender influenced their court proceedings; and what kinds of violence women inmates encountered. She also examines the prisoners' diet, illnesses, and experiences with pregnancy and child-bearing, as well as their survival strategies.
 
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Gendered Missions
Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice
Mary Taylor Huber and Nancy C. Lutkehaus, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Throughout the age of Western colonial expansion, Christian missionaries were important participants in the encounter between the West and peoples throughout the rest of the world. Mission schools, health services, and other cultural technologies helped secure Western colonialism, and in some cases transformed or even undermined colonialism's effect. The very breadth of missionaries's focus, however, made the involvement of women in missionary work both possible and necessary.
Missionary groups thus faced more immediately the destabilizing challenges that colonial experience posed to their own ways of organizing relations between women and men. Examining the changing prospects for professional women in the missions, the contributors to Gendered Missions ask how these shaped, and were shaped by, crucial practical, political, and religious developments at home and abroad. While the focus is on the tumultuous period that historian Eric Hobsbawm calls "The Age of Empire" (1875-1914), attention also is paid to how gender has been debated in later colonial and post-colonial missions.
Scholars from any field concerned with colonial and postcolonial societies or with gender and women's history should find this book of special interest. In addition, Gendered Missions should appeal to readers in church history, mission studies, and the sociology of religion.
Mary Taylor Huber is Senior Scholar, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Nancy C. Lutkehaus is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Southern California.
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Gendered Places
The Landscape of Local Gender Norms across the United States
William J. Scarborough
Temple University Press, 2023

Every place has its quirky attributes, cultural reputation, and distinctive flair. But when we travel across America, do we also experience distinct gender norms and expectations? In his groundbreaking Gendered Places, William Scarborough examines metropolitan commuting zones to see how each region’s local culture reflects gender roles and gender equity. He uses surveys and social media data to measure multiple dimensions of gender norms, including expectations toward women in leadership, attitudes toward working mothers, as well as the division of household labor.

Gendered Places reveals that different locations, even within the same region of the country, such as Milwaukee and Madison Wisconsin, have distinct gender norms and highly influential cultural environments. Scarboroughshows how these local norms shape the attitudes and behaviors of residents with implications on patterns of inequality such as the gender wage gap. His findings offer valuable insight for community leaders and organizers making efforts to promote equality in their region. 

Scarboroughrecognizes local culture as not value-neutral, but highly crucial to the gender structure that perpetuates, or challenges, gender inequality. Gendered Places questions how these gender norms are sustained and their social consequences.

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Gendered Pluralism
Belinda Robnett and Katherine Tate
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Focused on structural and political intersectionalities, Gendered Pluralism takes a broader approach to understanding the constellation of factors that drive gender and racial differences on an array of public policy issues. Belinda Robnett and Katherine Tate examine a broader set of actors absent the contextual factors that may drive them to compromise their opinions. Their study examines the ways in which (1) men and women differ on public policy issues and the factors that drive these differences; (2) whites and racial-ethnic minorities differ on public policy issues and the factors that drive these differences; (3) women differ on public policy issues and the factors that drive these differences; (4) African-American men and women differ on public policy issues and the factors that drive these differences; and (5) African-American women differ on public policy issues and the factors that drive these differences.

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The Gendered Pulpit
Preaching in American Protestant Spaces
Roxanne Mountford
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

In this feminist investigation into the art of preaching—one of the oldest and least studied rhetorical traditions—Roxanne Mountford explores the relationship between bodies, space, race, and gender in rhetorical performance and American Protestant culture. Refiguring delivery and physicality as significant components of the rhetorical situation, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces examines the strategies of three contemporary women preachers who have transgressed traditions, rearranged rhetorical space, and conquered gender bias to establish greater intimacy with their congregations.

Mountford’s examinations of the rhetoric inherent in preaching manuals from 1850 to the present provide insight into how “manliness” has remained a central concept in American preaching since the mid-nineteenth century. The manuals illustrate that the character, style, method of delivery, and theological purpose of preachers focused on white men and their cultural standing, leaving contemporary women preachers searching for ways to accommodate themselves to the physicality of preaching.

Three case studies of women preachers who have succeeded or failed in rearranging rhetorical space provide the foundation for the volume. These contemporary examples have important implications for feminist theology and also reveal the importance of gender, space, and bodies to studies of rhetoric in general. Mountford explores the geographies of St. John’s Lutheran Church and the preaching of Rev. Patricia O’Connor who reformed rhetorical space through the delivery of her sermons. At Eastside United Church of Christ, Mountford shows, Rev. Barbara Hill employed narrative style and prophetic utterance in the tradition of black preaching to address gender bias and institute change in her congregation. The final case study details the experiences of Pastor Janet Moore and her struggles at Victory Hills United Methodist Church, where the fractured congregation could not be united even with Pastor Moore’s focus on theological purpose and invention strategies.

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Gendered Resistance
Women, Slavery, and the Legacy of Margaret Garner
Edited by Mary E. Frederickson and Delores M. Walters
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Inspired by the searing story of Margaret Garner, the escaped slave who in 1856 slit her daughter's throat rather than have her forced back into slavery, the essays in this collection focus on historical and contemporary examples of slavery and women's resistance to oppression from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Each chapter uses Garner's example--the real-life narrative behind Toni Morrison's Beloved andthe opera Margaret Garner--as a thematic foundation for an interdisciplinary conversation about gendered resistance in locations including Brazil, Yemen, India, and the United States. 
 
Contributors are Nailah Randall Bellinger, Olivia Cousins, Mary E. Frederickson, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Carolyn Mazloomi, Cathy McDaniels-Wilson, Catherine Roma, Huda Seif, S. Pearl Sharp, Raquel Luciana de Souza, Jolene Smith, Veta Tucker, Delores M. Walters, Diana Williams, and Kristine Yohe.

