Profiles of influential Black women activists at a historic moment This volume offers a panoramic view of Black feminist politics through the stories of a remarkable cross section of Black women who attended the 1977 National Women's Conference. These women advocated for civil and women's rights but also for accessibility, lesbians, sex workers, welfare recipients, laborers, and children. The women featured in this book include icons Coretta Scott King and Michelle Cearcy, a teenager who served as a torchbearer at the conference. Contributors offer insights into the lives of Gloria Scott, Dorothy Height, Freddie Groomes-McLendon, and Jeffalyn Johnson. The profiles include activist organizers Georgia McMurray, Barbara Smith, Johnnie Tillmon, Addie Wyatt, and Florynce Kennedy. The hard-won achievements of politicians are examined and celebrated, including those of Barbara Jordan, Shirley Chisholm, Maxine Waters, C. Delores Tucker, the first Black female secretary of state for Pennsylvania, and Yvonne Burke, one of the first Black women elected to Congress and the first representative to give birth while serving. The final profiles cover Clara McClaughlin, reporter Melba Tolliver, and photojournalist Diana Mara Henry, who shared the details of the conference and the continual work being done by Black women with others through various media channels. This book places the diversity of Black women's experiences and their leadership at the center of the history of the women's movement. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This book is committed to women as writers and storytellers; all the selected novels are female-centric in that the main characters are women. The authors, also women, are from three diverse American ethnic groups from both the North and South. Through a close reading of several novels, Babakhani shows how the reinvention of cultural traditions serves these women writers as a political, decolonial, and feminist tool. Babakhani situates her readings in a critique of the concepts of realism and magical realism. Because magical realism sets realism against magic and implies binary oppositions, Babakhani proposes "cultural realism" as a revisionary concept that takes the cultural importance of rituals and beliefs seriously, without simply dismissing them as superstition.

Critically analyzes the discursive relationship between cultural value and popular feminism in American television. While American television has long relied on a strategic foregrounding of feminist politics to promote certain programming's cultural value, Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television is the first sustained critical analysis of the twenty-first-century resurgence of this tradition. In Woman Up, Julia Havas's central argument is that postmillennial "feminist quality television" springs from a rhetorical subversion of the (much-debated) masculine-coded "quality television"culture on the one hand and the dominance of postfeminist popular culture on the other. Postmillennial quality television culture promotes the idea of aesthetic-generic hierarchies among different types of scripted programming. Its development has facilitated evaluative academic analyses of television texts based on aesthetic merit, producing a corpus of scholarship devoted to pinpointing where value resides in shows considered worthy of discussion. Other strands of television scholarship have criticized this approach for sidestepping the gendered and classed processes of canonization informing the phenomenon. Woman Up intervenes in this debate by reevaluating such approaches and insisting that rather than further fostering or critiquing already prominent processes of canonization, there is a need to interrogate the cultural forces underlying them. Via detailed analyses of four TV programs emerging in the early period of the "feminist quality TV" trend-30 Rock (2006-13), Parks and Recreation (2009-15), The Good Wife (2009-16), and Orange Is the New Black (2013-19)-Woman Up demonstrates that such series mediate their cultural significance by combining formal aesthetic exceptionalism and a politicized rhetoric around a "problematic" postfeminism, thus linking ideals of political and aesthetic value. Woman Up will most appeal to students and scholars of cinema and media studies, feminist media studies, television studies, and cultural studies.

Through the use of in-depth qualitative interviews, Modern Day Mary Poppins: The Unintended Consequences of Nanny Work examines the experiences of and relationships between nannies and their employers. Laura Bunyan uncovers the depths of caring labor while exposing the complicated nature of the relationships formed in care work and their impact on work experiences. Modern Day Mary Poppins reveals that the hiring process for nannies, the personal relationships formed between families and nannies, and work experiences are not straightforward or one-dimensional. Bunyan sheds further light on the long-term implications of early gendered work experiences, and the ways they position women to perform precarious labor.

A long and ongoing challenge for social justice movements has been how to address difference. Traditional strategies have often emphasized universalizing messages and common identities as means of facilitating collective action. Feminist movements, gay liberation movements, racial justice movements, and even labour movements, have all focused predominantly on respective singular dimensions of oppression. Each has called on diverse groups of people to mobilize, but without necessarily acknowledging or grappling with other relevant dimensions of identity and oppression. While focusing on commonality can be an effective means of mobilization, universalist messages can also obscure difference and can serve to exclude and marginalize groups in already precarious positions. Scholars and activists, particularly those located at the intersection of these movements, have long advocated for more inclusive approaches that acknowledge the significance and complexity of different social locations, with mixed success. Gender Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges provides a much needed intersectional analysis of social movements in Europe and North America. With an emphasis on gendered mobilization, it looks at movements traditionally understood and/or classified as singularly gendered as well as those organized around other dimensions of identity and oppression or at the intersection of multiple dimensions. This comparative study of movements allows for a better understanding of the need for as well as the challenges

Genderblindness in American Society: The Rhetoric of a System of Social Control of Women rhetorically analyzes discourses of the current genderblind system of social control that seeks to render gender as irrelevant in public life. As an ideology, genderblindness shapes women's experiences in the public sphere by working to limit our understandings of gender and to separate the continued marginalization of women from ideas of gender discrimination. Taking a critical rhetoric perspective, Lucy J. Miller examines the discourse of genderblindness in the contexts of the gender wage gap, abortion rights, rape culture, and tech culture.

The first woman in America to own and operate a circus, Agnes Lake spent thirty years under the Big Top before becoming the wife of Wild Bill Hickok--a mere five months before he was killed. Although books abound on the famous lawman, Agnes's life has remained obscured by circus myth and legend.

Linda A. Fisher and Carrie Bowers have written the first biography of this colorful but little-known circus performer. Agnes originally found fame as a slack-wire walker and horseback rider, and later as an animal trainer. Her circus career spanned more than four decades. Following the murder of her first husband, Bill Lake, she was the sole manager of the "Hippo-Olympiad and Mammoth Circus." While taking her show to Abilene, she met town marshal Hickok and five years later she married him. After Hickok's death, Agnes traveled with P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill Cody, and managed her daughter Emma Lake's successful equestrian career.

This account of a remarkable life cuts through fictions about Agnes's life, including her own embellishments, to uncover her true story. Numerous illustrations, including rare photographs and circus memorabilia, bring Agnes's world to life.

Though there has been a rapid increase of women's representation in law and business, their representation in STEM fields has not been matched. Researchers have revealed that there are several environmental and social barriers including stereotypes, gender bias, and the climate of science and engineering departments in colleges and universities that continue to block women's progress in STEM. In this book, the authors address the issues that encounter women of color in STEM in higher education.