With vocal public figures such as Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam often appears to be a male-centric religious movement, and over 60 years of scholarship have perpetuated that notion. Yet, women have been pivotal in the NOI's development, playing a major role in creating the public image that made it appealing and captivating. Women of the Nation draws on oral histories and interviews with approximately 100 women across several cities to provide an overview of women's historical contributions and their varied experiences of the NOI, including both its continuing community under Farrakhan and its offshoot into Sunni Islam under Imam W.D. Mohammed. The authors examine how women have interpreted and navigated the NOI's gender ideologies and practices, illuminating the experiences of African-American, Latina, and Native American women within the NOI and their changing roles within this patriarchal movement. The book argues that the Nation of Islam experience for women has been characterized by an expression of Islam sensitive to American cultural messages about race and gender, but also by gender and race ideals in the Islamic tradition. It offers the first exhaustive study of womenOCOs experiences in both the NOI and the W.D. Mohammed community."

The patriarchal structure of the Nation of Islam (NOI) promised black women the prospect of finding a provider and a protector among the organization's men, who were fiercely committed to these masculine roles. Black women's experience in the NOI, however, has largely remained on the periphery of scholarship. Here, Ula Taylor documents their struggle to escape the devaluation of black womanhood while also clinging to the empowering promises of patriarchy. Taylor shows how, despite being relegated to a lifestyle that did not encourage working outside of the home, NOI women found freedom in being able to bypass the degrading experiences connected to labor performed largely by working-class black women and in raising and educating their children in racially affirming environments. Telling the stories of women like Clara Poole (wife of Elijah Muhammad) and Burnsteen Sharrieff (secretary to W. D. Fard, founder of the Allah Temple of Islam), Taylor offers a compelling narrative that explains how their decision to join a homegrown, male-controlled Islamic movement was a complicated act of self-preservation and self-love in Jim Crow America.

Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was a Nigerian feminist who fought for suffrage and equal rights for her countrywomen long before the second wave of the women's movement in the United States. She also joined the struggle for Nigerian independence as an activist in the anticolonial movement.For Women and the Nation is the story of this courageous woman, one of a handful of full-length biographies of African women activists. It will be welcomed by students of women's studies, African history, and biography, as well as by opponents of the Nigerian military regime that has held one of her sons, Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti, in solitary confinement since August 1995.CHERYL JOHNSON-ODIM, chair and associate professor of history at Loyola University in Chicago, is coeditor of Expanding the Boundaries of Women's History. NINA EMMA MBA, senior lecturer in history at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, is the author of Nigerian Women Mobilized and Ayo Rosijc.

"Capetillo evaluates the culture and working conditions in her native Puerto Rico and the world outside, while providing a sense of workers' movements and the condition of women at the turn of the century."--BOOK JACKET.

Though they are almost completely absent from the historical record, Palestinian women were extensively involved in the unfolding national struggle in their country during the British mandate period. This history studies the development of the Palestine women's movement between 1920 and 1948.

An examination of nationalism and gender.

No Nation for Women takes a hard, close look at what makes India unsafe for its women — from custodial rapes and honour killings to rapes of minors and trafficking — the author uncovers many unpalatable truths behind what we are familiar with as newspaper headlines only... Numbers convey, in part, why India is referred to as one of the world’s rape capitals — one woman is raped every 15 minutes; and, in 50 years, there has been a staggering rise of 873 per cent in sexual crimes against girls. And beyond the numbers and statistics, there are stories, often unreported — of women in Damoh, Madhya Pradesh, who are routinely raped if they spurn the advances of men; of girls from de-notified tribes in central India who have no recourse to justice if sexually violated; of victimized lower-caste girls in small-town Baduan, Uttar Pradesh; of frequent dislocation faced by survivor families in West Bengal; of political wrath turning into rape in Tripura. Priyanka Dubey travels through large swathes of India, over a period of six years, to uncover the accounts of disenfranchised women who are caught in the grip of patriarchy and violence. She asks if, after the globally reported December 2012 gang-rape of ‘Nirbhaya’ in New Delhi, India’s gender narrative has shifted — and, if it hasn’t, what needs to be done to make this a nation worthy of its women.