Celebrating Women’s History Month

This week in North Philly Notes, we celebrate Women’s History Month with a selection of recent, forthcoming, and classic Women’s Studies titles. Take 20% off our Women’s Studies titles this month using the code TWHM23 at checkout! And view all of our Women’s Studies titles here.

New and recent titles

Gendered Places: The Landscape of Local Gender Norms across the United States, by William J. Scarborough

Every place has its quirky attributes, cultural reputation, and distinctive flair. But when we travel across America, do we also experience distinct gender norms and expectations? In his groundbreaking Gendered Places, William Scarborough examines metropolitan commuting zones to see how each region’s local culture reflects gender roles and gender equity.

Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh, by Elora Halim Chowdhury

Ethical Encounters is an exploration of the intersection of feminism, human rights, and memory to illuminate how visual practices of recollecting violent legacies in Bangladeshi cinema can conjure a global cinematic imagination for the advancement of humanity. By examining contemporary, women-centered Muktijuddho cinema—features and documentaries that focus on the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971—Elora Chowdhury shows how these films imagine, disrupt, and reinscribe a gendered nationalist landscape of trauma, freedom, and agency.

Are You Two Sisters?: The Journey of a Lesbian Couple, by Susan Krieger

Are You Two Sisters? is Susan Krieger’s candid, revealing, and engrossing memoir about the intimacies of a lesbian couple. Krieger explores how she and her partner confront both the inner challenges of their relationship and the invisibility of lesbian identity in the larger world. Using a lively novelistic and autoethnographic approach that toggles back and forth in time, Krieger reflects on the evolution of her forty-year relationship.

Feminist Reflections on Childhood: A History and Call to Action, by Penny A. Weiss

In Feminist Reflections on Childhood, Penny Weiss rediscovers the radically feminist tradition of advocating for the liberatory treatment of youth. Weiss looks at both historical and contemporary feminists to understand what issues surrounding the inequality experienced by both women and children were important to the authors as feminist activists and thinkers. She uses the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Simone de Beauvoir to show early feminist arguments for the improved status and treatment of youth. Weiss also shows how Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a socialist feminist, and Emma Goldman, an anarchist feminist, differently understood and re-visioned children’s lives, as well as how children continue to show up on feminist agendas and in manifestos that demand better conditions for children’s lives.

Women’s Empowerment and Disempowerment in Brazil The Rise and Fall of President Dilma Rousseff, by Pedro A. G. dos Santos and Farida Jalalzai

In 2010, Dilma Rousseff was the first woman to be elected President in Brazil. She was re-elected in 2014 before being impeached in 2016 for breaking budget laws. Her popularity and controversy both energized and polarized the country. In Women’s Empowerment and Disempowerment in Brazil, dos Santos and Jalalzai examine Rousseff’s presidency and what it means for a woman to hold (and lose) the country’s highest power. The authors examine the ways Rousseff exercised dominant authority and enhanced women’s political empowerment. They also investigate the extent her gender played a role in the events of her presidency, including the political and economic crises and her ensuing impeachment.

Motherlands: How States Push Mothers Out of Employment, by Leah Ruppanner

In the absence of federal legislation, each state in the United States has its own policies regarding family leave, job protection for women, and childcare. No wonder working mothers encounter such a significant disparity when it comes to childcare resources in America! Whereas conservative states like Nebraska offer affordable, readily available, and high quality childcare, progressive states that advocate for women’s economic and political power, like California, have expensive childcare, shorter school days, and mothers who are more likely to work part-time or drop out of the labor market altogether to be available for their children. In Motherlands, Leah Ruppanner cogently argues that states should look to each other to fill their policy voids. 

Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy, edited by Shauna L. Shames, Rachel I. Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Langan Teele

After the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a large cohort of women emerged to run for office. Their efforts changed the landscape of candidates and representation. However, women are still far less likely than men to seek elective office, and face biases and obstacles in campaigns. (Women running for Congress make twice as many phone calls as men to raise the same contributions.) The editors and contributors to Good Reasons to Run, a mix of scholars and practitioners, examine the reasons why women run—and do not run—for political office. They focus on the opportunities, policies, and structures that promote women’s candidacies. How do nonprofits help recruit and finance women as candidates? And what role does money play in women’s campaigns?

