Women, Gender, and Sex

The publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch in 1970 was a landmark event, raising eyebrows and ire while creating a shock wave of recognition in women around the world with its steadfast assertion that sexual liberation is the key to women's liberation. Today, Greer's searing examination of the oppression of women in contemporary society is both an important historical record of where we've been and a shockingly relevant treatise on what still remains to be achieved.

"This book examines feminist divorce reformers, their relationship with the broader feminist movement, and their lasting effects on the American social welfare regime. It shows how the two distinctive qualities of the American welfare state-its gendered nature and its public/private nature-combined to encourage the breadwinner-homemaker model of marriage's use as policy tool. The linking of access to economic benefits to marriage, begun early in the development of the American social insurance system, shaped political identity and activism in the 1970s and has continued to do so into our current political moment. The result has not only affected policy questions directly relating to marriage but also limited the possibilities for expanding America's social welfare provisions. As a gateway to full economic citizenship, marriage has always served as an institution that protects and perpetuates class privilege"--

"We have seen through many examples that data science and artificial intelligence can reinforce structural inequalities like sexism and racism. Data is power, and that power is distributed unequally. This book offers a vision for a feminist data science that can challenge power and work towards justice. This book takes a stand against a world that benefits some (including the authors, two white women) at the expense of others. It seeks to provide concrete steps for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work towards justice, and for feminists seeking to learn how their own work can carry over to the growing field of data science. It is addressed to professionals in all fields where data-driven decisions are being made, as well as to communities that want to better understand the data that surrounds them. It is written for everyone who seeks to better understand the charts and statistics that they encounter in their day-to-day lives, and for everyone who seeks to better communicate the significance of such charts and statistics to others. This is an example-driven book written with a broad audience of scholars, students, and practitioners in mind. It offers a way of thinking about data, both their uses and their limits, that is informed by direct experience, by a commitment to action, and by the ideas associated with intersectional feminist thought"--

"She fought a lonely and almost single-handed fight, with the single-mindedness of a crusader, long before men or women of any race entered the arena; and the measure of success she achieved goes far beyond the credit she has been given in the history of the country."-Alfreda M. Duster   Ida B. Wells is an American icon of truth telling. Born to slaves, she was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She co-founded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement, working alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, Madam C. J. Walker, Mary Church Terrell, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony.   This engaging memoir, originally published 1970, relates Wells's private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice. This updated edition includes a new foreword by Eve L. Ewing, new images, and a new afterword by Ida B. Wells's great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster.

From literary essays on major writers to pieces on how black women contributed to the blues, this is the ultimate text for black women's studies. First published in 1982, But Some of Us Are Brave has been used in classrooms and universities ever since. The essays capture everything from a black women's place in art to racism and sexism, feminist thought and lesbian studies to political theories and ideologies. Not only does the book provide essential materials for academics and students, it is popular with general readers.

"A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are--and have always been--instrumental in shaping our country. In centering Black women's stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women's unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today. A Black Women's History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women's lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women's history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation"--

Foreword by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg In Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President , prize-winning legal historian Jill Norgren recounts, for the first time, the life story of one of the nineteenth century’s most surprising and accomplished advocates for women’s rights. As Norgren shows, Lockwood was fearless in confronting the male establishment, commanding the attention of presidents, members of Congress, influential writers, and everyday Americans. Obscured for too long in the historical shadow of her longtime colleague, Susan B. Anthony, Lockwood steps into the limelight at last in this engaging new biography. Born on a farm in upstate New York in 1830, Lockwood married young and reluctantly became a farmer’s wife. After her husband's premature death, however, she earned a college degree, became a teacher, and moved to Washington, DC with plans to become an attorney-an occupation all but closed to women. Not only did she become one of the first female attorneys in the U.S., but in 1879 became the first woman ever allowed to practice at the bar of the Supreme Court. In 1884 Lockwood continued her trailblazing ways as the first woman to run a full campaign for the U.S. Presidency. She ran for President again in 1888. Although her candidacies were unsuccessful (as she knew they would be), Lockwood demonstrated that women could compete with men in the political arena. After these campaigns she worked tirelessly on behalf of the Universal Peace Union, hoping, until her death in 1917, that she, or the organization, would win the Nobel Peace Prize. Belva Lockwood deserves to be far better known. As Norgren notes, it is likely that Lockwood would be widely recognized today as a feminist pioneer if most of her personal papers had not been destroyed after her death. Fortunately for readers, Norgren shares much of her subject’s tenacity and she has ensured Lockwood’s rightful place in history with this meticulously researched and beautifully written book.

