Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

Ann Fessler · 358 pages

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler bril

The Body Project:: An Intimate History of American Girls

Joan Jacobs Brumberg · 267 pages

Girls today are in crisis - and this book shows why. Drawing on a vast array of lively historical sources, unpublished diaries by adolescent girls, and photographs that conjure up memories of the past, The Body Project chronicles how growing up in a female body has changed over the past century and why that experience is more difficult today than ever before. Girls' bodies have certainly changed

Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society

Nickie Roberts · 380 pages

'If prostitution is the world's oldest profession, then men writing about it is certainly the second oldest.' It was to retrieve an important part of women's history from the hands of male writers - who have defined prostitution from their own point of view as the client sex - that Nickie Roberts undertook this invigorating blend of social history and sexual politics. In her far-reaching narrative

Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape

Susan Brownmiller · 480 pages

"A 'history of rape, including psychological, sociopolitical, and legal perspectives ... The material is well documented and compellingly presented.'" Choice.

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

Gail Collins · 471 pages

Tells how American women got from there to here, in politics, fashion, economics, sex, families and work in the past five decades.

Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York

Kathy Peiss · 244 pages

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race

Reni Eddo-Lodge · 272 pages

In 2014, award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote on her blog about her frustration with the way that discussions of race and racism in Britain were being led by those who weren't affected by it. Her words hit a nerve. The post went viral and comments flooded in from others desperate to speak up about their own experiences. Galvanised, she decided to dig into the source of these feelings. Ex

The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future

Riane Eisler · 261 pages

"In prehistorical times, Eisler argues, women and men lived together in egalitarian communities devoted to nurturance; with the imposition of male domination, female values gave way to creeds of hierarchy, aggression, power, obedience. Eisler, a futurist, posits a new society based on the recovery of more humane values."--Library journal (6/1/85).

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

Silvia Federici · 285 pages

Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made

Kristin Kobes Du Mez · 352 pages

A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

Jack Holland · 320 pages

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Michel Foucault · 333 pages

In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

A History of the Wife

Marilyn Yalom · 464 pages

How did marriage, considered a religious duty in medieval Europe, become a venue for personal fulfillment in contemporary America? How did the notion of romantic love, a novelty in the Middle Ages, become a prerequisite for marriage today? And, if the original purpose of marriage was procreation, what exactly is the purpose of marriage for women now?Combining "a scholar's rigor and a storyteller's

Guiding Modern Girls

Kristine Alexander · 297 pages

Across the British Empire and the world, the 1920s and 1930s were a time of unprecedented social and cultural change. Girls and young women were at the heart of many of these shifts, which included the aftermath of the First World War, the enfranchisement of women, and the rise of the flapper or “Modern Girl.” Out of this milieu, the Girl Guide movement emerged as a response to popular concerns ab

A Queer History of the United States

Michael Bronski · 287 pages

"A Queer History of the United States is groundbreaking and accessible. It looks at how American culture has shaped the LGBT, or queer, experience, while simultaneously arguing that LGBT people not only shaped but were pivotal in creating our country. Using numerous primary documents and literature, as well as social histories, Bronski's book takes the reader through the centuries--from Columbus'

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Charles Mackay · 410 pages

For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women

Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English · 369 pages

From the Publisher: A provocative new perspective on female history, the history of American medicine and psychology, and the history of child-rearing unlike any other.

Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983

Barbara Kingsolver · 224 pages

Novelist Barbara Kingsolver began her writing career with Holding the Line. It is the story of how women's lives were transformed by an eighteen-month strike against the Phelps-Dodge Copper Corporation. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, the story is partly oral history and partly social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which occurs when people work together as a community.

Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War

Virginia Nicholson · 312 pages

In 1919 a generation of young women discovered that there were, quite simply, not enough men to go round, and the statistics confirmed it. After the 1921 Census, the press ran alarming stories of the 'Problem of the Surplus Women - Two Million who can never become Wives...'. This book is about those women, and about how they were forced, by a tragedy of historic proportions, to stop depending on m

Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century

Betsy Israel · 304 pages

Women's Studies Journalist Betsy Israel paints remarkably vivid portraits of single women -- and how they have been perceived -- throughout the decades using primary sources, including private journals, newspapers, and other materials from popular media. From the nineteenth-century spinsters of New England to the Bowery girls of New York City, to the career girls of the 1950s and 1960s, single wom

Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069

William Strauss, Neil Howe · 538 pages

William Strauss and Neil Howe’s partnership began in the late 1980s when they began writing their first book Generations, which tells the history of America as a succession of generational biographies going back to 1584. Each had written on generational topics [...] The authors’ interest in generations as a broader topic emerged after they met in Washington, D.C., and began discussing the connecti

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

Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity

Sarah B. Pomeroy · 265 pages

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

Mike Davis · 462 pages