WOMEN & CONSUMER CULTURE/CONSUMER PROTECTION

“An explicit conception of consumer identity, an identity that was simultaneously bound up in notions of the feminine. Born at the same time, the "Organization Man" and "Mrs. Consumer" in many ways reprised the older dichotomy of manly producers and domestic women. American women had long been consumers in a sense: they bought, bartered, and used goods. Except on the far reaches of the frontier, few eighteenth-century households were entirely self-sufficient. During the Revolution, women's political role involved consumer boycotts of imported teas and cloth; expected to run a household well, they took an increasingly active role in purchasing decisions. “ 

Source: Journal for Multi-Media History

“The National Consumers League was chartered in 1899, by two of America’s leading social reformers, Jane Addams and Josephine Lowell.  These two women were pioneers in achieving many social reforms in communities and workplaces across the country. Under the direction of its first general secretary, Florence Kelley, the National Consumers League exposed child labor and other scandalous working conditions.  Kelley was to become one of the most influential and effective social reformers of the 20th century. During the early 1900s, she led the League in its efforts to:

• Protect in-home workers, often including whole families, from terrible exploitation by employers
• Promote the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906
• Write and champion state minimum wage laws for women
• Defend and, ultimately convince, the US Supreme Court to uphold a 10-hour work day law in the landmark Muller v. Oregon case of 1908
• Advocate for the creation of the United States Children’s Bureau and federal child labor restrictions”      

Source: NCL

American Women and the Making of Modern Consumer Culture --- the electronic text

History – National Consumers League

Adding women to corporate boards improves decisions about medical product safety

International Law and Consumer Protection: The history of consumer protection

Consumer protection

WOMEN & SOCIAL WORK

“Like the civil rights and antiwar movements, the anti-poverty programs of the 1960’s Johnson Administration planted seeds of feminist change, by mandating “maximum feasible participation” of agency clients and neighborhood residents, while empowering male agency heads, policymakers, and community leaders.  Not until the mid-1980’s, did the social work literature reflect issues concerning the feminist movement, which responded angrily and assertively to an era of social-change movements that often excluded women.”

Source: WH

Social Work History

Influential Women in the History of Social Work | Rutgers School of Social Work

From Charitable Volunteers to Architects of Social Welfare: A Brief History of Social Work

WOMEN & PUBLIC HOUSING AND WOMEN’S PROPERTY RIGHTS

“Today, it's easy to take for granted that women can take out a line of credit, apply for a home loan, or enjoy property rights. However, for centuries in the United States and Europe, this was not the case. A woman's husband or another male relative controlled any property allotted to her.

“The gender divide concerning property rights was so widespread that it inspired Jane Austen novels such as "Pride and Prejudice" and, more recently, period dramas such as "Downton Abbey." The plot lines of both works involve families made up solely of daughters. Because these young women can't inherit their father's property, their future depends on finding a mate.

“Women's right to own property was a process that took place over time, starting in the 1700s.”

Source: ThoughtCo

A Brief History of Women's Property Rights in the US

https://tunswblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/women-in-public-housing-history.html

Inside New York's last remaining all-women apartment buildings

The Evolution of the Fair Housing Act and Women's Progress in Housing

WOMEN & PUBLIC HEALTH 

“Women have always been healers as well as caretakers; they have acted as pharmacists, physicians, nurses, herbalists, abortionists, counselors, midwives, and sages or "wise women." They also have been called witches. In the physician role, however, society rarely permitted them to perform in the same capacities and positions as men.”

Source: Encyclopedia.com

Women as Health Professionals, Historical Issues of

History of the Women’s Health Movement in the 20th Century

Women in Leadership and Public Health | Public Health Post

Women's Public Health and Safety Act will put the wellbeing of women and babies first

Women in Public Health and Medicine - Women's History (US National Park Service)

Seven Unique Roles Of Female Public Health Professionals

WOMEN & PHILANTHROPY

“Women in the United States have been active philanthropists since the colonial era.  Beginning in the late-eighteenth century, middle- and upper-class white women (and to a lesser extent, women of color) fostered the development of a wide array of charitable services and social reform movements for women and children, created parallel power structures that resembled, but rarely precisely replicated, the political and economic functions of government.  Most of these organizations were built on a foundation of voluntarism rather than cash.