Forthcoming this Spring

Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors, edited by Sharon D. Wright Austin

Political Black Girl Magic explores black women’s experiences as mayors in American cities. The editor and contributors to this comprehensive volume examine black female mayoral campaigns and elections where race and gender are a factor—and where deracialized campaigns have garnered candidate support from white as well as Hispanic and Asian American voters. Chapters also consider how Black female mayors govern, from discussions of their pursuit of economic growth and how they use their power to enact positive reforms to the challenges they face that inhibit their abilities to cater to neglected communities.

Solidarity & Care: Domestic Worker Activism in New York City, by Alana Lee Glaser

The members of the Domestic Workers United (DWU) organization—immigrant women of color employed as nannies, caregivers, and housekeepers in New York City—formed to fight for dignity and respect and to “bring meaningful change” to their work. Alana Lee Glaser examines the process of how these domestic workers organized against precarity, isolation, and exploitation to help pass the 2010 New York State Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, the first labor law in the United States protecting in-home workers.

Classic Titles

Gross Misbehavior and Wickedness: A Notorious Divorce in Early Twentieth-Century America, by Jean Elson

The bitter and public court battle waged between Nina and James Walker of Newport, Rhode Island, from 1909 to 1916 created a sensation throughout the nation, with lurid accounts of their marital troubles fueling widespread gossip. The ordeal of this high-society couple, who wed as much for status as for love, is one of the prime examples of the growing trend of women seeking divorce during the early twentieth century. Gross Misbehavior and Wickedness—which takes its title from the charges Nina levied against James for his adultery (with the family governess) and extreme cruelty—recounts the protracted legal proceedings in juicy detail.

Fireweed: A Political Autobiography, by Gerda Lerner

In Fireweed, Gerda Lerner, a pioneer and leading scholar in women’s history, tells her story of moral courage and commitment to social change with a novelist’s skill and a historian’s command of context. Lerner’s memoir focuses on the formative experiences that made her an activist for social justice before her academic career began. Lerner insists that her decades of grassroots organizing largely account for the theoretical insights she was later able to bring to the development of women’s history.

What’s a mother to do?

This week in North Philly Notes, Leah Ruppanner, author of Motherlands, writes about women who are forced to choose between working and child care.

Emily Tatro is a paralegal working full-time while balancing the demands of three school aged kids. School closures mean she is learning Seesaw, Google classroom, IXL, and RazKids while also writing up legal briefs. She is at the end of her rope.

Emily said: “My everything is suffering and I’m not sure how much longer we can keep this up. As soon as the kids are asleep, I pass out because I’m always bone tired. But, I also feel this pressure to keep up a happy-it’s-all-good face so the kids don’t feel bad or sad or scared because none of it is their fault and I don’t want them to see this pressure.”

Without the support of her mother, she would drop out of work altogether. Working full-time job on top of school closures is unsustainable.

What happens when state governments close schools to stop the spread of a deadly pathogen?

The same as before: mothers step out of employment to manage the care.

My book, Motherlands: How States Push Mothers Out of Employment, shows these patterns are nothing new. Prior to the pandemic, California had some of the highest childcare costs in the nation and some of the shortest school days. Afterschool care? Forget about it—many Californian families need but cannot access afterschool care. These structural impediments mean mothers often reduce work to part-time or drop out altogether.

As Emily says, “Childcare was always hard and now it’s just impossible. In summer, I pay someone to watch the kids and I would lose money on these days.”

These patterns are distinct to many of the states in the heartland where childcare gobbles up less of the family budget, school days are longer and afterschool care is more accessible. The result? More mothers are employed, in part, because they can access more affordable childcare.

