The Second Shift


Arlie Russell Hochschild - 1989
    As the majority of women entered the workforce, sociologist and Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild was one of the first to talk about what really happens in dual-career households. Many people were amazed to find that women still did the majority of childcare and housework even though they also worked outside the home. Now, in this updated edition with a new introduction from the author, we discover how much things have, or have not, changed for women today.

"Believing Women" in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an


Asma Barlas - 2002
    Taking a wholly different view, Asma Barlas develops a believer's reading of the Qur'an that demonstrates the radically egalitarian and antipatriarchal nature of its teachings.Beginning with a historical analysis of religious authority and knowledge, Barlas shows how Muslims came to read inequality and patriarchy into the Qur'an to justify existing religious and social structures and demonstrates that the patriarchal meanings ascribed to the Qur'an are a function of who has read it, how, and in what contexts. She goes on to reread the Qur'an's position on a variety of issues in order to argue that its teachings do not support patriarchy. To the contrary, Barlas convincingly asserts that the Qur'an affirms the complete equality of the sexes, thereby offering an opportunity to theorize radical sexual equality from within the framework of its teachings. This new view takes readers into the heart of Islamic teachings on women, gender, and patriarchy, allowing them to understand Islam through its most sacred scripture, rather than through Muslim cultural practices or Western media stereotypes.

We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement


Andi Zeisler - 2016
    Once a dirty word brushed away with a grimace, "feminist" has been rebranded as a shiny label sported by movie and pop stars, fashion designers, and multi-hyphenate powerhouses like Beyoncé It drives advertising and marketing campaigns for everything from wireless plans to underwear to perfume, presenting what's long been a movement for social justice as just another consumer choice in a vast market. Individual self-actualization is the goal, shopping more often than not the means, and celebrities the mouthpieces. But what does it mean when social change becomes a brand identity? Feminism's splashy arrival at the center of today's media and pop-culture marketplace, after all, hasn't offered solutions to the movement's unfinished business. Planned Parenthood is under sustained attack, women are still paid 77 percent -- or less -- of the man's dollar, and vicious attacks on women, both on- and offline, are utterly routine. Andi Zeisler, a founding editor of Bitch Media, draws on more than twenty years' experience interpreting popular culture in this biting history of how feminism has been co-opted, watered down, and turned into a gyratory media trend. Surveying movies, television, advertising, fashion, and more, Zeisler reveals a media landscape brimming with the language of empowerment, but offering little in the way of transformational change. Witty, fearless, and unflinching, We Were Feminists Once is the story of how we let this happen, and how we can amplify feminism's real purpose and power.

Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media


Susan J. Douglas - 1994
    Photos.

The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire


Leslie P. Peirce - 1993
    This book examines the sources of royal women's power and assesses the reactions of contemporaries, which ranged from loyal devotion to armed opposition. By examining political action in the context of household networks, Leslie Peirce demonstrates that female power was a logical, indeed an intended, consequence of political structures. Royal women were custodians of sovereign power, training their sons in its use and exercising it directly as regents when necessary. Furthermore, they played central roles in the public culture of sovereignty--royal ceremonial, monumental building, and patronage of artistic production. The Imperial Harem argues that the exercise of political power was tied to definitions of sexuality. Within the dynasty, the hierarchy of female power, like the hierarchy of male power, reflected the broader society's control for social control of the sexually active.

Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred


M. Jacqui Alexander - 2005
    Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism. Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer studies to take up transnational frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the heteronormative regulatory practices of modern state formations; and for feminists to wrestle with the spiritual dimensions of experience and the meaning of sacred subjectivity.In these meditations, Alexander deftly unites large, often contradictory, historical processes across time and space. She focuses on the criminalization of queer communities in both the United States and the Caribbean in ways that prompt us to rethink how modernity invents its own traditions; she juxtaposes the political organizing and consciousness of women workers in global factories in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada with the pressing need for those in the academic factory to teach for social justice; she reflects on the limits and failures of liberal pluralism; and she presents original and compelling arguments that show how and why transgenerational memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently constituted women-of-color communities as it operates as a powerful antidote to oppression. In this multifaceted, visionary book, Alexander maps the terrain of alternative histories and offers new forms of knowledge with which to mold alternative futures.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity


Judith Butler - 1989
    This is the text where Judith Butler began to advance the ideas that would go on to take life as "performativity theory," as well as some of the first articulations of the possibility for subversive gender practices, and she writes in her preface to the 10th anniversary edition released in 1999 that one point of Gender Trouble was "not to prescribe a new gendered way of life [...] but to open up the field of possibility for gender [...]" Widely taught, and widely debated, Gender Trouble continues to offer a powerful critique of heteronormativity and of the function of gender in the modern world.

