Gender studies: women and girls Books

Responding to the most widely read breastfeeding manual, La Leche League's The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, Robyn Lee's The Ethics and Politics of Breastfeeding explores breastfeeding as an art that must be developed through skillful application of...

Disruptive Power examines a surprising revival of faith in Catholic miracles in Germany from the 1920s to the 1960s. The book follows the dramatic stigmata of Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth and her powerful circle of followers that included theologians,...

Critical Alliances argues that late-Victorian and modernist feminist authors saw in literary representations of female collaboration an opportunity to produce new gender and economic roles for women. It is not often that one thinks of female allegiances...

Violence against women is usually framed as an issue of interpersonal violence perpetuated by men. While domestic violence and sexual assault are significant social problems, such a narrow framing obscures the diversity of women's experience, fails to...

Inspired by the question of "what's next?" in the field of Canadian women's and gender history, this broadly historiographical volume represents a conversation among established and emerging scholars who share a commitment to understanding the past from...

(From the introduction) Collectively, these quilts and their stories tell the story of the women of Texas-hardships endured and overcome, friendships made, churches, schools, and communities established, of births, marriages, deaths-all the myriad...

Emmy Arnold was born in 1883 in Riva, Latvia, to a prominent family of academics. As an adult she turned her back on the middle-class milieu of her upbringing and married Eberhard Arnold, a revolutionary public speaker. In 1920 the couple left their...

It is summer, 1940. As Hitler's armies turn mainland Europe into a mass graveyard, his feared Luftwaffe rain bombs on England. Meanwhile, amid the green hills of the Cotswolds, a nest of "enemy aliens" has been discovered: the Bruderhof, a Christian...

What is the purpose of my life? What is friendship? What is faith? These universal questions, which are especially relevant to young adults, form the heart of this compelling story, told through real letters and diary entries.Anni, who grows from her...

Based on a year's research from within a Brazilian slum, this study follows a series of unemployed women who watch up to six hours of telenovelas a day, often in the midst of arduous physical labour in the home. The women suffer in relation to their...

'From Happy Homemaker to Desperate Housewives: Motherhood and Popular Television' is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to key debates concerning the representations of motherhood, motherwork and the maternal role in contemporary television...

'Jane Austen and her Readers, 17861945' is a study of the history of reading Jane Austen's novels. It discusses Austen's own ideas about books and readers, the uses she makes of her reading, and the aspects of her style that are related to the ways in...

"Jane Austen's Families" focuses on family dynamics in Jane Austen's six novels. After a general introduction, which places its approach in the context of ethical criticism, it divides into two sections. The first, "Family Dynamics," consists of three...

With characteristic intelligence, wit, and feminist insight, Ellen Willis addresses democracy as she sees it: "a commitment to individual freedom and egalitarian self-government in every area of social, economic, and cultural life." Moving between...

From the New Yorker's inimitable first pop music critic comes this pioneering collection of essays by a conscientious writer whose political realm is both radical and rational, and whose prime preoccupations are with rock 'n' roll, sexuality, and above...

In Hypertext and the Female Imaginary, Jaishree K. Odin reveals how media that use hypertextual strategies of narrative fragmentation provocatively engage questions of gender or cultural difference. Odin addresses hypertext on two levels: as an artistic...

Women's agency: Is it a matter of an individual's capacity for autonomy? Or of the social conditions that facilitate freedom? Combining theoretical and empirical perspectives, Carisa R. Showden investigates what exactly makes an agent and how that agency...

In the 1990s, a boom in autobiographical novels and memoirs about incest emerged, making incest one of the hottest topics to connect daytime TV talk shows, the self-help industry, and the literary publishing circuit. In Everybody's Family Romance,...

In American Piets, Ruby C. Tapia reveals how visual representations of racialized motherhood shape and reflect national citizenship. By means of a sustained engagement with Roland Barthes's suturing of race, death, and the maternal in Camera Lucida,...

There are two major women's movements in Morocco: the Islamists who hold shari'a as the platform for building a culture of women's rights, and the feminists who use the United Nations' framework to amend shari'a law. Between Feminism and Islam shows how...

Many immigrant communities along the U.S. border with Mexico are colonias, border settlements lacking infrastructure or safe housing. A Jumble of NeedsSurprisingly, Dolhinow reveals, many NGOs promote neoliberal ideals, resulting in continued...

