Mignon R. Moore brings to light the family life of a group that has been largely invisible--gay women of color--in a book that questions longstanding ideas about racial identity, family formation, and routes to motherhood for lesbians. Drawing from three years of interview, survey, and participant observation study of more than 100 women, Invisible Families explores the ways that race and class have influenced how these women understand their sexual orientation, find partners, and form families. Invisible Families asks how people with multiple stigmatized identities imagine and construct an individual and collective sense of self.

Who was Mary the Magdalene? Why was the Saint's legend so significant for occidental artists and writers through the centuries, especially during the Golden Age? This book aims to solve these questions by means of presenting texts previously neglected by critics and also by revising original interpretations of Golden Age canonical works, through the analysis of the representation of Mary Magdalene in Francisco Delicado, Miguel de Cervantes, Fernández de Avellaneda, and Lope de Vega. The study goes beyond national borders and literary genres and emphasizes the relationship between visual arts and written texts, interweaving ekphrasis and hagiography. Likewise, the author uses a comparative approach in analyzing the role of the Magdalene in Shakespeare's theater and Spanish Golden Age drama. Despite the vast bibliography on the saint, there existed the need for a broad and insightful study to highlight the importance of this figure throughout the Early Modern Age literature. In Spanish with notes and quotes in English.

In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, ideas of genius did more than define artistic and intellectual originality. They also provided a means for conceptualizing women's participation in a democracy that marginalized them. Widely distributed across print media but reaching their fullest development in literary fiction, tropes of female genius figured types of subjectivity and forms of collective experience that were capable of overcoming the existing constraints on political life. The connections between genius, gender, and citizenship were important not only to contests over such practical goals as women's suffrage but also to those over national membership, cultural identity, and means of political transformation more generally.

In The Genius of Democracy Victoria Olwell uncovers the political uses of genius, challenging our dominant narratives of gendered citizenship. She shows how American fiction catalyzed political models of female genius, especially in the work of Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Mary Hunter Austin, Jessie Fauset, and Gertrude Stein. From an American Romanticism that saw genius as the ability to mediate individual desire and collective purpose to later scientific paradigms that understood it as a pathological individual deviation that nevertheless produced cultural progress, ideas of genius provided a rich language for contests over women's citizenship. Feminist narratives of female genius projected desires for a modern public life open to new participants and new kinds of collaboration, even as philosophical and scientific ideas of intelligence and creativity could often disclose troubling and more regressive dimensions. Elucidating how ideas of genius facilitated debates about political agency, gendered identity, the nature of consciousness, intellectual property, race, and national culture, Olwell reveals oppositional ways of imagining of women's citizenship, ways that were critical of the conceptual limits of American democracy as usual.

When aging parents need help, who do they turn to first? A daughter. The Daughter Trap answers the question "now what?" and helps women successfully juggle caregiving, careers, kids, siblings, and marriage on their own terms. It's all about new options, clear priorities, and no guilt.

Based on 200-plus personal interviews, The Daughter Trap gives voice to the trials, tribulations, and tender moments of elder care and outlines what individuals, employers, and medical and social systems can do to alleviate the pressures of caring for elderly relatives.

The Women's Movement Inside and Outside the State argues that the mobilization and success of the U.S. women's movement cannot be fully understood without recognizing the presence of feminist activist networks inside the federal government. Utilizing in-depth interviews and historical sources, Lee Ann Banaszak's research documents the significant contributions that these insider activists made to the creation of feminist organizations and the vital roles that they played in the development and implementation of policies in many areas, including education, foreign policy, and women's health. Banaszak also finds that working inside government did not always co-opt or deradicalize these activists. Banaszak's research causes us to rethink our current understanding of many social movement concepts and processes, including political opportunities, movement institutionalization, and confrontational tactics, and it alters our conception of the interests and character of the American state.

This is Not How I Thought It Would Be is an important look at motherhood and family dynamics in the 21st century--by the past president of Mothers & More.

Author Kristin Maschka shines a spotlight on the complex issues mothers face--at work, in their homes, their lives, and with their partners--and shows how the hidden assumptions that society, the media, public policy, and women themselves hold about motherhood can keep mothers from having the lives they want.

Maschka weaves together her own story, anecdotes from mothers all over the country, and a deep knowledge of history and society to offer mothers a comforting, often funny read that helps them see themselves and the world around them in a whole new way. At the same time she provides specific actions women can take today to remodel motherhood to live the lives they always thought they would.