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Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives
Edited by Jan Bender Shetler
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
Do African men and women think about and act out their ethnicity in different ways? Most studies of ethnicity in Africa consider men’s experiences, but rarely have scholars examined whether women have the same idea of what it means to be, for example, Igbo or Tswana or Kikuyu. Or, studies have invoked the adage “women have no tribe” to indicate a woman’s loss of ethnicity as she marries into her husband’s community. This volume engages directly the issue of women’s ethnicity and makes stimulating contributions to debates about how and why women’s movements have a unifying role in African political organization and peace movements.
            Drawing on extensive field research in many different regions of Africa, the contributors demonstrate in their essays that women do make choices about the forms of ethnicity they embrace, creating alternatives to male-centered definitions—in some cases rejecting a specific ethnic identity in favor of an interethnic alliance, in others reinterpreting the meaning of ethnicity within gendered domains, and in others performing ethnic power in gendered ways. Their analysis helps explain why African women may be more likely to champion interethnic political movements while men often promote an ethnicity based on martial masculinity. Bringing together anthropologists, historians, linguists, and political scientists, Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives offers a diverse and timely look at a neglected but important topic.
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Gendering Politics
Women in Israel
Hanna Herzog
University of Michigan Press, 1999
What are the cultural and structural mechanisms that exclude women from politics in general and from local politics in particular? What meaning is ascribed to women's political activity?
Gendering Politics explores the place of women in democratic politics by means of a detailed study of women in Israeli politics who were elected to municipal councils from 1950 to 1989. Drawing from a variety of sources, including questionnaires, interviews, newspaper coverage, and existing statistical data, as well as examinations of studies of the role of women in politics in other democracies, Herzog analyzes the extent of success and failure of women in Israeli elections. She then explores reasons why female participation in Israeli politics has been relatively slight, despite historical precedents and social circumstances that would indicate otherwise.
The author examines the gendered bias of the power structure as it is shaped by basic cultural organizing principles. She exposes hidden assumptions--and notes the overt assumptions--which by definition exclude women from politics. The author also looks at the structure of opportunities within the prevailing political system, uncovering the relevant blocking and facilitating elements.
Gendering Politics will be of interest to students and scholars of women's studies, Israeli studies, political sociology, and political science.
Hanna Herzog is Associate Professor of Sociology, Tel Aviv University.
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Gendering the Fair
Histories of Women and Gender at World's Fairs
Edited by TJ Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn
University of Illinois Press, 2010
This field-defining work opens the study of world's fairs to women's and gender history, exploring the intersections of masculinity, femininity, exoticism, display, and performance at these influential events. As the first global gatherings of mass numbers of attendees, world's fairs and expositions introduced cross-class, multi-racial, and mixed-sex audiences to each other, as well as to cultural concepts and breakthroughs in science and technology. Gendering the Fair focuses on the manipulation of gender ideology as a crucial factor in the world's fairs' incredible power to shape public opinions of nations, government, and culture.
 
Established and rising scholars working in a variety of disciplines and locales discuss how gender played a role in various countries' exhibits and how these nations capitalized on opportunities to revise national and international understandings of womanhood. Spanning several centuries and extending across the globe from Portugal to London and from Chicago to Paris, the essays cover topics including women's work at the fairs; the suffrage movement; the intersection of faith, gender, and patriotism; and the ability of fair organizers to manipulate fairgoers' experience of the fairgrounds as gendered space. The volume includes a foreword by preeminent world's fair historian Robert W. Rydell.
 
Contributors are TJ Boisseau, Anne Clendinning, Lisa K. Langlois, Abigail M. Markwyn, Sarah J. Moore, Isabel Morais, Mary Pepchinski, Elisabeth Israels Perry, Andrea G. Radke-Moss, Alison Rowley, and Anne Wohlcke.
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Generations
Academic Feminists In Dialogue
Devoney Looser
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

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Genocide Lives in Us
Women, Memory, and Silence in Rwanda
Jennie E. Burnet
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, Rwandan women faced the impossible—resurrecting their lives amidst unthinkable devastation. Haunted by memories of lost loved ones and of their own experiences of violence, women rebuilt their lives from “less than nothing.” Neither passive victims nor innate peacemakers, they traversed dangerous emotional and political terrain to emerge as leaders in Rwanda today. This clear and engaging ethnography of survival tackles three interrelated phenomena—memory, silence, and justice—and probes the contradictory roles women played in postgenocide reconciliation.
    Based on more than a decade of intensive fieldwork, Genocide Lives in Us provides a unique grassroots perspective on a postconflict society. Anthropologist Jennie E. Burnet relates with sensitivity the heart-wrenching survival stories of ordinary Rwandan women and uncovers political and historical themes in their personal narratives. She shows that women’s leading role in Rwanda’s renaissance resulted from several factors: the dire postgenocide situation that forced women into new roles; advocacy by the Rwandan women’s movement; and the inclusion of women in the postgenocide government.

Honorable Mention, Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association

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The Georgia of the North
Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey
Hettie V. Williams
Rutgers University Press, 2024
The Georgia of the North is a historical narrative about Black women and the long civil rights movement in New Jersey from the Great Migration to 1954. Specifically, the critical role played by Black women in forging interracial, cross-class, and cross-gender alliances at the local and national level and their role in securing the passage of progressive civil rights legislation in the Garden State is at the core of this book. This narrative is largely defined by a central question:  How and why did New Jersey’s Black leaders, community members, and women in particular, affect major civil rights legislation, legal equality, and integration a decade before the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas decision? In this analysis, the history of the early Black freedom struggle in New Jersey is predicated on the argument that the Civil Rights Movement began in New Jersey, and that Black women were central actors in this struggle. 
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Germaine Dulac
A Cinema of Sensations
Tami Williams
University of Illinois Press, 2014

Best known for directing the Impressionist classic The Smiling Madame Beudet and the first Surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Germaine Dulac, feminist and pioneer of 1920s French avant-garde cinema, made close to thirty fiction films as well as numerous documentaries and newsreels. Through her filmmaking, writing, and cine-club activism, Dulac’s passionate defense of the cinema as a lyrical art and social practice had a major influence on twentieth century film history and theory.

In Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations, Tami Williams makes unprecedented use of the filmmaker's personal papers, production files, and archival film prints to produce the first full-length historical study and critical biography of Dulac. Williams's analysis explores the artistic and sociopolitical currents that shaped Dulac's approach to cinema while interrogating the ground breaking techniques and strategies she used to critique conservative notions of gender and sexuality. Moving beyond the director’s work of the 1920s, Williams examines Dulac's largely ignored 1930s documentaries and newsreels establishing clear links with the more experimental impressionist and abstract works of her early period.


This vivid portrait will be of interest to general readers, as well as to scholars of cinema and visual culture, performance, French history, women’s studies, queer cinema, in addition to studies of narrative avant-garde, experimental, and documentary film history and theory.


