A history of women who have made contributions to history in almost every major field of endeavor looks at over 1,400 women who have been originators, leaders, or celebrities

Looks at the history of activism by African Americans in Chicago.

Identifies people, concepts, events, organizations, and laws

Not only a biography of Florence Kelley, a leading reformer in the Progressive Era, this book also serves as a political history of the USA during a period of change when women worked to end the abuses of unregulated industrial capitalism.

A history of social change at a critical period in American history, from the end of the Civil War to the early days of the Depression.

In one of the first books to address the New German Cinema from a feminist perspective, Barbara Kosta looks closely at two autobiographical films, Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother and Jutta Brckner's Years of Hunger; and at two books, Ruth Rehmann's Man in the Pulpit: Questions for a Father, and Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood. In different ways, Kosta shows, these works of the 1970s and 1980s have recast traditional autobiography, offering fresh characters in new roles, exploring innovative forms of expression, and confronting long-repressed themes such as the devaluation of the female voice and the horror of Germany's fascist past.

Asian American women have long dealt with charges of betrayal within and beyond their communities. Images of their "disloyalty" pervade American culture, from the daughter who is branded a traitor to family for adopting American ways, to the war bride who immigrates in defiance of her countrymen, to a figure such as Yoko Ono, accused of breaking up the Beatles with her "seduction" of John Lennon. Leslie Bow here explores how representations of females transgressing the social order play out in literature by Asian American women. Questions of ethnic belonging, sexuality, identification, and political allegiance are among the issues raised by such writers as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Bharati Mukherjee, Jade Snow Wong, Amy Tan, Sky Lee, Le Ly Hayslip, Wendy Law-Yone, Fiona Cheong, and Nellie Wong. Beginning with the notion that feminist and Asian American identity are mutually exclusive, Bow analyzes how women serve as boundary markers between ethnic or national collectives in order to reveal the male-based nature of social cohesion. In exploring the relationship between femininity and citizenship, liberal feminism and American racial discourse, and women's domestic abuse and human rights, the author suggests that Asian American women not only mediate sexuality's construction as a determiner of loyalty but also manipulate that construction as a tool of political persuasion in their writing. The language of betrayal, she argues, offers a potent rhetorical means of signaling how belonging is policed by individuals and by the state. Bow's bold analysis exposes the stakes behind maintaining ethnic, feminist, and national alliances, particularly for women who claim multiple loyalties.

This fascinating study explores the pleasures and torments of love and sexuality as depicted in the works of six important French women writers: Rachilde, Colette, Leduc, Wittig, Cixous and Duras. Historically, erotic literature has been dominated by male writers. Feminist critics have argued that its central motifs of voyeurism, sadomasochism, incest and violence to women's bodies are governed by the unconscious fantasies and prejudices of a patriarchal sociocultural order. The contributors question how this sociocultural order has affected the erotic writing of the women writers studied. They explore the opportunities for, and constraints on, women's erotic writing in the early to mid-twentieth century through the works of Rachilde, Colette and Leduc. This is contrasted with the writing of prominent contemporary authors -- Wittig, Cixous and Duras -- to reveal new developments and diversification within the genre. The focus throughout is on how these writers deal with erotic language and rhetoric, their treatment of traditional themes of eroticism, and -- most vital to recent feminist criticism and theory -- their vision of the female body and women's sexual pleasure. The book provides key insights into the development of women's erotic discourse throughout this century and the diversity that characterizes it.