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Image one: E-book titled A History of Midwifery in the United States: The Midwife Said Fear Not (2016) - synopsis: Written by two of the profession's most prominent midwifery leaders, this authoritative history of midwifery in the United States, from the 1600s to the present, is distinguished by its vast breadth and depth. The book spans the historical evolution of midwives as respected, autonomous health care workers and midwifery as a profession, and considers the strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities for this discipline as enduring motifs throughout the text.
Image two: E-book titled Woman-priest: Tradition and Transgression in the Contemporary Roman Catholic Church (2020) - synopsis: While some Catholics and even non-Catholics today are asking if priests are necessary, especially given the ongoing sex-abuse scandal, The Roman Catholic Woman-priests (RCWP) looks to reframe and reform Roman Catholic priesthood, starting with ordained women. Woman-priest is the first academic study of the RCWP movement. As an ethnography, Woman-priest analyzes the women-priests’ actions and lived theologies in order to explore ongoing tensions in Roman Catholicism around gender and sexuality, priestly authority, and religious change.
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Image one: E-book titled Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Backgrounds Issues (2020) - synopsis: This book argues that women served as leaders in a number of synagogues during the Roman and Byzantine periods. The evidence for this consists of nineteen Greek and Latin inscriptions in which women bear the titles "head of the synagogue," "leader," "elder," "mother of the synagogue" and "priestess." These inscriptions range in date from 27 B.C.E. to perhaps the sixth century C.E. and in provenance from Italy to Asia Minor, Egypt and Palestine. While new discoveries make this a growing corpus of material, a number of the inscriptions have been known to scholars for some time.
Image two: E-book titled Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (2017) - synopsis: Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a broad overview of the great diversity of feminist thought and practice in Japan from the early twentieth century to the present. Drawing on methodologies and approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, and sociology, each chapter presents the results of research based on some combination of original archival research, careful textual analysis, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation.
Image one: E-book titled Family Jigsaws: Grandmothers as the Missing Piece Shaping Bilingual Children's Learner Identities (2017) - synopsis: This exciting ethnographic study spotlights the multiple identities of three third-generation British-born Bangladeshi children in London's East End as they learn with their teachers, mothers and grandmothers. The book reveals for the first time the remarkable ability of young bilingual children to compartmentalize their learning and become flexible learners. It is the first to show how it is children's interactions with their grandmothers - who often speak no English - that most powerfully enhance and extend their educational and cultural experiences.
Image two: E-book titled After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (2015) - synopsis: Forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade continues to make headlines. After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate cuts through the myths and misunderstandings to present a clear-eyed account of cultural and political responses to the landmark 1973 ruling in the decade that followed. The grassroots activists who shaped the discussion after Roe, Mary Ziegler shows, were far more fluid and diverse than the partisans dominating the debate today.
Image one: E-book titled Complicated Lives: Girls, Parents, Drugs, and Juvenile Justice (2017) - synopsis: Focuses on the lives of sixty-five drug-using girls in the juvenile justice system (living in group homes, a residential treatment center, and a youth correctional facility) who grew up in families characterized by parental drug use, violence, and child maltreatment. Vera Lopez situates girls' relationships with parents who fail to live up to idealized parenting norms and examines how these relationships change over time, and ultimately contribute to the girls' future drug use and involvement in the justice system. Lopez provides an optimistic prescription for reform and improvement of the lives of these young women and presents a number of suggestions ranging from enhanced cultural competency training for all juvenile justice professionals to developing stronger collaborations between youth and adult serving systems and agencies.
Image two: E-book titled An Extraordinary Ordinary Woman: The Journal of Phebe Orvis, 1820-1830 (2017) - synopsis: In 1820, Phebe Orvis began a journal that she faithfully kept for a decade. Richly detailed, her diary captures not only the everyday life of an ordinary woman in early nineteenth-century Vermont and New York, but also the unusual happenings of her family, neighborhood, and beyond. The journal entries trace Orvis's transition from single life to marriage and motherhood, including her time at the Middlebury Female Seminary and her observations about the changing social and economic environment of the period.
Image one: E-book titled Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (2010) - synopsis: Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman (1860–1935) launched her career as a lecturer, author, and reformer with the story for which she is best-known today, "The Yellow Wallpaper." She was hailed as the "brains" of the US women's movement, whose focus she sought to broaden from suffrage to economics. Her most influential sociological work criticized the competitive individualism of capitalists and Social Darwinists, and touted altruistic service as the prerequisite to both social progress and human evolution.
