Many know that in March we recognize and honor women's contributions to history, culture and society. This has been a monthly celebration in the US since 1987, but globally, International Women's Day has been around since 1911! This global day of celebration, acknowledges the economic, political and social achievements of women around the world.
In the spirit of both International Women's Day, this year on March 8, and Women's History Month, you are invited to check out (literally!) both the e-books below and the physical book display in Hunt Library, which rotates weekly.
Feature image: Photograph shows suffrage and labor activist Flora Dodge "Fola" La Follette (1882-1970), social reformer and missionary Rose Livingston, and a 14-year old striker during a garment strike in New York City in 1913. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
Special thanks to our Materials Processing Coordinator Leah Zande for compiling this list.
Funding Women Entrepreneurs: How to Empower Growth
Fackelmann, Surya; De Concini, Alessandro (2020)
Financial and policy measures are needed to improve access-to-finance conditions for women-led companies.
EIB's InnovFin Advisory assesses the access-to-risk-capital conditions for women-driven companies in Europe in comparison to mainly the US. While women-led companies still account for a small portion of deal flow and overall volume invested, the rate of growth has increased. Nevertheless, structural inequalities and persistent biases hinder the transition to a better functioning funding environment.
The study puts forth a number of innovation finance and policy related recommendations. Restarting the EU economy after the coronavirus pandemic provides a unique opportunity to include the gender dimension. - Publisher's Description
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Claiming Home: Migration Biographies and Everyday Lives of Queer Migrant Women in Switzerland
Büchler, Tina (2022)
Through biographical narratives, "Claiming Home" traces how queer migrant women living in Switzerland navigate often contradictory perspectives on sexuality, gender, and nation.
Situated between heteronormative and racialized stereotypes of migrant women on the one hand, and the implicitly white figure of the lesbian on the other, queer migrant women are often rendered ›impossible subjects. "Claiming Home" maps how they negotiate conflicting loyalties in this field and how they, in their own way, claim a sense of belonging and home. - Publisher's Description
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Women in Supramolecular Chemistry: Collectively Crafting the Rhythms of Our Work and Lives in STEM
Büchler, Tina (2022)
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) disciplines face a gender gap that has been exacerbated during COVID-19. Drawing on research carried out by the Women in Supramolecular Chemistry (WISC) network, this essential book sets out the extent to which women working in STEM face inequality and discrimination.
The authors use approaches more commonly associated with social sciences, such as creative and reflective research methods, to shed light on the human experiences lying behind scientific research. They share fictional vignettes drawn from research findings to illustrate the challenges faced by women working in science today. Additionally, they show how this approach helps make sense of difficult personal experiences and to create a culture of change. Offering a path forward to inclusivity and diversity, this book is crucial reading for anyone working in STEM. - Publisher's Description
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Women and the UN: A New History of Women's International Human Rights
Adami, Rebecca; Plesch, Dan (2022)
This book provides a critical history of influential women in the United Nations and seeks to inspire empowerment with role models from bygone eras.
The women whose voices this book presents helped shape UN conventions, declarations, and policies with relevance to the international human rights of women throughout the world today. From the founding of the UN up until the Latin American feminist movements that pushed for gender equality in the UN Charter, and the Security Council Resolutions on the role of women in peace and conflict, the volume reflects on how women delegates from different parts of the world have negotiated and disagreed on human rights issues related to gender within the UN throughout time. In doing so it sheds new light on how these hidden historical narratives enrich theoretical studies in international relations and global agency today. In view of contemporary feminist and postmodern critiques of the origin of human rights, uncovering women’s history of the United Nations from both Southern and Western perspectives allows us to consider questions of feminism and agency in international relations afresh.
With contributions from leading scholars and practitioners of law, diplomacy, history, and development studies, and brought together by a theoretical commentary by the Editors, Women and the UN will appeal to anyone whose research covers human rights, gender equality, international development, or the history of civil society. - Publisher's Description
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Women in Marvel Films
Kent, Miriam (2021)
The concept of identity in superhero narratives has become a burgeoning field in academic studies of this increasingly popular cinematic genre. "Women in Marvel Films" provides the first rigorous analysis of the portrayals of women, heroic and otherwise, in films based on Marvel comics from the 1980s to the present. It explores the relationships between this cultural phenomenon and wider issues of gender equality, considering the cultural moments in which Marvel films are made and incorporating complex histories of the comic book and Hollywood industries. The book also asks how feminist issues surface within superhero adaptations and how they are dealt with via Hollywood and comic book conventions.
