While playing the southern lady for the white political establishment, thousands of mostly middle-class, middle-aged, married white women become grassroots activists in America's civil rights movement, sometimes at the cost of friendships, status, economic security, and family support. The original essays in this collection tell who these women were, why they became committed to racial justice and equal opportunity, and how they organized to change southern society. The women worked within a range of national and local institutions, both segregated and biracial. Their stories, largely unknown, span half of the 20th century from the New Deal to the early 1970s and took place across the South from Louisville to New Orleans. Some of them brought years of experience in church groups or welfare organizations to the movement; others became converts only when local crises forced them to examine the hypocrisy and privilege of their lives. Some couched their civil rights arguments in terms of their maternal identity and a belief that racial discrimination defiled the world in which they reared their children. Many shared a basic optimism about the willingness of white southerners to change. And many were well aware that their leisure to pursue reform activities often was made possible by the black women who managed their households, cooked their food, and tended their children. Four essays profile specific women and their personal strategies for attacking prejudice and discrimination. The remaining essays focus on particular organizations, such as the YWCA, United Church Women, the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, and the Saturday Luncheon Club, a group whose name belied its subversive intentions. Using autobiography, oral history, news accounts, organization papers, and personal letters, the contributors show the importance of female support networks, the influence of African American mentors, and the social ostracism that resulted from defying white supremacy. In the ongoing struggle for human dignity and a voice in American life, this book adds a new and necessary dimension to our understanding of both biracial activism and white anti-racism.

The supernatural has become extraordinarily popular in literature, television, and film. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, witches, and wizard have become staples of entertainment industries, and many of these figures have received extensive critical attention. But one figure has remained in the shadows - the female ghost. Inherently liminal, often literally invisible, the female ghost has nevertheless appeared in all genres. Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture brings this figure into the light, exploring her cultural significance in a variety of media from 1926 to 2014. Robin Roberts argues that the female ghost is well worth studying for what she can tell us about feminine subjectivity in cultural contexts. Subversive Spirits examines appearances of the female ghost in heritage sites, theater, Hollywood film, literature, and television in the United States and the United Kingdom. What holds these disparate female ghosts together is their uncanny ability to disrupt, illuminate, and challenge gendered assumptions. As with other supernatural figures, the female ghost changes over time, especially responding to changes in gender roles. Roberts's analysis begins with comedic female ghosts in literature and film and moves into horror by examining the successful play The Woman in Black and the legend of the weeping woman, La Llorona. Roberts then situates the canonical works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison in the tradition of the female ghost to explore how the ghost is used to portray the struggle and pain of women of color. Roberts further analyzes heritage sites that use the female ghost as the friendly and inviting narrator for tourists. The book concludes with a comparison of the British and American versions of the television hit Being Human, where the female ghost expands her influence to become a mother and savior to all humanity.

Most people think that the difficulty of balancing career and personal/family relationships is the fault of present-day society or is due to their own inadequacies. But in this major new book, eminent moral philosopher Michael Slote argues that the difficulty runs much deeper, that it is due to the essential nature of the divergent goods involved in this kind of choice. He shows more generally that perfect human happiness and perfect virtue are impossible in principle, a view originally enunciated by Isaiah Berlin, but much more thoroughly and synoptically defended here than ever before.
Ancient Greek and modern-day Enlightenment thought typically assumed that perfection was possible, and this is also true of Romanticism and of most recent ethical theory. But if, as Slote maintains, imperfection is inevitable, then our inherited categories of virtue and personal good are far too limited and unqualified to allow us to understand and cope with the richer and more complex life that characterizes today's world. And The Impossibility of Perfection argues in particular that we need some new notions, new distinctions, and even new philosophical methods in order to distill some of the ethical insights of recent feminist thought and arrive at a fuller and more realistic picture of ethical phenomena.

In this provocative new book, Shritha Vasudevan argues that feminist international relations (IR) theory has inadvertently resulted in a biased worldview, the very opposite of what feminist IR set out to try to rectify. This book contests theoretical presumptions of Western feminist IR and attempts to reformulate it in contexts of non-Western cultures. Vasudevan deftly utilizes the theoretical constructs of IR to explore the ramifications for India. This hypothesis argues that the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has predictive validity and is not a top-down norm but derived from the material and contingent experiences of nation states. This book enters the debate between feminist qualitative and quantitative IR through the lens of gender-based violence (GBV) under the CEDAW.

The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body investigates the concept of body shame and explores its significance when considering philosophical accounts of embodied subjectivity. Body shame only finds its full articulation in the presence (actual or imagined) of others within a rule and norm governed milieu. As such, it bridges our personal, individual and embodied experience with the social, cultural and political world that contains us. Luna Dolezal argues that understanding body shame can shed light on how the social is embodied, that is, how the body-experienced in its phenomenological primacy by the subject-becomes a social and cultural artifact, shaped by external forces and demands. The Body and Shame introduces leading twentieth-century phenomenological and sociological accounts of embodied subjectivity through the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias. Dolezal examines the embodied, social and political features of body shame. contending that body shame is both a necessary and constitutive part of embodied subjectivity while simultaneously a potential site of oppression and marginalization. Exploring the cultural politics of shame, the final chapters of this work explore the phenomenology of self-presentation and a feminist analysis of shame and gender, with a critical focus on the practice of cosmetic surgery, a site where the body is literally shaped by shame. The Body and Shame will be of great interest to scholars and students in a wide variety of fields, including philosophy, phenomenology, feminist theory, women's studies, social theory, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, and medical humanities.