Image two: E-book titled Queen of Vaudeville: The Story of Eva Tanguay (2012) - synopsis: In her day, Eva Tanguay (1879–1947) was one of the most famous women in America. Widely known as the 'I Don't Care Girl'—named after a song she popularized and her independent, even brazen persona—Tanguay established herself as a vaudeville and musical comedy star in 1901 with the New York City premiere of the show My Lady—and never looked back. Queen of Vaudeville is a dynamic portrait of a dazzling and unjustly forgotten show business star.
Image one: E-book titled African American Women Chemists (2011) - synopsis: In this book, Jeannette Brown, an African American woman chemist herself, will present a wide-ranging historical introduction to the relatively new presence of African American women in the field of chemistry. It will detail their struggles to obtain an education and their efforts to succeed in a field in which there were few African American men, much less African American women. The book contains sketches of the lives of African America women chemists from the earliest pioneers up until the late 1960's when the Civil Rights Acts were passed and greater career opportunities began to emerge.
Image two: E-book titled Madame Wu Chien-Shiung: The First Lady of Physics Research (2013) - synopsis: Narrating the well-lived life of the “Chinese Madame Curie” — a recipient of the first Wolf Prize in Physics (1978), the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Princeton University, as well as the first female president of the American Physical Society — this book provides a comprehensive and honest account of the life of Dr. Wu Chien-Shiung, an outstanding and leading experimental physicist of the 20th century.
Image one: E-book titled Lady Lushes: Gender, Alcoholism, and Medicine in Modern America (2017) - synopsis: From the glamorous hard-drinking flapper of the 1920s to the disgraced and alcoholic wife and mother played by Lee Remick in the 1962 film “Days of Wine and Roses,” alcohol consumption by American women has been seen as both a prerogative and as a threat to health, happiness, and the social order. In Lady Lushes, medical historian Michelle L. McClellan traces the story of the female alcoholic from the late-nineteenth through the twentieth century. She draws on a range of sources to demonstrate the persistence of the belief that alcohol use is antithetical to an idealized feminine role, particularly one that glorifies motherhood. Lady Lushes offers a fresh perspective on the importance of gender role ideology in the formation of medical knowledge and authority.
Image two: E-book titled A Medieval Woman's Companion (2016) - synopsis: Focusing on women from Western Europe between c. 300 and 1500 CE in the medieval period and richly carpeted with detail, A Medieval Woman's Companion offers a wealth of information about real medieval women who are now considered vital for understanding the Middle Ages in a full and nuanced way. Short biographies of 20 medieval women illustrate how they have anticipated and shaped current concerns, including access to education; creative emotional outlets such as art, theater, romantic fiction, and music; marriage and marital rights; fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, contraception and gynecology; sex trafficking and sexual violence; the balance of work and family; faith; and disability.
Image one: E-book titled Starring Red Wing!: The Incredible Career of Lilian M. St. Cyr, the First Native American Film Star (2019) - synopsis: The epic biography Starring Red Wing! brings the exciting career, dedicated activism, and noteworthy legacy of Ho-Chunk actress Lilian Margaret St. Cyr vividly to life. Known to film audiences as “Princess Red Wing,” St. Cyr emerged as the most popular Native American actress in the pre-Hollywood and early studio-system era in the United States, befriending and working with icons such as Mary Pickford, Jewell Carmen, Tom Mix, Max Sennett, and William Selig.
Image two: E-book titled Pythagorean Women: Their History and Writings (2013) - synopsis: Pythagorean Women provides English translations of all the earliest extant examples of literary Greek prose by Neo-pythagorean women, shedding light on their attitudes about marriage, the home, music, and the cosmos. Author Sarah B. Pomeroy sets the Pythagorean and Neo-pythagorean women vividly in their historical, ecological, and intellectual contexts, illustrated with original photographs of sites and artifacts known to these women.
Image one: E-book titled Heroines of the Qing: Exemplary Women Tell Their Stories (2016) - synopsis: Traditionally, “exemplary women” (lienu)--heroic martyrs, chaste widows, and faithful maidens, for example--were written into official dynastic histories for their unrelenting adherence to female virtue by Confucian family standards. However, despite the rich writing traditions about these women, their lives were often distorted by moral and cultural agendas. Binbin Yang, drawing on interdisciplinary sources, shows how they were able to cross boundaries that were typically closed to women--boundaries not only of gender, but also of knowledge, economic power, political engagement, and ritual and cultural authority.
Image two: E-book titled The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science (2010) - synopsis: In The Madame Curie Complex, Julie Des Jardins dismantles the myth of the lone male genius, reframing the history of science with revelations about women’s substantial contributions to the field. She explores the lives of some of the most famous female scientists, including Jane Goodall, the eminent primatologist; Rosalind Franklin, the chemist whose work anticipated the discovery of DNA’s structure; Rosalyn Yalow, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist; and, of course, Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning pioneer whose towering, mythical status has both empowered and stigmatized future generations of women considering a life in science.
