Slavery in the United States continues to loom large in our national consciousness and is a major curricular focus in African American studies, during Black History Month, and for slavery units. This is the first encyclopedia to focus on the typical experiences and roles and material life of female slaves in the United States from Colonial times to Emancipation. More than 150 essay entries written by a host of experts offer a unique perspective on the material life, events, typical experiences, and roles of enslaved women and girls in both their interactions with their owners and the little private time they could manage. This groundbreaking volume is an exciting focus for research and general browsing and belongs in all American History, Women's Studies, and African American Studies collections.

The coverage includes entries illuminating women's work, on the plantation, from the big house to the field and slave cabin as well as individual entrepeneurialship. Aspects of daily life such as food procurement and meals, folk medicine and healing, and hygiene are revealed. Material life is uncovered through entries such as Auction Block, Clothing and Adornments, and Living Quarters. Life cycle events from pregnancy and birthing to childcare to holidays and death and funeral customs are discussed. The resistance to slavery and its horrors are enumerated in many entries such as Abolition, Sexual Violence, and the Underground Railroad. A wider understanding of the different ways that slavery played out for various enslaved women can be seen in entries regarding African origins and that depict regions in the North and South such as Low Country and groups such as Maroon Communities. Profiles of noted female slaves and their works are also included. Accompanying the entries are suggestions for further reading. Further scholarly value is added with a chronology and selected bibliography. Numerous photos and sidebars complement the essays, with quotations from oral history and literature plus document excerpts.

This essential text for newcomers and experts alike combines a broad survey of African American women's writing with a vivid critique by Sandi Russell, inspired by her discovery of her own cultural inheritance.

This was the first book to focus on the full scope of African American women's writing and creativity. It has now been completely revised and is reissued with a new introduction. Filling as it does the growing demand for critical work on black women's writing, it is particularly suited to undergraduate courses in literature, women's studies and American studies.

The wildly funny, occasionally heartbreaking internationally bestselling memoir about growing up, growing older, and learning to navigate friendships, jobs, loss, and love along the ride

When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else— realizing that you are enough.

Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones’ Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.

Remember when we hit it off so well that we decided "We’re Going to Need More Wine?" Well, this time you and I are going to turn to our friend the bartender and ask, "You Got Anything Stronger?" I promise to continue to make you laugh, but with this round, the stakes get higher as the conversation goes deeper.

So. Where were we? Right, you and I left off in October 2017, when my first book came out. The weeks before were filled with dreams of loss. Pets dying. My husband leaving me. Babies not being born. My therapist told me it was my soul preparing for my true self to emerge after letting go of my grief. I had finally spoken openly about my fertility journey. I was having second thoughts—in fact, so many thoughts they were organizing to go on strike. But I knew I had to be honest because I didn’t want other women going through IVF to feel as alone as I did. I had suffered in isolation, having so many miscarriages that I could not give an exact number. Strangers shared their own journeys and heartbreak with me. I had led with the truth, and it opened the door to compassion.

When I released "We’re Going to Need More Wine", the response was so great people asked when I would do a sequel. The New York Times even ran a headline reading “We’re Going to Need More Gabrielle Union.” Frankly, after being so open and honest in my writing, I wasn’t sure there was more of me I was ready to share. But life happens with all its plot twists, and new stories demand to be told. This time, I need to be more vulnerable—not so much for me, but anyone who feels alone in what they’re going through.

A lot has changed in four years—I became a mom and I’m raising two amazing girls. My husband retired. My career has expanded so that I have the opportunity to lift up other voices that need to be heard. But the world has also shown us that we have a lot we still have to fight for—as women, as black women, as mothers, as aging women, as human beings, as friends. In "You Got Anything Stronger?", I show you how this ever-changing life presents challenges, even as it gives me moments of pure joy. I take you on a girl’s night at Chateau Marmont, and I also talk to Isis, my character from Bring It On. For the first time, I truly open up about my surrogacy journey and the birth of Kaavia James Union Wade. And I take on racist institutions and practices in the entertainment industry, asking for equality and real accountability.

"You Got Anything Stronger?" is me at my most vulnerable. I have recently found true strength in that vulnerability, and I want to share that power with you here, through this book.

"I will always be somebody." This assertion, a startling one from a nineteenth-century woman, drove the life of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the only American woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor. President Andrew Johnson issued the award in 1865 in recognition of the incomparable medical service Walker rendered during the Civil War. Yet few people today know anything about the woman so well-known--even notorious--in her own lifetime. Theresa Kaminski shares a different way of looking at the Civil War, through the eyes of a woman confident she could make a contribution equal to that of any man. She takes readers into the political cauldron of the nation's capital in wartime, where Walker was a familiar if notorious figure. Mary Walker's relentless pursuit of gender and racial equality is key to understanding her commitment to a Union victory in the Civil War. Her role in the women's suffrage movement became controversial and the US Army stripped Walker of her medal, only to have the medal reinstated posthumously in 1977.

Following her internationally bestselling book The Good Women of China, Xinran has written one of the most powerful accounts of the lives of Chinese women. She has gained entrance to the most pained, secret chambers in the hearts of Chinese mothers--students, successful businesswomen, midwives, peasants--who, whether as a consequence of the single-child policy, destructive age-old traditions, or hideous economic necessity, have given up their daughters. Xinran beautifully portrays the "extra-birth guerrillas" who travel the roads and the railways, evading the system, trying to hold on to more than one baby; naive young girl students who have made life-wrecking mistakes; the "pebble mother" on the banks of the Yangtze River still looking into the depths for her stolen daughter; peasant women rejected by their families because they can't produce a male heir; and Little Snow, the orphaned baby fostered by Xinran but confiscated by the state.
For parents of adopted Chinese children and for the children themselves, this is an indispensable, powerful, and intensely moving book. Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is powered by love and by heartbreak and will stay with readers long after they have turned the final page.

This book considers what work and retirement mean for older women, how each is experienced, and how working fits with other facets of their lives. The authors draw on data collected from women themselves, employers, industry stakeholders and older workers' advocates, to explore older women's experiences of work and retirement against a backdrop of current policy efforts to extend working lives in response to ageing societies. Contrary to common representations of the situation of older workers, the data reveal how workplaces can be seen as relatively benign, and retirement viewed positively. It contributes to academic debate regarding identity, purpose and meaning in later life, identifying challenges for work-focused public policy. Students and scholars of human resource management, sociology, gerontology and social policy will appreciate the extension of understanding older women's life course trajectories that the book offers. Public policy-makers will benefit from the different representations of older women in the book, and the identification of where they would benefit from policy changes.

Today, women everywhere clamor for the latest erotic bestselling novels--their scenes of daring sexual exploits have fired up our collective imagination. But before we turned to fiction for our turn-ons, Nancy Friday unleashed a sexual revolution with her collections of uninhibited writings--the "real "fantasies of "real "women, in books that broke "all "the rules. . . .
FORBIDDEN FLOWERS
After "My Secret Garden," Nancy Friday's first boundary-shattering collection, rocked America and freed women to put their most private longings and secret desires into words for all to read, hundreds more were inspired to do just that: From the seeds sown in "My Secret Garden "grew "Forbidden Flowers," an even more explicit and colorful gathering of daring imaginings, uninhibited dreamings, and real-life experimental encounters experienced by women just like you. More fun than fiction, more supremely sexy than you ever imagined, here are the kinds of fantasies that dare you to cross a line and pluck some forbidden flowers of your very own.