Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture

Peggy Orenstein · 252 pages

The author explores her own conflicting feelings as a mother as she protects her offspring and probes the roots and tendrils of the girlie-girl movement and concludes that parents who think through their values early on and set reasonable limits, encourage dialogue and skepticism, and are canny about the consumer culture can combat the 24/7 "media machine" aimed at girls and hold off the focus on

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

Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

Angela Garbes · 256 pages

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

Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

Meghan Daum · 282 pages

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

Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness

Jessica Valenti · 176 pages

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

Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families

Leslie Morgan Steiner · 346 pages

With motherhood comes one of the toughest decisions of a woman's life: Stay at home or pursue a career? The dilemma not only divides mothers into hostile, defensive camps but pits individual mothers against themselves. Leslie Morgan Steiner has been there. As an executive at The Washington Post, a writer, and mother of three, she has lived and breathed every side of the "mommy wars." Rather than j

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.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Jia Tolentino · 303 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

Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (And More Life to Live)

Eve Rodsky · 352 pages

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

Cathi Hanauer · 306 pages

The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

Arlie Russell Hochschild, Anne Machung · 318 pages

"When The Second Shift was first published in 1989, it was hailed as "a scream in the dark" and "a brilliant, urgently needed analysis ... of the working woman who has it all". Now, in the twenty-first century, The Second Shift remains as important and relevant as when it was first published. As the majority of women entered the workforce, sociologist and Berkeley professor Arlic Hochschild was on

Born to Buy

Juliet B. Schor · 289 pages

Ads aimed at kids are virtually everywhere -- in classrooms and textbooks, on the Internet, even at slumber parties and the playground. Product placement and other innovations have introduced more subtle advertising to movies and television. Companies are enlisting children as guerrilla marketers, targeting their friends and families. Even trusted social institutions such as the Girl Scouts are te

Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

Sady Doyle · 324 pages

"From Mary Wollstonecraft--who, for decades after her death, was more famous for her illegitimate child and suicide attempts than for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman--to Charlotte Brontë, Billie Holiday, Sylvia Plath, and even Hillary Clinton, [this book] dissects a centuries-old phenomenon and asks what it means now, in a time when we have unprecedented access to celebrities and civilians al

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

Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work Is Done

Susan J. Douglas · 354 pages

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 320 pages

*A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything* Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But

Bossypants

Tina Fey · 277 pages

Tina Fey’s new book *Bossypants* is short, messy, and impossibly funny (an apt description of the comedian herself). From her humble roots growing up in Pennsylvania to her days doing amateur improv in Chicago to her early sketches on Saturday Night Live, Fey gives us a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of modern comedy with equal doses of wit, candor, and self-deprecation. Some of the funnie

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood

Maureen Ryan · 348 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

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