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German Women for Empire, 1884-1945
Lora Wildenthal
Duke University Press, 2001
When Germany annexed colonies in Africa and the Pacific beginning in the 1880s, many German women were enthusiastic. At the same time, however, they found themselves excluded from what they saw as a great nationalistic endeavor. In German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 Lora Wildenthal untangles the varied strands of racism, feminism, and nationalism that thread through German women’s efforts to participate in this episode of overseas colonization.
In confrontation and sometimes cooperation with men over their place in the colonial project, German women launched nationalist and colonialist campaigns for increased settlement and new state policies. Wildenthal analyzes recently accessible Colonial Office archives as well as mission society records, periodicals, women’s memoirs, and fiction to show how these women created niches for themselves in the colonies. They emphasized their unique importance for white racial “purity” and the inculcation of German culture in the family. While pressing for career opportunities for themselves, these women also campaigned against interracial marriage and circulated an image of African and Pacific women as sexually promiscuous and inferior. As Wildenthal discusses, the German colonial imaginary persisted even after the German colonial empire was no longer a reality. The women’s colonial movement continued into the Nazi era, combining with other movements to help turn the racialist thought of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries into the hierarchical evaluation of German citizens as well as colonial subjects.
Students and scholars of women’s history, modern German history, colonial politics and culture, postcolonial theory, race/ethnicity, and gender will welcome this groundbreaking study.
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Getting Paid While Taking Time
The Women's Movement and the Development of Paid Family Leave Policies in the United States
Megan Sholar
Temple University Press, 2016

The United States remains the only industrialized nation in the world that does not provide paid family leave at the national level for either men or women. In the more than two decades since the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, there have been numerous unsuccessful attempts to expand family leave benefits nationally. However, in the United States, it is common for innovations in family policies to arise at the state level.

In her timely book, Getting Paid While Taking Time, Megan Sholar explains the development of family leave policies at both the national and state levels in the United States. She provides cogent studies of states that have passed and proposed family leave legislation, and she pays special attention to the ways in which women’s movement actors and other activists (e.g., labor unions) exert pressure on public officials to help influence the policymaking process. In her conclusion, Sholar considers the future of paid family leave policies in the United States and the chances for it ever equaling the benefits in other countries. 

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Getting Screwed
Sex Workers and the Law
Alison Bass
University Press of New England, 2015
Alison Bass weaves the true stories of sex workers with the latest research on prostitution into a gripping journalistic account of how women (and some men) navigate a culture that routinely accepts the implicit exchange of sex for money, status, or even a good meal, but imposes heavy penalties on those who make such bargains explicit. Along the way, Bass examines why an increasing number of middle-class white women choose to become sex workers and explores how prostitution has become a thriving industry in the twenty-first-century global economy. Situating her book in American history more broadly, she also discusses the impact of the sexual revolution, the rise of the Nevada brothels, and the growing war on sex trafficking after 9/11. Drawing on recent studies that show lower rates of violence and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, in regions where adult prostitution is legal and regulated, Bass makes a powerful case for decriminalizing sex work. Through comparisons of the impact of criminalization vs. decriminalization in other countries, her book offers strategies for making prostitution safer for American sex workers and the communities in which they dwell. This riveting assessment of how U.S. anti-prostitution laws harm the public health and safety of sex workers and other citizens—and affect larger societal attitudes toward women—will interest feminists, sociologists, lawyers, health-care professionals, and policy makers. The book also will appeal to anyone with an interest in American history and our society’s evolving attitudes toward sexuality and marriage.
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Ghost Stories for Darwin
The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity
Banu Subramaniam
University of Illinois Press, 2014
In a stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, Banu Subramaniam explores how her dissertation on flower color variation in morning glories launched her on an intellectual odyssey that engaged the feminist studies of sciences in the experimental practices of science by tracing the central and critical idea of variation in biology.

Subramaniam reveals the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical understandings of difference and diversity that permeate common understandings of differences among people exist in contexts that seem distant from the so-called objective hard sciences. Journeying into interdisciplinary areas that range from the social history of plants to speculative fiction, Subramaniam uncovers key relationships between the life sciences, women's studies, evolutionary and invasive biology, and the history of ecology, and how ideas of diversity and difference emerged and persist in each field.

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Ghosts Of Slavery
A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives
Jenny Sharpe
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Questions traditional assumptions about power and agency in slave women's everyday lives. Through their open defiance, women like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth had a significant impact on the institution of slavery. But what of the countless other women who did not commit public or even private acts of resistance? Are their stories worthy of our attention? While some scholars imply that only the struggle for freedom was legitimate, Jenny Sharpe complicates the linear narrative-from slavery to freedom and literacy-that emerged from the privileging of autobiographical accounts like that of Frederick Douglass. She challenges a paradigm that equates agency with resistance and self-determination, and introduces new ways to examine negotiations for power within the constraints of slavery. In Ghosts of Slavery, Sharpe introduces a wider range of everyday practices by examining the lives of three distinctive Caribbean women: a maroon leader, a mulatto concubine, and a fugitive slave. Through them she explains how the diasporic experience of slavery enabled black women to claim an authority that they didn't possess in Africa; how concubines empowered themselves through their mimicry of white women; and how less-privileged slave women manipulated situations that they were powerless to change. Finding the highly mediated portrayal of slave women in the historical records limited and sometimes misleading, Sharpe turns to unconventional sources for investigating these women's lives. In this fascinating and historically rich account, she calls for new strategies of reading that question traditional narratives of history, and she finds alternative ways to integrate oral storytelling, slave songs, travel writing, court documents, proslavery literature, and contemporary literature into black history. Ultimately, this layered approach not only produces a more complex picture of the slave women's agency than conventional readings, it encourages a more nuanced understanding of the roles of slaves in the history of slavery. Jenny Sharpe is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (1993).
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Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years
Edited by Annette R. Federico, Foreward by Sandra M. Gilbert
University of Missouri Press, 2009

When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imaginationwas hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar’s approach. It includes work by established and up-and-coming scholars, as well as retrospective accounts of the ways in which The Madwoman in the Attic has influenced teaching, feminist activism, and the lives of women in academia.

These contributions represent both the diversity of today’s feminist criticism and the tremendous expansion of the nineteenth-century canon. The authors take as their subjects specific nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, the state of feminist theory and pedagogy, genre studies, film, race, and postcolonialism, with approaches ranging from ecofeminism to psychoanalysis. And although each essay opens Madwoman to a different page, all provocatively circle back—with admiration and respect, objections and challenges, questions and arguments—to Gilbert and Gubar's groundbreaking work.

