Beyond Women’s Words unites feminist scholars, artists, and community activists working with the stories of women and other historically marginalized subjects to address the contributions and challenges of doing feminist oral history. Feminists who work with oral history methods want to tell stories that matter. They know, too, that the telling of those stories—the processes by which they are generated and recorded, and the different contexts in which they are shared and interpreted—also matters—a lot. Using Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai’s classic text, Women’s Words, as a platform to reflect on how feminisms, broadly defined, have influenced, and continue to influence, the wider field of oral history, this remarkable collection brings together an international, multi-generational, and multidisciplinary line-up of authors whose work highlights the great variety in understandings of, and approaches to, feminist oral histories. Through five thematic sections, the volume considers Indigenous modes of storytelling, feminism in diverse locales around the globe, different theoretical approaches, oral history as performance, digital oral history, and oral history as community-engagement. Beyond Women’s Words is ideal for students of oral history, anthropology, public history, women’s and gender history, and Women’s and Gender Studies, as well as activists, artists, and community-engaged practitioners.

Essays from the New York Times–bestselling author who inspired the film The Glorias, a “woman who has told the truth about her life and ours” (Los Angeles Times). With cool humor and rich intellect, Gloria Steinem strips bare our social constructions of gender and race, explaining just how limiting these invented cultural identities can be. In the first of six sections, Steinem imagines how our understanding of human psychology would be different in a witty reversal: What if Freud had been a woman who inflicted biological inferiority on men (think “womb envy”)? In other essays, she presents positive examples of people who turn gendered stereotypes on their heads, from a female bodybuilder to Mahatma Gandhi, whose followers absorbed his wisdom that change starts at the bottom. And in some of the most moving pieces, Steinem reveals some of her own complicated history as a writer, woman, and citizen of the world. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Gloria Steinem including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.

This first oral history of living Medal of Honor winners evokes Flags of Our Fathers with stirring accounts of patriotic valor. This New York Times best-selling account of battlefield courage celebrates the larger-than-life sacrifices of those awarded the nation's highest honor for valor in combat. Exclusive interviews with these twenty-four men—firsthand accounts of battlefield sacrifice from the greatest generation to Vietnam, along with before-and-after stories—form the core of this classic work. The recipients, as portrayed here, represent a cross-section as diverse as America itself—officers and enlisted men; African Americans, Hispanics, and Caucasians; men who went on to become famous (Daniel Inouye, James Stockdale, Bob Kerrey) and others who returned proudly to small towns. Beyond Glory, in the voices of these heroes, is a testament to the courage of the American nation.

How have ideas about white women figured in the history of racism? Vron Ware argues that they have been central, and that feminism has, in many ways, developed as a political movement within racist societies. Dissecting the different meanings of femininity and womanhood, Beyond the Pale examines the political connections between black and white women, both within contemporary racism and feminism, as well as in historical examples like the anti-slavery movement and the British campaign against lynching in the United States. Beyond the Pale is a major contribution to anti-racist work, confronting the historical meanings of whiteness as a way of overcoming the moralism that so often infuses anti-racist movements.

The ultimate guide to building confidence in your body, beauty, clothes and life in an era of toxic social media-driven beauty standards. “A self-confidence bible that every woman should read.”—Caroline Dooner, author of The F*ck It Diet Empowering, insightful, and psychology-driven, Beyond Beautiful is filled with proven, no-BS strategies for proactive self-care. This stylish and practical handbook takes a deep-dive into all of the factors that make it hard to feel good about yourself, and offers sage answers to tricky questions, like: • Why do I hate the way I look in pictures? • How can I stop feeling like a total slob compared to everyone on social media? • How exactly does this "self-love" thing work? • How do I find the confidence to use less make up, stop shaving, or wear what I want? • Is body positivity really the answer? Illustrated with full-color art, Beyond Beautiful is a much-needed breath of fresh air that will help you live your best life, know your worth, and stop wasting any more precious energy and mental space worrying about the way you look. Praise for Beyond Beautiful “This compact book delves into every aspect of the body-image problem and sets forth feasible ideas for accepting one’s physical appearance to enhance confidence and joy.”—Library Journal (starred review) “Rees’s emboldening message will surely help any reader struggling with self-confidence.”—Publishers Weekly

Much has been written about the "southern lady," that pervasive and enduring icon of antebellum regional identity. But how did the lady get on her pedestal--and were the lives of white southern women always so different from those of their northern contemporaries? In her ambitious new book, Cynthia A. Kierner charts the evolution of the lives of white southern women through the colonial, revolutionary, and early republican eras. Using the lady on her pedestal as the end--rather than the beginning--of her story, she shows how gentility, republican political ideals, and evangelical religion successively altered southern gender ideals and thereby forced women to reshape their public roles. Kierner concludes that southern women continually renegotiated their access to the public sphere--and that even the emergence of the frail and submissive lady as icon did not obliterate women's public role.Kierner draws on a strong overall command of early American and women's history and adds to it research in letters, diaries, newspapers, secular and religious periodicals, travelers' accounts, etiquette manuals, and cookery books. Focusing on the issues of work, education, and access to the public sphere, she explores the evolution of southern gender ideals in an important transitional era. Specifically, she asks what kinds of changes occurred in women's relation to the public sphere from 1700 to 1835. In answering this major question, she makes important links and comparisons, across both time and region, and creates a chronology of social and intellectual change that addresses many key questions in the history of women, the South, and early America.