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

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.

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.

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

Jack Holland · 320 pages

Feminism: A Very Short Introduction

Margaret Walters · 159 pages

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 Drawing on a vast array of lively historical sources, unpublished diaries by adolescent girls, and photographs that conjure up memories of the past, The Body Project chronicles how growing up in a female body has changed over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

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

Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media

Susan J. Douglas · 368 pages

Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild

Deborah Siegel · 232 pages

Chronicling the battles that have shaped modern conceptions of feminism across two generations, this book illuminates how younger women are reliving, often without realizing it, the battles of the past. Contrary to cliches about the end of feminism, the author argues that younger women are not abandoning the movement but reinventing it. After forty years, is feminism today a culture, or a cause? A

Promiscuities: An Opinionated History of Female Desire

Naomi Wolf · 286 pages

Promiscuities follows a group of adolescent girls as they gradually become aware of themselves as sexual beings and discover what our culture tells them being female means. Drawing on her own experiences as well those of her contemporaries, Naomi Wolf reveals the secrets of our coming of age: the sexual games, forbidden crushes, losses of virginity, and rites of initiation. She also uncompromisin

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

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

Kathy Peiss · 244 pages

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

Silvia Federici · 285 pages

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.

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

America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

Gail Collins · 592 pages

From the women peering worriedly over the side of the Mayflower to feminists having a grand old time protesting beauty pageants and bridal fairs, America's Women tells the story of how women shaped the nation and our vision of what it means to be female in America. Spanning wars, the pioneering days, the fight for suffrage, the Depression, the era of Rosie the Riveter, the civil rights movement, a

A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique & American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

Stephanie Coontz · 256 pages

In 1963, Betty Friedan unleashed a storm of controversy with her bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique . Hundreds of women wrote to her to say that the book had transformed, even saved, their lives. Nearly half a century later, many women still recall where they were when they first read it. In A Strange Stirring , historian Stephanie Coontz examines the dawn of the 1960s, when the sexual revolu

Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate

Leila Ahmed · 304 pages

Explores the historical roots of the debate about women in Islamic societies by tracing the developments in Islamic discourses on women and gender up to the present. The book describes the gender systems in place in the Middle East both before and after the rise of Islam.

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).

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution

Sara Marcus · 367 pages

A history of Riot Grrrl, a radical feminist movement that was started in the 1990s by young women who were fed up with sexism and harrassment and decided to make some noise.

Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo

Margot Mifflin · 160 pages

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

Hallie Rubenhold · 352 pages

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

Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love

Elizabeth Prioleau · 366 pages

"[A] glossy, steam-heated analysis of temptresses and their tactics." —The New York TimesIn this road map to restoring feminine sexual power, Betsy Prioleau introduces and analyzes the stories and stratagems of history's greatest seductresses. These are the women who ravished the world—from such classic figures as Cleopatra and Mae West to such lesser-known women as the infamous Violet Gordon Wood