The essays are as diverse as they are provocative. Susan Fraiman describes how Madwoman opened the canon, politicized critical practice, and challenged compulsory heterosexuality, while Marlene Tromp tells how it elegantly embodied many concerns central to second-wave feminism. Other chapters consider Madwoman’s impact on Milton studies, on cinematic adaptations of Wuthering Heights, and on reassessments of Ann Radcliffe as one of the book’s suppressed foremothers.
In the thirty years since its publication, The Madwoman in the Attic has potently informed literary criticism of women’s writing: its strategic analyses of canonical works and its insights into the interconnections between social environment and human creativity have been absorbed by contemporary critical practices. These essays constitute substantive interventions into established debates and ongoing questions among scholars concerned with defining third-wave feminism, showing that, as a feminist symbol, the raging madwoman still has the power to disrupt conventional ideas about gender, myth, sexuality, and the literary imagination.
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The Girl in the Yellow Poncho
A Memoir
Kristal Brent Zook
Duke University Press, 2023
At five years old, Kristal Brent Zook sat on the steps of a Venice Beach, California, motel trying to make sense of her white father’s abandonment, which left her feeling unworthy of a man’s love and of white protection. Raised by her working-class African American mother and grandmother, Zook was taught not to count on anyone, especially men. Men leave. Men disappoint. In adulthood she became a feminist, activist, and “race woman” journalist in New York City. Despite her professional success, something was missing. Coming to terms with her identity was a constant challenge.

The Girl in the Yellow Poncho is Zook’s coming-of-age tale about what it means to be biracial in America. Throughout, she grapples with in-betweenness while also facing childhood sexual assault, economic insecurity, and multigenerational alcoholism and substance abuse on both the Black and white sides of her family. Her story is one of strong Black women—herself, her cousin, her mother, and her grandmother—and the generational cycles of oppression and survival that seemingly defined their lives.

Setting out on an inner journey that takes her across oceans and continents, Zook tells the story of a little girl who never gives up on love, even long after it seems to have been destroyed. In the end she triumphs, reconciling with her father and mother to create the family of her dreams through forgiveness and sheer force of will. A testament to the power of settling into one’s authentic identity, this book tells a story of a daughter’s lifelong yearning, a mother’s rediscovery of lost love, and the profound power of atonement and faith to heal a broken family.
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Girlhood
A Global History
Helgren, Jennifer
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Girlhood, interdisciplinary and global in source, scope, and methodology, examines the centrality of girlhood in shaping women's lives. Scholars study how age and gender, along with a multitude of other identities, work together to influence the historical experience.

Spanning a broad time frame from 1750 to the present, essays illuminate the various continuities and differences in girls' lives across culture and region--girls on all continents except Antarctica are represented. Case studies and essays are arranged thematically to encourage comparisons between girls' experiences in diverse locales, and to assess how girls were affected by historical developments such as colonialism, political repression, war, modernization, shifts in labor markets, migrations, and the rise of consumer culture.
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Girls at a Vocational High
Henry Joseph Meyer
Russell Sage Foundation, 1965
Teachers, social workers, psychologists, and sociologists carried out an ambitious, six-year experiment in individual casework and group therapy with potential problem girls in a New York City vocational high school. Conducted in collaboration with Youth Consultation Service, this provocative study provides valuable data on adolescent girls—and raises compelling questions on the extent to which casework can be effective in interrupting deviant careers.
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Girls! Girls! Girls! In Contemporary Art
Edited by Catherine Grant and Lori Waxman
Intellect Books, 2011
 
Since the 1990s, female artists have led the contemporary art world in the creation of art depicting female adolescence, producing challenging, critically debated, and avidly collected artworks that are driving the current and momentous shift in the perception of women in art. Girls! Girls! Girls! presents essays from established and up-and-coming scholars who address a variety of themes, including narcissism, nostalgia, postfeminism, and fantasy with the goal of approaching the overarching question of why female artists are turning in such numbers to the subject of girls—and what these artistic explorations signify. Artists discussed include Anna Gaskell, Marlene McCarty, Sue de Beer, Miwa Yanagi, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Collier Schorr, and more.
            Contributors include Lucy Soutter, Harriet Riches, Maud Lavin, Taru Elfving, Kate Random Love, and Carol Mavor.
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The Girls' History and Culture Reader
The Nineteenth Century
Edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell and Leslie Paris
University of Illinois Press, 2011
The Girls' History and Culture Reader: The Nineteenth Century provides scholars, instructors, and students with the most influential essays that have defined the field of American girls' history and culture. A relatively new and energetic field of inquiry, girl-centered research is critical for a fuller understanding of women and gender, a deeper consideration of childhood and adolescence, and a greater acknowledgment of the significance of generation as a historical force in American culture and society.
 
Bringing together work from top scholars of women and youth, The Girls' History and Culture Reader: The Nineteenth Century addresses topics ranging from diary writing and toys to prostitution and slavery. Covering girlhood and the relationships between girls and women, this pioneering volume tackles pivotal themes such as education, work, play, sexuality, consumption, and the body. The reader also illuminates broader nineteenth-century developments—including urbanization, industrialization, and immigration--through the often-overlooked vantage point of girls. As these essays collectively suggest, nineteenth-century girls wielded relatively little political or social power but carved out other spaces of self-expression.
 
Contributors are Carol Devens, Miriam Forman-Brunell, Jane H. Hunter, Anya Jabour, Anne Scott MacLeod, Susan McCully, Mary Niall Mitchell, Leslie Paris, Barbara Sicherman, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Christine Stansell, Nancy M. Theriot, and Deborah Gray White.
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The Girls' History and Culture Reader
The Twentieth Century
Edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell and Leslie Paris
University of Illinois Press, 2011
The Girls' History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century provides scholars, instructors, and students with the most influential essays that have defined the field of American girls' history and culture. A relatively new and energetic field of inquiry, girl-centered research is critical for a fuller understanding of women and gender, a deeper consideration of childhood and adolescence, and a greater acknowledgment of the significance of generation as a historical force in American culture and society.
 
Bringing together work from top scholars of women and youth, The Girls' History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century illustrates girls' centrality to major twentieth-century forces such as immigration, labor, feminism, and consumerism. Themes in this pioneering volume include girls' use of fashion and music, their roles as workers, their friendships, and new ideas about girls' bodies. While girls in the twentieth century found new avenues for personal ambition and self-expression, especially at school and in the realm of leisure and popular culture, they continued to wrestle with traditional ideas about feminine identity, socialization, and sexuality.
 
Contributors are Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Rachel Devlin, Susan J. Douglas, Miriam Forman-Brunell, Kyra D. Gaunt, Mary Celeste Kearney, Ilana Nash, Mary Odem, Leslie Paris, Kathy Peiss, Vicki L. Ruiz, Kelly Schrum, and Judy Yung.
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The Girls Next Door
Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines
Kara Dixon Vuic
Harvard University Press, 2019

The story of the intrepid young women who volunteered to help and entertain American servicemen fighting overseas, from World War I through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The emotional toll of war can be as debilitating to soldiers as hunger, disease, and injury. Beginning in World War I, in an effort to boost soldiers’ morale and remind them of the stakes of victory, the American military formalized a recreation program that sent respectable young women and famous entertainers overseas.

