Women's Studies

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  Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity

  Arabs and Jews are thought to inhabit the Middle East or urban areas in the United States, not Kentucky or other out of the way locales. Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity explores the untold accounts of ten Arab and Jewish women who managed in the past and currently their unique identities tending to both their religious/ethnic traditions and acculturating to Kentucky ways. In the details of women's stories, ties between Arabs and Jews not in the Middle East, but middle America, emerge. Common ground surfaces displaying Arab and Jewish women with similar tales of ...Read More

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  You've Come A Long Way, Baby: Women, Politics, and Popular Culture

  No matter what brand of feminism one may subscribe to, one thing is indisputable: the role of women in society during the past several decades has changed dramatically, and continues to change in a variety of ways. In You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, Lilly J. Goren and an impressive group of contributors explore the remarkable advancement achieved by American women in a historically patriarchal social and political landscape, while examining where women stand today and contemplating the future challenges they face worldwide. As comprehensive as it is accessible, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby appeals to anyone interested in ...Read More

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  Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975

  Between the 1920s and the 1970s, American economic culture began to emphasize the value of consumption over production. At the same time, the rise of new mass media such as radio and television facilitated the advertising and sales of consumer goods on an unprecedented scale. This book analyzes an often overlooked facet of twentieth-century consumer society as it explores the political, social, and racial implications of the business devoted to producing and marketing beauty products for African American women. It examines African American beauty culture as a significant component of twentieth-century consumerism and links both subjects to the complex racial ...Read More

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  Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film

  This book examines the fascinating and often disturbing portrayal of Native American women in film. Through discussion of thirty-four Hollywood films from the silent period to the present, the book examines the sacrificial role of what it terms the “Celluloid Maiden”—a young Native woman who allies herself with a white male hero and dies as a result of that choice. The book intertwines theories of colonization, gender, race, and film studies to ground the study in socio-historical context all in an attempt to define what it means to be an American. As the book charts the consistent depiction of the ...Read More

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  Seeing America: Women Photographers between the Wars

  Seeing America explores the camera work of five women who directed their visions toward influencing social policy and cultural theory. Taken together, they visually articulated the essential ideas occupying the American consciousness in the years between the world wars.

  Melissa McEuen examines the work of Doris Ulmann, who made portraits of celebrated artists in urban areas and lesser-known craftspeople in rural places; Dorothea Lange, who magnified human dignity in the midst of poverty and unemployment; Marion Post Wolcott, a steadfast believer in collective strength as the antidote to social ills and the best defense against future challenges; Margaret Bourke-White, who ...Read More

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  Sisters in Pain: Battered Women Fight Back

  In 1995, Kentucky governor Brereton Jones granted parole to ten women who had been convicted of killing, conspiring to kill, or assaulting the men who had abused them for years. The media began referring to them as the "Sisters in Pain," a name they embraced. These are their stories.

  L. Elisabeth Beattie and Mary Angela Shaughnessy's interviews of seven of the Sisters in Pain detail the physical, sexual, or psychological abuse they suffered at the hands of their husbands or boyfriends, battery beyond comprehension. Anyone who has ever asked, "Why don't they just leave?" will come to understand the interconnected ...Read More

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  Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill

  Women have traditionally been expected to tend the sick as part of their domestic duties; yet throughout history they have faced an uphill struggle to be accepted as healers outside the household.

  In this provocative anthology, twelve essays by historians and literary scholars explore the work of women as healers and physicians. The essays range across centuries, nations, and cultures to focus on the ideological and practical obstacles women have faced in the world of medicine. Each examines the situation of women healers in a particular time and place through cases that are emblematic of larger issues and controversies in ...Read More

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  Women Politicians and the Media

  All American politicians face the glare of media coverage, both in running for office and in representing their constituents if elected. But for women seeking or holding high public office, as Maria Braden demonstrates, the scrutiny by newspapers and television can be both withering and damaging—a fact that has changed little over the decades despite the emergence of more women in politics and more women in the news media.

  Particularly disturbing is the fact that the increase in the number of women reporters appears to have had little effect on the way women candidates are portrayed in the media. Some ...Read More

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  Coal Miners' Wives: Portraits of Endurance

  Few people in America today live with the dangers and deprivations that Appalachian coal mining families experience. But to the eighteen West Virginia women Carol Giesen interviewed for this book, hard times are just everyday life.

  These coal miners’ wives, ranging in age from late teens to eighty-five, tell of a way of life dominated by coal mining—and shadowed by a constant fear of death or injury to a loved one. From birth to old age, they experience the social and economic pressures of the coal mining industry. Few families in these communities earn their living in any job outside ...Read More

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  Mothers and Daughters in Nineteenth-Century America: The Biosocial Construction of Femininity

  The feminine script of early nineteenth century centered on women’s role as patient, long-suffering mothers. By mid-century, however, their daughters faced a world very different in social and economic options and in the physical experiences surrounding their bodies. In this groundbreaking study, Nancy Theriot turns to social and medical history, developmental psychology, and feminist theory to explain the fundamental shift in women’s concepts of femininity and gender identity during the course of the century—from an ideal suffering womanhood to emphasis on female control of physical self.

  Theriot's first chapter proposes a methodological shift that expands the interdisciplinary horizons of women's ...Read More