Women's Studies

Follow

• 

  Daughters Of Canaan: A Saga of Southern Women

  From Gone with the Wind to Designing Women, images of southern females that emerge from fiction and film tend to obscure the diversity of American women from below the Mason-Dixon line. In a work that deftly lays bare a myriad of myths and stereotypes while presenting true stories of ambition, grit, and endurance, Margaret Ripley Wolfe offers the first professional historical synthesis of southern women's experiences across the centuries.

  In telling their story, she considers many ordinary lives—those of Native-American, African-American, and white women from the Tidewater region and Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to the Gulf Coastal Plain, women ...Read More

• 

  She Said What? Interviews with Women Newspaper Columnists

  No longer relegated to reporting on society happenings or household hints, women columnists have over the past twenty years surged across the boundary separating the “women’s” or “lifestyle” sections and into the formerly male bastions of the editorial, financial, medical, and “op-ed” pages. Where men previously controlled the nation’s new organizations, were the chief opinion givers, and defined what is newsworthy, many women newspaper columnists are now nationally syndicated and tackle the same subjects as their male counterparts, bringing with them distinctive styles and viewpoints.

  Through these frank and lively interviews, Maria Braden explores the lives and work of columnists ...Read More

• 

  A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences

  In this pathbreaking book, Alice Kessler-Harris explores the meanings of women’s wages in the United States in the twentieth century, focusing on three sets of issues that capture the transformation of women’s roles: the battle over minimum wage for women, which exposes the relationship between family ideology and workplace demands; the argument over equal pay for equal work, which challenges gendered patterns of self-esteem and social organization; and the current debate over comparable worth, which seeks to incorporate traditionally female values into new work and family trajectories. Together these issues trace the many ways in which gendered meaning has been ...Read More

• 

  Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press

  The so-called “New Woman”—that determined and free-wheeling figure in “rational” dress, demanding education, suffrage, and a career-was a frequent target for humorists in the popular press of the late nineteenth century. She invariably stood in contrast to the “womanly woman,” a traditional figure bound to domestic concerns and a stereotype away from which many women were inexorably moving.

  Patricia Marks’s book, based on a survey of satires and caricatures drawn from British and American periodicals of the 1880s and 1890s, places the popular view of the New Woman in the context of the age and explores the ways in which ...Read More

• 

  Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory

  The first major book of feminist critical theory published in the United States is now available in an expanded second edition. This widely cited pioneering work presents a new introduction by the editor and a new bibliography of feminist critical theory from the last decade. This book has become indispensable to an understanding of feminist theory. Contributors include Cheri Register, Dorin Schumacher, Marcia Holly, Barbara Currier Bell, Carol Ohmann, Carolyn Heilbrun, Catherine Stimpson, and Barbara A. White.

  "Donovan impressively surveys feminist criticism since 1975."—Style

  "Provides insight into feminist approaches to literary criticism . . . The book offers genuine critical ...Read More

• 

  Ourselves Alone: Women's Emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920

  In early April of 1888, sixteen-year-old Mary Ann Donovan stood alone on the quays of Queenstown in county Cork waiting to board a ship for Boston in far-off America. She was but one of almost 700,000 young, usually unmarried women, traveling alone, who left their homes in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a move unprecedented in the annals of European emigration. Using a wide variety of sources—many of which appear here for the first time—including personal reminiscences, interviews, oral histories, letter, and autobiographies as well as data from Irish and American census and emigration reports, ...Read More

• 

  Playing The Game: Sports and the Physical Emancipation of English Women, 1870-1914

  In England, the latter years of the nineteenth century were a period of rapid and profound change in the role of women in sports. Kathleen McCrone describes this transformation and the social changes it helped to bring about.

  Since women's entry into sports was chiefly a consequence of the campaign for better female education, Playing the Game begins with an account of sports at the Oxbridge women's colleges, at the girls' public schools, and at the new women's physical training colleges. It then looks at specific team sports such as hockey, lacrosse, and cricket as well as at such individual ...Read More