Belonging to the World: Women's Rights and American Constitutional Culture surveys the treatment of women in American law from the nation's earliest beginnings in British North America to the present. Placing the legal history of women in the broader social, political, and economic context of American history, this book examines the evolution of women's constitutional status in the United States, the development of rights consciousness among women, and their attempts to expand zones of freedom for all women. This is the first general account of women and American constitutional history to include the voices of women alongside the more familiar voices of lawmakers. An original work of historical synthesis, it delineates the shifting relationships between American law practice and women, both within the family and elsewhere, as it looks beyond the campaign for woman suffrage to broader areas of contest and controversy. Women's stories are used throughout the book to illustrate the extraordinary range and persistence of female rebellion from the 1630s up through the present era of "post-feminist" retrenchment and backlash. Belonging to the World: Women's Rights and American Constitutional Culture dispels the myth that the story of women and the law is synonymous only with woman suffrage or married women's property acts, showing instead that American women have struggled along many fronts, not only to regain and expand their rights as sovereign citizens, but also to remake American culture.

In recent decades, laws and workplace policies have emerged that seek to address the "balance" between work and family. Millions of women in the U.S. take some time off when they give birth or adopt a child, making use of "family-friendly" laws and policies in order to spend time recuperating and to initiate a bond with their children. The Balance Gap traces the paths individual women take in understanding and invoking work/life balance laws and policies. Conducting in-depth interviews with women in two distinctive workplace settings--public universities and the U.S. military--Sarah Cote Hampson uncovers how women navigate the laws and the unspoken cultures of their institutions. Activists and policymakers hope that family-friendly law and policy changes will not only increase women's participation in the workplace, but also help women experience greater workplace equality. As Hampson shows, however, these policies and women's abilities to understand and utilize them have fallen short of fully alleviating the tensions that women across the nation are still grappling with as they try to reconcile their work and family responsibilities.

A history of America's civil rights movement traces the pivotal influence of sexual violence that victimized African American women for centuries, revealing Rosa Parks's contributions as an anti-rape activist years before her heroic bus protest.;Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery's city buses, and whose supposedly spontaneous act sparked the 1955 boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the boycott is far different from anything previously written. In this groundbreaking book, Danielle McGuire writes about the 1944 rape of Recy Taylor, a mother and sharecropper who was abducted after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Alabama. The president of the local NAACP branch sent his best investigator. Her name was Rosa Parks. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against black women and added fire to the growing call for change. -- Publisher description.

More than half a century after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights defined what a human being is and is entitled to, Catharine MacKinnon asks: Are women human yet? If women were regarded as human, would they be sold into sexual slavery worldwide; veiled, silenced, and imprisoned in homes; bred, and worked as menials for little or no pay; stoned for sex outside marriage or burned within it; mutilated genitally, impoverished economically, and mired in illiteracy--all as a matter of course and without effective recourse? The cutting edge is where law and culture hurts, which is where MacKinnon operates in these essays on the transnational status and treatment of women. Taking her gendered critique of the state to the international plane, ranging widely intellectually and concretely, she exposes the consequences and significance of the systematic maltreatment of women and its systemic condonation. And she points toward fresh ways--social, legal, and political--of targeting its toxic orthodoxies. MacKinnon takes us inside the workings of nation-states, where the oppression of women defines community life and distributes power in society and government. She takes us to Bosnia-Herzogovina for a harrowing look at how the wholesale rape and murder of women and girls there was an act of genocide, not a side effect of war. She takes us into the heart of the international law of conflict to ask--and reveal--why the international community can rally against terrorists' violence, but not against violence against women. A critique of the transnational status quo that also envisions the transforming possibilities of human rights, this bracing book makes us look as never before at an ongoing war too long undeclared.

