Women's History Month

Publication Date: 2020

n the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own.
In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond.

Publication Date 2020

In Recasting the Vote, Cathleen D. Cahill tells the powerful stories of a multiracial group of activists who propelled the national suffrage movement toward a more inclusive vision of equal rights. Cahill reveals a new cast of heroines largely ignored in earlier suffrage histories: Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša), Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Carrie Williams Clifford, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, and Adelina “Nina” Luna Otero-Warren. With these feminists of color in the foreground, Cahill recasts the suffrage movement as an unfinished struggle that extended beyond the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Publication Date: 1998

This comprehensive look at the African American women who fought for the right to vote analyzes the women's own stories and examines why they joined and how they participated in the U.S. women's suffrage movement. Terborg-Penn shows how every political and racial effort to keep African American women disfranchised met with their active resistance until black women finally achieved full citizenship.

Publication Date: 2020

How have American women voted in the first 100 years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment? How have popular understandings of women as voters both persisted and changed over time? Bringing together new and existing data, the book provides unique insight into women's (and men's) voting behavior, and traces how women's turnout and vote choice evolved across a century of enormous transformation overall and for women in particular.

Publication date: 2016

Presents studies of minority women that highlight how they are similar and dissimilar to other groups of women or minorities, as well as variations within groups of minority women. This book provides a detailed view of how minority women will utilize their sheer numbers, collective voting behavior, policy preferences, and roles as elected officials to impact American politics.

Publication date: 2012

Moves beyond the traditional understanding of the four elements of hip-hop culture - rapping, breakdancing, graffiti art, and deejaying - to articulate how hip-hop feminist scholarship can inform educational practices and spark, transform, encourage, and sustain local and global youth community activism efforts. This multi-genre and interdisciplinary reader engages performance, poetry, document analysis, playwriting, polemics, cultural critique, and autobiography to radically reimagine the political utility of hip-hop-informed social justice efforts that insist on an accountable analysis of identity and culture.

Publication date: 2020

In her searing collection of essays, Mikki Kendall takes aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Drawing on her own experiences with hunger, violence, and hypersexualization, along with incisive commentary on politics, pop culture, the stigma of mental health, and more, Hood Feminism delivers an irrefutable indictment of a movement in flux. An unforgettable debut, Kendall has written a ferocious clarion call to all would-be feminists to live out the true mandate of the movement in thought and in deed.

Publication date: 2018

Collection of essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship. Considers topics including the politics of visibility, histories of Asian American participation in women of color political formations, accountability for Asian American settler complicities and cross-racial solidarities, and Asian American community-based strategies against state violence as shaped by and tied to women of color feminisms.

Publication date: 2012

In recognizing the relation between gender, race, and class oppression, American women of the postwar Progressive Party made the claim that peace required not merely the absence of violence, but also the presence of social and political equality. This study maps the routes taken by postwar popular front women activists into peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Publication date: 2020

Following the events of September 11, 2001, American Muslims found themselves under unprecedented scrutiny. Muslim communities in the United States seized the opportunity to shape the intellectual contribution of American Muslims to contemporary Muslim thought as never before. Muslim women in particular—often assumed to be silenced, oppressed members of their own communities—challenged stereotypes through their writing, seeking to express what it means to be a Muslim woman in America. Hammer looks at the work of significant female American Muslim writers, scholars, and activists, using their writings as a lens for a larger discussion of Muslim intellectual production in America and beyond.

Publication date: 2020

In this book, Zavella draws on five years of ethnographic research to explore collaborations among women of color engaged in reproductive justice activism. While there are numerous organizations focused on reproductive justice, most are racially specific, such as the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum and Black Women for Wellness. Yet Zavella reveals that many of these organizations have built coalitions among themselves, sharing resources and supporting each other through different campaigns and struggles. While the coalitions are often regional—or even national—the organizations themselves remain racially or ethnically specific, presenting unique challenges and opportunities for the women involved.

Publication date: 2019

This book provides a feminist analysis of #MeToo and the sexual assault allegations against celebrity perpetrators which have emerged since the Weinstein story of October 2017. It argues for the importance of understanding #MeToo in relation to an on-going history of Anglo-American feminist activism, theory and interdisciplinary research. Boyle investigates how speaking out about rape, sexual assault and harassment on social media can be understood in relation to second-wave feminist traditions of consciousness-raising.

Publication date: 2020

Believe Me brings readers into the evolving landscape of the movement against sexual violence, and outlines how trusting women is the critical foundation for future progress.
In Believe Me, contributors ask and answer the crucial question: What would happen if we didn't just believe women, but acted as though they matter? If we take women's experiences of online harassment seriously, it will transform the internet. If we listen to and center survivors, we could revolutionize our systems of justice. If we believe Black women when they talk about pain, we will save countless lives.

Publication date: 2019

In 2017, when Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey investigated the prominent Hollywood producer for the New York Times, interviews with actresses, top models, and former Weinstein employees revealed many disturbing and long-buried allegations and a web of onerous secret payouts and nondisclosure agreements.
Within days after the publication of their initial Weinstein story, a veritable Pandora’s box of sexual harassment and abuse was opened as women all over the world came forward with their own traumatic stories. Kantor and Twohey describe not only the consequences of their reporting for the #MeToo movement, but the inspiring and affecting journeys of the women who spoke up—for the sake of other women, for future generations, and for themselves.

Publication date: 2019

The Voices of #MeToo: From Grassroots Activism to a Viral Roar is a timely analysis of how marginalized voices are engaged or silenced in one of the most successful social media projects in recent history. Accessibly written, this book unravels the ideas and practices of activism throughout the #MeToo movement from its inception to its current viral moment.

