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

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

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.

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 Drawing on a vast array of lively historical sources, unpublished diaries by adolescent girls, and photographs that conjure up memories of the past, The Body Project chronicles how growing up in a female body has changed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

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

Kathy Peiss · 244 pages

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

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.

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).

Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America

Tanner Colby · 307 pages

“Tanner Colby woke up one day and realized that he didn’t know any black people – his friends, former classmates, coworkers, acquaintances, just about everyone he knew and interacted with was white. And this lopsided state of affairs, as he soon discovered, was hardly unique. Pressing those friends and coworkers about their own lives, he found the same thing to be true again and again: even with a

Outliers: The Story of Success

Malcolm Gladwell · 320 pages

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

Mike Davis · 462 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.

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

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

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.

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

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Charles Mackay · 410 pages

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Jared Diamond · 592 pages

"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" "As in Guns, G

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

Silvia Federici · 285 pages

The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries

Rodney Stark · 246 pages

The idea that Christianity started as a clandestine movement among the poor is a widely accepted notion. Yet it is one of many myths that must be discarded if we are to understand just how a tiny messianic movement on the edge of the Roman Empire became the dominant faith of Western civilization. In a fast-paced, highly readable book that addresses beliefs as well as historical facts, Rodney Stark

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.

Division Street: America

Studs Terkel · 381 pages

Life stories, based on personal interviews, of some seventy selected residents of Chicago, Ill. intended to portray changes occurring in the U.S.A. during the past few decades.