"Women in Marvel Films" shows how the Marvel superhero film taps into political complexities regarding gender and related identity issues, such as women’s roles in society and their relation to men, and provides a fascinating insight into gendered power dynamics in contemporary American popular culture. - Publisher's Description
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Sound Citizens: Australian Women Broadcasters Claim their Voice, 1923–1956
Fisher, Catherine (2021)
In 1954 Dame Enid Lyons, the first woman elected to the Australian House of Representatives, argued that radio had ‘created a bigger revolution in the life of a woman than anything that has happened any time’ as it brought the public sphere into the home and women into the public sphere. Taking this claim as its starting point, "Sound Citizens" examines how a cohort of professional women broadcasters, activists and politicians used radio to contribute to the public sphere and improve women’s status in Australia from the introduction of radio in 1923 until the introduction of television in 1956.
This book reveals a much broader and more complex history of women’s contributions to Australian broadcasting than has been previously acknowledged. Using a rich archive of radio magazines, station archives, scripts, personal papers and surviving recordings, "Sound Citizens" traces how women broadcasters used radio as a tool for their advocacy; radio’s significance to the history of women’s advancement; and how broadcasting was used in the development of women’s citizenship in Australia. It argues that women broadcasters saw radio as a medium that had the potential to transform women’s lives and status in society, and that they worked to both claim their own voices in the public sphere and to encourage other women to become active citizens. Radio provided a platform for women to contribute to public discourse and normalised the presence of women’s voices in the public sphere, both literally and figuratively. - Publisher's Description
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Substantive Representation of Women in Asian Parliaments
Echle, Christian; Joshi, Devin (2021)
Combining data from nearly 100 interviews with national parliamentarians from ten Asian countries, the contributors to this book analyze and evaluate the advancement of gender equality in Asia.
As of the year 2022, no country in Asia has gender parity in its parliament. Meanwhile, the proportion of national-level women parliamentarians in Asia averages a mere 20%. What is more important than simple descriptive representation, however, is whether outcomes for women are improving. Rather than focusing on numerical representation, the chapters in this book focus on the substantive representation of women. In other words, what do women and men parliamentarians do to advance women’s well-being and gender equality? Using semi-structured interviews, the author of each chapter examines these efforts in the context of a specific Asian country. The case studies include Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Timor-Leste. The book is an essential resource for scholars and students of Asian politics and the politics of gender. - Publisher's Description
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Women and Reproductive Technologies: The Socio-Economic Development of Technologies Changing the World
Burfoot, Annette; Güngör, Derya (2022)
A sociological and historical study of the development of reproductive technologies, this book focuses on key technological developments through a biomedicalization lens with special attention to gender. Using in vitro fertilization (IVF) as a hub, it critically examines the main areas of related socio-technical developments: reproductive science, birth control, animal husbandry, genetics and reproductive medicine.
Employing a critical framework to illuminate dominant discourses, the book also highlights examples of social resistance, as well as contradictory responses to new reproductive technologies. Over eight chapters, the author examines the social history of reproduction and sexuality, reproductive technologies from old to new and debates surrounding new reproductive technologies and genetic engineering. "Women and Reproductive Technologies" pays close attention to the interconnections between the business of reproduction (and replication industries), the sociality of reproduction (including reproductive justice) and what are considered the technologies themselves. As such, it constitutes essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of sociology, health studies and gender studies interested in the current state of human reproduction. - Publisher's Description
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Feminist Connections: Rhetoric and Activism Across Time, Space, and Place
Fredlund, Katherine; Hauman, Kerri; Ouellette, Jessica; Graban, Tarez; Blair, Kristine; Applegarth, Risa; Banaji, Paige; Blankenship, Lisa; Brandt, Maria; Hallenbeck, Sarah (2020)
In 1917, Alice Paul and other suffragists famously picketed in front of the White House while holding banners with short, pithy sayings such as “Mr. President: How long must women wait for Liberty?” Their juxtaposition of this short phrase with the image of the White House (a symbol of liberty and justice) relies on the same rhetorical tactics as memes, a genre contemporary feminists use frequently to make arguments about reproductive rights, Black Lives Matter, sex-positivity, and more. Many such connections between feminists of different spaces, places, and eras have yet to be considered, let alone understood. Feminist Connections: Rhetoric and Activism across Time, Space, and Place reconsiders feminist rhetorical strategies as linked, intergenerational, and surprisingly consistent despite the emergence of new forms of media and intersectional considerations.