“These patterns began to change in the 1980’s with the emergence of women’s funds, which are designed to channel money into organizations that focus on women and children, and to do so in ways that involve recipients, as well as, the donors in the allocation of grants.  In effect, they are designed to cut across the barriers of class and race.  One of the innovators in this area was the Ms. Foundation.  Created in 1972, Ms. was the first national, multi-national public women’s fund. Ms. has funded a variety of efforts, providing funds to prevent sexual abuse, to aid battered women, to curb sexual harassment in the workplace, to promote the passage of pro-choice legislation, to develop income-generation programs for poor women, and to train women at all levels of society to assume more visible leadership roles.”  

Source: WH

Women and Philanthropy

MacKenzie Scott, Melinda Gates, Priscilla Chan: On Women Philanthropists

https://www.donorsearch.net/womens-philanthropy-insight

WOMEN & CIVIL RIGHTS

“The success of the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s was, in large part, a result of the crucial role that women played in propelling and sustaining mass action.  Women in communities throughout the South acted as leaders, organizers and members of the rank and file from the movement’s beginnings.  African American women already had begun organizing and protesting the discriminatory treatment of Blacks in urban transportation systems.  Civil rights activist, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested on December 1, 1955.  Parks’ action was not coincidental, but rather a response to years of organizing experience in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

“The first major federal legislative response to the Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, and religion in several important arenas, including public accommodations, education, and employment.  The employment provision (Title VII) also barred discrimination on the basis of sex.  No provision of the Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.  The authors of the Civil Rights Act did not intend to include sex discrimination in any of its provisions.  Sex discrimination was introduced into the civil rights debate by southern opponents of the measure who south to flummox its supporters and kill it through ridicule.”  

Source: WH

“Up to the 1940s, white southern female activism manifested itself through all-female, church-related groups. Most of these women belonged to the middle- and upper-class, and remained within the bounds of respectability as « southern ladies ». Yet they often found themselves at odds with their male-dominated institutions, and laid the groundwork for the following generations of activists.”

Source: Amnis Open Edition Journal

Women in the Civil Rights Movement | Articles and Essays | Civil Rights History Project | Digital Collections

8 historic women who pioneered the Civil Rights Movement

https://www.essence.com/holidays/black-history-month/photos-iconic-women-civil-rights-moveent/#212038

https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/history/info-2014/female-civil-rights-leaders.html#slide1

WOMEN & AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

“Advocates for affirmative action do not slight the value of merit, but do disagree that merit alone should determine the distribution of entry-level opportunity.  According to its advocates, affirmative action is necessary to ensure that people with power over hiring and admissions do not disregard the merits of white women and people of color.  Advocates also want to expand the meaning of merit to include the way life’s struggles - against sexism and racism - modulate ability and enrich each individual’s contribution to her job, school or community.”  

Source: WH

The Changing Meaning of Affirmative Action | The New Yorker

Affirmative Action Is Great For White Women. So Why Do They Hate It? | HuffPost Australia (huffingtonpost.com.au)

WOMEN & CLASS

“Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.”

Source: Isabel Wilkerson, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”

“Class analysis, if central to women’s history, has its limits. The class position of many women is by no means simple to assess.  Where, for example, do we place the impoverished white tenant farm women depicted in Margaret Hagood’s 1939 study Mothers of the South? They fit no easy Marxist categories.  They were near starvation, often dominated by abusive husbands; and yet they could still afford occasionally to hire African American women to help them after childbirth or when ill.  Their example illustrates the ways in which race privilege has sharply divided white women of a given class from those of the same ostensible class position who have been marked as racially inferior.”  

Source: WH

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”

Source: Isabel Wilkerson, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”

Gender, social class, and women's employment (hbs.edu)

WOMEN & ECONOMIC POWER/EMPOWERMENT

“Periods of more economic growth typically are accompanied by expansion in labor market opportunities for women.  Women have held jobs vacated by men who are engaged in war. And, wartime spending stimulates demand for goods and services, and leads to increased production of goods and services.  Rapid economic growth appears to provide relatively greater opportunities for disadvantaged groups such as working-class women and people of color, while periods of slower growth disproportionately harm these groups.”  

Source: The Reader’s Guide to Women’s History

What’s Really Holding Women Back? (hbr.org)Women as Drivers of Economic Growth | S&P Global

How Women’s Economic Power Is Reshaping The Consumer Market (forbes.com)

Women’s Power Index | Council on Foreign Relations (cfr.org)

Women gain more political and economic power, but gender gap persists | EurekAlert! Science News

WOMEN & SLAVERY AND WOMEN & ABOLITION

“Despite their common bondage, men and women did not experience slavery the same way.  Slave women experienced sexual exploitation, childbearing, motherhood, and the slaveholder’s sexism.  Slave women were exploited for their reproductive, as well as, productive capacities.”

