Fertile Visions conceptualises the uterus as a narrative space so that the female reproductive body can be understood beyond the constraints of a gendered analysis. Unravelling pregnancy from notions of maternity and mothering demands that we think differently about narratives of reproduction. This is crucial in the current global political climate wherein the gender-specificity of pregnancy contributes to how bodies that reproduce are marginalised, controlled, and criminalised. Anne Carruthers demonstrates fascinating and insightful close analyses of films such as Juno, Birth, Ixcanul and Arrival as examples of the uterus as a narrative space. Fertile Visions engages with research on the foetal ultrasound scan as well as phenomenologies, affect and spectatorship in film studies to offer a new way to look, think and analyse pregnancy and the pregnant body in cinema from the Americas.

Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man traces efforts within contemporary American feminist utopias to imagine healthier conceptions of manhood. As this analysis illuminates, feminist works envisioning the improved society and its attending masculinities make up an overlooked site for mining new masculinities. During the years in which such utopias moved from the margins to the mainstream, the early 1970s to the mid-2010s, these novels grew more complex, challenging essentialist conceptions of masculinity and female experience. As this analysis demonstrates, these texts vary in their focus, but are united by an interest in transforming patriarchal masculinities and replacing them with an alternative informed by second wave and intersectional feminism. This book analyzes the centrality of such alternative masculinities to these ideal societies and the ways feminist writers present in their fiction new conceptions of manhood pivotal to discussions surrounding the ongoing crisis of American masculinity.

Questioning hegemonic masculinity in literature is not novel. In the nineteenth century, under the July Monarchy (1830 1848), several French writers depicted characters who did not conform to gender expectations: hermaphrodites, castrati, homosexuals, effete men and mannish women. This book investigates the historical conditions in which these protagonists were created and their success during the July Monarchy. It analyses novels and novellas by Balzac, Gautier, Latouche, Musset and Sand in order to determine how these literary narratives challenged the traditional representations of masculinity and even redefined genders through their unconventional characters. This book also examines the connections and the disparities between these literary texts and contemporary scientific texts on sexual difference, homosexuality and intersexuality. It thus highlights the July Monarchy as a key period for the redefinition of gender identities.

Prostitution, gambling, and saloons were a vital, if not universally welcome, part of life in frontier boomtowns. In Saloons, Prostitutes, and Temperance in Alaska Territory, Catherine Holder Spude explores the rise and fall of these enterprises in Skagway, Alaska, between the gold rush of 1897 and the enactment of Prohibition in 1918. Her gritty account offers a case study in the clash between working-class men and middle-class women, and in the growth of women's political and economic power in the West. Where most books about vice in the West depict a rambunctious sin-scape, this one addresses money and politics. Focusing on the ambitions and resources of individual prostitutes and madams, landlords and saloon owners, lawmen, politicians, and reformers, Spude brings issues of gender and class to life in a place and time when vice equaled money and money controlled politics. Women of all classes learned how to manipulate both money and politics, ultimately deciding how to practice and regulate individual freedoms. As Progressive reforms swept America in the early twentieth century, middle-class women in Skagway won power, Spude shows, at the expense of the values and vices of the working-class men who had dominated the population in the town's earliest days. Reform began when a citizens' committee purged Skagway of card sharks and con men in 1898, and culminated when middle-class businessmen sided with their wives - giving them the power to vote - and in the process banned gambling, prostitution, and saloons. Today, a century after the era Spude describes, Skagway's tourist industry perpetuates the stereotypes of good times in saloons and bordellos. This book instead takes readers inside Skagway's real dens of iniquity, before and after their demise, and depicts frontier Skagway and its people as they really were. It will open the eyes of historians and tourists alike.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft's passionate work supporting women's rights, is considered to be among the very first examples of feminist philosophy. When it appeared in 1792, Wollstonecraft's treatise sets out a range of what were at the time radical beliefs; she thought all women should have a formal education, so that they may raise their children to be keener in mind as well as prove able conversationalists with their husbands. Wollestonecraft by no means unreservedly supports marriage: she states that women should not be thought of merely as items to be bandied about and wed, but as human beings capable of great intellect. Wollstonecraft also lambastes the prevailing social picture of women; that they have a number of fixed, narrow and often domestic duties. She also singles out how women are expected to behave, criticizing in particular the notion that the highest aspiration of a woman is to be a sentimental heroine in a popular romance novel.

When Angela Davis (b. 1944) was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list in 1970 and after she successfully gained acquittal in the 1972 trial that garnered national and international attention, she became one of the most recognizable and iconic figures in the twentieth century. An outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, she has written extensively about the intersections between race, class, and gender; Black liberation; and the US prison system. Conversations with Angela Davis seeks to explore Davis's role as an educator, scholar, and activist who continues to engage in important and significant social justice work. Featuring seventeen interviews ranging from the 1970s to the present day, the volume chronicles Davis's life and her involvement with and influence on important and significant historical and cultural events. Davis comments on a range of topics relevant to social, economic, and political issues from national and international contexts, and taken together, the interviews explore how her views have evolved over the past several decades. The volume provides insight on Davis's relationships with such organizations as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Communist Party, the Green Party, and Critical Resistance, and how Davis has fought for racial, gender, and social and economic equality in the US and abroad. Conversations with Angela Davis also addresses her ongoing work in the prison abolition movement.

There has been an increase in women entrepreneurs participating in the growth of local, regional, national, and global economies. While these women showcase crucial skills for strategic leadership and strategy that can advance companies, they face cultural, educational, social, and political barriers that impede their development and participation within the global economy. Women Entrepreneurs and Strategic Decision Making in the Global Economy is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on understanding the value of women entrepreneurs and the strategies they can use on the economy and examines gender impact on strategic management and entrepreneurship. While highlighting topics such as emotional intelligence, global economy, and strategic leadership, this book is ideally designed for managers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, academicians, and students.

The 1920s Jazz Age is remembered for flappers and speakeasies, not for the success of a declining labor movement. A more complex story was unfolding among the young women and men in the hosiery mills of Kensington, the working-class heart of Philadelphia. Their product was silk stockings, the iconic fashion item of the flapper culture then sweeping America and the world. Although the young people who flooded into this booming industry were avid participants in Jazz Age culture, they also embraced a surprising, rights-based labor movement, headed by the socialist-led American Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers (AFFFHW). In this first history of this remarkable union, Sharon McConnell-Sidorick reveals how activists ingeniously fused youth culture and radical politics to build a subculture that included dances and parties as well as picket lines and sit-down strikes, while forging a vision for social change. In documenting AFFFHW members and the Kensington community, McConnell-Sidorick shows how labor federations like the Congress of Industrial Organizations and government programs like the New Deal did not spring from the heads of union leaders or policy experts but were instead nurtured by grassroots social movements across America.