Contributors to this volume highlight continuities in feminist rhetorical practices that are often invisible to scholars, obscured by time, new media, and wildly different cultural, political, and social contexts. Thus, this collection takes a nonchronological approach to the study of feminist rhetoric, grouping chapters by rhetorical practice rather than time, content, or choice of media.
By connecting historical, contemporary, and future trajectories, this collection develops three feminist rhetorical frameworks: revisionary rhetorics, circulatory rhetorics, and response rhetorics. A theorization of these frameworks explains how feminist rhetorical practices (past and present) rely on similar but diverse methods to create change and fight oppression. Identifying these strategies not only helps us rethink feminist rhetoric from an academic perspective but also allows us to enact feminist activist rhetorics beyond the academy during a time in which feminist scholarship cannot afford to remain behind its hallowed yet insular walls. - Publisher's Description
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No Explanation Required!
Sankar, Carol (2022)
With only 5.8% of CEO positions in the S&P 500 held by women, it’s clear that there are more women who deserve a seat at the table than actually have one. In "No Explanation Required!," Carol Sankar gives you the strategies you need to create the success you deserve―today. As founder of the global leadership firm, The Confidence Factor for Women, her goal is to ensure you deliver decisions and other communications with confidence―no “explanations” required!
Loaded with real-life examples and backed by proprietary research, No Explanation Required! coaches you on how to speak up for yourself, stop debating your decisions, and eliminate “limiting” language. In example after example, it becomes clear how these too-frequent expressions (“I’m sorry,” “Excuse me,” “I’ll get back to you”) can strip you of your authority and credibility.
Instead, you’ll discover positive, practical ways to assert your confidence and master communication at work, with chapters that include “The Self Promotion Gap,” “Perception and Performance,” “What’s Like Got to Do with It?,” and “The 8-Minute Rule”―how to create 8-minute micro conversations and connections. Every chapter offers key takeaways you’ll want to put into effect immediately―and keep in mind always.
With the tactics in "No Explanation Required!" mastered, you’ll be better equipped to stop explaining and start negotiating―for gender parity, better compensation, opportunities, and so much more. - Publisher's Description
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The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City
Seligman, Scott (2020)
In the wee hours of May 15, 1902, three thousand Jewish women quietly took up positions on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Convinced by the latest jump in the price of kosher meat that they were being gouged, they assembled in squads of five, intent on shutting down every kosher butcher shop in New York’s Jewish quarter.
What was conceived as a nonviolent effort did not remain so for long. Customers who crossed the picket lines were heckled and assaulted, their parcels of meat hurled into the gutters. Butchers who remained open were attacked, their windows smashed, stocks ruined, equipment destroyed. Brutal blows from police nightsticks sent women to local hospitals and to court. But soon Jewish housewives throughout the area took to the streets in solidarity, while the butchers either shut their doors or had them shut for them. The newspapers called it a modern Jewish Boston Tea Party.
"The Great Kosher Meat War" of 1902 tells the twin stories of mostly uneducated female immigrants who discovered their collective consumer power and of the Beef Trust, the midwestern cartel that conspired to keep meat prices high despite efforts by the U.S. government to curtail its nefarious practices. With few resources and little experience but a great deal of steely determination, this group of women organized themselves into a potent fighting force and, in their first foray into the political arena in their adopted country, successfully challenged powerful vested corporate interests and set a pattern for future generations to follow. - Publisher's Description
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Wanderers: A History of Women Walking
Andrews, Kerri; Jamie, Kathleen (2020)
This is a book about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. "Wanderers" traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson’s daughter Elizabeth Carter—who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England—to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed.