Kara Dixon Vuic builds her narrative around the young women from across the United States, many of whom had never traveled far from home, who volunteered to serve in one of the nation’s most brutal work environments. From the “Lassies” in France and mini-skirted coeds in Vietnam to Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, Vuic provides a fascinating glimpse into wartime gender roles and the tensions that continue to complicate American women’s involvement in the military arena. The recreation-program volunteers heightened the passions of troops but also domesticated everyday life on the bases. Their presence mobilized support for the war back home, while exporting American culture abroad. Carefully recruited and selected as symbols of conventional femininity, these adventurous young women saw in the theater of war a bridge between public service and private ambition.

This story of the women who talked and listened, danced and sang, adds an intimate chapter to the history of war and its ties to life in peacetime.

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Girls Who Wore Black
Women Writing the Beat Generation
Johnson, Ronna C
Rutgers University Press, 2002
What do we know about the women who played an important role in creating the literature of the Beat Generation? Until recently, very little. Studies of the movement have effaced or excluded women writers, such as Elise Cowen, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Hettie Jones, and Diane Di Prima, each one a significant figure of the postwar Beat communities. Equally free-thinking and innovative as the founding generation of men, women writers, fluent in Beat, hippie, and women's movement idioms, partook of and bridged two important countercultures of the American mid-century. Persistently foregrounding female experiences in the cold war 1950s and in the counterculture 1960s and in every decade up to the millennium, women writing Beat have brought nonconformity, skepticism, and gender dissent to postmodern culture and literary production in the United States and beyond.
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The Glass Slipper
Women and Love Stories
Susan Ostrov Weisser
Rutgers University Press, 2013

Why is the story of romance in books, magazines, and films still aimed at women rather than at men? Even after decades of feminism, traditional ideas and messages about romantic love still hold sway and, in our “postfeminist” age, are more popular than ever. Increasingly, we have become a culture of romance: stories of all kinds shape the terms of love. Women, in particular, love a love story.

The Glass Slipper is about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Comparing influential classics to their current counterparts, Susan Ostrov Weisser relates in highly amusing prose how these stories are shaped and defined by and for women, the main consumers of romantic texts. Following a trajectory that begins with Jane Austen and concludes with Internet dating sites, Weisser shows the many ways in which nineteenth-century views of women’s nature and the Victorian idea of romance have survived the feminist critique of the 1970s and continue in new and more ambiguous forms in today’s media, with profound implications for women.

More than a book about romance in fiction and media, The Glass Slipper illustrates how traditional stories about women’s sexuality, femininity, and romantic love have survived as seemingly protective elements in a more modern, feminist, sexually open society, confusing the picture for women themselves. Weisser compares diverse narratives—historical and contemporary from high literature and “low” genres—discussing novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Victorian women’s magazines, and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Disney movies; popular Harlequin romance novels; masochistic love in films; pornography and its relationship to romance; and reality TV and Internet ads as romantic stories.

Ultimately, Weisser shows that the narrative versions of the Glass Slipper should be taken as seriously as the Glass Ceiling as we see how these representations of romantic love are meant to inform women’s beliefs and goals. In this book, Weisser’s goal is not to shatter the Glass Slipper, but to see through it.

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Glikl
Memoirs 1691-1719
Annotated by and with an Introduction by Chava Turniansky
Brandeis University Press, 2019
“My dear children, I write this for you in case your dear children or grandchildren come to you one of these days, knowing nothing of their family. For this reason I have set this down for you here in brief, so that you might know what kind of people you come from.”
These words from the memoirs Glikl bas Leib wrote in Yiddish between 1691 and 1719 shed light on the life of a devout and worldly woman. Writing initially to seek solace in the long nights of her widowhood, Glikl continued to record the joys and tribulations of her family and community in an account unique for its impressive literary talents and strong invocation of self. Through intensely personal recollections, Glikl weaves stories and traditional tales that express her thoughts and beliefs. While influenced by popular Yiddish moral literature, Glikl’s frequent use of first person and the significance she assigns her own life experience set the work apart. Informed by fidelity to the original Yiddish text, this authoritative new translation is fully annotated to explicate Glikl’s life and times, offering readers a rich context for appreciating this classic work.
 
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Global Icons
Apertures to the Popular
Bishnupriya Ghosh
Duke University Press, 2011
A widely disseminated photograph of Phoolan Devi, India’s famous bandit queen, surrendering to police forces in 1983 became an emotional touchstone for Indians who saw the outlaw as a lower-caste folk hero. That affective response was reignited in 1994 with the release of a feature film based on Phoolan Devi’s life. Despite charges of murder, arson, and looting pending against her, the bandit queen was elected to India’s parliament in 1996. Bishnupriya Ghosh considers Phoolan Devi, as well as Mother Teresa and Arundhati Roy, the prize winning author turned environmental activist, to be global icons: highly visible public figures capable of galvanizing intense affect and sometimes even catalyzing social change. Ghosh develops a materialist theory of global iconicity, taking into account the emotional and sensory responses that these iconic figures elicit, the globalized mass media through which their images and life stories travel, and the multiple modernities within which they are interpreted. The collective aspirations embodied in figures such as Barack Obama, Eva Perón, and Princess Diana show that Ghosh’s theory applies not just in South Asia but around the world.
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The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Duke University Press, 2009
Born in the Río Grande Valley of south Texas, independent scholar and creative writer Gloria Anzaldúa was an internationally acclaimed cultural theorist. As the author of Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa played a major role in shaping contemporary Chicano/a and lesbian/queer theories and identities. As an editor of three anthologies, including the groundbreaking This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, she played an equally vital role in developing an inclusionary, multicultural feminist movement. A versatile author, Anzaldúa published poetry, theoretical essays, short stories, autobiographical narratives, interviews, and children’s books. Her work, which has been included in more than 100 anthologies to date, has helped to transform academic fields including American, Chicano/a, composition, ethnic, literary, and women’s studies.

This reader—which provides a representative sample of the poetry, prose, fiction, and experimental autobiographical writing that Anzaldúa produced during her thirty-year career—demonstrates the breadth and philosophical depth of her work. While the reader contains much of Anzaldúa’s published writing (including several pieces now out of print), more than half the material has never before been published. This newly available work offers fresh insights into crucial aspects of Anzaldúa’s life and career, including her upbringing, education, teaching experiences, writing practice and aesthetics, lifelong health struggles, and interest in visual art, as well as her theories of disability, multiculturalism, pedagogy, and spiritual activism. The pieces are arranged chronologically; each one is preceded by a brief introduction. The collection includes a glossary of Anzaldúa’s key terms and concepts, a timeline of her life, primary and secondary bibliographies, and a detailed index.

