Though black and white women have long been associated with the heart of southern culture, their relationships with each other in the context of contemporary southern fiction have been largely glossed over until now. In Advancing Sisterhood? Sharon Monteith offers an enlightening map of this new literary ground. Beginning with an overview of the theory and literary incarnations of friendship, Advancing Sisterhood? examines how prevalent specific relationships between black and white women have become in the works of Ellen Douglas, Kaye Gibbons, Connie Mae Fowler, Lane von Herzen, Ellen Gilchrist, Carol Dawson, and others. Monteith explains that interracial friendships have become an alluring topic for white women writers. She also examines these friendships in relation to the ways black women writers and critics have pictured black and white girls and women in the South. Advancing Sisterhood? explores childhood female relationships in such works as Ellen Foster and Before Women Had Wings and considers recent ecocriticism and its role in charting the female southern landscape. Monteith also provides an in-depth examination of the archetypal friendship between white housewives and their black servants. Through these discussions, Advancing Sisterhood? demonstrates how contemporary white women writers have broadened their work to include friendships between women of diverse backgrounds and to influence literary expression.

This work traces the impact of a differentiated curriculum on girls' education in St. Louis public schools from 1870 to 1930. Its central argument is that the premise upon which a differentiated curriculum is founded, that schooling ought to differ among students in order prepare each for his or her place in the social order, actually led to academic decline. The attention given to the intersection of gender, race, and social class and its combined effect on girls' schooling, places this text in the new wave of critical historical scholarship in the field of educational research.

The relationship of 'The Word' to notions of unity and oneness has often served as a tool of tyranny and oppression in Christian history. Static, authoritarian religious institutions have formed and developed the central tenets of their faith, excluding from participation the voices of those who do not mirror the reality of the power brokers – overwhelmingly white, Western, heterosexual and male. Yet other voices have continually emerged in multiple locations to challenge the hegemony of 'The Word' and to claim authority and agency in the struggle for basic rights and justice. Some of these voices are explicitly religious, others not. All challenge the adequacy of a unilateral 'Word' to embody the dynamic and all-encompassing movement of the sacred in the world. This book suggests that a metaphor of 'voices' provides possibility for the intercourse of many diverse expressions of holy power in the world without insisting upon either a primal or an ultimate onenss. The implications of this shift are many. The sources where such revelations of the divine appear are broadened to include many texts not traditionally seen as theological. Conceptions of community are revolutionized, to include not only groupings of like-minded individuals coming together for support and nourishment, but also coalitions of diverse persons, who share no particular social or cultural identity but rather their commitment to work together for a more just world. Traditional theological categories are renamed and redefined, as their original definition and subsequent development are disclosed as limiting and inadequate. And the God whom we have been told is One is revealed as many-faceted and articulate, speaking through and among a radical multiplicity of created and creative beings who struggle together to live authentically in the world.

Feature articles in this issue include: "Women and Guilds in Bologna: The Ambiguities of 'Marginality'," by Dora Dumont; "Unpacking the First Person Singular: Negotiating Patriarchy in Nineteenth-Century Chile," by Andy Daitsman; "Culture Wars Won and Lost, Part II: Ethnic Museums on the Mall," by Fath Davis Ruffins (a continuation of an article published in RHR 68); and "'All the Intensity of My Nature': Ida B. Wells and African-American Women's Anger in History," by Patricia A. Schechter.

Racism in Contemporary America is the largest and most up-to-date bibliography available on current research on the topic. It has been compiled by award-winning researcher Meyer Weinberg, who has spent many years writing and researching contemporary and historical aspects of racism. Almost 15,000 entries to books, articles, dissertations, and other materials are organized under 87 subject-headings. In addition, there are author and ethnic-racial indexes. Several aids help the researcher access the materials included. In addition to the subject organization of the bibliography, entries are annotated whenever the title is not self-explanatory. An author index is followed by an ethnic-racial index which makes it convenient to follow a single group through any or all the subject headings. This is a source book for the serious study of America's most enduring problem; as such it will be of value to students and researchers at all levels and in most disciplines.

This book is the first to develop a history of the analogy between woman and slave, charting its changing meanings and enduring implications across the social movements of the long nineteenth century. Looking beyond its foundations in the antislavery and women’s rights movements, this book examines the influence of the woman-slave analogy in popular culture along with its use across the dress reform, labor, suffrage, free love, racial uplift, and anti-vice movements. At once provocative and commonplace, the woman-slave analogy was used to exceptionally varied ends in the era of chattel slavery and slave emancipation. Yet, as this book reveals, a more diverse assembly of reformers both accepted and embraced a woman-as-slave worldview than has previously been appreciated. One of the most significant yet controversial rhetorical strategies in the history of feminism, the legacy of the woman-slave analogy continues to underpin the debates that shape feminist theory today.

Introduction: political theory and the founding of American feminism -- Lifting the "Claud-Lorraine tint" over the Republic: Frances Wright's critique -- Of society and manners in America -- Harriet Martineau on the theory and practice of democracy in America -- Facing the "sledge hammer of truth": Angelina Grimke and the rhetoric of reform -- Sarah Grimke's Quaker liberalism -- "The most belligerent non-resistant": Lucretia Mott on women's rights -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton's rhetoric of ridicule and reform -- The shadow and the substance of Sojourner Truth -- Conclusion

This book argues that African American theatre in the twentieth century represented a cultural front of the civil rights movement. Highlighting the frequently ignored decades of the 1940s and 1950s, Burrell documents a radical cohort of theatre artists who became critical players in the fight for civil rights both onstage and offstage, between the Popular Front and the Black Arts Movement periods. The Civil Rights Theatre Movement recovers knowledge of little-known groups like the Negro Playwrights Company and reconsiders Broadway hits including Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, showing how theatre artists staged radically innovative performances that protested Jim Crow and U.S. imperialism amidst a repressive Cold War atmosphere. By conceiving of class and gender as intertwining aspects of racism, this book reveals how civil rights theatre artists challenged audiences to reimagine the fundamental character of American democracy.

From the first European encounters with Native American women to today's crisis of sexual assault, The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History boldly interprets the diverse history of women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America. Over twenty-nine chapters, this handbook illustrates how women's and gender history can shape how we view the past, looking at how gender influenced people's lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter is alive with colorful historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, and transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars across multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women's opinions to the suppression of Indian women's involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. Together and separately, these essays offer readers a deep understanding of the variety and centrality of women's lives to all dimensions of the American past, even as they show that the boundaries of "women," "American," and "history" have shifted across the centuries.