For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury. Offering a beguiling view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing—of being—articulated by these ten pathfinding women. - Publisher's Description
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Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement
Cahill, Cathleen (2020)
We think we know the story of women's suffrage in the United States: women met at Seneca Falls, marched in Washington, D.C., and demanded the vote until they won it with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. But the fight for women's voting rights extended far beyond these familiar scenes. From social clubs in New York's Chinatown to conferences for Native American rights, and in African American newspapers and pamphlets demanding equality for Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, a diverse cadre of extraordinary women struggled to build a movement that would truly include all women, regardless of race or national origin.
In "Recasting the Vote," Cathleen D. Cahill tells the powerful stories of a multiracial group of activists who propelled the national suffrage movement toward a more inclusive vision of equal rights. Cahill reveals a new cast of heroines largely ignored in earlier suffrage histories: Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša), Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Carrie Williams Clifford, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, and Adelina "Nina" Luna Otero-Warren. With these feminists of color in the foreground, Cahill recasts the suffrage movement as an unfinished struggle that extended beyond the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. As we celebrate the centennial of a great triumph for the women's movement, Cahill's powerful history reminds us of the work that remains. - Publisher's Description
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Relations of Power: Women's Networks in the Middle Ages
Bérat, Emma; Hardie, Rebecca; Dumitrescu, Irina; Armstrong, Abigail; Dempsey, Karen; Gabbay, Alyssa; Jasperse, Jitske (2020)
Women's networks - their relations with other women, men, objects and place - were a source of power in various European and neighboring regions throughout the Middle Ages. This interdisciplinary volume considers how women's networks, and particularly women's direct and indirect relationships to other women, constituted and shaped power from roughly 300 to 1700 AD.
The essays in this collection juxtapose scholarship from the fields of archaeology, art history, literature, history and religious studies, drawing on a wide variety of source types. The volume's aim is to highlight not only the importance of networks in understanding medieval women's power but also the different ways these networks are represented in medieval sources and can be approached today. This volume reveals how women's networks were widespread and instrumental in shaping political, familial and spiritual legacies. - Publisher's Description
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Following the Drum: Women at the Valley Forge Encampment
Loane, Nancy (2021)
Friday, December 19, 1777, dawned cold and windy. Fourteen thousand Continental Army soldiers tramped from dawn to dusk along the rutted Pennsylvania roads from Gulph Mills to Valley Forge, the site of their winter encampment. The soldiers’ arrival was followed by the army’s wagons and hundreds of camp women. "Following the Drum" tells the story of the forgotten women who spent the winter of 1777–78 with the Continental Army at Valley Forge—from those on society’s lowest rungs to ladies on the upper echelons.
Impoverished and clinging to the edge of survival, many camp women were soldiers’ wives who worked as the army’s washers, nurses, cooks, and seamstresses. Other women at the encampment were of higher status: they traveled with George Washington’s entourage when the army headquarters shifted locations and served the general as valued cooks, laundresses, or housekeepers. There were also the ladies at Valley Forge who were not subject to the harsh conditions of camp life and came and went as they and their husbands, Washington’s generals and military advisers, saw fit. Nancy K. Loane uses sources such as issued military orders, pension depositions after the war, soldiers’ descriptions, and some of the women’s own diary entries and letters to bring these women to life. - Publisher's Description
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Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World
Gee, Darien; Crujido, Carla (2022)
Editors Darien Hsu Gee and Carla Crujido bring together 131 personal narrativeswritten by established and emerging women of color. In 300 words or less, these true stories speak to otherness, familial relationships, impossible beauty standards, ancestral heritage, coming of age, and owning one's place in the world. This singular collection, inspired by Lucille Clifton's luminous poem, won't you celebrate with me, sings to the beauty of how these women live and thrive in the world, and how they make their lives their own.