Image one: E-book titled Black Women and Social Justice Education: Legacies and Lessons (2019) - synopsis: Black Women and Social Justice Education explores Black women’s experiences and expertise in teaching and learning about justice in a range of formal and informal educational settings. Linking historical accounts with groundbreaking contributions by new and rising leaders in the field, it examines, evaluates, establishes, and reinforces Black women’s commitment to social justice in education at all levels.
Image two: E-book titled Some Jewish Women in Antiquity (2020) - synopsis: This book sets out to characterize different types of Jewish women in Eretz-Israel over an extended period of more than a thousand years, from the biblical period to the time of the Mishnah and Talmud. This is a study in the comparative history of the status of women in Eretz-Israel in antiquity, and, like any comparative study, it addresses the same issues in different circumstances, contributing to the relatively new field of Jewish social history; it also furnishes additional proof, should any be necessary, of the scientific momentum to be gained by interdisciplinary study like the present combination of history and the social sciences.
Image of Virginia Woolf and a quote from her reading: "For most of history, 'anonymous' was a woman."
Image one: E-book titled Man-Made Woman: The Dialectics of Cross-Dressing (2017) - synopsis: On July 27th, 2015, Colin Cremin overcame a lifetime of fear and repression and came to work dressed as a woman called Ciara. This book charts her personal journey as a male-to-female cross-dresser in the ever-changing world of gender politics. Interweaving the personal and the political, through discussions of fetishism, aesthetics, and popular culture, Man-Made Woman explores gender, identity and pleasure through the lenses of feminism, Marxism and psychoanalytic theory.
Image two: E-book titled Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era (2017) - synopsis: Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era profiles the most important figures of this cultural and intellectual movement. Highlighting the accomplishments of black women who sought to create positive change after the end of WWI, this reference work includes representatives not only from the literary scene but also activists, actresses, artists, educators, entrepreneurs, musicians, political leaders, and scholars.
Image of Malala Yousafzai and a quote from her reading: "When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful."
Image one: E-book titled Mothers and Daughters in Nineteenth-Century America: The Biosocial Construction of Femininity (2015) - synopsis: The feminine script of early nineteenth century centered on women's role as patient, long-suffering mothers. By mid-century, however, their daughters faced a world very different in social and economic options and in the physical experiences surrounding their bodies. In this groundbreaking study, Nancy Theriot turns to social and medical history, developmental psychology, and feminist theory to explain the fundamental shift in women's concepts of femininity and gender identity during the course of the century -- from an ideal suffering womanhood to emphasis on female control of physical self.
Image two: E-book titled Toni Morrison: Forty Years in the Clearing (2012) - synopsis: Enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison’s cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades.
Image of Maxine Hong Kingston and a quote from her that reads: "In a time of destruction, create something."
Image one: E-book titled Jane Austen's Women: An Introduction (2018) - synopsis: Jane Austen's Women answers these questions by exploring Austen's affirming yet challenging vision of both who her dynamic female characters are, and who they become. This important new work analyzes the heroines' relationships to body, mind, spirit, environment, and society.
Image two: E-book titled Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan (2018) - synopsis: The overwhelming majority of tea practitioners in contemporary Japan are women, but there has been little discussion on their historical role in tea culture (chanoyu). In Cultivating Femininity, Rebecca Corbett writes women back into this history and shows how tea practice for women was understood, articulated, and promoted in the Edo (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. Viewing chanoyu from the lens of feminist and gender theory, she sheds new light on tea’s undeniable influence on the formation of modern understandings of femininity in Japan.
Image of Thuli Madonsela and a quote from her that reads: "I need to listen well so that I hear what is not said."
Image one: Women's History Month
Image two: E-book titled When Women Rule the Court: Gender, Race, and Japanese American Basketball (2017) - synopsis: For nearly one hundred years, basketball has been an important part of Japanese American life. Women's basketball holds a special place in the contemporary scene of highly organized and expansive Japanese American leagues in California, in part because these leagues have produced numerous talented female players. Using data from interviews and observations, Nicole Willms explores the interplay of social forces and community dynamics that have shaped this unique context of female athletic empowerment.
Image three: E-book titled Women in Mongol Iran: The Khatuns, 1206-1335 (2017) - synopsis: This book shows the development of women's status in the Mongol Empire from its original homeland in Mongolia up to the end of the Ilkhanate of Iran in 1335. Taking a thematic approach, the chapters show a coherent progression of this development and contextualise the evolution of the role of women in medieval Mongol society.
