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


Betsy Israel - 2002
    From the nineteenth-century spinsters, of New England to the Bowery girls of New York City, from the 1920s flappers to the 1940s working women of the war years and the career girls of the 1950s and 1960s, single women have fought to find and feel comfortable in that room of their own. One need only look at Bridget Jones and the Sex and the City gang to see that single women still maintain an uneasy relationship with the rest of society -- and yet they radiate an aura of glamour and mystery in popular culture.As witty as it is well researched, as thoughtful as it is lively, Bachelor Girl is a must-read for women everywhere.

The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace


Lynn Povich - 2012
    For many, filing the suit was a radicalizing act that empowered them to "find themselves" and stake a claim. Others lost their way in a landscape of opportunities, pressures, discouragements, and hostilities they weren't prepared to navigate.With warmth, humor, and perspective, the book also explores why changes in the law did not change everything for today's young women.

100 RV Tips and Tricks (Mack's RV Handbook)


Malcom "Mack" Massey - 2014
    This BONUS editon offers extra tips to introduce this handbook series.

The Marigold Story: Indira Gandhi & Others


Kumkum Chadha - 2019
    Prime Minister Indira Gandhi hated the marigold flower, although in death it was strewn all over her body; her son Sanjay Gandhi was dictatorial, but also uncommonly empathetic; Smita Patil, who was synonymous with strong, women-centric films, was deeply insecure in her personal life; Ekta Kapoor, the television czarina believes that her unabashed faith in God helped her scale heights and earn her first big bucks; and Abhinav Bindra, who won India the first Olympic gold medal in an individual event confessed how he was a laidback child with no goals in sight. Embellished with interesting nuggets, this book is a collection of fascinating profiles including, L.K. Advani, Smriti Irani, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Rajiv Gandhi, Amitabh Bachchan and Arun Jaitley. Uncommon access, being privy to confidences and, above all, a willingness to tell the story, bring alive the people behind the headlines. The Marigold Story: Indira Gandhi & Others is not a gushing account of newsmakers; if anything it captures their weaknesses; goes beyond their achievements and examines what makes these individuals distinctive and unforgettable at the same time.

Harry Truman: The Man Who Divided the World


Jack Steinberg - 2016
    Born and raised by poor, struggling farmers in America's heartland, he had become President through his integrity, a little bit of luck, and sheer hard work. He became the leader of the United States at the tail end of the world's deadliest conflict. Thrust into the middle of a world of conflicting ideologies, Truman would be faced with the newest threat to international stability: a ravenous Soviet Union ready to devour the world with its communist philosophies. As the nation's leader, it fell to him to decide the path which the United States would take into the future. A dedicated public servant and a lover of the freedoms guaranteed by the United States Constitution, Truman realized it was not only his duty but his responsibility to safeguard the free world. By pledging to protect the people of the world from totalitarian rule, Truman unintentionally triggered the Cold War. With his pledge, this often overlooked President forever reshaped American foreign policy, dividing the world into East and West for over forty years.

A Girl Raised by Wolves: An inspiring memoir of one woman's journey through sex trafficking, cancer, murder and more.


Lockey Maisonneuve - 2018
    town, an adolescent girl is unwittingly handed a one-way ticket by her mother to allegedly "visit" her estranged father in Florida. Young and vulnerable, Lockey Maisonnueve has no idea she is being abandoned and sent to live with a vile and dangerous pedophile who would spend the next several years violently raping, abusing and mercilessly selling his daughter's body into childhood prostitution to other adult men. After being rescued by her naive, but well-intentioned, grandparents, her troubled life is further devastated by cancer and ravaged by the subsequent brutal murder of her mother, in which Lockey is briefly considered a suspect. "A Girl Raised by Wolves' is the inspirational memoir of a survivor of the darkest circumstances one can endure in a single lifetime and still emerge with a sense of humor and to defiantly proclaim "they didn't break me!"

In the Body of the World


Eve Ensler - 2013
    Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body—a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain.”But Ensler is shocked out of her distance. While working in the Congo, she is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and through months of harrowing treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body—pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully—and gratefully—joined to the body of the world.Unflinching, generous, and inspiring, Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.http://us.macmillan.com/inthebodyofth...