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Glory in Their Spirit
How Four Black Women Took On the Army during World War II
Sandra M Bolzenius
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Before Rosa Parks and the March on Washington, four African American women risked their careers and freedom to defy the United States Army over segregation. Women Army Corps (WAC) privates Mary Green, Anna Morrison, Johnnie Murphy, and Alice Young enlisted to serve their country, improve their lives, and claim the privileges of citizenship long denied them. Promised a chance at training and skilled positions, they saw white WACs assigned to those better jobs and found themselves relegated to work as orderlies. In 1945, their strike alongside fifty other WACs captured the nation's attention and ignited passionate debates on racism, women in the military, and patriotism. Glory in Their Spirit presents the powerful story of their persistence and the public uproar that ensued. Newspapers chose sides. Civil rights activists coalesced to wield a new power. The military, meanwhile, found itself increasingly unable to justify its policies. In the end, Green, Morrison, Murphy, and Young chose court-martial over a return to menial duties. But their courage pushed the segregated military to the breaking point ”and helped steer one of American's most powerful institutions onto a new road toward progress and justice.
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Godly Women
Fundamentalism and Female Power
Brasher, Brenda E
Rutgers University Press, 1997
One of Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Books of 1998

Fundamentalist women are often depicted as dedicated to furthering the goals and ideas of fundamentalist men and thus of ancillary importance to the movement as a whole. Godly Women, Brenda Brasher's groundbreaking ethnographic study, reveals the paradox that fundamentalist women can be powerful people in a religious cosmos generally understood to be organized around their disempowerment. Brasher spent six months as an active participant in two Christian fundamentalist congregations to study firsthand the power of fundamentalist women. In addition to the narrow set of religious beliefs that constitute each congregation, she discovered that gender functions as a sacred partition which literally divides the congregation in two, establishing parallel religious worlds. The first of these worlds is led by men and encompasses overall congregational life; the second is a world composed of and led solely by women. Brasher explores how and why women become involved in this highly gendered religious world by examining women's ministries, Bible study groups, and conversion narratives. She discovers that women-only activities create and sustain a parallel symbolic world within and among congregations, which improves women's ability to direct the course of their lives and empowers them in their relationships with others. The women develop intimate social networks that act as a resource for those in distress and provide the basis for political coalition when women wish to alter the patterns of congregational life. Brasher's study sheds new light on the ideas and faith experiences of fundamentalist women, revealing that the religiosity they develop is not as disempowering as one might think. Brenda Brasher is an assistant professor of religion at Mount Union College.
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Gold Diggers and Silver Miners
Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode
Marion S. Goldman
University of Michigan Press, 1981
A study of prostitution in 19th-century Virginia City
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Gone to Another Meeting
The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993
Faith Rogow
University of Alabama Press, 1993

The first comprehensive history of the oldest national religious Jewish women's organization in the United States

Gone to Another Meeting charts the development of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) and its impact on both the Jewish Community in the United States and American Society in general.

Founded in 1893 by Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, NCJW provided a conduit through which Jewish women’s voices could be heard and brought a Jewish voice to America’s women’s rights movement. NCJW would come to represent both the modernization and renewal of traditional Jewish womanhood. Through its emphasis on motherhood, its adoption of domestic feminism, and its efforts to carve a distinct Jewish niche in the late 19th-century Progressive social reform movement in the largely Christian world of women’s clubs, NCJW was instrumental in defining a uniquely American version of Jewish womanhood.
 

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Good Maya Women
Migration and Revitalization of Clothing and Language in Highland Guatemala
by Joyce N. Bennett
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Analyzes the forced migration of Maya women from highland Guatemala and their turn toward language and Indigenous clothing in their homeland
 
Good Maya Women: Migration and Revitalization of Clothing and Language in Highland Guatemala analyzes how Indigenous women’s migration contributes to women’s empowerment in their home communities in Guatemala. This decolonial ethnographic analysis of Kaqchikel Maya women’s linguistic and cultural activism demonstrates that marginalized people can and do experience empowerment and hope for the future of their communities, even while living under oppressive neoliberal regimes. Joyce N. Bennett contests dominant frameworks of affect theory holding that marginalized peoples never truly experience unrestricted hope or empowerment, and she contributes new understandings of the intimate connections between Indigenous women, migration, and language and clothing revitalization.
 
Based on more than twenty months of fieldwork, the study begins with an ethnographic investigation of how economic policies force Indigenous women into migration for wage work. To survive, many, like the three young women profiled in this ethnography, are forced to leave their schooling, families, and highland homes to work in cities or other countries. They might work, for example, as vendors, selling crafts to tourists, or as housekeepers or waitresses. Their work exposes them to structural violence, including anti-Indigenous slurs, sexual harassment and violence, and robbery.
 
Furthermore, the women are pressured to wear Western clothing and to speak Spanish, which endangers Indigenous culture and language in Guatemala. Yet the Indigenous migrant women profiled do not abandon their Indigenous clothing and language, in this case Kaqchikel Maya. Instead, they find inspiration and pride in revitalizing Kaqchikel traditions in their hometowns post-migration. As women attempt to revitalize Kaqchikel Maya language and clothing, they seek to earn the title of “good” women in their home communities.
 
Unpacking women’s daily activisms reveals that women attempt to retain their language and clothing and also collectively seek to make space for Indigenous people in the modern world. Bennett reveals that women find their attempts at revitalization to be personally empowering, even when their communities do not support them.
 
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Good Reasons to Run
Women and Political Candidacy
Edited by Shauna L. Shames, Rachel I. Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Langan Teele
Temple University Press, 2020

After the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a large cohort of women emerged to run for office. Their efforts changed the landscape of candidates and representation. However, women are still far less likely than men to seek elective office, and face biases and obstacles in campaigns. (Women running for Congress make twice as many phone calls as men to raise the same contributions.) 

The editors and contributors to Good Reasons to Run, a mix of scholars and practitioners, examine the reasons why women run—and do not run—for political office. They focus on the opportunities, policies, and structures that promote women’s candidacies. How do nonprofits help recruit and finance women as candidates? And what role does money play in women’s campaigns? 

The essays in Good Reasons to Run ask not just who wants to run, but how to activate and encourage such ambition among a larger population of potential female candidates while also increasing the diversity of women running for office.

