Bøger i Gender and American Culture serien

Barbara Ransby chronicles Ella Baker's long political career as an organizer, intellectual and teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. She paints a picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with progressive struggles worldwide in the 20th century.

"In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources-union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories-Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and their labor activism. While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are"--

"Ava Purkiss examines how Black women demonstrated their literal and figurative 'fitness' for citizenship through exercise. Using public health records, beauty columns, physical education reports, cookbooks, newspapers, and magazines, she centers race and gender; challenges how historians have written about the relationship between physical fitness, civic fitness, and national belonging; and provides historical context for numerous public health studies concerned with the health of African American women and girls"--

The broad sweep of environmental and ecological history has until now been written and understood in predominantly male terms. In Made From This Earth, Vera Norwood explores the relationship of women to the natural environment through the work of writers, illustrators, landscape and garden designers, ornithologists, botanists, biologists, and conservationists.Norwood begins by showing that the study and promotion of botany was an activity deemed appropriate for women in the early 1800s. After highlighting the work of nineteenth-century scientific illustrators and garden designers, she focuses on nature's advocates such as Rachel Carson and Dian Fossey who differed strongly with men on both women's "e;nature"e; and the value of the natural world. These women challenged the dominant, male-controlled ideologies, often framing their critique with reference to values arising from the female experience. Norwood concludes with an analysis of the utopian solutions posed by ecofeminists, the most recent group of women to contest men over the meaning and value of nature.

In the late eighteenth century, Hawai'i's ruling elite employed sophisticated methods for resisting foreign intrusion. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, American missionaries had gained a foothold in the islands. Jennifer Thigpen explains this important shift by focusing on two groups of women: missionary wives and high-ranking Hawaiian women. Examining the enduring and personal exchange between these groups, Thigpen argues that women's relationships became vital to building and maintaining the diplomatic and political alliances that ultimately shaped the islands' political future. Male missionaries' early attempts to Christianize the Hawaiian people were based on racial and gender ideologies brought with them from the mainland, and they did not comprehend the authority of Hawaiian chiefly women in social, political, cultural, and religious matters. It was not until missionary wives and powerful Hawaiian women developed relationships shaped by Hawaiian values and traditions--which situated Americans as guests of their beneficent hosts--that missionaries successfully introduced Christian religious and cultural values.Incisively written and meticulously researched, Thigpen's book sheds new light on American and Hawaiian women's relationships, illustrating how they ultimately provided a foundation for American power in the Pacific and hastened the colonization of the Hawaiian nation.

Delinquent Daughters explores the gender, class, and racial tensions that fueled campaigns to control female sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Mary Odem looks at these moral reform movements from a national perspective, but she also undertakes a detailed analysis of court records to explore the local enforcement of regulatory legislation in Alameda and Los Angeles Counties in California. From these legal proceedings emerge overlapping and often contradictory views of middle-class female reformers, court and law enforcement officials, working-class teenage girls, and working-class parents. Odem traces two distinct stages of moral reform. The first began in 1885 with the movement to raise the age of consent in statutory rape laws as a means of protecting young women from predatory men. By the turn of the century, however, reformers had come to view sexually active women not as victims but as delinquents, and they called for special police, juvenile courts, and reformatories to control wayward girls. Rejecting a simple hierarchical model of class control, Odem reveals a complex network of struggles and negotiations among reformers, officials, teenage girls and their families. She also addresses the paradoxical consequences of reform by demonstrating that the protective measures advocated by middle-class women often resulted in coercive and discriminatory policies toward working-class girls.

In this richly textured history, Kara French investigates ideas about, and practices of, sexual restraint to better understand the sexual dimensions of American identity in the antebellum US. French considers three groups of Americans whose sexual abstinence provoked almost as much social, moral, and political concern as the idea of sexual excess.

Whether feared, admired, or desired, the "gold digger" appears almost everywhere gender, sexuality, class, and race collide. This fascinating work reveals the assumptions and disputes around women's sexual agency in American life, shedding new light on the cultural and legal forces underpinning romantic, sexual, and marital relationships.

This work reaches across the colour line to examine how race, gender, class and individual subjectivity shaped the lives of black and white women in the 19th- and 20th-century American South. Through six essays, Nell Irvin Painter explores such themes as interracial sex and white supremacy.

Chronicles the dawn of the global women's rights in the early twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the US or Europe. Instead, Katherine Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women who forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism.

Places familiar, often politicized questions about the crisis of African American marriage in conversation with a rich cultural archive that includes fiction by Terry McMillan and Sister Souljah, music by Anita Baker, and films such as The Best Man.

From 1950 to 1980, activists in the black freedom and women's liberation movements mounted significant campaigns in response to the injustices of rape. Catherine Jacquet examines these two movement responses together, explaining when and why they were in conflict, when and why they converged, and how activists both upheld and challenged them.

Explores the central role of black women in the political history of the Jim Crow era. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore explores the pivotal and interconnected roles played by gender and race in North Carolina politics from the period immediately preceding the disfranchisement of black men in 1900 to the time black and white women gained the vote in 1920.

Pursuing the meaning of gender in nineteenth-century urban American society, Ladies, Women, and Wenches compares the lives of women living in two distinctive antebellum cultures, Charleston and Boston, between 1820 and 1850. In contrast to most contemporary histories of women, this study examines the lives of all types of women in both cities.

A study of women in vaudeville. It reveals how female performers, patrons and workers shaped the rise and fall of the most popular live entertainment at the turn of the century. Once a sign of vaudeville's refinement, Kibler says, women became associated with the decay of vaudeville.

Investigates the reasons for women's literary professionalism in the nineteenth century, highlighting the experiences of E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gail Hamilton, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. Coultrap-McQuin examines the cultural milieu of women writers, the ideals of the literary marketplace, and the characteristics of women's literary activities.

This volume tells the story of several generations of women - both white and African American - who struggled to forge an enduring tradition of female religious leadership in colonial and antebellum America.

Native American philosophy has enabled Native American cultures to survive more than five hundred years of attempted cultural assimilation. This revised edition has been expanded to include extensive discussion of Native American philosophy and culture in the United States as well as Canada.

This critical, historical, and theoretical study looks at a little-known group of novels written during the 1930s by women who were literary radicals. Arguing that class consciousness was figured through metaphors of gender, Paula Rabinowitz challenges the conventional wisdom that feminism as a discourse disappeared during the decade.

In 1965 a group of female American peace activists decided to meet with Vietnamese women to discuss how to end US intervention. While other attempts at women's international cooperation and transnational feminism have led to cultural imperialism, Jessica M.Frazier reveals an instance when American women crossed geopolitical boundaries to criticize American Cold War culture, not promote it.

In this thought-provoking study of nineteenth-century America, J. Samaine Lockwood offers an important new interpretation of the literary movement known as American regionalism. Lockwood argues that regionalism in New England was part of a widespread woman-dominated effort to rewrite history.

Often photographed in a cowboy hat with her middle finger held defiantly in the air, Florynce "Flo" Kennedy (1916-2000) left a vibrant legacy as a leader of the Black Power and feminist movements. In the first biography of Kennedy, Sherie Randolph traces the life and political influence of this strikingly bold and controversial radical activist.

In this innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier.