Hot Off the Presses!
New book releases!
-
The White House Project: Benchmarking Women's Leadership
-
Reproductive Justice: A Global ConcernABC-CLIO
Every woman in the world has the right to control her own body, plan her family, receive good quality medical care, and give birth to a healthy baby. This book takes a comprehensive look at the status of women's reproductive rights from a transnational, human-rights perspective.
The statistics are ugly: one woman somewhere in the world dies every minute of every day due to pregnancy- and childbirth-related complications. The United Nations estimates that three million girls worldwide are at risk of female genital cutting each year. Every year, tens of thousands of women die due to unsafe abortions. And the sex trafficking of girls and women continues to be a problem that affects many countries.
"Reproductive justice" is a relatively new term that underscores the fact that the existence of reproductive rights does not mean that women are able to exercise those rights. For women unable to exercise their rights for any number of reasons—a lack of available services where they live, lack of money or health insurance to pay for services, being forbidden by family members to seek services—the reality is they have no choices to make and possess little if any control over their own bodies, regardless of what the government states their "rights" are.
Reproductive Justice: A Global Concern provides a comprehensive and integrated examination of the status of reproductive rights for the world's women, covering a wide range of reproductive rights issues. Topics include women's rights to determine their own sexuality and choose their own partners, rape, sex trafficking, fertility treatments and other assisted reproductive technologies, contraception and abortion, maternal and infant mortality, postpartum support, and breastfeeding.
Features
• Contributions from 25 distinguished international scholars with research, practice, and public policy expertise on reproductive rights
• Bibliography with each chapter
• Concluding chapter on international public policy
Highlights
• Gathers and analyzes statistical data and research from many diverse countries
• Covers a wide variety of topics related to reproductive justice, including rape, female genital cutting, and STDs alongside discussions of subjects such as contraception, abortion, and maternal/infant mortality, allowing readers to develop a well-rounded and integrated understanding of the issues
• Presents information in an accessible, interesting style, making this book suitable for both classroom and reference use, and ideal for the educated lay reader with an interest in women's issues -
The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork ImaginariesDuke University Press
In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good. While progressive political movements, including the Marxist and feminist movements, have fought for equal pay, better work conditions, and the recognition of unpaid work as a valued form of labor, even they have tended to accept work as a naturalized or inevitable activity. Weeks argues that in taking work as a given, we have “depoliticized” it, or removed it from the realm of political critique. Employment is now largely privatized, and work-based activism in the United States has atrophied. We have accepted waged work as the primary mechanism for income distribution, as an ethical obligation, and as a means of defining ourselves and others as social and political subjects. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation. Work, she contends, is a legitimate, even crucial, subject for political theory.About The Author
Kathi Weeks is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Constituting Feminist Subjects and a co-editor of The Jameson Reader. -
Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian CancerW. W. Norton & Company
In this moving memoir, a renowned feminist scholar explores the physical and psychological ordeal of living with ovarian cancer.Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, Susan Gubar underwent radical debulking surgery, an attempt to excise the cancer by removing part or all of many organs in the lower abdomen. Her memoir mines the deepest levels of anguish and devotion as she struggles to come to terms with her body’s betrayal and the frightful protocols of contemporary medicine. She finds solace in the abiding love of her husband, children, and friends while she searches for understanding in works of literature, visual art, and the testimonies of others who suffer with various forms of cancer.
Ovarian cancer remains an incurable disease for most of those diagnosed, even those lucky enough to find caring and skilled physicians. Memoir of a Debulked Woman is both a polemic against the ineffectual and injurious medical responses to which thousands of women are subjected and a meditation on the gifts of companionship, art, and literature that sustain people in need.
-
Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes: Canadian Women, Smoking, and Visual Culture, 1880-2000McGill-Queen's University Press
Despite well documented health risks, young women are still drawn to the act of smoking and continue to smoke at an alarming rate. A century ago, women were vocal leaders of campaigns against tobacco across North America. In Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes, Sharon Anne Cook explores the history of the paradoxical relationship between women and the cigarette, in a sensitive and lively description of the many different meanings that smoking has held for women.Focusing on the social context of smoking, Cook explores its allure for elite, middle-class, working, and marginalized women from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. She argues that smoking's attraction is rooted in women's changing identity formation and in strategies for empowerment, an idea enriched through extensive analysis of visual culture. It is in these images (yearbooks, posters, photographic collages, print advertisements, billboards, movies) but also in the act of smoking itself, that women harnessed the power of the visual. Smoking remains a powerful way for women to express themselves and is closely connected to the processes of modernity, sexualization, and commodification of desire. Textual documents (newspapers, magazine features, textbooks, teachers' guides) and oral testimony are also explored to show how dominant discourses of smoking, sexuality, and health have shaped women's experiences and how women have moulded these discourses themselves.
The first comprehensive study of women and smoking in Canada, Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes creates a rich portrait of the cultural factors that have resulted in over a century of women smokers.
Sharon Anne Cook is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Ottawa.
-
Victory: The Triumphant Gay RevolutionHarperCollins
Supreme Court lawyer and political pundit Linda Hirshman details the stunning story of how a resourceful and dedicated minority transformed the notion of American marriage equality and forged a campaign for cultural change that will serve as a model for all future political movements. In the vein of Taylor Branch’s classic Parting of the Waters, Hirshman’s groundbreaking Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution is the powerful story of a massive shift in American culture. Hirshman offers an insider’s view of the crucial struggle that is leading to change, incorporating her unique experiences and insights and drawing upon new interviews—with movement titans such as Frank Kameny and Phyllis Lyon, with next-generation activists such as Evan Wolfson of Freedom to Marry, and with allies including the likes of New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand—to create a comprehensive, inspiring history of change in our time.Book DescriptionA Supreme Court lawyer and political pundit details the enthralling and groundbreaking story of the gay rights movement, revealing how a dedicated and resourceful minority changed America forever.When the modern struggle for gay rights erupted—most notably at a bar called Stonewall in Greenwich Village—in the summer of 1969, most religious traditions condemned homosexuality; psychiatric experts labeled people who were attracted to others of the same sex "crazy"; and forty-nine states outlawed sex between people of the same gender. Four decades later, in June 2011, New York legalized gay marriage—the most populous state in the country to do so thus far. The armed services stopped enforcing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, ending a law that had long discriminated against gay and lesbian members of the military. Successful social movements are always extraordinary, but these advances were something of a miracle.Political columnist Linda Hirshman recounts the long roads that led to these victories, viewing the gay rights movement within the tradition of American freedom as the third great modern social-justice movement, alongside the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement. Drawing on an abundance of published and archival material, and hundreds of in-depth interviews, Hirshman shows, in this astute political analysis, how the fight for gay rights has changed the American landscape for all citizens—blurring rigid gender lines, altering the shared culture, and broadening our definitions of family.From the Communist cross-dresser Harry Hay in 1948 to New York's visionary senator Kirsten Gillibrand in 2010, the story includes dozens of brilliant, idiosyncratic characters. Written in vivid prose, at once emotional and erudite,Victory is an utterly vibrant work of reportage and eyewitness accounts, revealing how, in a matter of decades, while facing every social adversary—church, state, and medical establishment—a focused group of activists forged a classic campaign for cultural change that will serve as a model for all future political movements. -
A Little F'd Up: Why Feminism Is Not a Dirty WordSeal Press
Young women today have a bad reputation, and for good reason: They’re sexting their classmates, they spend more time on Facebook than they do in class, and their appetite for material possessions and reality TV is matched only by their overwhelming apathy about important social and political issues. Right?
Wrong.
FBomb blog creator Julie Zeilinger debunks these (and other) myths about modern youth in A Little F’d Up, the first book about feminism for young women in their teens and twenties to actually be written by one of their peers. In this accessible handbook, Zeilinger takes a critical, honest, and humorous look at where young feminists are as a generation, and where they’re going—and she does so from the perspective of someone who’s in the trenches right alongside her readers.
Fun, funny, and engaging, A Little F’d Up is a must-read for the growing number of intelligent, informed young women out there who are ready to start finding their voice—and changing the world.About the author
Originally from Pepper Pike, Ohio, 18-year-old Julie Zeilinger is currently an undergraduate at Barnard College, Columbia University. The founder and editor of FBomb (thefbomb.org), a feminist blog and community for teens and young adults who care about their rights and want to be heard, Zeilinger has been named one of the eight most influential bloggers under the age of 21 by Woman’s Day magazine, one of More Magazine’s “New Feminists You Need To Know,” one of The Times' “40 Bloggers Who Really Count,” and one of the Plain Dealer’s “Most Interesting People of 2011.” She has contributed to the Huffington Post, Feminist.com, Skirt! magazine, and the Cleveland Jewish News, among other publications.