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Good-Natured Feminist
Ecofeminism And The Quest For Democracy
Catriona Sandilands
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

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Gossip, Markets, and Gender
How Dialogue Constructs Moral Value in Post-Socialist Kilimanjaro
Tuulikki Pietilä
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

"All traders are thieves, especially women traders," people often assured social anthropologist Tuulikki Pietilä during her field work in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, in the mid-1990s. Equally common were stories about businessmen who had "bought a spirit" for their enrichment. Pietilä places these and similar comments in the context of the liberalization of the Tanzanian economy that began in the 1980s, when many men and women found themselves newly enmeshed in the burgeoning market economy. Even as emerging private markets strengthened the position of enterprising people, economic resources did not automatically lead to heightened social position. Instead, social recognition remained tied to a complex cultural negotiation through stories and gossip in markets, bars, and neighborhoods.
    With its rich ethnographic detail, Gossip, Markets, and Gender shows how gossip and the responses to it form an ongoing dialogue through which the moral reputations of trading women and businessmen, and cultural ideas about moral value and gender, are constructed and rethought. By combining a sociolinguistic study of talk, storytelling, and conversation with analysis of gender, the political economy of trading, and the moral economy of personhood, Pietilä reveals a new perspective on the globalization of the market economy and its meaning and impact on the local level.

Winner, Aidoo-Snyder Prize, African Studies Association Women’s Caucus

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The Grasinski Girls
The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made
Mary Patrice Erdmans
Ohio University Press, 2004

The Grasinski Girls were working-class Americans of Polish descent, born in the 1920s and 1930s, who created lives typical of women in their day. They went to high school, married, and had children. For the most part, they stayed home to raise their children. And they were happy doing that. They took care of their appearance and their husbands, who took care of them. Like most women of their generation, they did not join the women’s movement, and today they either reject or shy away from feminism.

Basing her account on interviews with her mother and aunts, Mary Erdmans explores the private lives of these white, Christian women in the post-World War II generation. She compares them, at times, to her own postfeminist generation. Situating these women within the religious routines that shaped their lives, Professor Erdmans explores how gender, class, ethnicity, and religion shaped the choices the Grasinski sisters were given as well as the choices they made. These women are both acted upon and actors; they are privileged and disadvantaged; they resist and surrender; they petition the Lord and accept His will.

The Grasinski Girls examines the complexity of ordinary lives, exposing privileges taken for granted as well as nuances of oppression often overlooked. Erdmans brings rigorous scholarship and familial insight to bear on the realities of twentieth-century working-class white women in America.

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A Great Big Girl Like Me
The Films of Marie Dressler
Victoria Sturtevant
University of Illinois Press, 2008
In this study of Marie Dressler, MGM's most profitable movie star in the early 1930s, Victoria Sturtevant analyzes Dressler's use of her body to challenge Hollywood's standards for leading ladies. At five feet seven inches tall and two hundred pounds, Dressler was never considered the popular "delicate beauty," often playing ugly ducklings, old maids, doting mothers, and imperious dowagers. However, Dressler's body, her fearless physicality, and her athletic slapstick routines commanded the screen. Although an unlikely movie star, Dressler represented for Depression-era audiences a sign of abundance and generosity in a time of scarcity.

This premier analysis of her body of work explores how Dressler refocused the generic frame of her films beyond the shallow problems of the rich and beautiful, instead dignifying the marginalized, the elderly, women, and the poor. Sturtevant inteprets the meanings of Dressler's body through different genres, venues, and historical periods by looking at her vaudeville career, her transgressive representation of an "unruly" yet sexual body in Emma and Christopher Bean, ideas of the body politic in the films Politics and Prosperity, and Dressler as a mythic body in Min and Bill and Tugboat Annie.

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The Great Upheaval
Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria
Judith A. Byfield
Ohio University Press, 2021
This social and intellectual history of women’s political activism in postwar Nigeria reveals the importance of gender to the study of nationalism and poses new questions about Nigeria’s colonial past and independent future. In the years following World War II, the women of Abeokuta, Nigeria, staged a successful tax revolt that led to the formation first of the Abeokuta Women’s Union and then of Nigeria’s first national women’s organization, the Nigerian Women’s Union, in 1949. These organizations became central to a new political vision, a way for women across Nigeria to define their interests, desires, and needs while fulfilling the obligations and responsibilities of citizenship. In The Great Upheaval, Judith A. Byfield has crafted a finely textured social and intellectual history of gender and nation making that not only tells a story of women’s postwar activism but also grounds it in a nuanced account of the complex tax system that generated the “upheaval.” Byfield captures the dynamism of women’s political engagement in Nigeria’s postwar period and illuminates the centrality of gender to the study of nationalism. She thus offers new lines of inquiry into the late colonial era and its consequences for the future Nigerian state. Ultimately, she challenges readers to problematize the collapse of her female subjects' greatest aspiration, universal franchise, when the country achieved independence in 1960.
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The Great Woman Singer
Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music
Licia Fiol-Matta
Duke University Press, 2017
Licia Fiol-Matta traces the careers of four iconic Puerto Rican singers—Myrta Silva, Ruth Fernández, Ernestina Reyes, and Lucecita Benítez—to explore how their voices and performance style transform the possibilities for comprehending the figure of the woman singer. Fiol-Matta shows how these musicians, despite seemingly intractable demands to represent gender norms, exercised their artistic and political agency by challenging expectations of how they should look, sound, and act. Fiol-Matta also breaks with conceptualizations of the female pop voice as spontaneous and intuitive, interrogating the notion of "the great woman singer" to deploy her concept of the "thinking voice"—an event of music, voice, and listening that rewrites dominant narratives. Anchored in the work of Lacan, Foucault, and others, Fiol-Matta's theorization of voice and gender in The Great Woman Singer makes accessible the singing voice's conceptual dimensions while revealing a dynamic archive of Puerto Rican and Latin American popular music.
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Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BCE–200 CE
Allison Glazebrook
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BCE–200 CE challenges the often-romanticized view of the prostitute as an urbane and liberated courtesan by examining the social and economic realities of the sex industry in Greco-Roman culture. Departing from the conventional focus on elite society, these essays consider the Greek prostitute as displaced foreigner, slave, and member of an urban underclass.
    The contributors draw on a wide range of material and textual evidence to discuss portrayals of prostitutes on painted vases and in the literary tradition, their roles at symposia (Greek drinking parties), and their place in the everyday life of the polis. Reassessing many assumptions about the people who provided and purchased sexual services, this volume yields a new look at gender, sexuality, urbanism, and economy in the ancient Mediterranean world.