The Face Behind The Veil


Donna Gehrke-White - 2006
    In this extraordinary and moving book, journalist Donna Gehrke-White provides a rare, revealing look into the hearts, minds, and everyday lives of Muslim women in America, and opens a window on a culture as diverse as it is misunderstood. The only book of its kind and the first to explore America's Muslim women--from "The New Traditionalists" (women who wear the veil even if earlier generations did not) to "The Blenders"' (women who don't wear the veil but consider themselves spiritual) to "The Converts" (women from other religious backgrounds who have recently converted to Islam) and the myriad of women that fall somewhere in between. Here, in their own words, are the many different voices of doctors, soccer moms, rebels, reformers, former political prisoners, survivors, activists--women of faith, courage, hope, and change--all Muslims, all Americans.

Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS


Azadeh Moaveni - 2019
    Emma from Hamburg, Sharmeena and three high school friends from London, Nour, a religious dropout from Tunis: all found rebellion or community in political Islam and fell prey to sophisticated propaganda that promised them a cosmopolitan adventure and a chance to forge an ideal Islamic community where they could live devoutly without fear of stigma or repression. It wasn’t long before the militants exposed themselves as little more than violent criminals, more obsessed with power than the tenets of Islam, and the women of ISIS were stripped of any agency, perpetually widowed and remarried, and ultimately trapped in a brutal, lawless society. The fall of the caliphate only brought new challenges to women no state wanted to reclaim. Moaveni’s sensitivity and reporting makes these forgotten women indelible and illuminates the turbulent politics that set them on their paths.

The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (Updated With a New Epilogue)


Riane Eisler - 1987
    The Chalice and the Blade tells a new story of our cultural origins. It shows that warfare and the war of the sexes are neither divinely nor biologically ordained. It provides verification that a better future is possible—and is in fact firmly rooted in the haunting dramas of what happened in our past.

But Some of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women's Studies


Akasha Gloria Hull - 1986
    "Important and innovative."--Feminist Bookstore News

The Feminine Mystique


Betty Friedan - 1963
    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 woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire. This 50th–anniversary edition features an afterword by best-selling author Anna Quindlen as well as a new introduction by Gail Collins.

Discourse on Colonialism


Aimé Césaire - 1950
    Nearly twenty years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialism inspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and antiwar movements. Aimé Césaire eloquently describes the brutal impact of capitalism and colonialism on both the colonizer and colonized, exposing the contradictions and hypocrisy implicit in western notions of "progress" and "civilization" upon encountering the "savage," "uncultured," or "primitive." He reaffirms African values, identity, and culture, and their relevance, reminding us that "the relationship between consciousness and reality is extremely complex. . . . It is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society." An interview with Aimé Césaire by the poet René Depestre is also included.

The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution


Carolyn Merchant - 1980
    An examination of the Scientific Revolution that shows how the mechanistic world view of modern science has sanctioned the exploitation of nature, unrestrained commercial expansion, and a new socioeconomic order that subordinates women.

Race, Class, & Gender: An Anthology


Margaret L. Andersen - 1992
    The author's selection of very accessible articles show how race, class, and gender shape people's experiences, and help students to see the issues in an analytic, as well as descriptive way. The book also provides conceptual grounding in understanding race, class, and gender; has a strong historical and sociological perspective; and is further strengthened by conceptual introductions by the authors.Students will find the readings engaging and accessible, but may gain the most from the introduction sections that highlight key points and relate the essential concepts. Included in the collection of readings are narratives aimed at building empathy, and articles on important social issues such as prison, affirmative action, poverty, immigration, and racism, among other topics.IncludesWhy race, class, and gender still matter by M.L. Andersen and P.H. CollinsMissing people and others, joining together to expand the circle by A. MadridSystems of power and inequality by M.L. Andersen and P.H. CollinsRace and racism, Racism without "racists" by E. Bonilla-SilvaClass and inequality, Growing gulf between rich and the rest of us by H. SklarGender and sexism, Sex and gender through the prism of difference by M.B. Zinn, P. Hondahneu-Sotelo, and M. MessnerEthnicity and nationality, Is this a white country, or what? by L. RubinSexuality and heterosexism, "You talkin' to me?" by J. KilbourneStructure of social institutions by M.L. Andersen and P.H. CollinsWork and economic transformation, Race, class, gender, and women's works by T. Amott and J. MatthaeiFamilies, Our mothers' grief, racial-ethnic women and the maintenance of families by B.T. DillMedia and culture, Racist stereotyping in the English language by R.B. MooreHealth and social welfare, Can education eliminate race, class, and gender inequality? by R.A. Mickelson and S.S. SmithState institutions and violence, First Americans, American Indians by C.M. SnippSocial change and sites of change by M.L. Andersen and P.H. CollinsSites of change, Starbucks paradox by K. FellnerProcesses of change, How the new working class transform urban America by R.D.G. Kelley