In late nineteenth-century England, "mannish" women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? Citizen, Invert, Queer illustrates...

Unraveling the Garment Industry is an ambitious investigation of the politics of labor and protest within an industry that has come to define the possibilities and abuses of globalization and its feminized labor: the garment industry. Focusing on three...

Alice Munro's Miraculous Art is a collection of sixteen original essays on Nobel laureate Alice Munro's writings. The volume covers the entirety of Munro's career, from the first stories she published in the early 1950s as an undergraduate at the...

Margaret Atwood enjoys a unique prominence in Canadian letters. With over thirty books to her credit, in genres ranging from children's writing to dystopic novels, she is as creatively diverse as she is internationally acclaimed. Her success, however,...

Irish women writers entered the British and international publishing scene in unprecedented numbers in the period between 1878 and 1922. Literary history is only now beginning to give them the attention they deserve for their contributions to the...

This book explores the experiences of a range of women from the early days of 1914, through the big events of the war on the Eastern Front. Their diaries, letters, memoirs and journalism are used to investigate the extraordinary role played by British...

This interdisciplinary study of competing representations of the Virgin Mary examines how anxieties about religious and gender identities intersected to create public controversies that, whilst ostensibly about theology and liturgy, were also attempts to...

At once pervasive and marginal, appealing and repellent, exemplary and atypical, the women of the Bible provoke an assortment of readings across early modern literature. Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550-1700 draws attention to the...

Imagining women readers reassesses the cultural significance of women's reading in the period 1789-1820. From the turbulent years following the French Revolution to the fiction of Jane Austen, this book charts the rise of a self-regulating reader, who...

Provides an original and challenging perspective on the history of chocolate, questioning the romantic images of the commodity offered in marketing campaigns. It weaves together a variety of previously unexamined sources including oral histories of women...

Women Police examines the professional roles, identities, activities and everyday experiences of women employed within the UK police service since the First World War against a backdrop of social and cultural change.As the first in-depth historical study...

Drawing on a unique body of oral history interviews, archival material and published sources, this book shows how women's participation in radical Basque nationalism has changed from the founding of ETA in 1959 to the present. It analyses several aspects...

Vanishing for the vote recounts what happened on one night, Sunday 2 April, 1911, when the Liberal government demanded every household comply with its census requirements. Suffragette organisations urged women, all still voteless, to boycott this census...

This study brings images of holy motherhood and childbearing into the centre of an art-historical enquiry, showing how images worked not only to script and maintain gender and social roles within patriarchal society but also to offer viewers ways of...

This book explores the contribution that five conservative, voluntary and popular women's organisations made to women's lives and to the campaign for women's rights throughout the period 1928-64. The book challenges existing histories of the women's...

Women and the Liberal Democrats is a timely and original exploration of women's representation and the third party in UK politics. Based on extensive research, it is the first comprehensive gendered analysis of the Liberal Democrats and the research...

This is the first academic book ever written on women and body hair, which has been seen until now as too trivial, ridiculous or revolting to write about. Even feminist writers or researchers on the body have found remarkably little to say about body...

This is an original, full length biography of Britain's first twentieth-century black feminist - Una Marson - poet, playwright, and social activist and BBC broadcaster. Una Marson is recognised today as the first major woman poet of the Caribbean and as...

This groundbreaking anthology, part of the Women, Theatre and Performance series, brings together an extraordinary mix of one-act and full length plays and solo performance texts written by women. Included in the volume are texts by Beatrice Herford,...

"This is the first attempt to recover the entirety of women's contribution to British museums in the period 1850-1914. It sheds lights on women as museum workers, donors and visitors, demonstrates that through such roles women profoundly influenced the...

This book provides the first full-length biography of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy (1833-1918) - someone referred to among contemporaries as 'the grey matter in the brain' of the late-Victorian women's movement. A pacifist, humanitarian 'free-thinker',...

The anthology of original sources from c.1400 to 1650, translated form Italian or Latin, and accompanied by introductions and bibliographies, is concerned with women's varied involvement with the visual arts and material culture of their day. The readers...

Available in paperback for the first time, this important collection of essays illustrates the complexity, richness and diversity of the suffrage movement.Combining historical reappraisal with lively accounts of the culture of the women's suffrage...

For too long, American women have been hidden in the history of the Cold War. In *Cold War women* Helen Laville recovers their significance by examining the activities and ambitions of American women's organisations in the long period of uneasy peace...