Judy Chicago's monumental art installation "The Dinner Party "was an immediate sensation when it debuted in 1979, and today it is considered the most popular work of art to emerge from the second-wave feminist movement. Jane F. Gerhard examines the piece's popularity to understand how ideas about feminism migrated from activist and intellectual circles into the American mainstream in the last three decades of the twentieth century.
More than most social movements, feminism was transmitted and understood through culture--art installations, "Ms. Magazine," "All in the Family," and thousands of other cultural artifacts. But the phenomenon of cultural feminism came under extraordinary criticism in the late 1970s and 1980s Gerhard analyzes these divisions over whether cultural feminism was sufficiently activist in light of the shifting line separating liberalism from radicalism in post-1970s America. She concludes with a chapter on the 1990s, when "The Dinner Party" emerged as a target in political struggles over public funding for the arts, even as academic feminists denounced the piece for its alleged essentialism.
The path that" The Dinner Party" traveled--from inception (1973) to completion (1979) to tour (1979-1989) to the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum (2007)--sheds light on the history of American feminism since 1970 and on the ways popular feminism in particular can illuminate important trends and transformations in the broader culture.

For 30 years, since the publication of her landmark book The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams and her readers have continued to document and hold to account the degrading interplay of language about women, domesticated animals, and meat in advertising, politics, and media. Serving as sequel and visual companion, The Pornography of Meat charts the continued influence of this language and the fight against it. This new edition includes more than 300 images, most of them new, and brings the book up to date to include expressions of misogyny in online media and advertising, the #MeToo movement, and the impact of Donald Trump and white supremacy on our political language. Never has this book--or Adams's analysis--been more relevant.

A master class that shares the un-common sense women need to succeed—and the lies to ignore along the way.

Bonnie Hammer’s legendary career spans five decades in a turbulent, male-driven industry. Today, Bonnie is a powerful leader at the very top of her field, and women at all levels constantly ask her: What is your secret to success?

Her power—and her staying power—comes from rejecting common myths about how women are “supposed” to act in the workplace. She knows that the traditional wisdom women are told about work—pithy phrases like “don’t mix work with play,” “talk is cheap,” “follow your dreams,” “know your worth,” “trust your gut,” and “you can have it all”—hold women back. Having risen from an entry-level production assistant whose chief charge was a dog, to a transformative, top executive at NBCUniversal, Bonnie challenges conventional workplace wisdom and shares the un-common sense women need to succeed.

Bonnie has mentored countless women in every industry. She’s known for telling the uncensored and uncompromising truth—even when it isn’t easy to hear. Now, she gives you her private master class—replacing the lies women have been fed about work with her unique wisdom. You will learn powerful new truths and easily digestible, practical advice to apply in your own life.

Written with humor and heart, and full of insights and research, 15 Lies Women Are Told at Work is an “honest, unfiltered guidebook…a must-read for any woman at any stage in her career” (Chelsea Clinton). It doesn’t just explain one woman’s rise to the top in a tough industry; it shows how any woman can rise as high as she wants in her own work world.

Julia Fox Garrison refused to listen to the professionals she called Dr. Jerk and Dr. Panic, who--after she suffered a massive, debilitating stroke at age thirty-seven--told her she'd probably die, or to Nurse Doom, who ignored her emergency call button. Instead she heeded the advice of kind, gifted Dr. Neuro, who promised her he would "treat your mind as well as your body." Julia figured if she could somehow manage to get herself into a wheelchair, at least she'd always find parking. But after many, many months of hospitalization and rehab--with the help of family, friends, and her own indomitable spirit--Julia not only got into a wheelchair, but she got back out.

Don't Leave Me This Way is the funny, inspiring, profoundly moving true story of a woman's fight for her life and dignity--and her determined quest to awaken an entrenched, unfeeling medical community to the fact that there's always a human being inside every patient.

When author Nalini Juthani and her new husband, Viren, left India for the United States in June of 1970, neither they nor their families knew this adventure would continue for a lifetime, that America would be the place where they would fulfill their dreams, raise a family, and find a new home. In "An Uncompromising Activist," Juthani shares the stories from her life as a woman, daughter, wife, immigrant, medical educator, mother, and grandmother.

These essays, with photographs included, provide a glimpse of what it was like for the first twenty-four years of growing up in India as a woman and how the loss of her father at an early age affected her and her future. "An Uncompromising Activist" narrates her experiences of getting her first job in New York, her first car, her first house, and her first American friend. The stories show the courage of a woman who became a trendsetter in a new country.

Inspiring and touching, the essays describe the influence Juthani had on the lives of others while overcoming cultural barriers. It also offers the story of the Ghevaria-Juthani families and provides a history for future generations.