In Some Liked It Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928-1959, music scholar Kristin McGee illuminates the tenuous yet persistent relationship between the media and popular female jazz performers during the first half of the 20th century. McGee examines emerging media such as vaudeville, variety shows, radio, film, and television, and how new technologies supported, sustained, or prohibited professional women's performative and musical lives. Further, Some Liked It Hot looks at the underlying tensions surrounding the transformation of gender and race relations from the second industrial revolution to the more conservative and economically prosperous postwar era.
 
Jazz came to be seen as a "true" national culture in the early 20th century. Female jazz instrumentalists and performers were actively and consistently featured in a variety of media, but they are grossly underrepresented in the resulting jazz canon. McGee examines how and why this is the case, and in doing so unearths some important lost performances by talented women like Hazel Scott, Ina Rae Hutton, and Lena Horne, as well as popular all-girl bands.
 
Kristin McGee draws heavily from the disciplines of ethnomusicology, gender studies, and cultural studies in her analyses of mass-mediated female jazz performers. She examines how women, both white and women of color, constructed alternate identities as jazz musicians, defying traditional gender and racial roles of the day.

Eve's portrayal in the Bible as a sinner and a temptress seemed to represent and justify women's inferior position in society for much of history. During the Enlightenment, women challenged these traditional gender roles by joining the public sphere as writers, intellectuals, philanthropists, artists, and patrons of the arts. Some sought to reclaim Eve by recasting her as a positive symbol of women's abilities and intellectual curiosity. In Eve's Enlightenment, leading scholars in the fields of history, art history, literature, and psychology discuss how Enlightenment philosophies compared to women's actual experiences in Spain and Spanish America during the period.

Relying on newspaper accounts, poetry, polemic, paintings, and saints' lives, this diverse group of contributors discuss how evolving legal, social, and medical norms affected Hispanic women and how art and literature portrayed them. Contributors such as historians Mónica Bolufer Peruga and María Victoria López-Cordón Cortezo, art historian Janis A. Tomlinson, and literary critic Rebecca Haidt also examine the contributions these women's experiences make to a transatlantic understanding of the Enlightenment. A common theme unites many of the essays: while Enlightenment reformers demanded rational equality for men and women, society increasingly emphasized sentiment and passion as defining characteristics of the female sex, leading to deepening contradictions. Despite clear gaps between Enlightenment ideals and women's experiences, however, the contributors agree that the women of Spain and Spanish America not only took part in the social and cultural transformations of the time but also exerted their own power and influence to help guide the Spanish-speaking world toward modernity.

The first interdisciplinary collection published in English, Eve's Enlightenment offers a wealth of information for scholars of eighteenth-century Spanish history, literature, art history, and women's studies. An introduction by editors Catherine M. Jaffe and Elizabeth Franklin Lewis provides helpful historical and contextual information.

The 1947 Partition of India resulted in the death of two million people and the displacement of 16 million more. It continues to haunt contemporary life in India--not only for discourses that debate the place of religion in India, but also for the historical interpretation of justice and minority belonging, and for the tension-ridden struggle over the production of secular national culture in the subcontinent.

Violent Belongings is about the relation between culture and violence in the modern world, exploring contemporary ethnic and gendered violence, and the questions about belonging that trouble nations and nationalisms today. Kavita Daiya examines South Asian ethnic violence and related mass migration in and after 1947 through its representation in postcolonial Indian and, more broadly, global South Asian literature and culture. By investigating such texts as Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan with Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies, alongside the writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Bollywood cinema, and diasporic films like Deepa Mehta's Earth, Daiya illuminates the cultural and political negotiation of postcolonial migration, nationality, gender, and violence in transnational public spheres.

This critical study provides a comprehensive history of Cameroonian women's writing in French, using an anthropological approach to literature. Since Western feminism has not always allowed a full understanding of African mores, this book seeks to define what is meant by contemporary "matriarchies" in African culture and to explore a variety of African feminisms as expressed through Cameroonian women's writings. In the introduction, numerous theories of African-defined "matriarchy" are examined; subsequent chapters give concrete examples and explanations of how these contemporary matriarchies manifest themselves in the works of Marie-Claire Matip, Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury, Werewere Liking, Calixthe Beyala, Philomène Bassek, Léonora Miano, and Jeannette Momo Doughagni. The book is the only critical study that gives a complete history--from its origins in 1954 to the present--of the nation's francophone literature written by its women. Foreword by Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury, first woman novelist of Cameroon and Francophone Africa.