Her work is invaluable, from setting up a vital lifeline for women to learn about their rights on maternity discrimination, to the frontlines of the Covid-19 crisis, where she battled for women not to be left out of the picture altogether.' - Laura BatesImagine suddenly being sacked from your job. After spending years building your career, it’s all taken away in just one moment. Why? Because you told your boss you are pregnant.    This happened to Joeli Brearley. And she quickly realised she wasn’t alone - 54,000 women a year are forced out of their job because they dared to procreate, and three quarters of working mothers face workplace discrimination. And this was before the pandemic, with its never-ending cycle of extraordinary childcare challenges and overt pregnancy and maternity discrimination, resulting in a tsumani of mothers exiting the labour force.   Pregnant Then Screwed is an expose of the unscrupulous work practices and antiquated systems that we’ve been conditioned to accept and a toolkit for how to challenge them. It’s full of practical advice to help you navigate systemic barriers when they slap you in the face.  Whether you’re a mother who is sick of being sidelined, undermined, and underpaid. A ''stay at home'' mother who wants to work but can't. A future parent who is scared that having children will affect your career. An employer who wants to get the best out of its parent employees, or you simply want a stronger, fairer economy, Pregnant Then Screwed is a compelling manifesto for change and a call to arms for all women.

    The rapid changes in your body, your lifestyle, and your very identity call for a certain mental agility. Mindfulness can help you meet the challenge and approach every experience with your new baby with open eyes and an open heart.Easy ten-minute meditation exercises and yoga poses throughout this book will help you cultivate greater flexibility and mindful awareness during pregnancy, childbirth, and your baby's first year. Whenever you have a moment to spare, open Mindful Motherhood and discover a skill that will help you find balance and fulfillment during those times when you feel most overwhelmed.Co-published with the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS).Mindful Motherhood contains what so many other parenting books omit:: the consoling information that each mother has the ability to know, deep within, how to care for her child. Mindful Motherhood is a gem.-Christiane Northrup, MD, author of Women's Bodies, Women's WisdomWise, soothing, and helpful-this is really good stuff for new mothers.-Jack Kornfield, author of The Wise Heart

    Unerringly nice, polite, modest, and selfless, the Good Girl is a paradigm so narrowly defined that it's unachievable. When girls inevitably fail to live up- experiencing conflicts with peers, making mistakes in the classroom or on the playing field-they are paralyzed by self-criticism, stunting the growth of vital skills and habits. Simmons traces the poisonous impact of Good Girl pressure on development and provides a strategy to reverse the tide. At once expository and prescriptive, The Curse of the Good Girl is a call to arms from a new front in female empowerment. Looking to the stories shared by the women and girls who attend her workshops, Simmons shows that Good Girl pressure from parents, teachers, coaches, media, and peers erects a psychological glass ceiling that begins to enforce its confines in girlhood and extends across the female lifespan. The curse of the Good Girl erodes girls' ability to know, express, and manage a complete range of feelings. It expects girls to be selfless, limiting the expression of their needs. It requires modesty, depriving the permission to articulate their strengths and goals. It diminishes assertive body language, quieting voices and weakening handshakes. It touches all areas of girls' lives and follows many into adulthood, limiting their personal and professional potential. Since the popularization of the Ophelia phenomenon, we have lamented the loss of self-esteem in adolescent girls, recognizing that while the doors of opportunity are open to twenty-first-century American girls, many lack the confidence to walk through them. In The Curse of the Good Girl, Simmons provides a catalog of tangible lessons in bolstering the self and silencing the curse of the Good Girl. At the core of Simmons's radical argument is her belief that the most critical freedom we can win for our daughters is the liberty not only to listen to their inner voice but also to act on it. Watch a Video

    Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores not only the dark corners of private violence, but also its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.

    But a few years ago, he realized that while some of the habits he outlined in What Got You Here apply to both men and women, women face specific, and different, challenges as they seek to advance in their careers.So he partnered with his longtime colleague, women’s leadership expert Sally Helgesen, to create this invaluable handbook for women trying to take the next step in their careers. They realized that for women in particular, the very skills and habits that made them successful early in their careers could actually be holding them back as they advance to the next stage of their working lives. Women in particular struggle with habits like:1. Reluctance to Claim Your Achievements2. Expecting Others to Spontaneously Notice and Reward Your Hard Work3. Overvaluing Expertise4. Building Rather than Leveraging Relationships5. Failing to Enlist Allies from Day One6. Putting Your Job Before Your Career7. The Disease to Please8. The Perfection Trap9. Minimizing10. Too Much11. Ruminating12. Letting Your Radar Distract YouLike the original What Got You Here, this new book will help women identify specific behaviors that keep them from realizing their full potential, no matter what stage they are in their career. It will also help them identify why what worked for them in the past will not necessarily get them where they want to go in the future–and how to finally shed those behaviors so they can advance to the next level, whatever that may be.

