Woman Study

More than 20 years ago, sociologist and University of California, Berkeley, professor Arlie Hochschild set off a tidal wave of conversation and controversy with her best-selling book, The Second Shift. In it, she examined what really happens in dual-career households. Adding together time in paid work, child care, and housework, she found that working mothers put in a month of work a year more than their spouses.

The adoption business was founded on secrecy and lies. American Baby lays out how a lucrative and exploitative industry removed children from their birth mothers and placed them with hopeful families, fabricating stories about infants' origins and destinations, then closing the door firmly between the parties forever. Adoption agencies and other organizations that purported to help pregnant women struck unethical deals with doctors and researchers for pseudoscientific "assessments," and shamed millions of women into surrendering their children.

This is the story of Tenzin Palmo, the daughter of a fishmonger from London's East End who became a Tibetan nun. After meditating for 12 years in a cave 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas, she became a world-renowned spiritual leader and champion of the right of women to achieve spiritual enlightenment.

At the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue. "I’ve always loved Orwell," Funder writes, "his self-deprecating humor, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on." So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation.

Does the Bible feel confusing and complicated to you? Perhaps some of it feels familiar, but overall, does it feel impossible to navigate? Maybe you recognize the stories, but you just don’t know how they all fit together. Yet they do fit together. In her unique and remarkably listenable way, Angie Smith - best-selling author of What Women Fear, Mended, I Will Carry You, and Seamless - helps you tie together all the loose, disconnected threads you find in the Bible, weaving them into a beautifully crafted storyline.

Why are so many women still not properly listened to? Why do they sometimes feel that they’re less interesting than they are? Why do they often rush when they speak? Why do some women feel the pressure to sound like little girls? From one of the world's leading experts on the voice comes this call to arms for women to reclaim their voices. Using elements of experience and practice from her prolific career, Patsy Rodenburg examines these questions, and many more, to decipher what lies at the heart of female empowerment.

A rousing call to arms, packed with surprising insights, that explores how carrying "the mental load" - the thankless day-to-day anticipating of needs and solving of problems large and small - is adversely affecting women’s lives and feeding gender inequality, and shows the way forward for better balancing our lives.

Her Space, Her Time shares the stories of women in physics and astronomy whose work expanded scientific understanding yet whose accomplishments are often overlooked—creating a thrilling account of scientific discovery, inspirational leadership and persistence in the face of overwhelming challenges. In shaping her narrative around the science that fascinated them and the social context in which they worked, award-winning quantum physicist Shohini Ghose champions these remarkable women’s contributions, which loom even larger given the misogyny and discrimination they faced.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) had a profound influence on the shape of 19th-century thought and political discourse. His view of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to the unrestricted state. Mill favoured decentralised forms of socialism because he thought that a centralised model would discourage competition, neglect talent, and disregard freedom.

The Authority Gap provides a startling perspective on the unseen bias at work in our everyday lives, to reveal the scale of the gap that still persists between men and women. Would you believe that female US Supreme Court Justices are interrupted four times more often than male ones...96 percent of the time by men? Marshalling a wealth of data with precision and insight, and including interviews with pioneering women, Mary Ann Sieghart exposes unconscious bias in this fresh, feminist take on how to address and counteract systemic sexism in ways that benefit us all.

In this timely and necessary book, New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose dismantles two hundred years of unrealistic parenting expectations and empowers today’s mothers to make choices that actually serve themselves, their children, and their communities.

Margaret Starbird's theological beliefs were profoundly shaken when she read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a book that dared to suggest that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalen and that their descendants carried on his holy bloodline in Western Europe. Shocked by such heresy, this Roman Catholic scholar set out to refute it but instead found new and compelling evidence for the existence of the bride of Jesus - the same enigmatic woman who anointed him with precious unguent from her "alabaster jar".

On Tuesday 13 September 2022, all Mahsa Amini has planned is a day shopping in Tehran. Her birthday is next week. But she is arrested as she comes out of the subway—the Guidance Patrol deem her hijab inadequate. On Friday she is pronounced dead. By Sunday, women have taken to the streets across Iran, setting their headscarves on fire and cursing the Supreme Leader. Months later, workers down their tools and businesses close. The battle-cry everywhere: Women, Life, Freedom.

Fifteen-year-old Diamond stopped going to school the day she was expelled for lashing out at peers who constantly harassed and teased her for something everyone on the staff had missed: she was being trafficked for sex. After months on the run, she was arrested and sent to a detention center for violating a court order to attend school. Just 16 percent of female students, Black girls make up more than one-third of all girls with a school-related arrest.

Revised and updated to include current studies, politics, and discussions, The Macho Paradox is the first book to show how violence against women is a male issue as well as a female one - and how we can come together to stop it. Written by pioneering anti-violence educator Jackson Katz, The Macho Paradox incorporates the voices and experiences of women and men who have confronted the problem from all angles, the discussions surrounding currents events in politics and pop culture, and where the violence is ignored or encouraged in our upbringing.

For millions of women, shame is a vicious predator. It tells us we are less than, that we are unworthy. We try everything to escape shame—ignoring it, intellectualizing it, and even, ironically, shaming ourselves for feeling it. The reality is that women experience shame more frequently and more intensely than men—a direct result, as acclaimed journalist Melissa Petro explains, of a patriarchal culture that “urges women to feel bad about themselves, and then punishes them when they do.” Why can’t we figure out how to break the shame cycle once and for all?

When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s the agency excluded women from the corps, arguing that only military test pilots—made up exclusively of men—had the right stuff. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed unqualified for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA recognized its blunder and opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of 8,000 six elite women were selected in 1978—Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon.

In this landmark work of emerging African American womanist theology, Delores Williams finds in the biblical figure of Hagar-mother of Ishmael, cast into the desert by Abraham and Sarah, but protected by God - a prototype for the struggle of African-American women. African slave, homeless exile, surrogate mother, Hagar's story provides an image of survival and defiance appropriate to black women today.

A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, revealing the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real.

Part deep dive reportage, part personal journey, part cabinet of curiosities, Butts is an entertaining, illuminating, and thoughtful examination of why certain silhouettes come in and out of fashion—and how larger ideas about race, control, liberation, and power affect our most private feelings about ourselves and others.