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Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam
Short Stories by Caribbean Women
Esteves, Carmen C
Rutgers University Press, 1991
This collection of short stories features moving tales from the rich Caribbean oral tradition, stories that question women's traditional roles, present women's perspectives on the history of Caribbean slavery and colonialism, and convey the beautiful cadences of the language of Caribbean women. It offers the general reader a broad selection of the themes, styles, and techniques characteristic of contemporary women's fiction in the Caribbean. There are twenty-seven enjoyable and vibrant tales in this anthology, some of them originally written in English, others in French, Dutch, and Spanish. There are writers from Guadeloupe, Dominica, Jamaica, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Antigua, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Surinam. Along with stories by well-known writers such as Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Maryse Conde, and Rosario Ferre, the anthology also includes first-rate stories by lesser-known but equally talented writers. The collection also contains a critical introduction, biographical notes, and a bibliography.
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The Grind
Black Women and Survival in the Inner City
McCurn, Alexis S
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Few scholars have explored the collective experiences of women living in the inner city and the innovative strategies they develop to navigate daily life in this setting. The Grind illustrates the lived experiences of poor African American women and the creative strategies they develop to manage these events and survive in a community commonly exposed to violence.
 
Alexis S. McCurn draws on nearly two years of naturalistic field research among adolescents and adults in Oakland, California to provide an ethnographic account of how black women accomplish the routine tasks necessary for basic survival in poor inner-city neighborhoods and how the intersections of race, gender, and class shape how black women interact with others in public. This book makes the case that the daily consequences of racialized poverty in the lives of African Americans cannot be fully understood without accounting for the personal and collective experiences of poor black women. 
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Gross Misbehavior and Wickedness
A Notorious Divorce in Early Twentieth-Century America
Jean Elson
Temple University Press, 2017
The bitter and public court battle waged between Nina and James Walker of Newport, Rhode Island from 1909 to 1916 created a sensation throughout the nation with lurid accounts of—and gossip about—their marital troubles. The ordeal of this high-society couple, who wed as much for status as for love, is one of the prime examples of the growing trend of women seeking divorce during the early twentieth century. 
 
Gross Misbehavior and Wickedness—the charges Nina levied at James for his adultery (with the family governess) and extreme cruelty—recounts the protracted legal proceedings in juicy detail.
Jean Elson uses court documents, correspondence, journals, and interviews with descendants to recount the salacious case. In the process, she underscores how divorce—in an era when women needed husbands for economic support—was associated with women’s aspirations for independence and rights. The Walkers’ dispute, replete with plot twists and memorable characters, sheds light on a critical period in the evolution of American culture. 
 
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Growing Girls
The Natural Origins of Girls' Organizations in America
Miller, Susan A
Rutgers University Press, 2007
In the early years of the twentieth century, Americans began to recognize adolescence as a developmental phase distinct from both childhood and adulthood. This awareness, however, came fraught with anxiety about the debilitating effects of modern life on adolescents of both sexes. For boys, competitive sports as well as "primitive" outdoor activities offered by fledging organizations such as the Boy Scouts would enable them to combat the effeminacy of an overly civilized society. But for girls, the remedy wasn't quite so clear.

Surprisingly, the "girl problem"?a crisis caused by the transition from a sheltered, family-centered Victorian childhood to modern adolescence where self-control and a strong democratic spirit were required of reliable citizens?was also solved by way of traditionally masculine, adventurous, outdoor activities, as practiced by the Girl Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, and many other similar organizations.

Susan A. Miller explores these girls' organizations that sprung up in the first half of the twentieth century from a socio-historical perspective, showing how the notions of uniform identity, civic duty, "primitive domesticity," and fitness shaped the formation of the modern girl.

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Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany
Dagmar Reese, Translated by William Templer
University of Michigan Press, 2010
Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany explores the world of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), the female section within the Hitler Youth that included almost all German girls aged 10 to 14. The BDM is often enveloped in myths; German girls were brought up to be the compliant handmaidens of National Socialism, their mental horizon restricted to the "three Ks" of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, and church).

Dagmar Reese, however, depicts another picture of life in the BDM. She explores how and in what way the National Socialists were successful in linking up with the interests of contemporary girls and young women and providing them a social life of their own. The girls in the BDM found latitude for their own development while taking on responsibilities that integrated them within the folds of the National Socialist state.

"At last available in English, this pioneering study provides fresh insights into the ways in which the Nazi regime changed young 'Aryan' women's lives through appeals to female self-esteem that were not obviously defined by Nazi ideology, but drove a wedge between parents and children. Thoughtful analysis of detailed interviews reveals the day-to-day functioning of the Third Reich in different social milieus and its impact on women's lives beyond 1945. A must-read for anyone interested in the gendered dynamics of Nazi modernity and the lack of sustained opposition to National Socialism."
--Uta Poiger, University of Washington

"In this highly readable translation, Reese provocatively identifies Nazi girls league members' surprisingly positive memories and reveals significant implications for the functioning of Nazi society. Reaching across disciplines, this work is for experts and for the classroom alike."
--Belinda Davis, Rutgers University

Dagmar Reese is The Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum Potsdam researcher on the DFG-project "Georg Simmels Geschlechtertheorien im ‚fin de siecle' Berlin", 2004

William Templer is a widely published translator from German and Hebrew and is on the staff of Rajamangala University of Technology Srivijaya.
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Guilty Pleasures
Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna
Pamela Robertson
Duke University Press, 1996
“Camp,” Mae West told Playboy, “is the kinda comedy where they imitate me.” But what was West doing, if not camp itself? Guilty Pleasures puts women back into the history of camp, a story long confined to gay male practice. Emphasizing the distinctive roles women have played as producers and consumers of camp, Pamela Robertson links her subject to feminist discussions of gender parody, performance, and spectatorship. Her book offers a heady tour of social and cultural criticism at its most interesting, and American culture at its most flamboyant.
Robertson grounds her theoretical discussion of female performance and spectatorship in detailed studies of figures such as Mae West, Joan Crawford, and Madonna. She locates these figures in turn within a tradition of feminist camp—a female form of aestheticism related to masquerade and rooted in burlesque, parallel to but different from gay male camp. Through analyses of films from Gold Diggers of 1933 to Johnny Guitar, as well as video and television, Robertson shows how the gold digger is to feminist camp what the dandy is to gay male camp—its original personification and defining voice. Set against a backdrop of social history, her analysis demonstrates that feminist camp flourishes during periods of antifeminist backlash in America, and that it reflects a working-class sensibility particularly attuned to changing attitudes toward women’s work and sexuality.
Appealing to a wide range of scholars spanning the fields of film and mass culture, feminism, gay/lesbian/queer studies, and cultural studies, Guilty Pleasures will also attract an audience of general readers interested in camp and popular culture.
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