“The organization of female antislavery societies reflected the conventional organizational structure present in social reform organizations, in which men formed the leadership and headed the state and national societies, while women were expected to form separate, auxiliary societies.  The function of female antislavery societies was similar to that of other female reform organizations of the period, namely, to raise money to support the movement’s lecturers and its official newspapers…..Unlike other reform movements of the time, including temperance and anti-prostitution groups, in which such questions rarely arose.  By the mid-1830’s, abolitionist men and women furiously debated the “proper” role of women in public reform movements….Some women abolitionists pushed the boundaries of acceptable behavior in public reform by stepping into male domains and expanding discussions about “equality” in the movement.  In so doing, this generation of women activists forged a collective legacy for subsequent movements for sexual and racial equality in U.S. society.  More importantly, their participation in abolition and women’s rights also foretold the continuing struggle over racism, classism, and sexism; both within the movements themselves and in society, at large.”

Source: The Reader’s Guide to Women’s History

“So I start the book by talking about how white slave-holding parents trained their daughters how to be slave owners. They gave them lessons in slave discipline and slave management. Some even allowed their daughters to mete out physical punishments.

Slave-holding parents and slave-holding family members gave girls enslaved people as gifts — for Christmas sometimes, when they turned 16 or when they turned 21.There are even accounts of slave-holding parents and family members giving white female infants enslaved people as their own. There is one particular instance of a case, in a court record, where a woman talks about how her grandfather gave her an enslaved person as her own when she was 9 months old.”

Source: Stephanie Jones-Rogers in VOX interview about her book, “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South”

Women and Abolitionism | The Abolition Seminar

History of slavery: white women were not passive bystanders - Vox

Abolitionist Movement — History of U.S. Woman's Suffrage (crusadeforthevote.org)

How Women Abolitionists Fought Enslavement (thoughtco.com)

Female Slave Owners - Atlantic History - Oxford Bibliographies

WOMEN & EDUCATION

“In 1837, Oberlin College in Ohio was the first to admit to higher education, women and men of all races. Oberlin students were required to work, as well as, study. One could speculate that one reason Oberlin admitted women was that they would take care of domestic chores for the males, who worked on the college farm.  In the early Republic, white women’s education focused on preparing females to be beacons of enlightened morality for the families and better companions for their husbands.  In addition, many women were trained to be teachers, as well as caretakers, such as nurses and social workers.  Well into the twentieth century, girls were raised and women were more formally educated to do the unpaid or underpaid work that boys and men did not think they should do.”

https://www.thoughtco.com/history-women-higher-ed-4129738

Women, Marriage, Education, and Occupation in the United States from 1940-2000 | History 90.01: Topics in Digital History (dartmouth.edu)

WOMEN & SUFFRAGE 

The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920. It declares that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Women’s Suffrage - The U.S. Movement, Leaders & Amendment - HISTORY

The Complex History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Leaving all to younger hands: Why the history of the women’s suffragist movement matters (brookings.edu)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage_in_the_United_States

WOMEN & WAGE/INCOME INEQUALITY

“The first surveys of earning, and a self-perpetuating cycle of low employer expectations, low wages, and low lifetime female workforce participation.

“Individual characteristics in the late nineteenth century indicate that men were paid more than women upon hiring, but that the wage gap closed over time.  Analysis of these data suggests that the nineteenth-century wage gap can be explained largely by differences in experience, productivity and expected lifetime workforce participation.  The fact that women were paid low wages may have encouraged them to leave the workplace, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of low employee expectations, low wages and low lifetime female workforce participation.”

Source: The Reader’s Companion to Women’s History

https://now.org/resource/the-gender-pay-gap-myth-vs-fact

Quick Facts About the Gender Wage Gap - Center for American Progress

Income Inequality Definition, Facts, and History of Income Inequality in the US - 2021 - MasterClass

Gender pay gap has narrowed, but changed little in past decade | Pew Research Center

5 Reasons The Gender Pay Gap Exists (Yes, There’s Not Just One) - Future Women

What’s the difference between wealth inequality and income inequality, and why does it matter? - Positive Money

WOMEN & CREDIT

“Banks could refuse women a credit card until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974  was signed into law. Prior to that, a bank could refuse to issue a credit card to an unmarried woman, and if a woman was married, her husband was required to cosign.  

