Social Science : Women's Studies

The first female head of state in the Western world and one of the most influential women in modern history, Golda Meir was a member of the tiny coterie of founders of the State of Israel, the architect of its socialist infrastructure, and its most tenacious international defender. Her uncompromising devotion to shaping and defending a Jewish homeland against dogged enemies and skittish allies stunned political contemporaries skeptical about the stamina of an elderly leader, and transformed Middle Eastern politics for decades to follow. A blend of Emma Goldman and Martin Luther King Jr. in the guise of a cookie-serving grandmother, Meir was a tough-as-nails politician who issued the first prescient warnings about the rise of international terrorism, out-maneuvered Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger at their own game of realpolitik, and led Israel through a bloody war even as she eloquently pleaded for peace. A prodigious fundraiser and persuasive international voice, Golda carried the nation through its most perilous hours while she herself battled cancer. In this masterful biography, critically acclaimed author and Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist Elinor Burkett looks beyond Meir's well-known accomplishments to the complex motivations and ideals, personal victories and disappointments, of her charismatic public persona. Beginning with Meir's childhood in virulently anti-Semitic Russia and her family's subsequent relocation to the United States, Burkett places Meir within the framework of the American immigrant experience, the Holocaust, and the single-mindedness of a generation that carved a nation out of its own nightmares and dreams. She paints a vivid portrait of a legendary woman defined by contradictions: an iron resolve coupled with magnetic charm, an utter ordinariness of appearance matched to extraordinary achievements, a kindly demeanor that disguised a stunning hard-heartedness, and a complete dedication to her country that often overwh more...

Price: $19.95

Donna M. Goldstein challenges much of what we think we know about the "culture of poverty." Drawing on more than a decade of experience in Brazil, Goldstein provides an intimate portrait of everyday life among the women of the favelas, or urban shantytowns. more...

Price: $15.95

Kerry Cohen’s extraordinary memoir tells it like it is—she’s a teenager like any other, dealing with parents, school, and friends, but for some reason, “standing out” seems to have become almost impossible. Boys—and men—are a different matter altogether, and young Kerry soon realizes that, with the right clothes and attitude, she can get all the male attention she wants. What she doesn’t realize is how easy it is to get more than you’re ready for. In rich, engaging detail, LOOSE GIRL discovers what it’s like to live for sex. Looking back on her girlhood, Kerry Cohen remembers how it felt to be in that desperate moment, and why it’s so important to come to terms with it—moving forward with confidence and strength. more...

Price: $16.95

In this examination of white and Mexican-American girls coming of age in California's Central Valley, Julie Bettie turns class theory on its head and offers new tools for understanding the ways in which class identity is constructed and, at times, fails to be constructed in relationship to color, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. more...

Price: $15.95

The first comparative study of the women's sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman fiction of the 1890s, two genres which undermined the ideal of the `proper feminine' and dangerously put female sexuality on the literary agenda. more...

Price: $113.75