Only in recent decades has the American academic profession taken women's history seriously. But the very concept of women's history has a much longer past, one that's intimately entwined with the development of American advertising and consumer culture. Selling Women's History reveals how, from the 1900s to the 1970s, popular culture helped teach Americans about the accomplishments of their foremothers, promoting an awareness of women's wide-ranging capabilities. On one hand, Emily Westkaemper examines how this was a marketing ploy, as Madison Avenue co-opted women's history to sell everything from Betsy Ross Red lipstick to Virginia Slims cigarettes. But she also shows how pioneering adwomen and female historians used consumer culture to publicize histories that were ignored elsewhere. Their feminist work challenged sexist assumptions about women's subordinate roles. Assessing a dazzling array of media, including soap operas, advertisements, films, magazines, calendars, and greeting cards, Selling Women's History offers a new perspective on how early- and mid-twentieth-century women saw themselves. Rather than presuming a drought of female agency between the first and second waves of American feminism, it reveals the subtle messages about women's empowerment that flooded the marketplace.
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Women in the United States organized around their own sense of a distinct set of needs, skills, and concerns. And just as significant as women's acting on their own behalf was the fact that race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity shaped their strategies and methods. This authoritative anthology presents some of the powerful work and ideas about activism published in the acclaimed series Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History. Assembled to commemorate the series'thirty-fifth anniversary, the collection looks at two hundred years of labor, activist, legal, political, and community organizing by women against racism, misogyny, white supremacy, and inequality. The authors confront how the multiple identities of an organization's members presented challenging dilemmas and share the histories of how women created change by working against inequitable social and structural systems. Insightful and provocative, Women's Activist Organizing in US History draws on both classic texts and recent bestsellers to reveal the breadth of activism by women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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In the 1970s, feminist slogans proclaimed “Sisterhood is powerful,” and women's historians searched through the historical archives to recover stories of solidarity and sisterhood. However, as feminist scholars have started taking a more intersectional approach—acknowledging that no woman is simply defined by her gender and that affiliations like race, class, and sexual identity are often equally powerful—women's historians have begun to offer more varied and nuanced narratives. The ten original essays in U.S. Women's History represent a cross-section of current research in the field. Including work from both emerging and established scholars, this collection employs innovative approaches to study both the causes that have united American women and the conflicts that have divided them. Some essays uncover little-known aspects of women's history, while others offer a fresh take on familiar events and figures, from Rosa Parks to Take Back the Night marches. Spanning the antebellum era to the present day, these essays vividly convey the long histories and ongoing relevance of topics ranging from women's immigration to incarceration, from acts of cross-dressing to the activism of feminist mothers. This volume thus not only untangles the threads of the sisterhood mythos, it weaves them into a multi-textured and multi-hued tapestry that reflects the breadth and diversity of U.S. women's history.
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This timely volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to explore the ways that women responded to situations of immense deprivation, need, and victimization under Hitler's dictatorship. Paying acute attention to the differences that gender made, Women Defying Hitler examines the forms of women's defiance, the impact these women had, and the moral and ethical dilemmas they faced. Several essays also address the special problems of the memory and historiography of women's history during World War II, and the book features standpoints of historians as well as the voices of survivors and their descendants. Notably, this book also serves as a guide for human behaviour under extremely difficult conditions. The book is relevant today for challenging discrimination against women and for its nuanced exploration of the conditions minorities face as outspoken protagonists of human rights issues and as resisters of discrimination. From this perspective the voices being empowered in this book are clear examples of the importance of protest by women in forcing a totalitarian regime to pause and reconsider its options for the moment. In revealing so, Women Defying Hitler ultimately foregrounds that women rescuers and resisters were and are of great continuing consequence.
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Despite recent advances in the study of black thought, black women intellectuals remain often neglected. This collection of essays by fifteen scholars of history and literature establishes black women's places in intellectual history by engaging the work of writers, educators, activists, religious leaders, and social reformers in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. Dedicated to recovering the contributions of thinkers marginalized by both their race and their gender, these essays uncover the work of unconventional intellectuals, both formally educated and self-taught, and explore the broad community of ideas in which their work participated. The end result is a field-defining and innovative volume that addresses topics ranging from religion and slavery to the politicized and gendered reappraisal of the black female body in contemporary culture.Contributors are Mia E. Bay, Judith Byfield, Alexandra Cornelius, Thadious Davis, Corinne T. Field, Arlette Frund, Kaiama L. Glover, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Natasha Lightfoot, Sherie Randolph, Barbara D. Savage, Jon Sensbach, Maboula Soumahoro, and Cheryl Wall.
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