Many banks required single, divorced or widowed women to bring a man with them to cosign for a credit card, according to CNN, and some discounted the wages of women by as much as 50% when calculating their credit card limits, according to an article from Smithsonian Magazine.”

Women's rights and their money: a timeline from Cleopatra to Lilly Ledbetter | Money | The Guardian

How Ruth Bader Ginsburg Paved Way for Women to Get Credit Cards | NextAdvisor with TIME

WOMEN & CITIZENSHIP

“Race and marriage mediated women’s nationality status until the 1930’s.  From the constitutional founding through the Civil War, African, Indian and Asian women and men could not be naturalized.  Mexicans in the Southwest could become naturalized after the mid-nineteenth-century U.S. conquest of Mexican territory, and Africans were permitted naturalization under post-civil war legislation.  Except for those Indians(sic) whose tribal treaties with the U.S. government provided naturalization rights, Indians were excluded from naturalization until 1924.  Until 1952, Asian immigrants were deemed “ineligible for citizenship.”

Although early-nineteenth-century judicial decisions considered women’s nationality status to be independently determined by the territorial condition of their birth, by the mid-nineteenth century, women’s nationality was tied to that of their husband.  Following the family law doctrine of coverture, according to which married women assumed the state or domicile citizenship of their husbands, the Naturalization Act of 1855 imposed citizenship on foreign-born white women who married U.S. citizens.  This assigned political consequences to women’s marriage decisions; it also reinforced the idea that by consenting to marriage, women consented to multiple forms of dependency on and subordination to men.

The 1907 naturalization policy added a punitive dimension to women’s derivative citizenship by revoking the nationality status of U.S.-born women who married men from other countries.”

Source: The Reader’s Companion to Women’s History

Batlan, F. “She Was Surprised And Furious”: Expatriation, Suffrage, Immigration, and The Fragility Of Women’s Citizenship, 1907-1940.

Gardner, S. (2014). Psi Sigma Siren. Marriage and Citizenship in the United States, 8(1).

The Cable Act (1922) It served to lend women independence from their husbands, in citizenship.

Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States book by Teresa Ann Murphy

FACTOIDS

• The celebration of Women's History Month dates back to the mid-twentieth century,  when historians, Elizabeth H. Pleck and Gerda Lerner, confronted the absence of women in scholarship, and spearheaded the first graduate programs in women's history.

• Fact check: Post detailing nine things women couldn't do before 1971 is mostly right

• Forty Years Ago, Women Had a Hard Time Getting Credit Cards

• WOMEN & CREDIT  “Banks could refuse women a credit card until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 was signed into law. Prior to that, a bank could refuse to issue a credit card to an unmarried woman, and if a woman was married, her husband was required to cosign.  

• Many banks required single, divorced or widowed women to bring a man with them to cosign for a credit card, according to CNN, and some discounted the wages of women by as much as 50% when calculating their credit card limits, according to an article from Smithsonian Magazine.”

• Most of the changes made in family law in the late twentieth century have been based on overturning concepts of marriage, family, and gender that go back to European feudalism, canon (church) law, and custom

• March is National Women's History Month, but since women are pretty historic year-round, it begs the question: Why March? Is this month significant to women's history, or is it just an arbitrary month on the calendar?

• Five Things You Should Know: African American Suffragists

EVENT-IN-A-BOX

Women’s History Trivia Quiz:

Take this quiz and see how much you know, or learn something new, about the women who have shaped our world today. Share your scores, favorite questions, or surprising anecdotes with us, by posting to our Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter page with the #learningwomenshistory and linking the quiz!

Women’s History My Country²:        

Have Women’s Caucus or other interested members facilitate a conversation comparing the history of women’s movements and the state of women’s rights in the U.S. versus the country where you live. More information here.

Break the Bias Event:

International Women’s Day: March 8th, 2022 Theme: #BreaktheBias

• Click here for comprehensive resources on your “Break the Bias” event

National Women’s History Alliance Online Store

National Women’s History Alliance: Theme: “Women Providing Healing, Promoting Hope”

• Click here for materials from the National Women’s History Alliance online store for your event.

