Gender Studies: Books

In this new edition of her popular and highly lauded book, Harriet Bradley provides an introduction to the concept of gender and the different theoretical approaches which have developed within gender studies. This accessible book will be of interest across the social sciences, and anyone interested in contemporary relations between women and men.

An authoritative guide on gender prehistory for researchers, instructors and students in anthropology, archaeology, and gender studies. Features numerous regional and thematic topics authored by established specialists in the field, with incisive coverage of gender research in prehistoric and protohistoric cultures of Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas and the Pacific

Integrating both sex (biological characteristics) and gender (socially constructed factors) into any health study is necessary in order to produce more accurate, effective, and relevant research findings. This book provides the first resource dedicated to critically examining gender and sex study design, methods, and analysis in health research.

Gender and Culture in Psychology introduces new approaches to the psychological study of gender that bring together feminist psychology, socio-cultural psychology, discursive psychology and critical psychology.

This collection highlights the fluidity of masculinity in American popular culture at the turn of the new millennium and beyond by examining possibilities for male identity formation. Each chapter mines American popular culture to pose questions about the process of gender creation and the contestation of masculinities as constantly changing political forms.

This book is about the gender dimensions of natural resource exploitation and management, with a focus on Asia.

Originally published in 1993. This introductory text brings the somewhat gender blind fields of educational administration and policy into contact with feminism.

Wonder Woman, created in 1941, on the brink of World War II, is the most popular female superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, she has lasted the longest and commanded the most vast and wildly passionate following. Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike others, she also has a secret history. In Jill Lepore's riveting work of historical detection, Wonder Woman's story provides the missing link in the history of the struggle for women's rights--a chain of events that begins with the women's suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later. This edition includes a new afterword with fresh revelations based on never before seen letters and photographs from the Marston family's papers. With 161 illustrations and 16 pages in full color

Exotic, seductive, and doomed: the antebellum mixed-race free woman of color has long operated as a metaphor for New Orleans. Commonly known as a "quadroon," she and the city she represents rest irretrievably condemned in the popular historical imagination by the linked sins of slavery and interracial sex. However, as Emily Clark shows, the rich archives of New Orleans tell a different story. Free women of color with ancestral roots in New Orleans were as likely to marry in the 1820s as white women. And marriage, not concubinage, was the basis of their family structure. In The Strange History of the American Quadroon, Clark investigates how the narrative of the erotic colored mistress became an elaborate literary and commercial trope, persisting as a symbol that long outlived the political and cultural purposes for which it had been created. Untangling myth and memory, she presents a dramatically new and nuanced understanding of the myths and realities of New Orleans's free women of color.

The definitive political biography of Rosa Parks examines her six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement Presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who, with a single act, birthed the modern civil rights movement, Theoharis provides a revealing window into Parks's politics and years of activism. She shows readers how this civil rights movement radical sought--for more than a half a century--to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice.

Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace explores the social and political activism of American Jewish women from approximately 1890 to the beginnings of World War II. The book demonstrates that no history of the birth control, suffrage, or peace movements in the United States is complete without analyzing the impact of Jewish women's presence.

From the author of the acclaimed Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, a landmark work of lesbian history that both "sets the record straight (or unstraight)" for all Americans and "provides a usable past" for lesbians "This is a book about how millions of American women became what they are now: full citizens, educated, and capable of earning a decent living for themselves. But it departs from other such histories because it focuses on how certain late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women whose lives can be described as 'lesbian' were in the forefront of the battle to procure the rights and privileges that large numbers of Americans enjoy today." A groundbreaking reappraisal of those women known by history but whose histories are incomplete, To Believe in Women examines how their lesbianism may in fact have facilitated their accomplishments. Lillian Faderman, twice winner of the Lambda Award, persuasively argues that even before a "lesbian identity" was defined, many early female leaders had what would now be called lesbian relationships, free from the constraints of traditional heterosexual arrangements that might otherwise have impeded their pursuits in education, politics, and culture. A book of impeccable research and compelling readability, To Believe in Women will be a source of enlightenment for all, and for many a singular source of pride.

