Providing an in-depth look at the lives of women and girls in approximately 150 countries, this multivolume reference set offers readers transnational and postcolonial analysis of the many issues that are critical to the success of women and girls. For millennia, women around the world have shouldered the responsibility of caring for their families. But in recent decades, women have emerged as a major part of the global workforce, balancing careers and family life. How did this change happen? And how are societies in developing countries responding and adapting to women's newer roles in society? This four-volume encyclopedia examines the lives of women around the world, with coverage that includes the education of girls and teens; the key roles women play in their families, careers, religions, and cultures; how issues for women intersect with colonialism, transnationalism, feminism, and established norms of power and control. Organized geographically, each volume presents detailed entries about the lives of women in particular countries. Additionally, each volume offers sidebars that spotlight topics related to women and girls in specific regions or focus on individual women's lives and contributions. Primary source documents include sections of countries' constitutions that are relevant to women and girls, United Nations resolutions and national resolutions regarding women and girls, and religious statements and proclamations about women and girls. The organization of the set enables readers to take an in-depth look at individual countries as well as to make comparisons across countries.

"Originally published by Atlantic Books in 2014."

Widely praised as an outstanding contribution to social welfare and feminist scholarship, Regulating the Lives of Women (1988, 1996) was one of the first books to apply a race and gender lens to the U.S. welfare state. The first two editions successfully exposed how myths and stereotypes built into welfare state rules and regulations define women as "deserving" or "undeserving" of aid depending on their race, class, gender, and marital status. Based on considerable new research, the preface to this third edition explains the rise of Neoliberal policies in the mid-1970s, the strategies deployed since then to dismantle the welfare state, and the impact of this sea change on women and the welfare state after 1996. Published upon the twentieth anniversary of "welfare reform," Regulating the Lives of Women offers a timely reminder that public policy continues to punish poor women, especially single mothers-of-color for departing from prescribed wife and mother roles. The book will appeal to undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students of social work, sociology, history, public policy, political science, and women, gender, and black studies – as well as today’s researchers and activists.

This highly acclaimed collection provides a unique look into the public and private lives and legal status of Greek and Roman women of all social classes-from wet nurses, prostitutes, and gladiatrixes to poets, musicians, intellectuals, priestesses, and housewives. The third edition adds new texts to sections throughout the book, vividly describing women's sentiments and circumstances through readings on love, bereavement, and friendship, as well as property rights, breast cancer, female circumcision, and women's roles in ancient religions, including Christianity and pagan cults.

The debut novel from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction” (The New York Times). “Munro has an unerring talent for uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary.”—Newsweek Rural Ontario, 1940s. Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father’s fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women—her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother’s boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro’s unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.

Contemporary old age is fraught with contradiction and complexity—women portrayed either as incompetent and cuddly grandmothers or as young women trapped in old bodies, images that rarely reflect how women actually see themselves. Women in Late Life explores the thorny issues related to gender and aging, including prevailing but problematic cultural expectations, body image, ageism, the experience of chronic illness, threats to Social Security and the very possibility of a secure retirement while challenging a long-term care system that disadvantages women. Author Martha Holstein writes from a critical feminist perspective, drawing on her many years of experience in gerontology, as well as interviews and personal experience as a woman now in her seventies. The book highlights how women’s experience of late life is shaped by the effects of lifelong gender norms, by contemporary culture—from gender stereotypes to ageism—and by the political context. The book blends critique with proposals aimed at resisting damaging inequities resulting from being simultaneously old and a woman. She focuses on changes needed on multiple levels—societal, cultural, political, and individual. This interdisciplinary look at key questions around gender and aging is nuanced and beautifully written.

This important book looks at the changes in AFDC, Social Security, and Unemployment Insurance, and welfare "reform." This new edition reveals how welfare policy scapegoats women more than ever to justify widespread retrenchment and to divert the public's attention from the real causes of the nation's mounting economic woes.

Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname.

Women’s Lives: A Psychological Exploration, 3rd Edition draws on a wealth of the literature to present a rich range of experiences and issues of relevance to girls and women. This text offers the unique combination of a chronological approach to gender that is embedded within topical chapters. Cutting-edge and comprehensive, each chapter integrates current material on women differing in age, ethnicity, social class, nationality, sexual orientation and ableness. The third edition reflects substantial changes in the field while maintaining its empirical focus through engaging writing, student activities, and critical thinking exercises. With over 2,100 new references emphasizing the latest research and theories, the authors continue to pique interests in psychology of women.

"This is a collection of biographies and composite essays of Texas women, contextualized over the course of history to include subjects that reflect the enormous racial, class, and religious diversity of the state. Offering insights into the complex ways that Texas' position on the margins of the United States has shaped a particular kind of gendered experience there, the volume also demonstrates how the larger questions in United States women's history are answered or reconceived in the state. Beginning with Juliana Barr's essay, which asserts that 'women marked the lines of dominion among Spanish and Indian nations in Texas' and explodes the myth of Spanish domination in colonial Texas, the essays examine the ways that women were able to use their borderland status to stretch the boundaries of their own lives. Eric Walther demonstrates that the constant changing of governments in Texas (Spanish, Mexican, Texan, and U.S.) gave slaves the opportunities to resist their oppression because of the differences in the laws of slavery under Spanish or English or American law. Gabriela Gonzalez examines the activism of Jovita Idar on behalf of civil rights for Mexicans and Mexican Americans on both sides of the border. Renee Laegreid argues that female rodeo contestants employed a "unique regional interplay of masculine and feminine behaviors" to shape their identities as cowgirls"--