Women's History

Agnès Humbert was an art historian in Paris during the German occupation in 1940. Though she might well have weathered the oppressive regime, Humbert was stirred to action by the atrocities she witnessed. In an act of astonishing bravery, she joined forces with several colleagues to form an organized resistance-very likely the first such group to fight back against the occupation. (In fact, their newsletter, Resistance, gave the French Resistance its name.)In the throes of their struggle for freedom, the members of Humbert's group were betrayed to the Gestapo; Humbert herself was imprisoned. In immediate, electrifying detail, Humbert describes her time in prison; her deportation to Germany, where for more than two years she endured a string of brutal labor camps; and the horror of discovering that seven of her friends were executed by a firing squad.

This edited collection will explore the challenges women faced as inmates, their efforts to exert agency or control over their lives and bodies, how issues of race and social class influenced experiences, and how their experiences differed from that of male inmates. Contributions extend from the early nineteenth century into the twenty-first century to provide an opportunity to examine change over time with regards to female imprisonment.

Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape.

A comprehensive encyclopedia tracing the history of the women's rights movement in the United States from the American Revolution to the present day.

Immersed in radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes, this is the fascinating story of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century

Aulette and Wittner look at how concrete forms of gender, race, class, and sexual inequality operate transnationally; examine the impact of globalization on local and everyday life experiences; and identify how local actors re-imagine social possibilities, resist injustice, and work toward change.