In Separated by Their Sex, Mary Beth Norton offers a bold genealogy that shows how gender came to determine the right of access to the Anglo-American public sphere by the middle of the eighteenth century. Earlier, high-status men and women alike had been recognized as appropriate political actors, as exemplified during and after Bacon's Rebellion by the actions of--and reactions to--Lady Frances Berkeley, wife of Virginia's governor. By contrast, when the first ordinary English women to claim a political voice directed group petitions to Parliament during the Civil War of the 1640s, men relentlessly criticized and parodied their efforts. Even so, as late as 1690 Anglo-American women's political interests and opinions were publicly acknowledged. Norton traces the profound shift in attitudes toward women's participation in public affairs to the age's cultural arbiters, including John Dunton, editor of the Athenian Mercury, a popular 1690s periodical that promoted women's links to husband, family, and household. Fittingly, Dunton was the first author known to apply the word "private" to women and their domestic lives. Subsequently, the immensely influential authors Richard Steele and Joseph Addison (in the Tatler and the Spectator) advanced the notion that women's participation in politics--even in political dialogues--was absurd. They and many imitators on both sides of the Atlantic argued that women should confine themselves to home and family, a position that American women themselves had adopted by the 1760s. Colonial women incorporated the novel ideas into their self-conceptions; during such "private" activities as sitting around a table drinking tea, they worked to define their own lives. On the cusp of the American Revolution, Norton concludes, a newly gendered public-private division was firmly in place.

In the last several decades, U.S. women's history has come of age. Not only have historians challenged the national narrative on the basis of their rich explorations of the personal, the social, the economic, and the political, but they have also entered into dialogues with each other over the meaning of women's history itself. In this collection of seventeen original essays on women's lives from the colonial period to the present, contributors take the competing forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and region into account. Among many other examples, they examine how conceptions of gender shaped government officials' attitudes towards East Asian immigrants; how race and gender inequality pervaded the welfare state; and how color and class shaped Mexican American women's mobilization for civil and labor rights.

Drawing on the diaries of a midwife and healer in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier.

"A Studio of Her Own tells the interwoven stories of some forty women artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploring, in the author's words, "both the individual lives and talents of Boston women artists and the integrated relationships that enabled many of them to excel."" "No one category or medium can encompass these careers, which range from the paintings of Ellen Day Hale and the sculptures of Katharine Lane Weems to the photographs of Sarah Sears and the innovative book designs of Sarah Wyman Whitman. Included as well are lengthy discussions of the importance of the Arts and Crafts movement; the conflicts presented by concerns of marriage and family (as well as the relative freedom offered by the "Boston marriage" between two women); the role of the MFA School and of such key instructors as Frank W. Benson, William Rimmer, and Edmund Tarbell; and the ways in which societal changes have influenced the art itself. Perhaps more than anything, this is a story of community and resourcefulness, in which some artists adopted "suitable" media and subject matter - still lifes, arts and crafts - and made them their own, while others campaigned for the right to work in such traditionally "male" domains as monumental sculpture, and still others braved the scandal of painting from live nude models, traveling abroad to study their art, or showing their work on a national scale." "Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, A Studio of Her Own is the definitive work on an important but little-known moment in America's cultural history"--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Inventing Black Women fills important gaps in our understanding of how African American women poets have resisted those conventional notions of gender and race that limit the visibility of Black female subjects. The first historical and thematic survey of African American women's poetry, this book examines the key developments that have shaped the growing body of poems by and about Black women over the nearly 125 years since the end of slavery and Reconstruction, as it offers incisive readings of individual works by important poets such as Alice B. Neal, Maggie Pogue Johnson, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and many others. Ajuan Maria Mance establishes that the history of African American women's poetry revolves around the struggle of the Black female poet against two marginalizing forces: the widespread association of womanhood with the figure of the middle-class, white female; and the similar association of Blackness with the figure of the African American male. In so doing, she looks closely at the major trends in Black women's poetry during each of four critical moments in African American literary history: the post-Reconstruction era from 1877 to 1910; the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; the Black Arts Movement from 1965 to 1975; and the late twentieth century from 1975 to 2000. Inventing Black Women will prove an invaluable resource for scholars and students of American literature, African American studies, and women's studies.

Jane Austen's six complete novels and her juvenilia are examined in the context of civil society and gender. Steiner's study uses a variety of contexts to appraise Austen's work: Scottish Enlightenment theories of societal development, early-Romantic discourses on gender roles, modern sociological theories on the civilizing process.