-
You Can't Eat Dirt: Leading the First All-Women Tribal Council and How We Changed Palm SpringsFan Palm Research Project
We are just dirt rich," admitted Vyola Olinger (later Ortner) in the summer of 1958, when, as chairman of the first all-women tribal council in the United States, she presided over "one of the biggest real estate deals . . . in the country" and the most consequential ever on Indian land. Released by the Fan Palm Research Project, You Can't Eat Dirt: Leading the First All-Women Tribal Council and How We Changed Palm Springs chronicles Olinger's trailblazing political career.
Part autobiography, part biography, this beautifully designed and thoroughly researched publication--filled with rare historical documents and archival photographs--tells the remarkable story of Olinger's rapid ascent in 1954 to the chairmanship of the Tribal Council for the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians in Palm Springs, California. It explains how--against all odds--she and her fellow female tribal leaders came together during the 1950s to forever alter the destinies and fortunes of the Agua Caliente Cahuilla and, ultimately, of other tribes across this nation.
-
The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of WomenMetropolitan Books
In the pathbreaking tradition of Backlash and The Time Bind, The Conflict, a #1 European bestseller, identifies a surprising setback to women's freedom: progressive modern motherhoodElisabeth Badinter has for decades been in the vanguard of the European fight for women's equality. Now, in an explosive new book, she points her finger at a most unlikely force undermining the status of women: liberal motherhood, in thrall to all that is "natural." Attachment parenting, co-sleeping, baby-wearing, and especially breast-feeding—these hallmarks of contemporary motherhood have succeeded in tethering women to the home and family to an extent not seen since the 1950s. Badinter argues that the taboos now surrounding epidurals, formula, disposable diapers, cribs—and anything that distracts a mother's attention from her offspring—have turned childrearing into a singularly regressive force.In sharp, engaging prose, Badinter names a reactionary shift that is intensely felt but has not been clearly articulated until now, a shift that America has pioneered. She reserves special ire for the orthodoxy of the La Leche League—an offshoot of conservative Evangelicalism—showing how on-demand breastfeeding, with all its limitations, curtails women's choices. Moreover, the pressure to provide children with 24/7 availability and empathy has produced a generation of overwhelmed and guilt-laden mothers—one cause of the West's alarming decline in birthrate.A bestseller in Europe, The Conflict is a scathing indictment of a stealthy zealotry that cheats women of their full potential. -
The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work, and FamilyChelsea Green Publishing
Feminists opened up thousands of doors in the 1960s and 1970s, but decades later, are U.S. women where they thought they'd be? The answer, it turns out, is a resounding no. Surely there have been gains. Women now comprise nearly 60 percent of college undergraduates and half of all medical and law students. They have entered the workforce in record numbers, making the two-wage-earner family the norm. But combining a career and family turned out to be more complicated than expected. While women changed, social structures surrounding work and family remained static. Affordable and high-quality child care, paid family leave, and equal pay for equal work remain elusive for the vast majority of working women. In fact, the nation has fallen far behind other parts of the world on the gender-equity front. We lag behind more than seventy countries when it comes to the percentage of women holding elected federal offices. Only 17 percent of corporate boards include women members. And just 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies are led by women.It’s time, says Madeleine M. Kunin, to change all that. Looking back over five decades of advocacy, she analyzes where progress stalled, looks at the successes of other countries, and charts the course for the next feminist revolution—one that mobilizes women, and men, to call for the kind of government and workplace policies that can improve the lives of women and strengthen their families.
About the author:
Madeleine M. Kunin was the first woman governor of Vermont and the first woman in the U.S. to serve three terms as governor. She served as Deputy Secretary of Education and Ambassador to Switzerland in the Clinton administration. Kunin is the author of The New Feminist Agenda; Pearls, Politics and Power; and Living a Political Life. She is also a Marsh professor at the University of Vermont, a commentator on Vermont Public Radio, and founder and board member of the global Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC), a nongovernmental organization focused on climate change and civil society.
(Publisher's book synopsis)
North County Public Radio interview with Madeleine Kunin
The New York Times: Madeleine Kunin “is almost unimpeachably right”
What We Do
NCRW is a network of leading university and community based research, policy, and advocacy centers with a growing global reach dedicated to advancing rights and opportunities for women and girls. We also have a Corporate Circle comprised of senior diversity professionals from leading U.S. and global member companies and a Presidents Circle of college and university leaders who share our commitment. NCRW harnesses the collective power of its network to provide knowledge, analysis, and thought leadership on issues ranging from reducing women’s poverty to building a critical mass of women’s leadership across sectors.
