Offers advice on diet, exercise, sexuality, and self-image for middle aged women. Includes the Prime Time Workout.

From Girl to Woman examines the coming-of-age narratives of a diverse group of American women writers, including Annie Dillard, Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Mary McCarthy, and explores the crucial role of such narratives in the development of American feminism. Women have long known that identity is complex and contradictory, but in the twentieth century their coming-of-age narratives finally voice this knowledge. Addressing a variety of themes—awakening sexuality, the body's metamorphosis in puberty, consciousness of difference from males, and the socialization into feminine gender roles—these narratives reject the heroine's narrative ending in romance, allowing American women writers to create alternative subjectivities by rejecting the notion that identity is ever fixed. While activists have succeeded in winning legal battles that have changed the legal status of women, these narratives perform the cultural work of exposing the painful contradictions faced by women as they come of age.

“I am here. You will never be alone. We are dancing for you.” So begins Cutcha Risling Baldy’s deeply personal account of the revitalization of the women’s coming-of-age ceremony for the Hoopa Valley Tribe. At the end of the twentieth century, the tribe’s Flower Dance had not been fully practiced for decades. The women of the tribe, recognizing the critical importance of the tradition, undertook its revitalization using the memories of elders and medicine women and details found in museum archives, anthropological records, and oral histories. Deeply rooted in Indigenous knowledge, Risling Baldy brings us the voices of people transformed by cultural revitalization, including the accounts of young women who have participated in the Flower Dance. Using a framework of Native feminisms, she locates this revival within a broad context of decolonizing praxis and considers how this renaissance of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies confounds ethnographic depictions of Native women; challenges anthropological theories about menstruation, gender, and coming-of-age; and addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities.

Much of what we know about life in the medieval Islamic Middle East comes from texts written to impart religious ideals or to chronicle the movements of great men. How did women participate in the societies these texts describe? What about non-Muslims, whose own religious traditions descended partly from pre-Islamic late antiquity? Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt approaches these questions through Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). Using hundreds of everyday papers preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Eve Krakowski follows the lives of girls from different social classes—rich and poor, secluded and physically mobile—as they prepared to marry and become social adults. She argues that the families on whom these girls depended were more varied, fragmented, and fluid than has been thought. Krakowski also suggests a new approach to religious identity in premodern Islamic societies—and to the history of rabbinic Judaism. Through the lens of women’s coming-of-age, she demonstrates that even Jews who faithfully observed rabbinic law did not always understand the world in rabbinic terms. By tracing the fault lines between rabbinic legal practice and its practitioners’ lives, Krakowski explains how rabbinic Judaism adapted to the Islamic Middle Ages. Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt offers a new way to understand how women took part in premodern Middle Eastern societies, and how families and religious law worked in the medieval Islamic world.

This book began as a panel of University professors on the theme of Francophone Women, Coming of Age, Memoirs of Childhood and Adolescence, presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia, 2006. The essays center on the plight of growing up female in male-dominated Francophone cultures. Issues of culture, tradition, religion (Catholic and Muslim), parental conflicts and sibling rivalry are addressed in the works of authors from France, Quebec, Africa and the Caribbean. Authors whose memoirs and fiction are analyzed in this study span three continents––europe, North America (Quebec and the Caribbean) and Africa––but they share a common search for identity and self-definition.Dr. Beth Gale (Clark University) analyzes role-play and the use of language in the works of Annie Ernaux (France) and Assia Djebar (North Africa). Post-colonial angst and cross-cultural misunderstanding are the focus of the study of Aminata Sow Fall's Douceurs du bercail (Senegal, West Africa) by Dr. Natalie Edwards (Wagner College). Two chapters focus on Caribbean authors, from Guadeloupe: Dr. Debra Popkin (Baruch College CUNY) analyzes Giséle Pineau's special relationship with grandmother who gave her a sense of cultural identity; Dr. Leah Tolbert Lyons (Middle Tennessee State University) discusses the negative impact of the bad mothering in Myriam Warner-Vieyra's first novel, As the Sorcerer Said ... Three chapters are devoted to writers from French-speaking Canada: Dr. Myrna Delson-Karan (St. John's University) traces the portraits of children and adolescents in the works of Gabrielle Roy; Dr. Pascale Vergereau-Dewey (Kutztown University, Pennsylvania) explores the tormented childhood of Marie-Claire Blais's Pauline Archange; Dr. Edith B. Vandervoort (Defense Language Institute in Monterey) examines the search for identity and tortured father-daughter relationships in the novels of Gabrielle Gourdeau, Monique Proulx, and Marie Laberge (contemporary writers from Quebec), The seven chapters in this book explore the challenges faced by women from late 19th century through the 20th and into the 21st century as they gradually gained a voice to express their changing roles in society. Themes to be examined include sexual awakening, teenage pregnancy, and the rituals of coming of age. Conflicts occur between daughter and parents who inculcate traditional values and try to restrict their child's freedom. The importance of writing as a source of liberation and self-definition will be explored in light of the young girl's quest for freedom. Why write memoirs? Why write in French? These issues are discussed especially in cases where French is the language of the colonizer (Assia Djebar and Giséle Pineau) or where French is essential to the preservation of one's cultural identity, as it is for Quebec writers. This book will be a fine resource for college and university professors and students in programs of French, Women's Studies, and French/Francophone Literature as well as African, Caribbean, and Quebec Studies.

