Social Science / Women's Studies

A Detailed Study of the Rhetorical Labor of Low- and No-Wage Women Workers Unaffiliated with Traditional Labor Unions

A compelling study of the sea change brought about in politics, society, and gender roles during World Wars I and II by campaigns to recruit Women’s Land Armies in Great Britain and the United States to cultivate victory gardens. Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant compares and contrasts the outcomes of war in both nations as seen through women’s ties to labor, agriculture, the home, and the environment. She sheds new light on the cultural legacies left by the Women’s Land Armies and their major role in shaping national and personal identities.

Tasteful Domesticity demonstrates how women marginalized by gender, race, ethnicity, and class used the cookbook as a rhetorical space in which to conduct public discussions of taste and domesticity.

Winner, 2016 ALA-Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Hedrick illuminates how discourses of Americanization, ethnicity, gender, class, and commodification shape the genre of “chica lit,” popular fiction written by Latina authors with Latina characters. Looking at chica lit’s market-driven representations of difference, poverty, and Americanization, Hedrick shows how this writing functions within the larger arena of struggles over popular representation of Latinas and Chicanas.

New in Paper

Janet Carey Eldred examines the rise of women magazine editors during the mid-twentieth century and reveals their unheralded role in creating a literary aesthetic for the American public.

Kim Clark relates the stories of women who successfully challenged Ecuadorian state programs in the wake of the Liberal Revolution of 1895. New laws left loopholes wherein women could contest entry into education systems, certain professions, and vote in elections. These women became modernizers and agents of change, winning freedoms for themselves and future generations.

An original study on the use and misuse of global institutional rhetoric and the effects of these practices on women, particularly in developing countries. Using a feminist lens, Rebecca Dingo views the complex networks that rhetoric flows through, globally and nationally, and how it’s often reconfigured to work both for and against women and to maintain existing power structures.

Winner of the 2012 JAC W. Ross Winterowd Award

Kelly Ritter chronicles the evolution of writing programs at a landmark Southern women’s college during the postwar period. She finds that despite its conservative Southern culture and vocational roots, the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina was a unique setting where advanced writing programs and creativity flourished long before these trends emerged nationally.

Ruthchild’s study reveals that Russian feminists were an integral force for revolution and social change, particularly during the monumental uprisings of 1905-1917. She analyzes the backgrounds, motivations, methods, activism, and organizational networks of early Russian feminists that came to challenge, and eventually bring down, the patriarchal tsarist regime.

Wit’s End is an original perspective on women’s use of humor as a performative strategy, seen in works of twentieth-century American literature. Zwagerman argues that women, whose direct, explicit performative speech has been traditionally denied, or not taken seriously, have often turned to humor as a means of communicating with men.

Rhetorica in Motion is the first collected work to investigate feminist rhetorical research methods in both contemporary and historical contexts. The contributors analyze familiar themes, such as archival, literary, and online research, but also looks to other areas of rhetoric, such as disability studies; gerontology/aging studies; Latina/o, queer, and transgender studies; performance studies; and transnational feminisms in both the United States and larger geopolitical spaces.

Examines debates over women’s rights in the first half of the twentieth century, to show how Czechs gradually turned away from democracy and established the separation of state and domestic issues, at the expense of personal freedoms.

Writing the Siege of Leningrad tells of women’s experiences keeping the city alive and functioning during the 900 day Siege of Leningrad. Utilizing the words and descriptions of these women, Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina tell the story of a previously overlooked section of the population.

A collection of essays examining the intersection between water conservation and women’s roles in a variety of Latin American settings—rural and urban, across a range of countries.

In this brilliantly edited collection of personal interviews, Maida Springer, one of the twentieth-century’s most fascinating international labor leaders and powerful African-American women, tells her story in her own words.