When a reporter becomes the West Africa bureau chief for The New York Times, she uproots her life--and her family--to a part of the world off the radar for much of Western society. In 2015, Dionne Searcey was covering the economy for The New York Times, living in Brooklyn with her husband and three young children. Saddled with the demands of a dual-career household and motherhood in an urban setting, her life was in a rut. She decided to pursue a job as the paper's West Africa bureau chief, landing with her family in Dakar, Senegal, where she found their lives turned upside down. They struggled to figure out how they fit into this new region, and their new family dynamic where she became the main breadwinner flying off to work as her husband stayed behind to manage the home front. In Pursuit of Disobedient Women follows Searcey's sometimes harrowing, sometimes rollicking experiences as she works to get Americans to pay attention to the region during the rise of Trump. She is gone from her family for sometimes weeks at a time, often risking her safety while covering stories like Boko Haram-conscripted teen girl suicide bombers or young women in small villages shaking up social norms by getting out of bad marriages. Ultimately, Searcey returns home to reconcile with skinned knees and school plays that happen without her and a begrudging husband thrown into the role of primary parent. Life, for Searcey, as with most of us, is a balancing act. She weaves a tapestry of women living at the crossroads of old-fashioned patriarchy and an increasingly globalized and connected world. The result is a deeply personal and highly compelling look into a modern-day marriage and a world most of us have barely considered.

Winner, 2021 AERA Outstanding Book Award Winner, 2021 AERA Division F New Scholar's Book Award Winner, 2020 Mary Kelley Book Prize, given by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Winner, 2020 Outstanding Book Award, given by the History of Education Society Uncovers the hidden role of girls and women in the desegregation of American education The story of school desegregation in the United States often begins in the mid-twentieth-century South. Drawing on archival sources and genealogical records, Kabria Baumgartner uncovers the story’s origins in the nineteenth-century Northeast and identifies a previously overlooked group of activists: African American girls and women. In their quest for education, African American girls and women faced numerous obstacles—from threats and harassment to violence. For them, education was a daring undertaking that put them in harm’s way. Yet bold and brave young women such as Sarah Harris, Sarah Parker Remond, Rosetta Morrison, Susan Paul, and Sarah Mapps Douglass persisted. In Pursuit of Knowledge argues that African American girls and women strategized, organized, wrote, and protested for equal school rights—not just for themselves, but for all. Their activism gave rise to a new vision of womanhood: the purposeful woman, who was learned, active, resilient, and forward-thinking. Moreover, these young women set in motion equal-school-rights victories at the local and state level, and laid the groundwork for further action to democratize schools in twentieth-century America. In this thought-provoking book, Baumgartner demonstrates that the confluence of race and gender has shaped the long history of school desegregation in the United States right up to the present.

Women and Politics is a comprehensive examination of women's use of politics in pursuit of gender equality. How can demands for gender equality be reconciled with sex differences? Resolving this paradoxical question has proceeded along two paths: the legal equality doctrine, which emphasizes gender neutrality, and the fairness doctrine, which recognizes differences between men and women. The text's clear analysis and presentation of theory and history helps students to think critically about the difficulties faced by women in politics, and about how public policies in education, labour and the economy, and family and fertility, impact gender equality. The fully-revised fourth edition explores new critical perspectives, recent political events, and current challenges to gender equality, including the 2016 presidential election and Hillary Clinton's candidacy, the fight for equal pay and paid leave, and the debate over reproductive rights and campus sexual assault. It also includes current scholarship on the intersections of race, class, and gender, and expanded coverage of minority women, women in the military, and conservative women. This text, and its two-path framework, is essential to understanding women's pursuit of equality via the political system.

A major new work by a leading women's historian and a study of how a "gendered imagination" has shaped social policy in America. Illustrations.

In The Pursuit of Happiness Bianca C. Williams traces the experiences of African American women as they travel to Jamaica, where they address the perils and disappointments of American racism by looking for intimacy, happiness, and a connection to their racial identities. Through their encounters with Jamaican online communities and their participation in trips organized by Girlfriend Tours International, the women construct notions of racial, sexual, and emotional belonging by forming relationships with Jamaican men and other "girlfriends." These relationships allow the women to exercise agency and find happiness in ways that resist the damaging intersections of racism and patriarchy in the United States. However, while the women require a spiritual and virtual connection to Jamaica in order to live happily in the United States, their notion of happiness relies on travel, which requires leveraging their national privilege as American citizens. Williams's theorization of "emotional transnationalism" and the construction of affect across diasporic distance attends to the connections between race, gender, and affect while highlighting how affective relationships mark nationalized and gendered power differentials within the African diaspora.

"Whitefield-Madrano ... examines the relationship between appearance and science, social media, sex, friendship, language, and advertising to show how beauty actually affects us day to day. Through ... research and interviews with dozens of women across all walks of life, she reveals surprising findings, like that wearing makeup can actually relax you, that you can convince people you're better looking just by tweaking your personality, and the ways beauty can be a powerful tool of connection among women"--Amazon.com.