Includes author commentaries, discussion questions for further exploration, resources for additional reading, and a guide to writing micro essays. Recommended for personal or classroom use; downloadable book club and teaching guides available. - Publisher's Description
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Women and China's Revolutions
Hershatter, Gail (2019)
If we place women at the center of our account of China’s last two centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened? This deeply knowledgeable book illuminates the places where the Big History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens. Leading scholar Gail Hershatter asks how these events affected women in particular, and how women affected the course of these events. For instance, did women have a 1911 revolution? A socialist revolution? If so, what did those revolutions look like? Which women had them?
Hershatter uses two key themes to frame her analysis. The first is the importance of women’s visible and invisible labor. The labor of women in domestic and public spaces shaped China’s move from empire to republic to socialist nation to rising capitalist power. The second is the symbolic work performed by gender itself. What women should do and be was a constant topic of debate during China’s transformation from empire to weak state to partially occupied territory to nascent socialist republic to reform-era powerhouse. What sorts of concerns did people express through the language of gender? How did that language work, and why was it so powerful?
Drawing on decades of Hershatter’s groundbreaking scholarship and mastery of a range of literatures, this beautifully written book will be essential reading for all students of China’s modern history. - Publisher's Description
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Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers
Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna (2017)
Examining the significance of women’s work in popular film genres, "Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers" sheds light on women’s contribution to genre cinema through an exploration of filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow, Diablo Cody, Sofia Coppola and Kelly Reichard. Exploring genres as diverse as horror, the war movie, the Western, the costume biopic and the romantic comedy, the book interrogates questions of authorial subversion, gendered concepts of film authorship and male/female genre divisions, as well as re-evaluating certain genres as a space worthy of feminist criticism. By offering an analysis of the films themselves and the circumstances of production and reception, this book redefines political, theoretical and commercial conceptualisations of women’s cinema, and offers new perspectives on how women filmmakers explore the aesthetic and imaginative power of genre. - Publisher's Description
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Women and Contemporary Art in the Gulf: Identity, Institutions and Representation
DeTurk, Sabrina (2022)
"Women and Contemporary Art in the Gulf" offers a unique focus on the roles of women in contemporary art, cultural production and arts institutions in the Gulf.
Drawing on in-person experiences of the art and sites discussed, as well as research on regional artists and arts institutions, DeTurk argues that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been largely excluded from the critical discourse about, and display of, contemporary Middle Eastern art. The book addresses this oversight by providing an examination of the work of several contemporary women artists from the Gulf region. DeTurk also discusses the role of women in museums and cultural institutions in the region, as well as the education systems available to emerging women artists. The discussion and analysis at the heart of the book connect to a range of larger themes, including the visual culture of patriarchy, connection to material culture and heritage, religious beliefs, trade and migration, rapid development, and the need to envision and create a post-oil economy.
"Women and Contemporary Art in the Gulf," with its examination of the critical role women play in the formation of the cultural landscape of the Gulf, is an important contribution to discourse around the changing role of the GCC. It will be essential reading for scholars and students engaged in the study of art history, visual culture, museums and heritage, and women and gender studies. - Publisher's Description
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Women, Activism and Apartheid South Africa
Orton, Bev (2018)
This book investigates women's political activism and conflict in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, examining issues around domestic violence, racial abuse and women in detention without trial. It builds on the theatrical analysis within play texts such as "You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock," "Glass House," "Born in the RSA," "Has Anyone Seen Zandile?" and "So What's New?" to chart participation in the struggle against apartheid between 1975 and 1993, providing a political, economic and social herstory of South African women's activism.
Further, the focus on play texts addresses the dearth of knowledge of pertinent herstorical moments, women's fight for political agency and equality, how apartheid laws affected women's role in theatre and provides a feminist lens and insight into how these laws affected the herstory of South Africa. The inclusion of a critical perspective from women who wrote plays and worked in theatre takes the book beyond a purely theatrical analysis. It seeks to explore how theatre as a form can help write a 'herstory' of apartheid, not only to document the reality of women's experiences but also as a means to imagine different realities. - Publisher's Description
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