According to popular conception, working-class women in the United States are part of the "silent majority." But during the 1970s and early 1980s these women have been far from silent. Speaking out both individually and collectively, they have staked new political ground for themselves and their families. Drawing on case studies of community and workplace organizing, these original essays redefine our notions of "the political" and address a wide range of topics, including the creation and reform of unions, domestic service, street vending, working-class education, health care, and social services. The contributors have focused on working-class women from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds employed in a wide variety of jobs. "Women and the Politics of Empowerment" documents the story of women learning about the sources of their powerlessness and mobilizing to increase their power. Ann Bookman is Assistant Director of the Mary Ingranham bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Sandra Morgan is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

In ""Security Disarmed"", scholars, policy planners, and activists come together to think critically about the human cost of violence and viable alternatives to armed conflict. The book critically challenges militarization and voices an alternative encompassing vision of human security by analyzing the relationships among gender, race, and militarization.

"In Into Our Own Hands, Sandra Morgen shows us, not just how the women's health movement started, but how it weathered adversity. This book is important reading for everyone who cares about the future of women's health as defined by women themselves." --Cynthia A. Pearson, executive director, National Women's Health Network "This is an analytically sophisticated and engaging contribution to our understanding of the feminist health movement."--Karen Brodkin, professor of anthropology and women's studies, UCLA Recent history has witnessed a revolution in women's health care. Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities across the United States challenged medical and male control over women's health. Few people today realize the extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into women's own hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates. Into Our Own Hands traces the women's health care movement in the United States. Richly documented, this study is based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with leading activists; documentary material from feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations; a survey of women's health movement organizations in the early 1990s; and ethnographic fieldwork. Sandra Morgen focuses on the clinics born from this movement, as well as how the movement's encounters with organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and neoliberal political forces in the 1970s to the 1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in women's health care. The book also explores the impact of political struggles over race and class within the movement organizations.