Publication date: 2015

In Asking for It, Kate Harding combines in-depth research with a frank, no-holds-barred voice to make the case that twenty-first-century America supports rapists more effectively than it supports victims. From institutional failures in higher education to real-world examples of rape culture, Harding offers ideas and suggestions for how we, as a society, can take sexual violence much more seriously without compromising the rights of the accused.

Publication date: 2017

From celebrity gossip expert and BuzzFeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen comes an accessible, analytical look at how female celebrities are pushing the boundaries of what it means to be an "acceptable" woman. You know the type: the woman who won't shut up, who's too brazen, too opinionated--too much. She's the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of "unruliness" to explore the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Lena Dunham, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures. With its brisk, incisive analysis, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud will be a conversation-starting book on what makes and breaks celebrity today.

Publication date: 2017
(National Book Critics Circle Award winner)

Explores how stories our culture tells us about what it means to be a girl can limit their lives and shape their destinies. Chocano blends formative personal stories with insightful and emotionally powerful analysis. Moving from Bugs Bunny to Playboy Bunnies, from Flashdance to Frozen, from the progressive ’70s through the backlash ’80s, the glib ’90s, and the pornified aughts—and at stops in between—she explains how growing up in the shadow of “the girl” taught her to think about herself and the world and what it means to raise a daughter in the face of these contorted reflections. Chocano shows that our identities are more fluid than we think, and certainly more complex than anything we see on any kind of screen.

Publication date: 2005

In the wake of September 11th. Muslim women in the West found themselves more marginalized than ever by a panicked discourse that did little to promote a true understanding of Islam or the Islamic world. Here. in this ambitious volume that includes essays. poetry, fiction, memoir, plays, and artwork, Muslim women speak for themselves, revealing a complexity of experience and thought that escapes most Western portrayals to form a more rounded portrait of what it is to be a Muslim woman in the 21st century.

Publication date: 2017

Meeting in evocative settings from kitchens and beauty parlors to screened-in porches with fifty-one women--black, Chinese, Lebanese, and white; elderly and young; rich and poor; bisexual and straight--the authors trace the extent to which the historical dimensions of southern womanhood like submissiveness, purity, piety, and domesticity are visible in contemporary Delta women's everyday enactments. Waggoner and Taylor argue that these women do not simply embrace or reject such dimensions, but instead creatively tweak stereotypes in such a way that skillfully legitimizes their authenticity.

Publication date: 2017

Black women of the Baby Boomer generation and Hip Hop generation share messages communicated and models witnessed in their socialization for strength revealing how this mandate endures in Black women's lived experiences. They also express concern that self-care was not presented as critical for sustaining life as a strong Black woman-a concern shared by Black women bloggers who advocate resisting the myth and redefining strength for self-care. This Black feminist exploration of strong Black womanhood provides an alternative to harmful perceptions, constructions, and representations of Black women and suggests a mandate to move toward the revolutionary act of Black women's self-care.

Publication Date: 1998

In turn-of-the-century Texas, newspapers routinely offered only fashion and social news to their women readers. Pauline Periwinkle, the pen name of Isadore Miner Callaway, changed this with her weekly column for the Woman’s Century Page of the Dallas Morning News which encourage women to take part in the Progressive Era by becoming involved in reform efforts in their cities and towns.

Publication Date: 2013

Voices from the borderlands push against boundaries in more ways than one, as Donna M. Kabalen de Bichara ably demonstrates in this investigation into the twentieth-century autobiographical writing of four women of Mexican origin who lived in the American Southwest.

Until recently, little attention has been paid to the writing of the women included in this study. As Kabalen de Bichara notes, it is precisely such historical exclusion of texts written by Mexican American women that gives particular significance to the reexamination of the five autobiographical works that provide the focus for this in-depth study.

Be a Girl Champion is a compilation of stories about seven young girls who faced hardships in their lives but who came out stronger and wiser. Readers of this book will take away one thing: everything that happened to these girls has happened and continues to happen to millions of others just like them, not just in Asia but around the world. Author Chloe Reynaldo wrote these stories hoping readers will realize that these unfortunate circumstances are commonplace, and that they are happening all around us, even though they go unnoticed. Reynaldo wrote them simply, to impress upon people of all ages the daunting problems these very young girls face. But these are also stories of hope--stories that show any step forward, no matter how small, can be a major improvement. One way or another, these girls strive to overcome their difficulties and to continuously grow as people. Reynaldo hopes that all will always be inspired to move past obstacles and look forward to the future--and always remember to support, bolster, and champion one another.

Publication Date: 2019

Wildlife biologist and gopher tortoise expert Joan E. Berish has spent her life studying and appreciating animals. Fire and Fauna is a unique, educational, and often humorous memoir reflecting the life of a woman in the field of wildlife conservation and her associated escapades early in life and today. Berish recounts her eventful and sometimes absurd journey to become a wildlife researcher. Outrunning treetop flames, spending a night in jail with a threatened species, and surviving a stalled airplane engine while searching for a missing tortoise, Berish introduces readers to the adventures, triumphs, and heartbreaks of working with animals, both domestic and wild.

Publication Date: 2020

This eye-opening memoir offers a window into the world of Texas history and politics in the 1970s, where sexual harassment was not considered discrimination, where women’s shelters did not exist, where no women were elected to city government, where women in the parks department were prohibited from working outdoors, and where women paid to use airport toilets while men did not. That world that may seem distant and slightly unreal today, so all the more reason to read Van Hightower’s journey as a feminist. Her story will remind us that while much has been achieved in gender relations and women’s rights, there is much that remains to be done.