The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World

Peggy Orenstein · 337 pages

"In her latest book, Orenstein looks at womanhood and what it means to be a woman at the beginning of this century. After talking to over two hundred women between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, she has blended their voices into a narrative that allows the reader to "eavesdrop" - to get deep inside the lives and choices of other women - and share their thoughts on ambition and power, the

The Wife Drought

Annabel Crabb · 293 pages

The Wife Drought is about women, men, family and work. Written in Annabel Crabb's inimitable style, it's full of candid and funny stories from the author's work in and around politics and the media, historical nuggets about the role of 'The Wife' in Australia, and intriguing research about the attitudes that pulse beneath the surface of egalitarian Australia.

Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

Anne-Marie Slaughter · 352 pages

"When Anne-Marie Slaughter accepted her dream job as the first female director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department in 2009, she was confident she could juggle the demands of her position in Washington, D.C., with the responsibilities of her family life in suburban New Jersey. Her husband and two young sons encouraged her to pursue the job; she had a tremendously supportive boss, Secret

Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

Angela Garbes · 256 pages

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Sheryl Sandberg · 240 pages

Thirty years after women became 50 percent of the college graduates in the United States, men still hold the vast majority of leadership positions in government and industry. This means that women's voices are still not heard equally in the decisions that most affect our lives. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg examines why women's progress in achieving leadership roles has stalled, explains the root ca

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Barbara Ehrenreich · 240 pages

The author's experience holding low-wage jobs in three parts of the U.S. in the late 1990s.

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage

Kathryn Edin, Maria J. Kefalas · 299 pages

Millie Acevedo bore her first child before the age of 16 and dropped out of high school to care for her newborn. Now 27, she is the unmarried mother of three and is raising her kids in one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to hav

The Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan · 410 pages

Landmark, groundbreaking, classic―these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn · 307 pages

From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era's most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold

The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women

Elisabeth Badinter · 212 pages

Today, to be pregnant seems not far from entering into a religious order. There is an expectation that mothers will fit the bill of breastfeeding, nappy-washing, home-cooking supermums. So are mums who rely on formula, childcare and disposable nappies lazy or liberated? The conflict between a woman's individual identity and her identity as a mother is not unique to our time. In the 18th century, F

The Way We Never Were: American Families & the Nostalgia Trap

Stephanie Coontz · 391 pages

"The Way We Never Were is an examination of two centuries of family life that shatter the myths that burden modern families and make them long for the past." "In a new introduction, Coontz examines key cultural events since the original 1992 publication - from Bill Clinton's sexual transgressions to high school shootings across the nation - and reexamines the myths that continue to compel the Amer

The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage

Cathi Hanauer · 306 pages

Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes

Sharon Lamb, Lyn Mikel Brown · 336 pages

The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued

Ann Crittenden · 329 pages

"The price of motherhood is everywhere apparent. College-educated women pay a "mommy tax" of more than a million dollars in lost income when they have a child. Family law deprives mothers of financial equality in marriage. Most child care is excluded from the gross domestic product, at-home mothers are not counted in the labor force, and the social safety net simply leaves them out. With passion a

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

Judith Warner · 336 pages

The paradigm-shattering bestseller that investigates how women have fallen into the trap of "total motherhood," and how that mind-set damages them and their relationships with their husbands and children. Manic cookie-baking at midnight. Play dates as complicated as peace summits. Mother-of-the-birthday-boy meltdown. Ambien nights and Ritalin days. No sex. No nights out. No sleep. Ever. It's madne

Are Prisons Obsolete?

Angela Y. Davis · 128 pages

>Amid rising public concern about the proliferation and privatization of prisons, and their promise of enormous profits, world-renowned author and activist Angela Y. Davis argues for the abolition of the prison system as the dominant way of responding to America's social ills. - publisher (allegedly)

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

Madhumita Murgia · 320 pages

We Should All Be Feminists

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 64 pages

In this essay -- adapted from her TEDx talk of the same name -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, award-winning author of Americanah, offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century, one rooted in inclusion and awareness. Drawing extensively on her own experiences and her understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics, here is one remarkable author's exploration

The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices

Xinran · 243 pages

"During the 1990s, a period of relative openness in China, Xinran hosted a radio call-in show, inviting Chinese women to speak with her on the air about their lives. Broadcast every evening, "Words on the Night Breeze" became famous throughout the country for its unflinching portrayal of what it means to be a woman in modern China." "In this remarkable book, Xinran devotes each chapter to an indiv

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Silvia Federici · 285 pages

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

Patricia Hill Collins · 283 pages

In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, originally published in 1990, Patricia Hill Collins set out to explore the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers, both within the academy and without. Here Collins provides an interpretive f

The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

Tamara Winfrey Harris · 147 pages

"Everyone seems to have an opinion about American black women--they need to get married, change their hair, act like 'ladies,' and so on. Celebrated writer Tamara Winfrey Harris writes a searing account of being a black woman in America and explains why it's time for black women to speak for themselves"--Provided by publisher.

The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It

Meenakshi Gigi Durham · 320 pages

In this expos of how young girls are sexualized in today's media, the author uses examples from popular TV shows, magazines, movies, and Web sites to show for the first time all the ways in which sexuality is defined in media--often in ways detrimental to girls' healthy development--as well as effective and progressive strategies for resisting the violations and repressions that render girls sexua

Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America

Melissa V. Harris-Perry · 378 pages

Jezebel's sexual lasciviousness, Mammy's devotion, and Sapphire's outspoken anger -- these are among the most persistent stereotypes that black women encounter in contemporary American life. Hurtful and dishonest, such representations force African American women to navigate a virtual crooked room that shames them and shapes their experiences as citizens. Many respond by assuming a mantle of stren