Women and Power in Postconflict Africa
by Aili Mari Tripp
Cambridge University Press, 2015
Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast
by Pernille Ipsen
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015
Gender: Ideas. Interactions. Institutions
by Lisa Wade and Myra Marx Ferree
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2014
Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian
by Ethlene Whitmire
University of Illinois Press, 2014)
Gender, Violence, and Human Security: Critical Feminist Perspectives
by
Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies
edited by Finn Enke
Temple University Press, 2013
Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics in Global Perspective
by Myra Marx Ferree
(Stanford University Press, 2012)
Second-Wave Neoliberalism: Gender, Race and Health Sector Reform in Peru
by Christina Ewig
Penn State Press, 2010
Second-Wave Neoliberalism combines top-down analysis of policy formation with bottom-up analysis of policy implementation using both qualitative and quantitative approachesinterviews and ethnographic observations along with formal surveys. Ewigs findings lead her to conclude that neoliberal health reforms have brought greater social stratification and, in many ways, have increased gender, racial, and class inequity. But the story is complex, with real progress in some areas and surprising paradoxes in others, such as feminist involvement in family planning policy that resulted in a massive sterilization program targeting poor, indigenous women.
Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom in the Low-Wage Labor Market
by Jane Lou Collins and Victoria Mayer
University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Both Hands Tied studies the working poor in the United States, focusing in particular on the relation between welfare and low-wage earnings among working mothers. Grounded in the experience of thirty-three women living in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin, it tells the story of their struggle to balance child care and wage-earning in poorly paying and often state-funded jobs with inflexible schedules—and the moments when these jobs failed them and they turned to the state for additional aid.
Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer here examine the situations of these women in light of the 1996 national Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and other like-minded reforms—laws that ended the entitlement to welfare for those in need and provided an incentive for them to return to work. Arguing that this reform came at a time of gendered change in the labor force and profound shifts in the responsibilities of family, firms, and the state, Both Hands Tied provides a stark but poignant portrait of how welfare reform afflicted poor, single-parent families, ultimately eroding the participants’ economic rights and affecting their ability to care for themselves and their children.
African Women’s Movements
Transforming Political Landscapes
by Aili Mari Tripp, Isabel Casimiro, Joy Kwesiga, and Alice Mungwa
Cambridge University Press, January 2009
Women entered the political scene in Africa after the 1990s, claiming more than one third of the parliamentary seats in countries like Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Burundi. Women in Rwanda hold the highest percentage of legislative seats in the world. Women’s movements lobbied for constitutional reforms and new legislation to expand women’s rights. This book examines the convergence of factors behind these dramatic developments, including the emergence of autonomous women’s movements, changes in international and regional norms regarding women’s rights and representation, the availability of new resources to advance women’s status, and the end of civil conflict. The book focuses on the cases of Cameroon, Uganda, and Mozambique, situating these countries in the broader African context. The authors provide a fascinating analysis of the way in which women are transforming the political landscape in Africa.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2009 – Winner
Make Way for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room
by Judith Walzer Leavitt
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Using fathers’ first-hand accounts from letters, journals, and personal interviews along with hospital records and medical literature, Judith Walzer Leavitt offers a new perspective on the changing role of expectant fathers from the 1940s to the 1980s. She shows how, as men moved first from the hospital waiting room to the labor room in the 1960s, and then on to the delivery and birthing rooms in the 1970s and 1980s, they became progressively more involved in the birth experience and their influence over events expanded. With careful attention to power and privilege, Leavitt charts not only the increasing involvement of fathers, but also medical inequalities, the impact of race and class, and the evolution of hospital policies. Illustrated with more than seventy images from TV, films, and magazines, this book provides important new insights into childbirth in modern America, even as it reminds readers of their own experiences.
Finding a Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space and Feminist Activism
by Anne Enke
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
In Finding the Movement, Anne Enke reveals that diverse women’s engagement with public spaces gave rise to and profoundly shaped second-wave feminism. Focusing on women’s activism in Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul during the 1960s and 1970s, Enke describes how women across race and class created a massive groundswell of feminist activism by directly intervening in the urban landscape. They secured illicit meeting spaces and gained access to public athletic fields. They fought to open bars to women and abolish gendered dress codes and prohibitions against lesbian congregation. They created alternative spaces, such as coffeehouses, where women could socialize and organize. They opened women-oriented bookstores, restaurants, cafes, and clubs, and they took it upon themselves to establish women’s shelters, health clinics, and credit unions in order to support women’s bodily autonomy.
