Women's History Resources: Equality

This groundbreaking and important book explores how women of different ethnic/racial groups conceive of feminism. Aída Hurtado advances the theory of relational privilege to explain those differing conceptions. Previous theories about feminism have predominantly emphasized the lives and experiences of middle-class white women. Aída Hurtado argues that the different responses to feminism by women of color are not so much the result of personality or cultural differences between white women and women of color, but of their differing relationship to white men.

This collection demonstrates the diversity of women's struggles against problems such as racism, violence, homophobia, focusing on the complex ways that gender, culture, race-ethnicity and class shape women's political consciousness in the US.

In The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, the eagerly awaited concluding volume of Women and History, Lerner documents the twelve-hundred-year struggle of women to free their minds from patriarchal thought, to create Women's History, and to achieve a feminist consciousness.

The Creation of Patriarchy is a radical reconceptualization of the history of Western civilization that makes gender central to its analysis. The author argues that male dominance over women is the product of historical development and is not "natural" or biological and hence unchangeable. Therefore patriarchy as a system of organizing society can be ended by historical process.

This first-class collection of historical essays revises and rejects the view that American women after suffrage rejected feminism and sank into political apathy and unconsciousness. Rather, the authors point out the limitations of the view of suffrage as either solving all women's problems or as a disappointment and failure for the women's movement. The problems and choices facing women in these decades emerge in part from the very diversity of women's experiences and interests portrayed to such effect in the rest of this volume.

Examines the dilemma of the educated American woman, with epilogue by the author criticizing forces threatening to disrupt original purposes of Women's Liberation.

Here are the essential historical writings of feminism. Many of these works, long out of print or forgotten in what Miriam Schneir describes as a male-dominated literary tradition, are finally brought out of obscurity and into the light of contemporary analysis and criticism. Included are more than forty selections, coveting 150 years of writings on women's struggle for freedom, from the American Revolution to the first decades of the twentieth century.

What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, bell hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives¿to see that feminism is for everybody.

The American women's movementhas been shrouded in myths, arguethree leading scholars in this bold andrevisionist history. Eschewing the conventional wisdom that places the origins of the American women's movement in the nostalgic glow of the late 1960s, Feminism Unfinished traces the beginnings of this seminal American social movement to the 1920s, in the process creating an expanded, historical narrative that dramatically rewrites a century of American women's history.

In Finding Feminism, Alison Dahl Crossley analyzes feminist activists at three different U.S. colleges, revealing that feminism is alive on campuses, but is complex, nuanced, and context-dependent. Young feminists are carrying the torch of the movement, despite a climate that is not always receptive to their claims.

The History of U.S. Feminism is an introductory text designed to be used as supplementary material for first-year women's studies students or as a brush-up text for more advanced students. Covering the first, second, and third waves of feminism, The History of U.S. Feminism provides historical context of all the major events and players since the late nineteenth century through today.

The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today's struggles.

This book chronicles the influence of second wave feminism on everything from electoral politics to LGBTQ rights. The original descriptions of second wave feminism focused on elite, white voices, obscuring the accomplishments of many activists, as third wave feminists rightly criticized. Those limited narratives also prematurely marked the end of the movement, imposing an imaginary timeline on what is a continuous struggle for women’s rights.

No Permanent Waves boldly enters the ongoing debates over the utility of the "wave" metaphor for capturing the complex history of women's rights by offering fresh perspectives on the diverse movements that comprise U.S. feminism, past and present. Seventeen essays--both original and reprinted--address continuities, conflicts, and transformations among women's movements in the United States from the early nineteenth century through today.

This book addresses the current resurgence of interest in feminism - notably within popular culture and media - that has led some to announce the arrival of the fourth wave. Research explores where fourth-wave feminism sits in relation to those that preceded it, and in particular, how fourth-wave feminism intersects with differing understandings of postfeminism(s).

Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, "the complex confluence of identities--race, class, gender, and sexuality--systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.

The First Edition of this Norton Critical Edition was both an acclaimed classroom text and ahead of its time. This Second Edition offers the best in Wollstonecraft scholarship and criticism since 1976, providing the ideal means for studying the first feminist document written in English.

When Everything Changed begins in 1960, when most American women had to get their husbands' permission to apply for a credit card. It ends in 2008 with Hillary Clinton's historic presidential campaign. This was a time of cataclysmic change, when, after four hundred years, expectations about the lives of American women were smashed in just a generation.

Louise Newman reinterprets an important period (1870s-1920s) in the history of women's rights, focusing attention on a core contradiction at the heart of early feminist theory. At a time when white elites were concerned with imperialist projects and civilizing missions, progressive white womendeveloped an explicit racial ideology to promote their cause, defending patriarchy for "primitives" while calling for its elimination among the "civilized." Exploring how progressive white women at the turn of the century laid the intellectual groundwork for the feminist social movements thatfollowed, Newman's book thus speaks to contemporary debates concerning the effect of race on current feminist scholarship.

While most people believe that the movement to secure voluntary reproductive control for women centered solely on abortion rights, for many women abortion was not the only, or even primary, focus. Jennifer Nelson tells the story of the feminist struggle for legal abortion and reproductive rights in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s through the particular contributions of women of color.

In this "indispensable book" (Sandra Gilbert), Ruth Rosen takes the reader on an unforgettable journey through the last half of the twentieth century, charting the accomplishments and failures of a movement that transformed American families, business, politics, and society.Weaving together ten years of archival research and interviews, Rosen turns the long and complicated history of the women's movement into a compelling and coherent narrative.

"In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister: a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. But had she been allowed to create, urges Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling. In this essay, Virginia Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give a voice to those who have none. Her message is simple: A woman must have an income and a room of her own in order to have the freedom to create."--BOOK JACKET.

Belonging to the World surveys the treatment of women in American law from the nation's earliest beginnings in British North America to the present. An original work of historical synthesis, the book aims to build bridges between fields long thought to be unbridgeable -- among them, thehistory of women, American constitutional and legal history, political theory, and law. It delinates the shifting relationships between American law practice and women, both within the family and elsewhere, as it looks beyond the campagin for women's suffrage to broader zones of contest andcontroversy. Women's stories and voices are used throughout to drive home the extraordinary range and persistence of female rebellion since the 1630s -- when Anne Hutchinson and Ann Hibbens decided to oppose forces of constraint in colonial New England -- to the present era of "post-feminist"retrenchment and backlash. As the narrative documents women's ongoing battles for such rights have been governed differently from men, often out of the state's line of vision, and that much of this difference reflected the survival of a unitary monarchical "head" in the constitutional and moraleconomy of households. Excellent for use in constitutional law and women's studies classes.

Taking a broad view of the ongoing efforts to attain rights for women, this work provides unique insight into the context of the issues and reveals the range of factors that can influence a particular policy decision. What constitutes "women's rights" depends on whom you ask--or who is in political office at the time. Understandably, women's rights have changed across time as perceptions of women and their roles have changed. What remains consistent regardless of the historic era is that rights assumed by men often must be specifically granted to women. This book presents an overview of women's rights that also addresses specific policy decisions.