ONLINE EXHIBITS AND EVENTS

• Exhibit at Europeana in the Netherlands
• Upcoming events at the National Women’s History Museum
• Smithsonian Voices for the Smithsonian Museum
• Library of Congress: Drawn to Purpose, American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists
• Library of Congress: Quilts and Quiltmaking in American
• Story: Mixteco Women on the Migration Route, by Laura Velasco Ortiz
• Women’s History Month online Exhibits and Collections Guide
• National Museum of American History: Girlhood

FILMS TO WATCH THIS MONTH

*images and text to be used for educational purposes only*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WgrqnSnsWQ

Provider NBC Universal

Rating PG-13

Release date 2015

Running time

1:46:26

Academy Award-nominees Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter, and three-time Academy Award-winner Meryl Streep star in this powerful drama, inspired by true events, about the women willing to lose everything in their fight for equality in early twentieth-century Britain. Galvanized by outlaw fugitive Emmeline (Meryl Streep), Maud (Carey Mulligan) joins the U.K.'s growing Suffragette movement alongside women from all walks of life who sacrificed their jobs, homes, children-and even their lives for the right to vote. (Original Title - Suffragette) - 2015 Focus Features. All Rights Reserved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abkka8Vf2_M

Provider Paramount

Rating PG-13

Release date 2014

Actors David Oyelowo　Tom Wilkinson　Carmen Ejogo　Giovanni Ribisi　Alessandro Nivola　Cuba Gooding　Tim Roth　Oprah Winfrey

From the Oscar-winning producers of 12 Years a Slave and acclaimed director Ava DuVernay comes the true story of courage and hope that changed the world forever. Golden Globe nominee David Oyelowo shines as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who rallied his followers on the historic march from Selma to Montgomery in the face of violent opposition an event that became a milestone victory for the civil rights movement. Oscar nominees Oprah Winfrey and Tom Wilkinson also star in this landmark film.

Provider KinoLorber

Rating Unrated

Release date 2017

Running time 1:36:38

Audio German

Subtitle (auto) English

Actors Marie Leuenberger　Maximilian Simonischek　Rachel Braunschweig　Sibylle Brunner　Bettina Stucky　Ella Rumpf

Winner of the Audience Award for Best Narrative Film at the Tribeca Film Festival, The Divine Order is set in Switzerland in 1971 where, despite the worldwide social upheavals of the previous decade, women were still denied the right to vote. When unassuming and dutiful housewife Nora (Marie Leuenberger, winner of a Best Actress award at Tribeca) is forbidden by her husband to take a part-time job, her frustration leads to her becoming the poster child of her town’s suffragette movement. Her newfound celebrity brings humiliation, threats, and the potential end to her marriage, but, refusing to back down, she convinces the women in her village to go on strike...and makes a few startling discoveries about her own liberation. Uplifting and crowd-pleasing, this charming, captivating film is a time-capsule that could not be more timely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOrD0tH_WaM

Iron Jawed Angels is a 2004 American historical drama film directed by Katja von Garnier. The film stars Hilary Swank as suffragist leader Alice Paul, Frances O'Connor as activist Lucy Burns, Julia Ormond as Inez Milholland, and Anjelica Huston as Carrie Chapman Catt.

Video: Planned Parenthood’s Sexual and Reproductive Justice Timeline Video

The past is the present and nowhere is that more clearly witnessed than in the Reproductive Justice timeline first documented by Western States Center and Advocates for Youth and built upon over years by numerous activists, advocates and scholars. This timeline offers a window into the nation’s reproductive history including its founding tenants, extremely dehumanizing acts and the unwavering lineage of resistance to reproductive oppression.  As a part of our Sexual and Reproductive Justice workgroup and later our Reviving Radical initiatives, we shared this enhanced reproductive justice timeline at our events and teach-ins.

https://visionmakermedia.org/watch-herald-native-women/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsSnfCY_bqY

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/g19037519/best-feminist-movies/

BOOKS TO READ THIS MONTH

*Images and text to be used for educational purposes only*

Our Time is Now by Stacey Abrams

A recognized expert on fair voting and civic engagement, Abrams chronicles a chilling account of how the right to vote and the principle of democracy have been and continue to be under attack. Abrams would have been the first African American woman governor, but experienced these effects firsthand, despite running the most innovative race in modern politics as the Democratic nominee in Georgia. Abrams didn't win, but she has not conceded. The book compellingly argues for the importance of robust voter protections, an elevation of identity politics, engagement in the census, and a return to moral international leadership.