From the Publisher: The American women's movement was one of the most influential social movements of the twentieth century. Beginning with small numbers, the women's movement eventually involved tens of thousands of women and men. Longstanding ideas and habits came under scrutiny as activists questioned and changed the nation's basic institutions, including all branches of government, the workplace, and the family. Nancy MacLean's introduction and collection of primary sources engage students with the most up-to-date scholarship in U.S. women's history. The introduction traces the deep roots of the women's movement and demonstrates the continuity from women's activism in the labor movement and New Deal networks, the black civil rights movement, and the peace movement to the height of Second Wave feminism and into the Third Wave. The primary sources reflect the social breadth and depth of the movement. Dispelling the misconception that the American women's movement was solely a white, middle-class cause, the documents include the voices of women of all ages, classes, and ethnicities. Topics addressed range from wage discrimination, peace activism, housework and childcare, sexuality, and reproductive rights to welfare, education, socialism, violence against women, and more. Document head notes, a chronology of the women's movement, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, and index support student learning, classroom discussion, and further research.

"A bold and gripping graphic history of the fight for women's rights The ongoing struggle for women's rights has spanned human history, touched nearly every culture on Earth, and encompassed a wide range of issues, such as the right to vote, work, get an education, own property, exercise bodily autonomy, and beyond. Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists is a fun and fascinating graphic novel-style primer that covers the key figures and events that have advanced women's rights from antiquity to the modern era. In addition, this compelling book illuminates the stories of notable women throughout history--from queens and freedom fighters to warriors and spies--and the progressive movements led by women that have shaped history, including abolition, suffrage, labor, civil rights, LGBTQ liberation, reproductive rights, and more. Examining where we've been, where we are, and where we're going, Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists is an indispensable resource for people of all genders interested in the fight for a more liberated future"--

"Rarely has a short book accomplished so much as Terborg-Penn's seminal work. With the utmost attention to detail Terborg-Penn examines the contributions of black suffragist stalwarts . . . It undoubtedly will become the definitive work on African American women's involvement in the mainstream woman suffrage movement and specifically on black women's struggle for the vote." --Choice " . . . this is a well-written overview of a crucial aspect of African American history that would be ideal for the college classroom." --Journal of American History " . . . not only a major contribution to suffrage history . . . but also a powerful indictment of white suffrage activists who were able to see beyond the sexism but not the racism of their society." --Journal of Southern History "This groundbreaking volume provides a theoretical and practical framework for new paradigms in African American women's history. . . . All Black politicians should read and discuss this unique and brilliant book. Many lessons can be learned." --Philadelphia New Observer 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.

In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.

Women's History Podcast

A feminist podcast that doesn't take itself too seriously. Katie Breen interviews feminist activists, researchers, and advocates working to make women's issues...well, non-issues, examining topics such as through the lens of intersectional feminism and reproductive justice. We also laugh.

Sex was never the only battleground for women’s voting rights. Amended, a podcast from Humanities New York, marks the centennial of the 19th Amendment.

Welcome to We've Got Issues, Girl – a podcast for women who are curious about politics. Every week, Schuyler Beckwith and Carrie Hartman will discuss how women's issues can't just be limited to reproductive rights.

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with sociologist Dr. Francesca Tripodi about her recent study looking at the gender bias on Wikipedia and who gets to be "notable."

The prolific author, poet, cultural critic, feminist and professor, who wrote more than three dozen wide-ranging books, died Wednesday at her home in Berea, Ky.

In honor of Women's History Month, Black Enterprise explores the contributions of revolutionary women.

Democracy Now! coverage of the historic Women's March on Washington.

The influential critic, author and feminist bell hooks died Wednesday at the age of 69. She was at home, surrounded by friends and family. Amna Nawaz looks at her work and legacy.

Chart the last 5 years of the women's movement and its intersectional fight for equality.

It wasn't until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that all African Americans were granted the full right to vote, but the fight began in the 1800s al...

As this year marks 100 years since the ratification of 19th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing women's right to vote, we look at the connection betwe...

Professor Carol Berkin discusses the roles of Native American women during the American Revolution.

Speaker: Mary Uyematsu KaoMary Uyematsu Kao will present her black-and-white photographs from the Asian American Movement of the 1970s and talk about the Asi...