Social Media Women

For forty years in the mid-nineteenth century, “Madame Restell,” the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth-control medication, attended women during their pregnancies, delivered their children, and performed abortions in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. It was the abortions that made her famous. “Restellism” became the term her detractors used to indict her. A story that is all too relevant, The Trials of Madame Restell paints an unforgettable picture of the changing society of nineteenth-century New York.

Women are expected to be many things. They should be creative, but not crazy; passionate, but not angry. They should be fertile, feminine and self-reliant, not barren, butch or solitary. Women, in other words, are caught between social expectations and a much more complicated reality. In The Defiant Middle, Kaya Oakes draws on the wisdom of women mystics and explores how transitional eras or living in marginalized female identities can be both spiritually challenging and wonderfully freeing, ultimately resulting in a reinvented way of seeing the world and changing it.

Rum has been the drink of rebels since the Old World. Now, there's a new generation of rebels—the business women curating the taste of today's best rum companies. Rum Rebels is a story of female empowerment in a traditionally male-dominated industry. Each chapter of Rum Rebels profiles women in leadership, their rum, and the perfect cocktail pairing. Alongside women leaders and pioneers, this worldwide master class explores everything from palates to aging, providing first-hand stories from today's leading rum distilleries.

Historian Georgina Hickey investigates challenges to the code of urban gender segregation in the twentieth century, focusing on organized advocacy to make the public spaces of American cities accessible to women. She traces waves of activism from the Progressive Era, with its calls for public restrooms, safe and accessible transportation, and public accommodations, through and beyond second-wave feminism, and its focus on the creation of alternative, women-only spaces and extensive anti-violence efforts.

In the late 1960s, Patsy Channing, a stunningly beautiful young woman, was suspended from the venerable Mississippi State College for Women for breach of conduct. The resulting scandal reached all the way to the Columbus courthouse, and the press ate it up. But Patsy's story starts long before that, living with a preoccupied and troubled mother in Memphis, Tennessee. Music becomes her ticket out and a vehicle for the one thing she covets most—a chance to be crowned Miss America. In Confessions of a Southern Beauty Queen, Julie Hines Mabus provides a peek into that world.

Since Victoria Woodhull launched her symbolic bid for the presidency in 1872, dozens of women have sought the presidency over the past 150 years. Their quest began long before women won the vote, and it unfolded over decades when a woman's pursuit of any higher political office was met with prejudice, mockery, and hostility. Even after women started voting in 1920, they remained shut out of rooms where presidential candidacies were often born.

Women have played a key role in these protests, refusing to wear a hijab and cutting their hair in public to chants of 'Woman, Life, Freedom'. In Farhad Khosrokhavar's account, these protests represent the first truly feminist movement in Iran, and one of the first in the Muslim world, where women have been in the vanguard. There have been many movements in the Muslim world in which women have taken part, but rarely have women—and especially young women—been the driving force.

Under the pseudonym Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P. B., humor writer Mortimer Thomson went undercover to investigate and report on the fortune tellers of New York City's tenements and slums. When his articles were published in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that scandalized and delighted the public. In Mortimer and the Witches, author Marie Carter examines the lives of these marginalized fortune tellers while detailing Mortimer Thomson's peculiar and complicated biography.

Renowned scholar-activist Cynthia Enloe lays out the lessons that women activists have drawn from their immediate experiences of war. Twelve Feminist Lessons of War draws on firsthand experiences of war from women in places as diverse as Ukraine, Myanmar, Somalia, Vietnam, Rwanda, Algeria, Syria, and Northern Ireland to show how women's wars are not men's wars. With her engaging trademark style, Cynthia Enloe demonstrates how patriarchy and militarism have embedded themselves in our institutions and our personal lives.

Sweet, supportive, dependable, selfless. Long before she had children of her own, journalist Carrie Mullins knew how mothers should behave. But how? Where did these expectations come from—and, more importantly, are they serving the mothers whose lives they shape? Carrie's suspicion, later crystallized while raising two small children, was that our culture’s idealization of motherhood was not only painfully limiting but harmful, leaving women to cope with impossible standards—standards rarely created by mothers themselves.

Conversations about gender equity in the workplace accelerated in the 2010s, with debates inside Hollywood specifically pointing to broader systemic problems of employment disparities and exploitative labor practices. Compounded by the devastating #MeToo revelations, these problems led to a wide-scale call for change. The Value Gap traces female-driven filmmaking across development, financing, production, film festivals, marketing, and distribution, examining the realities facing women working in the industry during this transformative moment.

From 1955 to 1975, Vera Pigee (1924-2007) put her life and livelihood on the line with grassroots efforts for social change in Mississippi, principally through her years of leadership in Coahoma County's NAACP. Known as the "Lady of Hats," coined by NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, Pigee was a businesswoman, mother, and leader. Her book, The Struggle of Struggles, offers a detailed view of the daily grind of organizing for years to open the state's closed society.

Art Monsters is a landmark feminist intervention in the way we think about women's stories and bodies, calling attention to a radical genealogy of feminist art that not only reacts against patriarchy but redefines its own aesthetic aims. Exploring a rich lineage of visual artists, thinkers, and writers, Elkin examines the ways feminists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth of their experiences as bodies.

During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, prisoners' and psychiatric patients' rights, and gender and sexual liberation. All Our Trials explores the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations.

Doing It All is a personal quest for empowerment, a fierce critique of the systems that leave single moms marginalized and exhausted, and a call to reclaim mothering as the life force of sustainable, connected, and radically responsible communities.

Girl Archaeologist recounts Alice Kehoe's life, begun in an era very different from the twenty-first century in which she retired as an honored elder archaeologist. She persisted against patriarchy in her childhood, at Harvard University, and as she did fieldwork with her husband in the northern plains. Working in archaeology and in the histories of American First Nations, Kehoe published groundbreaking books and articles, and fostered a sisterhood of feminists—strong, bright women archaeologists, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians who have been essential to the field.

Female writers, directors, and producers have radically transformed the television industry in recent years. Shonda Rhimes, Lena Dunham, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, Mindy Kaling: These extraordinary women have shaken up the entertainment landscape, making it look like an equal opportunity dream factory. But things weren't always this rosy. It took decades of determination in the face of preconceived ideas and outright prejudice to reach this new era.

Sex and World Peace unsettles a variety of assumptions in political and security discourse, demonstrating that the security of women is a vital factor in the security of the state and its incidence of conflict and war. Harnessing an immense amount of data, the authors call attention to discrepancies between national laws protecting women and the enforcement of those laws, and they note the adverse effects on state security of abnormal sex ratios favoring males, the practice of polygamy, and inequitable realities in family law, among other gendered aggressions.

In this raw and redemptive debut memoir, Ellen O'Connell Whittet explores the silent suffering of the ballerina - and finds it emblematic of the violence that women quietly shoulder every day. For O'Connell Whittet, letting go of one meant confronting the other - only then was it possible to truly take flight.

This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next 14 years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years - a book in the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club.