    A wise and brilliant guide to transforming the self and our society.In her powerful new book, critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them.When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defenses she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs.Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny.Written with Febos’ characteristic precision, lyricism, and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self.

    She then looks at the historical practices of Chinese foot binding and Medieval European witch burning from a radical feminist perspective. The book's final section discusses the concept of androgyny within various cultures' creation myths and argues for "the development of a new kind of human being and a new kind of human community" free from gender and gendered roles.

    Offers emotional support for working mothers and gives practical advice on such issues as selecting a breast pump, integrating pumping sessions into daily work routines, and maintaining a milk supply.

    So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why­ she - along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing - remains unmarried. This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless - the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life. Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives - a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savor.

    Yet so much about motherhood happens in your head. What everyone really wants to know: Is this normal? -Even after months of trying, is it normal to panic after finding out you’re pregnant? -Is it normal not to feel love at first sight for your baby? -Is it normal to fight with your parents and partner? -Is it normal to feel like a breastfeeding failure? -Is it normal to be zonked by “mommy brain?” In What No One Tells You, two of America’s top reproductive psychiatrists reassure you that the answer is yes. With thirty years of combined experience counseling new and expectant mothers, they provide a psychological and hormonal backstory to the complicated emotions that women experience, and show why it’s natural for “matrescence”—the birth of a mother—to be as stressful and transformative a period as adolescence. Here, finally, is the first-ever practical guide to help new mothers feel less guilt and more self-esteem, less isolation and more kinship, less resentment and more intimacy, less exhaustion and more pleasure, and learn other tips to navigate the ups and downs of this exciting, demanding time

    Linda Geddes was no different, except that as a journalist writing for New Scientist magazine she had access to the most up-to-date scientific research. What began as a personal quest to find the truth behind headlines and information that didn’t patronize or confuse is now a brilliant new book. In Bumpology, Geddes discusses the latest research on every topic that expectant parents encounter, from first pregnancy symptoms to pregnancy diet, the right birth plan, and a baby’s first year.

    Her 6-step, proven process to get your toddler out of diapers and onto the toilet has already worked for tens of thousands of kids and their parents. Here's the good news: your child is probably ready to be potty trained EARLIER than you think (ideally, between 20-30 months), and it can be done FASTER than you expect (most kids get the basics in a few days—but Jamie's got you covered even if it takes a little longer). If you've ever said to yourself:** How do I know if my kid is ready? ** Why won't my child poop in the potty? ** How do I avoid "potty power struggles"? ** How can I get their daycare provider on board? ** My kid was doing so well—why is he regressing? ** And what about nighttime?!Oh Crap! Potty Training can solve all of these (and other) common issues. This isn't theory, you're not bribing with candy, and there are no gimmicks. This is real-world, from-the-trenches potty training information—all the questions and all the ANSWERS you need to do it once and be done with diapers for good.

    As a silent, attentive partner, she followed eight teenagers in the typically American town of Reston, Virginia, listening to their stories, observing their rituals, watching them fulfill their dreams and enact their tragedies. What she found was that America's teens have fashioned a fully defined culture that adults neither see nor imagine--a culture of unprecedented freedom and baffling complexity, a culture with rules but no structure, values but no clear morality, codes but no consistency.Is it society itself that has created this separate teen community? Resigned to the attitude that adolescents simply live in "a tribe apart," adults have pulled away, relinquishing responsibility and supervision, allowing the unhealthy behaviors of teens to flourish. Ultimately, this rift between adults and teenagers robs both generations of meaningful connections. For everyone's world is made richer and more challenging by having adolescents in it.

    A doctor and a mother, she approaches the question of how a woman and baby might have the most fulfilling birth experience with respect for the wisdom of both medical science and the human body. Using current medical and epidemiological research plus women's experiences (including her own), she demonstrates that what she calls "undisturbed birth" is almost always healthier and safer than high-technology approaches to birth. Her wise counsel on issues like breastfeeding and sleeping during postpartum helps extend the gentle birth experience into a gentle parenting relationship.

    Wade In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who Went Away tells a story not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up for adoption. Based on Fessler's groundbreaking interviews, it brings to brilliant life these women's voices and the spirit of the time, allowing each to share her own experience in gripping and intimate detail. Today, when the future of the Roe decision and women's reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. In 2002, Fessler, an adoptee herself, traveled the country interviewing women willing to speak publicly about why they relinquished their children. Researching archival records and the political and social climate of the time, she uncovered a story of three decades of women who, under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced or outright forced to give their babies up for adoption. Fessler deftly describes the impossible position in which these women found themselves: as a sexual revolution heated up in the postwar years, birth control was tightly restricted, and abortion proved prohibitively expensive or life endangering. At the same time, a postwar economic boom brought millions of American families into the middle class, exerting its own pressures to conform to a model of family perfection. Caught in the middle, single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy. The majority of the women Fessler interviewed have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing and important look into a long-overlooked social history, The Girls Who Went Away is their story.