Social History Women

In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools. In A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable stories of these desegregation pioneers. She also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools.

How did powder and paint, once scorned as immoral, become indispensable to millions of respectable women? How did a "kitchen physic", as homemade cosmetics were once called, become a multibillion-dollar industry? And how did men finally take over that rarest of institutions, a woman's business? In Hope in a Jar, historian Kathy Peiss gives us the first full-scale social history of America's beauty culture.

When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But this is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently political state, one that has the potential to pose a serious challenge to the status quo. In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future.

Carve Her Name with Pride is the inspiring story of the half-French Violette Szabo who was born in Paris in 1921 to an English motorcar dealer, and a French Mother. She met and married Etienne Szabo, a Captain in the French Foreign Legion in 1940. Shortly after the birth of her daughter, Tania, her husband died at El Alamein. She became a FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) and was recruited into the SOE and underwent secret agent training. Her first trip to France was completed successfully even though she was arrested and then released by the French Police.

Dorothy L. Sayers is now famous for her Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane detective series, but she was equally well known during her life for an essay asking “Are Women Human?” Women’s rights were expanding rapidly during Sayers’s lifetime; she and her friends were some of the first women to receive degrees from Oxford. Yet, as historian Mo Moulton reveals, it was clear from the many professional and personal obstacles they faced that society was not ready to concede that women were indeed fully human.

From the critically acclaimed artist, designer, and author of the bestsellers The Principles of Uncertainty and My Favorite Things comes a collection of moving meditations on the beauty and complexity of women’s lives and roles, revealed in the things they hold, and on remorse, joy, ancestry, and memory. Ultimately, she reveals that many of the things we hold dear—as well as those that burden or haunt us—remain constant and connect us from generation to generation.

Prostitution, gambling, and saloons were a vital, if not universally welcome, part of life in frontier boomtowns. In Saloons, Prostitutes, and Temperance in Alaska Territory, Catherine Holder Spude explores the rise and fall of these enterprises in Skagway, Alaska, between the gold rush of 1897 and the enactment of Prohibition in 1918. Her gritty account offers a case study in the clash between working-class men and middle-class women, and in the growth of women’s political and economic power in the West.

Adventurous Women Throughout History is full of examples of remarkable women who inspire and who fought to break down barriers. By listening to the stories of their can-do attitudes, you'll feel empowered to carry on, no matter what obstacles you face.

Doing It All is a personal quest for empowerment, a fierce critique of the systems that leave single moms marginalized and exhausted, and a call to reclaim mothering as the life force of sustainable, connected, and radically responsible communities.

In the annals of World War II history, few figures emerge with the legendary status of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the Soviet sniper whose extraordinary skill and indomitable spirit made her one of the deadliest snipers in history. "Lyudmila Pavlichenko" delves into the life of this remarkable woman who changed the course of the war and became a symbol of courage and resilience.

The women's rights movement grew out of the women's suffrage movement of the mid-1800s and also addressed other women's legal rights issues. The second wave of the movement, which promoted economic, political, and social equality, gained momentum in the 1960s and '70s, when such groups as the National Organization for Women fought for equal pay and laws banning employment discrimination.

When Ohio newspapers published the story of Alice Chenoweth's affair with a married man, she changed her name to Helen Hamilton Gardener, moved to New York, and devoted her life to championing women's rights and decrying the sexual double standard. She became one of the most sought-after speakers on the 19th-century lecture circuit, published seven books and countless essays, supported herself, hobnobbed with the most interesting thinkers of her era, visited 22 countries, and was celebrated for her audacious ideas and keen wit.

Great Britain's forced transportation of convicts to colonial Australia is well known. Less widely known is Britain's earlier program of sending convicts - including women - to North America. Many of these women were assigned as servants in Maryland. Contemporary readers and scholars will be fascinated by Ziegler's explanation of how gender-influenced punishments were meted out to women and often ensnared them in Britain's system of convict labor.

¡México es el mejor país del mundo…! O eso dijo en marzo de 2024 la entonces candidata presidencial Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. Pero ahora, como presidenta, le tocará reducir la cantidad récord de homicidios con que cerró el sexenio de Andrés Manuel López Obrador; dar solidez a las finanzas públicas y manejar la deuda, así como contener la aún presente corrupción. También deberá revertir el derrumbe en la expectativa de vida de los mexicanos y la caída de los niveles educativos y de salud del país, así como crear condiciones para acabar con décadas de un comportamiento mediocre.

African American women have always played an important role in molding our country's history, and this book aims to highlight their contributions. A pair of award-winning historians are attempting to both inspire African American women and convince their allies that Black women's unique capacity to construct their own communities while battling centuries of oppression is a crucial component in our ongoing resistance to systemic racism and sexism. For those who want to learn more about Black women's history, this book serves as a beginning point.

On a hot and dusty December day in 1980, the bodies of four American women - three of them Catholic nuns - were pulled from a hastily dug grave in a field outside San Salvador. They had been murdered two nights before by the US-trained El Salvadoran military. News of the killing shocked the American public and set off a decade of debate over Cold War policy in Latin America. The women themselves became symbols and martyrs, shorn of context and background.

Writer, activist and journalist Joan Smith has worked for years to raise awareness of violence against women and girls, and has been instrumental in bringing the innate misogyny of the police to public attention. Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac reinterprets the bloody, violent story of twenty-three women closely associated with the Julio-Claudian emperors of Rome. Fewer than half a dozen of them can be said with any confidence to have died of natural causes.

Born into slavery in 1862, Ida Bell Wells was freed as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865. Yet she could see just how unjust the world she was living in was. This drove her to become a journalist and activist. Throughout her life, she fought against prejudice and for equality for African Americans. Ida B. Wells would go on to co-own a newspaper, write several books, help cofound the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and fight for women's right to vote.

Throughout history, girls have often been discussed in terms of what they couldn't or shouldn't do. Not anymore. It's time for herstory‚ a celebration not only of what girls can do but also of the remarkable things women have already accomplished, even when others tried to stop them. This uplifting and inspiring book follows the stories of 50 powerhouse women from around the world and across time who each managed to change the world as they knew it forever.

From an author praised for writing “delicious social history” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) comes a lively account of memorable Miss America contestants, protests, and scandals - and how the pageant, nearing its one hundredth anniversary, serves as an unintended indicator of feminist progress.