Prior to the millennium, economists and policy makers argued that free trade between the United States and Mexico would benefit both Americans and Mexicans. They believed that NAFTA would be a "win-win" proposition that would offer U.S. companies new markets for their products and Mexicans the hope of living in a more developed country with the modern conveniences of wealthier nations. Blending rigorous economic and statistical analysis with concern for the people affected, Mexican Women in American Factories offers the first assessment of whether NAFTA has fulfilled these expectations by examining its socioeconomic impact on workers in a Mexican border town. Carolyn Tuttle led a group that interviewed 620 women maquila workers in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The responses from this representative sample refute many of the hopeful predictions made by scholars before NAFTA and reveal instead that little has improved for maquila workers. The women's stories make it plain that free trade has created more low-paying jobs in sweatshops where workers are exploited. Families of maquila workers live in one- or two-room houses with no running water, no drainage, and no heat. The multinational companies who operate the maquilas consistently break Mexican labor laws by requiring women to work more than nine hours a day, six days a week, without medical benefits, while the minimum wage they pay workers is insufficient to feed their families. These findings will make a crucial contribution to debates over free trade, CAFTA-DR, and the impact of globalization.

This book provides a critical assessment of the impact of UN Resolution 1325 by examining the effect of peacebuilding missions on increasing gender equality within conflict-affected countries. UN Resolution 1325 was adopted in October 2000, and was the first time that the security concerns of women in situations of armed conflict and their role in peacebuilding was placed on the agenda of the UN Security Council. It was an important step forward in terms of bringing women's rights and gender equality to bear in the UN's peace and security agenda. More than a decade after the adoption of this Resolution, its practical reality is yet to be substantially felt on the ground in the very societies and regions where women remain disproportionately affected by armed conflict and grossly under-represented in peace processes. This realization, in part, led to the adoption in 2008 and 2009 of three other Security Council Resolutions, on sexual violence in conflict, violence against women, and for the development of indicators to measure progress in addressing women, peace and security issues. The book draws together the findings from eight countries and four regional contexts to provide guidance on how the impact of Resolution 1325 can be measured, and how peacekeeping operations could improve their capacity to effectively engender security. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, gender studies, the United Nations, international security and IR in general.

Drawing on war propaganda, popular advertising, voluminous government records, and hundreds of letters and other accounts written by women in the 1940s, Melissa A. McEuen examines how extensively women's bodies and minds became "battlegrounds" in the U.S. fight for victory in World War II. Women were led to believe that the nation's success depended on their efforts--not just on factory floors, but at their dressing tables, bathroom sinks, and laundry rooms. They were to fill their arsenals with lipstick, nail polish, creams, and cleansers in their battles to meet the standards of ideal womanhood touted in magazines, newspapers, billboards, posters, pamphlets and in the rapidly expanding pinup genre. Scrutinized and sexualized in new ways, women understood that their faces, clothes, and comportment would indicate how seriously they took their responsibilities as citizens. McEuen also shows that the wartime rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and postwar opportunity coexisted uneasily with the realities of a racially stratified society. The context of war created and reinforced whiteness, and McEuen explores how African Americans grappled with whiteness as representing the true American identity. Using perspectives of cultural studies and feminist theory, Making War, Making Women offers a broad look at how women on the American home front grappled with a political culture that used their bodies in service of the war effort.

In Women Singer-Songwriters in Rock: A Populist Rebellion in the 1990s, Ronald D. Lankford Jr. argues that women singer-songwriters formed a substantial movement within popular music during the 1990s, making a significant social and aesthetic contribution that pushed feminism into mainstream American culture. Lankford examines in depth the work of several artists--including Alanis Morissette, PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, Courtney Love, Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan, and Sheryl Crow--offering thorough descriptions and analyses of their music, lyrics, and album art. By looking at both the broader movement and individual performers, this book provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the movement and its message. Lankford introduces the singer-songwriter movement and the artists and genres that paved the way for these 1990s rockers, establishing the arch of the popular movement of women in rock as it mirrored the rise of third wave feminism and sketching the cultural and political landscape that served as a backdrop to the women's singer-songwriter movement during the 1990s. Drawing from resources in books, journals, and zines, Lankford focuses on the exploration of women's issues within the music through analyses of its lyrics and album art and examines how the often hard-edged feminist content was able to filter into mainstream popular culture. To help illustrate this, the book includes a select discography of albums and singles, including their placement and number of weeks spent on various charts. A complete bibliography and index round out this important study, which is a must for fans and scholars of music, popular culture, and women's studies.

