New England has nurtured countless women who shook off traditional gender roles to forge their own destinies. Their achievements are legion. Narragansett tribal historian Princess Red Wing served as a delegate to the United Nations and co-founded Rhode Island's Tomaquag Museum. Boston iconoclast Isabella Stewart Gardner had the acute artistic vision to establish the museum that bears her name. Harriet Beecher Stowe ignited public opinion against slavery, arguably hastening the Civil War, as displays in her Hartford home make clear. Pioneering naturalist Rachel Carson jumpstarted the modern environmental movement with her writings about the rocky beaches and quivering tidepools of Southport, Maine. New England's Notable Women shines the spotlight on 45 of these trailblazers and achievers and directs readers to the homes and sites throughout New England where their stories come to life.

Policing Sex in the Sunflower State: The Story of the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women is the history of how, over a span of two decades, the state of Kansas detained over 5,000 women for no other crime than having a venereal disease. In 1917, the Kansas legislature passed Chapter 205, a law that gave the state Board of Health broad powers to quarantine people for disease. State authorities quickly began enforcing Chapter 205 to control the spread of venereal disease among soldiers preparing to fight in World War I. Though Chapter 205 was officially gender-neutral, it was primarily enforced against women; this gendered enforcement became even more dramatic as Chapter 205 transitioned from a wartime emergency measure to a peacetime public health strategy. Women were quarantined alongside regular female prisoners at the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women (the Farm). Women detained under Chapter 205 constituted 71 percent of the total inmate population between 1918 and 1942. Their confinement at the Farm was indefinite, with doctors and superintendents deciding when they were physically and morally cured enough to reenter society; in practice, women detained under Chapter 205 spent an average of four months at the Farm. While at the Farm, inmates received treatment for their diseases and were subjected to a plan of moral reform that focused on the value of hard work and the inculcation of middle-class norms for proper feminine behavior. Nicole Perry's research reveals fresh insights into histories of women, sexuality, and programs of public health and social control. Underlying each of these are the prevailing ideas and practices of respectability, in some cases culturally encoded, in others legislated, enforced, and institutionalized. Perry recovers the voices of the different groups of women involved with the Farm: the activist women who lobbied to create the Farm, the professional women who worked there, and the incarcerated women whose bodies came under the control of the state. Policing Sex in the Sunflower State offers an incisive and timely critique of a failed public health policy that was based on perceptions of gender, race, class, and respectability rather than a reasoned response to the social problem at hand.

In step with the #MeToo movement and third wave feminism, women's roles provoke lively debate in today's evangelical sphere. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has a complicated past regarding this issue, and determining what exactly women's roles in home, church, and society should be, or even what these roles should be called, has been a contentious subject. In A Marginal Majority: Women, Gender, and a Reimagining of Southern Baptists, editors Elizabeth H. Flowers and Karen K. Seat and eight other contributors examine the SBC's complex history regarding women and how that history reshapes our understanding of the denomination and its contemporary debates. This comprehensive volume starts with women as SBC fundraisers, moves to the ways they served Southern Baptist missions, and considers their struggles to find a place at Southern Baptist seminaries as well as their launching of "teaching" or "women's" ministries. Along the way, it introduces new personalities, offers fresh considerations of familiar figures, and examines the power dynamics of race and class in a denomination that dominated the South and grew into a national behemoth. Additionally, the essay collection provides insights into why the SBC has often politically aligned with the right. Not only did the denomination become increasingly oriented toward authoritarianism as it clamped down on evangelical feminism, but, as several contributors reveal, even as Southern Baptist women sought agency, they often took it from others. Read together, the chapters strike a somber tone, challenging any triumphal historiography of the past. By providing a history of contentious issues from the nineteenth century to the present day, A Marginal Majority provides invaluable context for the recurrent struggles women have faced within the United States' largest Protestant denomination. Moreover, it points to new directions in the study of American denominational life and culture.

Dorothy Fujita-Rony's The Memorykeepers: Gendered Knowledges, Empires, and Indonesian American History examines the importance of women's memorykeeping for two Toba Batak women whose twentieth-century histories span Indonesia and the United States, H.L.Tobing and Minar T. Rony. This book addresses the meanings of family stories and artifacts within a gendered and interimperial context, and demonstrates how these knowledges can produce alternate cartographies of memory and belonging within the diaspora. It thus explores how women's memorykeeping forges integrative possibility, not only physically across islands, oceans, and continents, but also temporally, across decades, empires, and generations. Thirty-five years in the making, The Memorykeepers is the first book on Indonesian Americans written within the fields of US history, American Studies, and Asian American Studies. See inside the book.