Private Politics and Public Voices: Black Women’s Activism from World War I to the New Deal by Nikki Brown
This political history of middle-class African American women during World War I focuses on their patriotic activity and social work. Nearly 200,000 African American men joined the Allied forces in France. At home, black clubwomen raised more than $125 million in wartime donations and assembled "comfort kits" for black soldiers, with chocolate, cigarettes, socks, a bible, and writing materials. Given the hostile racial climate of the day, why did black women make considerable financial contributions to the American and Allied war effort? Brown argues that black women approached the war from the nexus of the private sphere of home and family and the public sphere of community and labour activism. Their activism supported their communities and was fuelled by a personal attachment to black soldiers and black families. Private Politics and Public Voices follows their lives after the war, when they carried their debates about race relations into public political activism.Nikki Brown is Chair of the History Department at Grambling State University.

Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell by Alison Parker
Born into slavery during the Civil War, Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) would become one of the most prominent activists of her time, with a career bridging the late nineteenth century to the civil rights movement of the 1950s. The first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a founding member of the NAACP, Terrell collaborated closely with the likes of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Unceasing Militant is the first full-length biography of Terrell, bringing her vibrant voice and personality to life. Though most accounts of Terrell focus almost exclusively on her public activism, Alison M. Parker also looks at the often turbulent, unexplored moments in her life to provide a more complete account of a woman dedicated to changing the culture and institutions that perpetuated inequality throughout the United States.

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
Between the first and second world wars a group of young, non-English-speaking Japanese women travelled by boat to America. They were picture brides, clutching photos of husbands-to-be whom they had yet to meet. Julie Otsuka tells their extraordinary, heartbreaking story in this spellbinding and poetic account of strangers lost and alone in a new and deeply foreign land.

White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind by Koa Beck
Join the important conversation about race, empowerment, and inclusion in the United States with this powerful new feminist classic and rousing call for change. Koa Beck, writer and former editor-in-chief of Jezebel, boldly examines the history of feminism, from the true mission of the suffragettes to the rise of corporate feminism with clear-eyed scrutiny and meticulous detail. She also examines overlooked communities—including Native American, Muslim, transgender, and more—and their difficult and ongoing struggles for social change.

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister
In the year 2018, it seems as if women’s anger has suddenly erupted into the public conversation. But long before Pantsuit Nation, before the Women’s March, and before the #MeToo movement, women’s anger was not only politically catalytic—but politically problematic. The story of female fury and its cultural significance demonstrates the long history of bitter resentment that has enshrouded women’s slow rise to political power in America, as well as the ways that anger is received when it comes from women as opposed to when it comes from men.

No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States by Nancy F. Cott (Editor)
Enriched by the wealth of new research into women's history, No Small Courage offers a lively chronicle of American experience, charting women's lives and experiences with fascinating immediacy from the precolonial era to the present. Individual stories and primary sources-including letters, diaries, and news reports-animate this history of the domestic, professional, and political efforts of American women.

Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she’s been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound. Now, in her first book, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths—that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own. In her book, as in her groundbreaking research, Simard proves the true connectedness of the Mother Tree to the forest, nurturing it in the profound ways that families and human societies nurture one another, and how these inseparable bonds enable all our survival.

Lists: Women's History Month General Reads

• Throughout Women’s History Month in March, we will be taking time to highlight the books by and about women who have pushed boundaries, affected change, redefined roles, or who have complicated our understanding of what it means to be powerful.
• Stories about women who stood up, spoke out, struggled through, and soared
• Continue your own learning on women’s history with these five new books written by scholars and public intellectuals passionate about the experiences and contributions of women
• Biographies of women heroes

Lists: Women's Suffrage

• List for the women's suffrage movement. (British or American)
• Six inspiring books About the Women's Suffrage Movement
• From titles on the long battle for voting rights to the wider experience of women since 1918, these are the most powerful suffragette reads out there

Lists: Black Feminism

• The Best Books for Budding Black Feminists, According to Experts

Welcome to the Blog for the Women's Economic Empowerment Initiative that advocates for women’s economic well-being and leadership in order to achieve, and possibly exceed, the policy goals for American women that are documented and adopted in the 2020 Democrats Abroad Platform.

Initiatives:
Women's Economic Empowerment

Team Leader: Carol Moore
Contact: [email protected]