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How Women Changed America

As recently as 1960 few women worked outside the home, married women could not borrow money in their own names, schools imposed strict quotas on female applicants, and sexual harassment did not exist as a legal concept.
In Tidal Wave, Sara M. Evans, one of our foremost historians of women in America, draws on an extraordinary range of interviews, archives, and published sources to tell for the first time the incredible story of the past forty years in women's history. Encompassing the so-called Second Wave of feminism (1960s and 1970s) and the Third Wave (1980s and 1990s), Sara M. Evans challenges traditional interpretations of women's history at every turn. Covering politics, economics, popular culture, marriage, and family, and including the perspectives of women ranging from leaders of NOW to little-known women who simply wanted more out of their lives, Tidal Wave paints a vast canvas of a society in upheaval.
The movement's shocking success is evinced, Evans notes, by the simple fact that we now live in a country in which all women are feminists, in practice if not in name.
Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End by Sara M. Evans
ISBN: 074325502X

Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

Polygamy, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, punishing women for being raped, differential access for men and women to health care and education, unequal rights of ownership, assembly, and political participation, unequal vulnerability to violence. These practices and conditions are standard in some parts of the world. Do demands for multiculturalism - and certain minority group rights in particular - make them more likely to continue and to spread to liberal democracies? Are there fundamental conflicts between our commitment to gender equity and our increasing desire to respect the customs of minority cultures or religions? In this book, the eminent feminist Susan Moller Okin and fifteen of the world's leading thinkers about feminism and multiculturalism explore these unsettling questions in a provocative, passionate, and illuminating debate.
Susan Moller Okin opens by arguing that some group rights can, in fact, endanger women. Okin points, for example, to the French government's giving thousands of male immigrants special permission to bring multiple wives into the country, despite French laws against polygamy and the wives' own bitter opposition to the practice. Susan Moller Okin argues that if we agree that women should not be disadvantaged because of their sex, we should not accept group rights that permit oppressive practices on the grounds that they are fundamental to minority cultures whose existence may otherwise be threatened.
In reply, some respondents reject Okin's position outright, contending that her views are rooted in a moral universalism that is blind to cultural difference. Others quarrel with Okin's focus on gender, or argue that we should be careful about which group rights we permit, but not reject the category of group rights altogether. Susan Moller Okin concludes with a rebuttal, clarifying, adjusting, and extending her original position. These incisive and accessible essays - expanded from their original publication in Boston Review and including four new contributions - are indispensable reading for anyone interested in one of the most contentious social and political issues today.
Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? by Susan Moller Okin
ISBN: 0691004323

War Against Boys

It's a bad time to be a boy in America. As the century drew to a close, the defining event for American girls was the triumph of the U.S. women's soccer team. For boys, the symbolic event was the mass killing at Columbine High School.
It would seem that boys in our society are greatly at risk. Yet the best-known studies and the academic experts say that it's girls who are suffering from a decline in self-esteem. It's girls, they say, who need extra help in school and elsewhere in a society that favors boys. The problem with boys is that they are boys, say the experts. We need to change their nature. We have to make them more like girls.
These arguments don't hold up to scrutiny, says Christina Hoff Sommers in this provocative, fascinating book. Sommers analyzes the work of the leading academic experts, Carol Gilligan and William Pollack, and finds it lacking in scientific rigor. There is no girl crisis, says Sommers. Girls are outperforming boys academically, and girls' self-esteem is no different from boys'. Boys lag behind girls in reading and writing ability, and they are less likely to go to college.
The girl crisis has been seized upon by some feminists and has been suffused with sexual politics. Under the guise of helping girls, many schools have adopted policies that penalize boys, often for simply being masculine. Christina Hoff Sommers says that boys do need help, but not the sort they've been getting. They need help catching up with girls academically. They need love, discipline, respect, and moral guidance. They desperately need understanding. They do not need to be rescued from masculinity.
The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men by Christina Hoff Sommers
ISBN: 0684849577

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were born four years and seventy-one miles apart, into a world ruled entirely by men. Together, for more than half a century, they led the struggle to win the most basic civil rights for women. Yet although their work immeasurably bettered the lives of a majority of American women, their names and deeds have been largely forgotten.
The two women could not have been more different. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been born to wealth and comfort, and was for many years the housebound mother of seven. However, she was also an uncompromising revolutionary for whom winning the vote was always just one item of a comprehensive agenda aimed at improving the status of all women in every area of life. Susan B. Anthony was a Quaker farmer's daughter who had chosen not to marry and remained self-supporting all her life. She was plainspoken, disciplined, and single-minded; she had learned to be a canny tactician as well, willing to tack to the left or right if by so doing she could steer the woman-suffrage movement closer to its goal.
With essays by Ellen Carol DuBois, Ann D. Gordon, and Martha Saxton, and a supporting cast that includes John Brown and Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott and Victoria Woodhull, Not for Ourselves Alone is a vivid and inspiring portrait of two of the most important, and least-known, figures in American history.
Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns and Ken C. Burns
ISBN: 037570969X