Books in the Gender and American Culture series

Delinquent Daughters explores the gender, class, and racial tensions that fueled campaigns to control female sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Mary Odem looks at these moral reform movements from a national perspective, but she also undertakes a detailed analysis of court records to explore the local enforcement of regulatory legislation in Alameda and Los Angeles Counties in California. From these legal proceedings emerge overlapping and often contradictory views of middle-class female reformers, court and law enforcement officials, working-class teenage girls, and working-class parents. Odem traces two distinct stages of moral reform. The first began in 1885 with the movement to raise the age of consent in statutory rape laws as a means of protecting young women from predatory men. By the turn of the century, however, reformers had come to view sexually active women not as victims but as delinquents, and they called for special police, juvenile courts, and reformatories to control wayward girls. Rejecting a simple hierarchical model of class control, Odem reveals a complex network of struggles and negotiations among reformers, officials, teenage girls and their families. She also addresses the paradoxical consequences of reform by demonstrating that the protective measures advocated by middle-class women often resulted in coercive and discriminatory policies toward working-class girls.

Whether feared, admired, or desired, the "gold digger" appears almost everywhere gender, sexuality, class, and race collide. This fascinating work reveals the assumptions and disputes around women's sexual agency in American life, shedding new light on the cultural and legal forces underpinning romantic, sexual, and marital relationships.

Chronicles the dawn of the global women's rights in the early twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the US or Europe. Instead, Katherine Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women who forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism.

From 1950 to 1980, activists in the black freedom and women's liberation movements mounted significant campaigns in response to the injustices of rape. Catherine Jacquet examines these two movement responses together, explaining when and why they were in conflict, when and why they converged, and how activists both upheld and challenged them.

Explores the central role of black women in the political history of the Jim Crow era. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore explores the pivotal and interconnected roles played by gender and race in North Carolina politics from the period immediately preceding the disfranchisement of black men in 1900 to the time black and white women gained the vote in 1920.

Pursuing the meaning of gender in nineteenth-century urban American society, Ladies, Women, and Wenches compares the lives of women living in two distinctive antebellum cultures, Charleston and Boston, between 1820 and 1850. In contrast to most contemporary histories of women, this study examines the lives of all types of women in both cities.

A study of women in vaudeville. It reveals how female performers, patrons and workers shaped the rise and fall of the most popular live entertainment at the turn of the century. Once a sign of vaudeville's refinement, Kibler says, women became associated with the decay of vaudeville.

Investigates the reasons for women's literary professionalism in the nineteenth century, highlighting the experiences of E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gail Hamilton, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. Coultrap-McQuin examines the cultural milieu of women writers, the ideals of the literary marketplace, and the characteristics of women's literary activities.

Native American philosophy has enabled Native American cultures to survive more than five hundred years of attempted cultural assimilation. This revised edition has been expanded to include extensive discussion of Native American philosophy and culture in the United States as well as Canada.

This critical, historical, and theoretical study looks at a little-known group of novels written during the 1930s by women who were literary radicals. Arguing that class consciousness was figured through metaphors of gender, Paula Rabinowitz challenges the conventional wisdom that feminism as a discourse disappeared during the decade.

Often photographed in a cowboy hat with her middle finger held defiantly in the air, Florynce "Flo" Kennedy (1916-2000) left a vibrant legacy as a leader of the Black Power and feminist movements. In the first biography of Kennedy, Sherie Randolph traces the life and political influence of this strikingly bold and controversial radical activist.

In this innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier.

What was it like to grow up black and female in the segregated South? To answer this question, LaKisha Simmons blends social history and cultural studies, recreating children's streets and neighbourhoods within Jim Crow New Orleans and offering a rare look into black girls' personal lives.

Throughout World War II, when Saturday nights came around, servicemen and hostesses forgot the war for a little while as they danced in USO clubs, which served as havens of stability. This book shows that in addition to boosting soldier morale, the USO acted as an architect of the gender roles and sexual codes that shaped the greatest generation.

Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America

Illuminates discussions about the value of women's work through analysis of texts and images created by writers, women's rights activists, Native American women, and more. Focusing on the range of materials through which domesticity was produced in the West, the author integrates voices into the study of domesticity's imperial manifestations.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution

Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935

Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities

Many early-nineteenth-century slaveholders considered themselves ""masters"" not only over slaves, but also over the institutions of marriage and family. According to historians, the privilege of mastery was reserved for white males. But slaveholding widows enjoyed material, legal, and cultural resources to which most southerners could only aspire.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Explores the dilemmas confronting progressive, conservative, and moderate Republican women as they sought to achieve a voice for themselves within the Grand Old Party (GOP). This book examines women's grassroots organizing for the party, in the decades following the initiation of women's suffrage.