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


Gail Collins - 2004
    It features a stunning array of personalities, from the women peering worriedly over the side of the Mayflower to feminists having a grand old time protesting beauty pageants and bridal fairs. Courageous, silly, funny, and heartbreaking, these women shaped the nation and our vision of what it means to be female in America. By culling the most fascinating characters — the average as well as the celebrated — Gail Collins, the editorial page editor at the New York Times, charts a journey that shows how women lived, what they cared about, and how they felt about marriage, sex, and work. She begins with the lost colony of Roanoke and the early southern "tobacco brides" who came looking for a husband and sometimes — thanks to the stupendously high mortality rate — wound up marrying their way through three or four. Spanning wars, the pioneering days, the fight for suffrage, the Depression, the era of Rosie the Riveter, the civil rights movement, and the feminist rebellion of the 1970s, America's Women describes the way women's lives were altered by dress fashions, medical advances, rules of hygiene, social theories about sex and courtship, and the ever-changing attitudes toward education, work, and politics. While keeping her eye on the big picture, Collins still notes that corsets and uncomfortable shoes mattered a lot, too. "The history of American women is about the fight for freedom," Collins writes in her introduction, "but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's roles that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders." Told chronologically through the compelling stories of individual lives that, linked together, provide a complete picture of the American woman's experience, America's Women is both a great read and a landmark work of history.

What Makes a Man


Rebecca Walker - 2004
    A timely and profound anthology from the national bestselling author of Black, White and Jewish, Representing a stunning range of essayists and novelists, both men and women, this groundbreaking anthology boldly confronts the complications, possibilities, uncertainties, and joys of being a man in the 21st century.

No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship


Linda K. Kerber - 1998
    Looking closely at thirty telling cases from the pages of American legal history, Kerber's analysis reaches from the Revolution, when married women did not have the same obligation as their husbands to be "patriots," up to the present, when men and women, regardless of their marital status, still have different obligations to serve in the Armed Forces.An original and compelling consideration of American law and culture, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies emphasizes the dangers of excluding women from other civic responsibilities as well, such as loyalty oaths and jury duty. Exploring the lives of the plaintiffs, the strategies of the lawyers, and the decisions of the courts, Kerber offers readers a convincing argument for equal treatment under the law.

Estrogen Matters: Why Taking Hormones in Menopause Can Improve Women's Well-Being and Lengthen Their Lives -- Without Raising the Risk of Breast Cancer


Avrum Bluming - 2018
    For years, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was hailed as a miracle. Study after study showed that HRT, if initiated at the onset of menopause, could ease symptoms ranging from hot flashes to memory loss; reduce the risk of heart disease, Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, and some cancers; and even extend a woman's overall life expectancy. But when a large study by the Women's Health Initiative announced results showing an uptick in breast cancer among women taking HRT, the winds shifted abruptly, and HRT, officially deemed a carcinogen, was abandoned. Now, sixteen years after HRT was left for dead, Dr. Bluming, a medical oncologist, and Dr. Tavris, a social psychologist, track its strange history and present a compelling case for its resurrection. They investigate what led the public -- and much of the medical establishment -- to accept the Women's Health Initiative's often exaggerated claims, while also providing a fuller picture of the science that supports HRT. A sobering and revelatory read, Estrogen Matters sets the record straight on this beneficial treatment and provides an empowering path to wellness for women everywhere.

The Fifties: A Women's Oral History


Brett Harvey - 1993
    In fact, it was a time of great fear, especially for women, and especially the fear of not fitting in. As a woman, you were odd if you graduated from college without being married; if you were married you were odd if you didn't immediately have children; if you had children you were odd if you also wanted to work. Before the feminist movement, women were treated as second-class citizens whose roles were utterly restricted, and The Fifties: A Women's Oral History fully explores those roles, the women who lived them, and the women who broke the molds.

Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II


Yoshimi Yoshiaki - 2000
    The large scale imprisonment and rape of thousands of women, who were euphemistically called "comfort women" by the Japanese military, first seized public attention in 1991 when three Korean women filed suit in a Toyko District Court stating that they had been forced into sexual servitude and demanding compensation. Since then the comfort stations and their significance have been the subject of ongoing debate and intense activism in Japan, much if it inspired by Yoshimi's investigations. How large a role did the military, and by extension the government, play in setting up and administering these camps? What type of compensation, if any, are the victimized women due? These issues figure prominently in the current Japanese focus on public memory and arguments about the teaching and writing of history and are central to efforts to transform Japanese ways of remembering the war.Yoshimi Yoshiaki provides a wealth of documentation and testimony to prove the existence of some 2,000 centers where as many as 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and some Japanese women were restrained for months and forced to engage in sexual activity with Japanese military personnel. Many of the women were teenagers, some as young as fourteen. To date, the Japanese government has neither admitted responsibility for creating the comfort station system nor given compensation directly to former comfort women.This English edition updates the Japanese edition originally published in 1995 and includes introductions by both the author and the translator placing the story in context for American readers.

Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century


Geoffrey R. Stone - 2017
    Stone demonstrates how the Founding Fathers, deeply influenced by their philosophical forebears, saw traditional Christianity as an impediment to the pursuit of happiness and to the quest for human progress. Acutely aware of the need to separate politics from the divisive forces of religion, the Founding Fathers crafted a constitution that expressed the fundamental values of the Enlightenment.Although the Second Great Awakening later came to define America through the lens of evangelical Christianity, nineteenth-century Americans continued to view sex as a matter of private concern, so much so that sexual expression and information about contraception circulated freely, abortions before “quickening” remained legal, and prosecutions for sodomy were almost nonexistent.The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reversed such tolerance, however, as charismatic spiritual leaders and barnstorming politicians rejected the values of our nation’s founders. Spurred on by Anthony Comstock, America’s most feared enforcer of morality, new laws were enacted banning pornography, contraception, and abortion, with Comstock proposing that the word “unclean” be branded on the foreheads of homosexuals. Women increasingly lost control of their bodies, and birth control advocates, like Margaret Sanger, were imprisoned for advocating their beliefs. In this new world, abortions were for the first time relegated to dank and dangerous back rooms.The twentieth century gradually saw the emergence of bitter divisions over issues of sexual “morality” and sexual freedom. Fiercely determined organizations and individuals on both the right and the left wrestled in the domains of politics, religion, public opinion, and the courts to win over the soul of the nation. With its stirring portrayals of Supreme Court justices, Sex and the Constitution reads like a dramatic gazette of the critical cases they decided, ranging from Griswold v. Connecticut (contraception), to Roe v. Wade (abortion), to Obergefell v. Hodges (gay marriage), with Stone providing vivid historical context to the decisions that have come to define who we are as a nation.Now, though, after the 2016 presidential election, we seem to have taken a huge step backward, with the progress of the last half century suddenly imperiled. No one can predict the extent to which constitutional decisions safeguarding our personal freedoms might soon be eroded, but Sex and the Constitution is more vital now than ever before.

Nobody's Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls


Carrie Goldberg - 2019
     “We are all a moment away from having our life overtaken by somebody hell-bent on our destruction.” That grim reality—gleaned from personal experience and twenty years of trauma work—is a fundamental principle of Carrie Goldberg's cutting-edge victims' rights law firm.Riveting and an essential timely conversation-starter, Nobody's Victim invites readers to join Goldberg on the front lines of the war against sexual violence and privacy violations as she fights for revenge porn and sextortion laws; uncovers major Title IX violations; and sues the hell out of tech companies, schools, and powerful sexual predators. Her battleground is the courtroom; her crusade is to transform clients from victims into warriors.In gripping detail, Goldberg shares the diabolical ways her clients are attacked and how she, through her unique combination of advocacy, badass relentlessness, risk-taking, and client-empowerment, pursues justice for them all. There are stories about a woman whose ex-boyfriend made fake bomb threats in her name and caused a national panic; a fifteen-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted on school grounds and then suspended when she reported the attack; and a man whose ex-boyfriend used a dating app to send more than 1,200 men to ex's home and work for sex. With breathtaking honesty, Goldberg also shares her own shattering story about why she began her work and the uphill battle of building a business.While her clients are a diverse group—from every gender, sexual orientation, age, class, race, religion, occupation, and background—the offenders are not. They are highly predictable. Goldberg offers a taxonomy of the four types of offenders she encounters most often at her firm: assholes, psychos, pervs, and trolls. “If we recognize the patterns of these perpetrators,” she explains, “we know how to fight back.”Deeply personal yet achingly universal, Nobody's Victim is a bold and much-needed analysis of victim protection in the internet era. It is an urgent warning of a coming crisis, a predictor of imminent danger, and a weapon to take back control and protect ourselves—both online and off.