By considering the development of feminism through an analysis of public space, Enke expands and revises the historiography of second-wave feminism. She suggests that the movement was so widespread because it was built by people who did not identify themselves as feminists as well as by those who did. Her focus on claims to public space helps to explain why sexuality, lesbianism, and gender expression were so central to feminist activism. Her spatial analysis also sheds light on hierarchies within the movement. As women turned commercial, civic, and institutional spaces into sites of activism, they produced, as well as resisted, exclusionary dynamics.
Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights
Edited by Myra Marx Ferree and Aili Mari Tripp
New York: New York University Press, 2006.
“Global Feminism is an extremely useful and important volume that systematically examines transnational women’s movements as well as raises a number of important theoretical questions about global rights and transnational organizing.”
—Amrita Basu, editor of The Challenge of Local Feminism: Women’s Movements in Global Perspective
Since the U.N.’s World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975, feminists around the world have campaigned with increasing success for recognition of women’s full personhood and empowerment. Global Feminism explores the social and political developments that have energized this movement. Drawn from an international group of scholars and activists, the authors of these original essays assess both the opportunities that transnationalism has created and the tensions it has inadvertently fostered. By focusing on both the local and global struggles of today’s feminist activists this important volume reveals much about women’s changing rights, treatment and impact in the global world.
Contributors: Melinda Adams, Aida Bagic, Yakin Ertürk, Myra Marx Ferree, Amy G. Mazur, Dorothy E. McBride, Hilkka Pietilä, Tetyana Pudrovska, Margaret Snyder, Sarah Swider, Aili Mari Tripp, Nira Yuval-Davis.
Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine and Menopause in Modern America
by Judith A. Houck
Harvard University Press, 2006
How did menopause change from being a natural (and often welcome) end to a woman’s childbearing years to a deficiency disease in need of medical and pharmacological intervention? As she traces the medicalization of menopause over the last 100 years, historian Judith Houck challenges some widely held assumptions. Physicians hardly foisted hormones on reluctant female patients; rather, physicians themselves were often reluctant to claim menopause as a medical problem and resisted the widespread use of hormone therapy for what was, after all, a normal transition in a woman’s lifespan. Houck argues that the medical and popular understandings of menopause at any given time depended on both pharmacological options and cultural ideas and anxieties of the moment. As women delayed marriage and motherhood and entered the workforce in greater numbers, the medical understanding, cultural meaning, and experience of menopause changed. By examining the history of menopause over the course of the twentieth century, Houck shows how the experience and representation of menopause has been profoundly influenced by biomedical developments and by changing roles for women and the changing definition of womanhood.
Perfect Motherhood: Science And Childrearing in America
By Rima Apple
Rutgers University Press, 2006.
“With skill and imagination, Rima Apple tracks the evolution of scientific advice to mothers through a prodigious array of sources. The book honors the rich particularity of women’s experiences and thoughtfully examines the relationships between mothers and medical experts.”—Barbara Melosh, author of Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption Parenting today is virtually synonymous with worry. We want to ensure that our children are healthy, that they get a good education, and that they grow up to be able to cope with the challenges of modern life. In our anxiety, we are keenly aware of our inability to know what is best for our children. When should we toilet train? What is the best way to encourage a fussy child to eat? How should we protect our children from disease and injury?
Before the nineteenth century, maternal instinct—a mother’s “natural know-how”—was considered the only tool necessary for effective childrearing. Over the past two hundred years, however, science has entered the realm of motherhood in increasingly significant ways. With each generation, psychologists, health experts, and physicians introduce new theories about the most appropriate way to raise children. These ideas are circulated through a wealth of public health pamphlets, books, popular magazines, and even films.
In Perfect Motherhood, Rima D. Apple shows how the growing belief that mothers need to be savvy about the latest scientific directives has shifted the role of childrearer away from the mother and toward the professional establishment. Apple, however, does not argue that mothers’ increasing reliance on expert advice has changed childrearing for the worse. Instead, she shows how most women today are finding ways to negotiate among the abundance of scientific recommendations, their own knowledge, and the reality of their daily lives.