feminist publishing

Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country

Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country

"Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country offers a fresh interpretation of the history of Navajo (Diné) pastoralism. Environmental historian Marsha Weisiger examines the factors that led to the poor condition of the range and explains how the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Navajos, and climate change contributed to it. Using archival sources and oral accounts, she describes the importance of land and stock animals in Navajo culture. By positioning women at the center of the story, she demonstrates the place they hold as significant actors in Native American and environmental history."
Author
Marsha L. Weisiger
Publication
2011
Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment: Delimiting Genre 

Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment: Delimiting Genre 

This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.
"Through examination of nearly sixty works, Fabienne Moore traces the prehistory of the French prose poem, demonstrating that the disquiet of some 18th-century writers with the Enlightenment gave rise to the genre nearly a century before it is generally supposed to exist."
Author
Fabienne Moore
Publication
2009
The Answer/La Respuesta, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

The Answer/La Respuesta

This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.
"Known as the first feminist of the Americas, the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz enjoyed an international reputation as one of the great lyric poets and dramatists of her time. While earlier translators have ignored Sor Juana's keen awareness of gender, this volume brings out her own emphasis and diction, and reveals the remarkable scholarship, subversiveness, and even humor she drew on in defense of her cause."
Author
Electa Arenal
Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell
Publication
2009
Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States

Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States

"What constitutes a family? Tracing the dramatic evolution of Americans’ answer to this question over the past century, Kinship by Design provides the fullest account to date of modern adoption’s history. Beginning in the early 1900s, when children were still transferred between households by a variety of unregulated private arrangements, Ellen Herman details efforts by the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the Child Welfare League of America to establish adoption standards in law and practice."
Author
Ellen Herman
Publication
2008
Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD’s 

Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD’s 

“More than 14 percent of the PhD’s awarded in the United States during the first four decades of the twentieth century went to women, a proportion not achieved again until the 1980s. This book is the result of a study in which the authors identified all of the American women who earned PhD’s in mathematics before 1940, and collected extensive biographical and bibliographical information about each of them. By reconstructing as complete a picture as possible of this group of women, Green and LaDuke reveal insights into the larger scientific and cultural communities in which they lived and worked.”
Author
Judy Green and Jeanne LaDuke
Publication
2009
Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood

Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood

This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.
“In the 1970s and early 1980s, mothers who came out as lesbians routinely lost custody of their children to homophobic court systems and outraged fathers,” says author Melissa Hart.  When she was 9 years old, this happened to her mother in Southern California, and Hart and her younger siblings weren’t allowed to live with her again until they turned 18. Hart documented this era in her new memoir Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood."
Author
Melissa Hart
Publication
2009
Women, Media, and Rebellion in Oaxaca

Women, Media, and Rebellion in Oaxaca

This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.
This documentary captures the unprecedented takeover in August 2006 of COR-TV, the state’s radio and television stations in Oaxaca, Mexico, when women marched to its installations to voice their political, social, economic, and cultural concerns and ended up taking over the airwaves. It all began when police responded to a teachers’ strike with brutal repression, turning the city of Oaxaca into a battle camp and leading to the formation of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO).Issues of justice, women’s rights, and human rights violations are at the core of this social uprising, in which media became an important site of struggle.
Author
Gabriela Martínez
Publication
2008
The Dance of Politics: Gender, Performance, and Democratization in Malawi

The Dance of Politics: Gender, Performance, and Democratization in Malawi

"Election campaigns, political events, and national celebration days in Malawi usually feature groups of women who dance and perform songs of praise for politicians and political parties. These lively performances help to attract and energize throngs of prospective voters. However, as Lisa Gilman explains, 'praise performing' is one of the only ways that women are allowed to participate in a male-dominated political system."
Author
Lisa Gilman
Publication
2009
Indigeneity in the Mexican Cultural Imagination

Indigeneity in the Mexican Cultural Imagination

This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.
"The book focuses on representations of indigenous peoples in post-revolutionary literary and intellectual history by examining key cultural texts. Using these analyses as a foundation, Analisa Taylor links her critique to national Indian policy, rights, and recent social movements in Southern Mexico. In addition, she moves beyond her analysis of indigenous peoples in general to take a gendered look at indigenous women ranging from the villainized Malinche to the highly romanticized and sexualized Zapotec women of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec."
Author
Analisa Taylor
Publication
2009
Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform

Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform

"Lynn Fujiwara reveals a neglected aspect of the Asian immigrant story: the ill effects of welfare reform on Asian immigrant women and families. Mothers without Citizenship intertwines the issues of social and legal citizenship, arguing that these draconian measures redefined immigrants as outsiders whose lack of citizenship was used to deem them ineligible for public benefits. Fujiwara shows how these people are both a vulnerable, invisible group and active agents of change."
Author
Lynn Fujiwara
Publication
2009