For upper/graduate-level Womens Studies courses; upper-level Womens History courses; US History courses; and English Literature courses. This important reader for women's studies contains selections by twenty scholars who have won Woodrow Wilson Fellowships in Womens Studies over the last 30 years and have helped establish and further this subject as an important discipline; they write about the changes in their fields, their recent research, and the theoretical underpinnings of their work. This is an indispensable book for instructors and students who want to know what contemporary scholars can tell us about womens lives and notions of gender in history, literature, the arts, and the social sciences; how they write about their findings; and how they define issues and develop approaches to their subjects.

Table of Contents:
Introduction  by Anne Firor Scott.  I. The Evolution of Economic and Political Citizenship for Women.  1. Estelle B. Freedman, Beyond the Waves: Rethinking the History of Feminisms. 2. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, African Feminisms: the Struggle Continues.  3. Antoinette Burton, Feminism, Empire, and the Fate of National Histories: The Case of Victorian Britain.   II. Gender Construction in Action. 1. Leila J.Rupp, When Women’s Studies Isn’t about Women: Writing About Drag Queens. 2. Caroline B. Brettell, Anthropology, Gender, and Narrative. 3. Sharon Marcus, The Queerness of Victorian Marriage Reform. 4. Deborah Epstein Nord, “Return from Exile”: Community, Nation, and Gender in George Eliot’s Fiction.   III. Labor, Class, and Space. 1. Jacqueline Jones, Writing Women’s History: What’s Feminism Got to Do with It? 2. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Independence Herself”: A New Spin on Old Stories about Household Production in Early New England. 3. Adela Pinch, Stealing Happiness: Women Shoplifters in Georgian England. 4. Shanshan Du, Gender Sharing of Labor: A Cross Cultural Perspective. 5. Felicity Callard, Understanding Agoraphobia: Women, Men, and the Historical Geography of Urban Anxiety.   IV. Rights, Reforms, and Welfare. 1. Miriam Cohen, The Politics of Gender and Schooling in the Progressive Era. 2. Felicia A. Kornbluh, Women’s History with the Politics Left IN:  Feminist Studies of the U.S.Welfare State. 3. Ellen R. Reese, Patriarchy, Racism, and Business Interests: Cross-Class Support for Welfare Entrenchment in the United States. 4. Myra Marx Ferree, Metaphors of Race and Class: Comparing German and American Racisms.   V. Knowledge Production. 1. Martha Nell Smith, Taking the “Man” Out of the Humanities: How Feminism and Technology Are Transforming the Discipline. 2. Michele Aina Barale: The Art of Darkness: Willa Cather’s Aesthetics. 3. Sabrina Barton, Feminist Film Theory and the Problem of Liking Characters. 4. Susan Casteras, Feminism and Art History: Past Achievements and New Directions.