As Motherlands shows, California is a gender progressive state and is one of the leaders in the country in empowering women. When women do work, they make more money and have access to higher level professional positions. More women are voted into California’s state legislature and California is one of the few states in the nation that provides its constituents paid parental leave.

So, what is happening here? How can California be both progressive in its gender policies but have some of the worst childcare outcomes?

Motherlands shows states tend to cluster on one of these metrics or the other—either facilitating mother’s employment through childcare resources or empowering women through policies and access to better economic markets. Only a handful of states do both—empower women and provide childcare resources. This means even the progressive states that aim to empower women must do more to support them when they become mothers.

And, now seems to be the time because women like Emily are suffering with closed schools and limited childcare support.

We need employers and governments to invest in, advocate for and execute comprehensive and effective childcare policies.

The pandemic and its impending recession is a major crisis. Within these crises, if we are smart, can come change. Putting childcare as a central policy solution is the only way forward.

Honoring Books about Motherhood for Mother’s Day

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase Temple University Press books about Moms and motherhood for Mother’s Day. 

The Paradox of Natural Mothering, by Chris Bobel

Single or married, working mothers are, if not the norm, no longer exceptional. These days, women who stay at home to raise their children seem to be making a radical lifestyle choice. Indeed, the women at the center of The Paradox of Natural Mothering have renounced consumerism and careerism in order to reclaim home and family. These natural mothers favor parenting practices that set them apart from the mainstream: home birth, extended breast feeding, home schooling and natural health care. Regarding themselves as part of a movement, natural mothers believe they are changing society one child, one family at a time.

Author Chris Bobel profiles some thirty natural mothers, probing into their choices and asking whether they are reforming or conforming to women’s traditional role.

Mothers, Daughters, and Political Socialization: Two Generations at an American Women’s College, by Krista Jenkins

Mothers, Daughters, and Political Socialization examines the role of intergenerational transmission—the maternal influences on younger women—while also looking at differences among women in attitudes and behaviors relative to gender roles that might be attributed to the nature of the times during their formative years. How do daughters coming of age in an era when the women’s movement is far less visible deal with gendered expectations compared to their mothers? Do they accept the contemporary status quo their feminist mothers fought so hard to achieve? Or, do they press forward with new goals?

Jenkins shows how contemporary women are socialized to accept or reject traditional gender roles that serve to undermine their equality.

My Mother’s Hip: Lessons from the World of Eldercare, by Luisa Margolies

After her mother’s double hip fracture, Luisa Margolies immersed herself in identifying and coordinating the services and professionals needed to provide critical care for an elderly person. She soon realized that the American medical system is ill prepared to deal with the long-term care needs of our graying society. The heart of My Mother’s Hip is taken up with the author’s day-to-day observations as her mother’s condition worsened, then improved only to worsen again, while her father became increasingly anxious and disoriented.

Weaving Work and Motherhood, by Anita Ilta Garey

In American culture, the image of balancing work and family life is most often represented in the glossy shot of the executive-track woman balancing cell-phone, laptop, and baby. In Weaving Work and Motherhood, Anita Ilta Garey focuses not on the corporate executives so frequently represented in American ads and magazines but, rather, on the women in jobs that typify the vast majority of women’s employment in the United States.

Moving beyond studies of women, work, and family in terms of structural incompatibilities, Garey challenges images of the exclusively “work-oriented” or exclusively “family-oriented” mother.

Pushing for Midwives: Homebirth Mothers and the Reproductive Rights Movement, by Christa Craven

With the increasing demand for midwives among U.S. women, reproductive rights activists are lobbying to loosen restrictions that deny legal access to homebirth options. In Pushing for Midwives, Christa Craven presents a nuanced history of women’s reproductive rights activism in the U.S. She also provides an examination of contemporary organizing strategies for reproductive rights in an era increasingly driven by “consumer rights.”

By framing the midwifery struggle through a political economic perspective on reproductive rights, Pushing for Midwives offers an in-depth look at the strategies, successes, and challenges facing midwifery activists in Virginia.