From Hannah Adams, born in 1755, to Vicki Ruiz, born in 1955, this book profiles some 200 women historians. Between Hannah Adams, who began compiling historical information while working as a bobbin lace weaver, and Vicki Ruiz, a third generation Chicana hailed for pioneering inclusive multicultural women's history, the reader will encounter women of diverse backgrounds, motivations, and accomplishments. They come from a variety of occupations, including public history, academia, archival work, and popular history writing and a variety of fields, including biography, art history, military history, and history based on issues of region, gender, race, ethnicity, class, or sexuality.

Neglected by the very field they have practiced, these women provide compelling and impressive examples of the historian at work. Selection for inclusion in this volume was based primarily on publications, but other criteria were considered as well, including participation in defining a field of study, influence on other historians or related scholars, cross-disciplinary achievements, and contributions to the work of others. Many of the women were firsts, such as Louise Phelps Kellogg, the first woman president of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (now the OAH), and Mary Frances Berry, the first black woman to become chancellor at a major research university. This book offers contemporary historians, and all readers, the opportunity to explore women historians' motivations, accomplishments, and above all, rich legacies.

The history of the second wave of feminism in the United States demonstrates the potential for both serious social change and seemingly intractable divisions among women. Race, ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, and religion have all been dividing influences among women, shaping their various perspectives on and relations to the women's movement. Yet collectively, women's efforts--identified as second wave feminism--are seen as having made a difference. This book highlights the lives and work of fifty second wave feminists, women who have served as catalysts in the developing feminist movement. A diverse group--playwrights and politicians, grassroots organizers and scientists, poets and theologians--they provide the reader with compelling stories of individual women's lives, collective feminist struggles, and the possibilities of feminist social change. Each woman's story provides inspiration to those interested in the power of one, and collectively, the stories show the range of motivations, activities, and accomplishments of feminist thinkers and activists today. Each entry contains three parts: a biographical portrait of the individual, including information about education, family life, and early activism; an analytical discussion, highlighting the person's accomplishments and her relationship to U.S. feminism; and a bibliographical section containing a selective list of the subject's publications and writings about her and her work.

A interdisciplinary collection of readings that answers the question: How do men and women practice consumer culture differently? What is the relationship between gender and consumerism? Jennifer Scanlon gathers a collection of readings and archival materials to explore the multiple and contradictory ways in which women and men consume. Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural in scope, The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader introduces the reader to some of the most compelling issues and arguments in this growing field of study. In questioning traditional ways of analyzing the relationships between gender and consumer culture, these essays analyze the liberatory and oppressive nature of consumer culture in both historical and contemporary contexts. The scholars gathered here look at the gendered relationship between the home and consumer culture, individual and group identity through purchasing, the supply side of consumer culture, and the ways in which consumers embrace, resist, and manipulate the messages and the activities of consumer culture. Topics range from white middle-class female shoplifters to the gendered depiction of Native Americans in nineteenth-century advertising, from gay men's acquisition of domestic space in early twentieth-century New York to black and Latino men's cultural resistance through dress. Archival materials link the essays in each section, creating a further historical context, and providing a connection between the readings and larger questions and issues currently being debated about gender and consumer culture. Contributors include Andrew Heinze, Erika Rappaport, George Chauncey, Steven M. Gelber, Jeffrey Steele, Ann McClintock, Robert E. Weems, Jr., Lillian Faderman, Malcolm Gladwell, Jennifer Scanlon, Lizabeth Cohen, Jane Bryce, Susan J. Douglas, Kenon Breazeale, Kathy Peiss, Elaine S. Abelson, Natasha B. Barnes, Danae Clark, Stuart Cosgrove.