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The journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, spanning the years from 1848 to 1889, is rare for its treatment of both the Civil War and postbellum years and for its candour and detail in treating these eras. Thomas, who was born to wealth and privilege and reared in the tradition of the southern belle, tells of the hard days of war and the poverty brought on by emancipation and Reconstruction.

"In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources-union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories-Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and their labor activism. While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are"--

This book situates North Carolina's reproductive politics in a national and global context. It demonstrates how each method for limiting unwanted pregnancies had the potential both to expand and to limit women's reproductive choices. Schoen's study allows deeper understandings of the modern welfare state and the lives of women.

At the end of World War II, working mothers in the USA protested vigorously at the termination of child care subsidies. This text traces grassroots activism and national and local policy debates concerning public funding of children's day care in the two decades after the end of the war.

An examination of American women's participation in the practice of history from the late-19th century through to the end of World War II. It shows how women transformed the profession during these years in their roles as writers, educators, archivists, preservationists and social activists.

In this biography, Ula Taylor explores the life and ideas of one of the most important, if largely unsung, Pan-African freedom fighters of the 20th century: Amy Jacques Garvey (1895-1973).

An exploration of black health under slavery showing how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South and invoked conflicts between the slave doctors and the whites who attempted to supervise their work.

This ain't no Dreamgirls, Rhodessa Jones warns participants in the Medea Project, the theatre program for incarcerated women that she founded. This work chronicles the collaborative process of transforming incarcerated women's stories into productions that include dance and music, for example.

Thousands of women pursued artistic careers in the United States during the late 19th century. Examining the effects of this change, Kirsten Swinth explores how women's growing presence in the American art world transformed both its institutions and its ideology.

An examination of the most successful interracial coalition in the 19th-century American South - Virginia's Readjuster Party. Melding social, cultural and political history, Jane Dailey chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political co-operation across the colour line.

Aiming to offer fresh insights into the history of labour policy, the New Deal, feminism, and southern politics, the author of this work examines the New Deal era of the National Consumers' League, one of the most influential reform organizations of the early 20th century.

Drawing on legal cases, church records, pamphlet literature, political fiction and women's rights convention proceedings, Nancy Isenberg here asserts that women's rights activists of the antebellum era crafted coherent feminist critique of church, state and family.

This text traces the history of ""Ms."" magazine from its origins in 1972 to its final commercial issue in 1989. It examines how the magazine negotiated the multiple and frequently incompatible demands of advertisers, readers, and the various and changing constituencies of the feminist movement.

This volume addresses the role of women in early American history, and more broadly in intellectual and cultural history, and it explores the rhetoric of historiography. The author includes women in the history of the Revolutionary era, then makes the discovery that gender is her central subject.

In this richly detailed and imaginatively researched study, Victoria Bynum investigates "unruly" women in central North Carolina before and during the Civil War. Analysing the complex and interrelated impact of gender, race, class, and region on the lives of black and white women, she shows how their diverse experiences influenced the changing social order and political economy of the state.

Explores the representation of gender in popular Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s, the last decade in which film enjoyed a pivotal cultural position. Both a work of feminist film criticism and theory and an analysis of popular culture, this provocative book examines from a cultural studies perspective the top-grossing film melodramas of that decade.

Susan Van Dyne's reading of twenty-five of Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems considers three contexts: Plath's journal entries from 1957 to 1959 (especially as they reveal her conflicts over what it meant to be a middle-class wife and mother and an aspiring writer in 1950s America); the interpretive strategies of feminist theory; and Plath's multiple revisions of the poems.

Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South

The author challenges the historical assumption that women of Virginia were largely excluded from public life. Varon demonstrates that throughout the antebellum period, white Southern women of the slaveholding class were involved in politics through their presence at political meetings and rallies. In the GENDER AND AMERICAN CULTURE series.

In 1942, Pauli Murray, a young black woman from North Carolina studying law at Howard University, visited a constitutional law class taught by Caroline Ware, one of the nation's leading historians. A friendship and a correspondence began, lasting until Murray's death in 1985. This title explores the cross-race friendship of two feminist activists.

Women initiate the project of American nationalism.

Amy G. Richter follows women travelers onto trains and considers the consequences of their presence. White men and women domesticated the railroad for themselves and paved the way for a racially segregated and class-stratified public space that freed women from the home yet preserved the railroad as a masculine domain.

Recent scholarship on slavery has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women.

Detroit's black population grew exponentially in the early decades of the 20th century. This work examines how the women served not just as models of bourgeois respectability, but began to shape traditional standards of deportment in response to the new realities of their lives.

During World War II, more than 12,000 male conscientious objectors entered Civilian Public Service. However, this study focuses on the 2000 women who joined this church-supported programme - most of whom were part of Mennonite, Amish, Brethren, or Quaker families with deeply held anti-war beliefs.

Traces the transformation of the American labour movement from community forms of solidarity to bureaucratic unionism. Arguing that gender is central to understanding this shift, Elizabeth Faue explores women's involvement in labour and political organisations and the role of gender and family ideology in shaping unionism in the twentieth century.

Reveals the vibrant, transnational, and multiethnic world of working-class women's politics. This title presents the Italian working-class women who helped shape the vibrant, transnational, radical political culture that expanded into the emerging industrial union movement.

In this study, Linda M. Grasso demonstrates that using anger as a mode of analysis and the basis of an aesthetic transforms our understanding of American women's literary history. She explores how black and white 19th-century women writers defined, expressed and dramatized anger.

In a new assessment of the shaping of black male identity in the early twentieth century, Martin Summers explores how middle-class African American and African Caribbean immigrant men constructed a gendered sense of self through organizational life, work, leisure, and cultural production.

African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) is remembered mainly for her antilynching crusade in the 1890s. This work seeks to restore her to her central place in the early reform movements for civil rights, women's suffrage, and Progressivism in the United States and abroad.