Description

This article is from the Feminism References FAQ, by Cindy Tittle Moore tittle@netcom.com with numerous contributions by others.

History:

Adamson, Nancy, Linda Briskin, and Margaret McPhail. _Feminist
Organizing For Change: The Contemporary Women's Movement in Canada_.
Oxford University Press (Don Mills, Ontario). 1988.
Blurb: "Beginning with a detailed history of the `second wave'
(post-1960), it makes a primary distinction between grass-roots
and institutionalized feminism, and by emphasizing the former
reveals a part of feminist organizing that has most often been
invisible."

Anderson, Bonnie S. and Judith P. Zinsser. _A History of Their Own:
Women in Europe from Prehistory to Present_. Vols I and II. Harper
and Row, Publishers, New York. 1988.
Blurb: "...A groundbreaking and controversial history of European
women -- the first to approach the past from the perspective of
women and to be organized by role."

Bridenthal, Renate, and Claudia Koonz, eds. _Becoming Visible, Women
in European History_.
An anthology going from prehistory to present day.

Carden, Maren. _The New Feminist Movement_. 1974.

Coote and Campbell. _Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women's
Liberation_. 1982.

DuBois, Ellen Carol and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds. _Unequal Sisters: A Multi-
Cultural Reader in U.S. Women's History_. Routledge, New York. 1990.

DuBoise, Ellen Carol. _Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an
Independent Women's Movement in America 1848-1869_. Third printing.
Cornell Paperbacks, Cornell University Press. 1985. ISBN:
0-8014-9182-7 (trade paperback).
Blurb: "...Duboise provides a framework and an analysis which link
present concerns with political events more than a century ago,
and by so doing illuminates both our contemporary situation and
our past. Hers is a rare blend of relevance and solid
scholarship..."

Eisler, Riane. _The Chalice and the Blade_. Harper, San Francisco.
1987.
An interesting revisionist view of history; describes a conflict
between "gylanic" (cooperative, giving of life honored,
stereotypically feminine) and "androcratic" (competitive, taking
of life honored, stereotypically masculine) tendencies in Western
history. She suggests that the problem with the latter system is
not men _per se_, but the expectation that men dominate women and
a few men dominate all the rest. She follows Marija Gimbutas on
European prehistory, suggesting that her "Old Europe" was a good
example of the former system. Caution: any attempt at finding
all-encompassing principles, as she does, is probably an
oversimplification.

Fraser, Antonia. _The Weaker Vessel_. Vintage Books, Random House,
New York. 1985. ISBN: 0-394-73251-0.
Blurb: "Fraser gives us life after woman's life in choice and
telling detail. This is 'hidden history'...the history of
ordinary women, and therefore of ordinary men. As such it is both
tantalizingly familliar and utterly exotic, close and yet distant
to our own lives."

Fraser, Antonia. _The Warrior Queens_. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
1989. ISBN: 0-394-54939-2 (hardback).
Blurb: "...Fraser gives us a singularly rich and provocative study
of the Warrior Queens. Dramatising the often astonishing ways in
which the world has perceived -- and still perceives -- women who
wield power, she examines the paradox and the politics, the mythic
and the real lives of the sovereign women who have led their
nations in war."

Gimbuta, Marija. _The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe_. c1974, 1982.
Documents Neolithic Europe in detail, describing such things as
settlement patterns, burial rites, a sacred script and inferences
on its social structure. She proposes that "Old Europe" featured
parity between the sexes, lack of interest in warfare, well-developed
artistic traditions, and a belief system centered on female
generative powers.

Gimbuta, Marija. _The Language of the Goddess_(1989) and _The
Civilization of the Goddess_(1991). Harper, San Francisco.
Expands on the belief system proposed in the first book.

Goreau, Angeline, ed. _The Whole Duty of a Woman: Female Writers in
Seventeenth Century England_. Dial Press, Garden City, New York.
1985.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. _Writing a Woman's Life_. Ballantine Books.
ISBN 0-345-36256-X.
Blurb: "With subtlety and great eloquence, Carolyn Heilbrun shows
how, throughout the centuries, those who write about women's lives
-- biographers AND autobiographers -- have suppressed the truth of
the female experience, in order to make the "written life" conform
to society's expectations of what that life should be."

Hiley, Michael. _Victorian Working Women: Portraits from Life_.
Gordon Fraser, London. 1979.
A collection of Arther Munby's photography. It was his firm
belief that women should be free to take on any job they wished.
A fascinating compendium. Karlsen, Carol F. _The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in
Colonial New England_. W.W. Norton and Company, New York and London.
1987.
Blurb: "A pioneer work in what might be called the sex 
structuring of society. this is not just another book about
witchcraft. Carol Karlsen has uncovered the assumptions, explicit
and implicit, that goverened the everyday relationships of men and
women in early New England...The 'witches' come alive in this
book, not as stereotypes, but as real women living in a society
that suspected and feared their independence and combativeness."

Miles, Rosalind. _The Women's History of the World_. Perennial
Library, Harper and Row, Publishers. 1990. ISBN: 0-06-097317-X.

Rossi, Alice S., ed. _The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de
Beauvoir_. 1st Northeastern University Press ed. Boston :
Northeastern University Press, 1988, c1973. Reprint. Originally
published: New York : Columbia University Press, 1973.
Women, feminism and history: sources.

Rothschild, Joan, ed. _Women, Technology, and Innovation_. Pergamon
Press, Oxford and New York. 1982.
Includes bibliography. Discusses technology and innovation on the
part of women throughout history, with essays on current feminist
thought on pedagogy and technology.

Scharff, Virginia. _Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the
Motor Age_. The Free Press, Macmillian, Inc. 1991. ISBN: 0-02928135-0.
Blurb: "Most men did not want or expect women to drive the new
gasoline powered automobiles of the early 1900's. Women took the
wheel anyway. As Virginia Scharff explains in this engaging
survey, the constraints of gender affected the ways in which women
met the new automotive technology but seldom slowed them down.
Car culture, Scharff shows with her precise scholarship and
thoughtful commentarty, was women's culture, too."

Scott, Joan Wallach. _Gender and the Politics of History_. Series
title: Gender and Culture. Columbia University Press, New York.
1988.
She uses postructural philosophies (Michel Foucault and Jacques
Derrida - the latter almost considered the father of
postructuralism) to analyse Gender and the way that History has
been written. She "deconstructs" the texts hoping to find their
biases, and so understand why they cannot be "correct," taking the
position that history has repressed what it means to be a woman.

Sullivan, Sorayan, translator. _Stories by Iranian Women_.
Introduction by Fazaneh Milani. Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
University of Texas at Austin. ISBN: 0-292-77649-7.

Wilson, Katharina M., ed. _Women Writers of the Renaissance and
Reformation_. University of Georgia Press. ISBN: 0-8203-0866-8.

Wilson, Vincent Jr. _The Book of Distinguished American Women_.
American HIstory Research Associates, PO BOX 140, Brookeville, MD
20833, 1983. ISBN 0-910086-05-2. (100p paperback)
Brief but inspiring biographies of 50 (!) women who made names for
themselves in fields from astronomy to public health to literature.