The abuse of women and children transcends geographical boundaries as well as economic, cultural, religious, political, and social divisions. Comprised of the work of more than 20 academics and practitioners from around the world, Criminal Abuse of Women and Children documents the atrocities that have been committed against these victims from ancient to modern times. It examines the causes of such abuse and provides a global survey of what forms of abuse exist and how cases are handled in various parts of the world. International Experts Survey Patterns of Abuse   Following an introduction to the historical antecedents and theoretical explanations of criminal abuse, the contributors review efforts at control and prevention. They focus on informal control mechanisms, religious intervention, and the criminal justice system, and highlighting the limitations that are inherent in these attempts. The remainder of the text consists mainly of case studies covering the various facets of abuse in numerous countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. The contributors also explore the role of community policing and supply a critical assessment of how American police practices may contribute to the continued victimization of women and children. A Call to Action to End the Scourge of Victimization A comprehensive analysis of the worldwide problem of the exploitation of women and children, the book elevates this topic to a subject worthy of academic discourse. It underlines the need for concerted global action and intervention at the national, regional, and local level.

nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;From admired historian--and coiner of one of feminism's most popular slogans--Laurel Thatcher Ulrich comes an exploration of what it means for women to make history. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;In 1976, in an obscure scholarly article, Ulrich wrote, "Well behaved women seldom make history."nbsp; Today these words appear on t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, greeting cards, and all sorts of Web sites and blogs.nbsp; Ulrich explains how that happened and what it means by looking back at women of the past who challenged the way history was written.nbsp; She ranges from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, to the twentieth century's Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One's Own.nbsp; Ulrich updates their attempts to reimagine female possibilities and looks at the women who didn't try to make history but did.nbsp; And she concludes by showing how the 1970s activists who created "second-wave feminism" also created a renaissance in the study of history.

Why aren't more women pursuing careers in science, engineering, and math? Is the lack of women in these fields a consequence of societal discouragements, innate differences in ability between the sexes, or differences in aspirations? These questions always spark a host of other questions - and a multiplicity of answers - all of which have important implications for gender equality and for retaining the nation's competitiveness in the technological marketplace. The most reliable and current knowledge about women's participation in science is presented in this collection of fifteen essays written by top researchers on gender differences in ability. The essayists were chosen to reflect the diversity and complexity of views on the topic, about which knowledge has been accumulating and evolving for decades. The editors provide an introduction that defines the key issues and embeds them in historical context and a conclusion that synthesizes and integrates the disparate views. psychologists and other social scientists, the contributors reframe this key controversy and challenge readers' emotional and political biases through solid empirical science. Taken together, the introduction, essays, and conclusion make a convincing case that sex differences are neither as unambiguous as earlier researchers suggested nor as insubstantial as some current critics claim. Sex differences in career choices are definitely not inevitable, as the past thirty years have documented both a sea change in the gender makeup of various fields and fluctuations in ability-score differences between the sexes. However, as the essays make clear, such changes leave open the possibility of cultural and biological bases for today's sex differences in science, engineering, and math participation.

Nearly half of all physicians and biologists are females, as are the majority of new psychologists, veterinarians, and dentists, suggesting that women have achieved equality with men in the workforce. But the ranks of professionals in math-intensive careers remain lopsidedly male; up to 93% of tenure-track academic positions in some of the most mathematically-oriented fields are held by men. Three main explanations have been advanced to explain the dearth of women in math-intensive careers, and in The Mathematics of Sex, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams describe and dissect the evidence for each. The first explanation involves innate ability--male brains are physiologically optimized to perform advanced mathematical and spatial operations; the second is that social and cultural biases inhibit females' training and success in mathematical fields; the third alleges that women are less interested in math-intensive careers than are men, preferring people-oriented pursuits. Drawing on research in endocrinology, economics, sociology, education, genetics, and psychology to arrive at their own unique, evidence-based conclusion, the authors argue that the problem is due to certain choices that women (but not men) are compelled to make in our society; that women tend not to favor math-intensive careers for certain reasons, and that sex differences in math and spatial ability cannot adequately explain the scarcity of women in these fields. The Mathematics of Sex represents the first time such a thorough synthesis of data has been carried out to solve the puzzle of women's underrepresentation in math-intensive careers. The result is a readable, engaging account suitable not only for academics in an array of disciplines, but for general readers as well--including educators, science policymakers, parents of daughters, and anyone intellectually curious about a key controversy of our time.