The JGirls Guide is an inspirational, interactive book designed to help pre-teen Jewish girls address the spiritual, educational, and psychological issues surrounding coming of age in today's society. Topics include: - Ideals of beauty- Friendship- Sexuality- Dealing with parents- Attitudes toward eating- Coping with stress and indentity

'In Jennifer Makumbi, we have a giant of literature living among us.' Peter Kalu, Jhalak Prize Judge Longlisted for the Diverse Book Awards, 2021 'Jennifer Makumbi is a genius storyteller.' Reni Eddo-Lodge A SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY MAIL, BBC CULTURE & IRISH INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR At once epic and deeply personal, the second novel from prize-winning author Jennifer Makumbi is an intoxicating mix of Ugandan folklore and modern feminism that will linger in the memory long after the final page. As Kirabo enters her teens, questions begin to gnaw at her – questions which the adults in her life will do anything to ignore. Where is the mother she has never known? And why would she choose to leave her daughter behind? Inquisitive, headstrong, and unwilling to take no for an answer, Kirabo sets out to find the truth for herself. Her search will take her away from the safety of her prosperous Ugandan family, plunging her into a very different world of magic, tradition, and the haunting legend of 'The First Woman'.

In all of your gorgeous shades and hues, black girls, this book is for you! Stereotypes and images tell us how to dress and think, but what truly defines you? Have you ever looked in the mirror and felt that your weight, hair, or skin tone were inadequate and didnt measure up to others? Navigating through self-acceptance can be difficultnot to mention dealing with relationships and family dynamics. But through this book, you will discover that you are not alone. For Black Girls is about coming of age and taking control of your life and making choices that will set you on the path to self-discovery. For Black Girls will help you do the following: Discover the difference between your identity and stereotypes Develop life and career goals Appreciate your unique beauty and worth Use concrete tools to break destructive habits in relationships Make meaningful relationship goals Find strategies for time management Learn to be healthy and accept your body Identify what your spending habits say about you and how to change them It includes questions for individual/group reflection and discussions. As you take charge of your life, watch as you emerge and flourish into the beautiful young woman you were meant to be!

The book discusses a selection of coming-of-age narratives that offer a revisiting of the classic Bildungsroman heroine – the young white middle-class woman – and present her developments in postwar and postmillennial British literature. In terms of theoretical approaches, the study draws on works by the feminist critics whose incorporation of gender into the studies of the Bildungsroman resulted in the delineation of the female version of the genre, the female Bildungsroman and its specific twentieth-century variation, the feminist Bildungsroman. The selected coming-of-age novels present further transformations of the female Bildungsroman. The classic heroine of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bildung narratives reappears in twentieth-century novels as a modern girl who experiences a significant rise of feminist consciousness. In more recent works, she becomes a postfeminist girl who questions “victim feminism” and tests the potential of “girl power” to subvert the patriarchal tradition. Relating the postfeminist developments of the girl heroine to the influence of contemporary media culture, the book explores whether these literary representations of girlhood incorporate antifeminist backlash messages. It will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of literary and girls’ studies, particularly those who want to see new trends and issues in young adult fiction in the context of a literary tradition.

Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860—1920 draws on a wealth of archival material, much of which has never been published—or even read—to illuminate the ways in which Jewish girls’ adolescent experiences reflected larger issues relating to gender, ethnicity, religion, and education. Klapper explores the dual roles girls played as agents of acculturation and guardians of tradition. Their search for an identity as American girls that would not require the abandonment of Jewish tradition and culture mirrored the struggle of their families and communities for integration into American society. While focusing on their lives as girls, not the adults they would later become, Klapper draws on the papers of such figures as Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah; Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Showboat; and Marie Syrkin, literary critic and Zionist. Klapper also analyzes the diaries, memoirs, and letters of hundreds of other girls whose later lives and experiences have been lost to history. Told in an engaging style and filled with colorful quotes, the book brings to life a neglected group of fascinating historical figures during a pivotal moment in the development of gender roles, adolescence, and the modern American Jewish community.