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Women in History

Eighty six years ago on June 18, 1928, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger aboard a Fokker tri-motor aircraft that was piloted by Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon. Just four years later, in 1932 Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean. She completed her 2,026 mile journey in under 15 hours after departing from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland.

Forty five years later on same date, June 18, 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly to space as a crew member on space shuttle Challenger for STS-7.

To celebrate women in history we invite you to browse through some of our Gender Studies titles:

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GENDER HISTORY IN A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders
Edited by Oliver Janz and Daniel Schönpflug

By looking at the restless lives and work of women’s activists in informal border-crossings, ephemeral NGOs, the lower management of established international organizations, and other global networks, this volume reflects the potential of a new perspective that allows for a more adequate analysis of transnational activities. By pointing out cultural hierarchies, the vicissitudes of translation and re-interpretation, and the ambiguity of intercultural exchange, this volume demonstrates the critical potential of transnational history. It allows us to see the limits of universalist and cosmopolitan claims so dear to many historical actors and historians.

 

 

 

MAPPING DIFFERENCE
The Many Faces of Women in Contemporary Ukraine
Edited by Marian J. Rubchak

The contributors are an interdisciplinary, transnational group of scholars from gender studies, feminist theory, history, anthropology, sociology, women’s studies, and literature. Among the issues they address are: the impact of migration, education, early socialization of gender roles, the role of the media in perpetuating and shaping negative stereotypes, the gendered nature of language, women and the media, literature by women, and local appropriation of gender and feminist theory. Each author offers a fresh and unique perspective on the current process of survival strategies and postcommunist identity reconstruction among Ukrainian women in their current climate of patriarchalism.

 

 

 

THE JOURNALISM OF MILENA JESENSKÁ
A Critical Voice in Interwar Central Europe
Edited and translated from the Czech, and with an Introduction by Kathleen Hayes

Milena Jesenská, born in Prague in 1896, is most famous as one of Franz Kafka’s great loves. Although their relationship lasted only a short time, it won the attention of the literary world with the 1952 publication of Kafka’s letters to Milena. Her own letters did not survive. Later biographies showed her as a fascinating personality in her own right. In the Czech Republic, she is remembered as one of the most prominent journalists of the interwar period and as a brave one: in 1939 she was arrested for her work in the resistance after the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, and died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944.

 

 

 

CREATING A NATION WITH CLOTH
Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora
Ping-Ann Addo

Tongan women living outside of their island homeland create and use hand-made, sometimes hybridized, textiles to maintain and rework their cultural traditions in diaspora. Central to these traditions is an ancient concept of homeland or nation— fonua—which Tongans retain as an anchor for modern nation-building. Utilizing the concept of the “multi-territorial nation,” the author questions the notion that living in diaspora is mutually exclusive with authentic cultural production and identity. The globalized nation the women build through gifting their barkcloth and fine mats, challenges the normative idea that nations are always geographically bounded or spatially contiguous. The work suggests that, contrary to prevalent understandings of globalization, global resource flows do not always primarily involve commodities.

 

 

 

WRAPPED IN THE FLAG OF ISRAEL
Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture
Smadar Lavie

Wrapped in the Flag of Israel discusses social protest movements from the 2003 Single Mothers’ March led by Mizrahi Vicky Knafo, to the “Tahrir is Here” Israeli mass protests of summer 2011. Equating bureaucratic entanglements with pain—what, arguably, can be seen as torture, Smadar Lavie explores the conundrum of loving and staying loyal to a state that repeatedly inflicts pain on its non-European Jewish women citizens through its bureaucratic system. The book presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology and posits that Israeli State bureaucracy is based on a theological essence that fuses the categories of religion, gender, and race into the foundation of citizenship.

 

 

 

 


 

from Berghahn Journals

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Aspasia
The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History

Aspasia is the international peer-reviewed annual of women’s and gender history of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). It aims to transform European women’s and gender history by expanding comparative research on women and gender to all parts of Europe, creating a European history of women and gender that encompasses more than the traditional Western European perspective.

 

 

 

Girlhood Studies
An Interdisciplinary Journal

Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for the critical discussion of girlhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and for the dissemination of current research and reflections on girls’ lives to a broad, cross-disciplinary audience of scholars, researchers, practitioners in the fields of education, social service and health care and policy makers. International and interdisciplinary in scope, it is committed to feminist, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression approaches and solicits manuscripts from a variety of disciplines.