Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times

Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
Author: Elizabeth Wayland Barber
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 344
Release: 1995-09-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0393285588

"A fascinating history of…[a craft] that preceded and made possible civilization itself." —New York Times Book Review New discoveries about the textile arts reveal women's unexpectedly influential role in ancient societies. Twenty thousand years ago, women were making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers. In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women. Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture. Elizabeth Wayland Barber has drawn from data gathered by the most sophisticated new archaeological methods—methods she herself helped to fashion. In a "brilliantly original book" (Katha Pollitt, Washington Post Book World), she argues that women were a powerful economic force in the ancient world, with their own industry: fabric.

The Female Brain

The Female Brain
Author: Louann Brizendine, MD
Publisher: Harmony
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2007-08-07
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0767928415

Since Dr. Brizendine wrote The Female Brain ten years ago, the response has been overwhelming. This New York Times bestseller has been translated into more than thirty languages, has sold nearly a million copies between editions, and has most recently inspired a romantic comedy starring Whitney Cummings and Sofia Vergara. And its profound scientific understanding of the nature and experience of the female brain continues to guide women as they pass through life stages, to help men better understand the girls and women in their lives, and to illuminate the delicate emotional machinery of a love relationship. Why are women more verbal than men? Why do women remember details of fights that men can’t remember at all? Why do women tend to form deeper bonds with their female friends than men do with their male counterparts? These and other questions have stumped both sexes throughout the ages. Now, pioneering neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, M.D., brings together the latest findings to show how the unique structure of the female brain determines how women think, what they value, how they communicate, and who they love. While doing research as a medical student at Yale and then as a resident and faculty member at Harvard, Louann Brizendine discovered that almost all of the clinical data in existence on neurology, psychology, and neurobiology focused exclusively on males. In response to the overwhelming need for information on the female mind, Brizendine established the first clinic in the country to study and treat women’s brain function. In The Female Brain, Dr. Brizendine distills all her findings and the latest information from the scientific community in a highly accessible book that educates women about their unique brain/body/behavior. The result: women will come away from this book knowing that they have a lean, mean, communicating machine. Men will develop a serious case of brain envy.

Difficult Women

Difficult Women
Author: Roxane Gay
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2017-01-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802189644

The New York Times–bestselling author of Bad Feminist shares a collection of stories about hardscrabble lives, passionate loves and vexed human connection. The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. A pair of sisters, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and must negotiate the elder sister’s marriage. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind. From a girls’ fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Roxanne Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America with her “signature wry wit and piercing psychological depth” (Harper’s Bazaar).

Women Talking

Women Talking
Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2019-04-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1635572592

The basis of the Oscar-winning film from writer/director Sarah Polley, starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, with Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand. INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale.” -Margaret Atwood, on Twitter "Scorching . . . a wry, freewheeling novel of ideas that touches on the nature of evil, questions of free will, collective responsibility, cultural determinism, and, above all, forgiveness." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women-all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in-have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they've ever known or should they dare to escape? Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women's all-female symposium, Toews's masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

The Women of Troy

The Women of Troy
Author: Pat Barker
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2021-08-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 038554670X

A daring and timely feminist retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of the women of Troy who endured it—an extraordinary follow up to The Silence of the Girls from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy and “one of contemporary literature’s most thoughtful and compelling writers" (The Washington Post). Troy has fallen and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of an endless war—including the women of Troy themselves. They await a fair wind for the Aegean. It does not come, because the gods are offended. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated, and so the victors remain in suspension, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed as the coalition that held them together begins to unravel. Old feuds resurface and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester. Largely unnoticed by her captors, the one time Trojan queen Briseis, formerly Achilles's slave, now belonging to his companion Alcimus, quietly takes in these developments. She forges alliances when she can, with Priam's aged wife the defiant Hecuba and with the disgraced soothsayer Calchas, all the while shrewdly seeking her path to revenge.

Dangerous Women

Dangerous Women
Author: Hope Adams
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2021-02-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593099591

Named one of 2021’s Most Anticipated Historical Novels by Oprah Magazine ∙ Cosmopolitan ∙ and more! Nearly two hundred condemned women board a transport ship bound for Australia. One of them is a murderer. From debut author Hope Adams comes a thrilling novel based on the 1841 voyage of the convict ship Rajah, about confinement, hope, and the terrible things we do to survive. London, 1841. One hundred eighty Englishwomen file aboard the Rajah, embarking on a three-month voyage to the other side of the world. They're daughters, sisters, mothers—and convicts. Transported for petty crimes. Except one of them has a deadly secret, and will do anything to flee justice. As the Rajah sails farther from land, the women forge a tenuous kinship. Until, in the middle of the cold and unforgiving sea, a young mother is mortally wounded, and the hunt is on for the assailant before he or she strikes again. Each woman called in for question has something to fear: Will she be attacked next? Will she be believed? Because far from land, there is nowhere to flee, and how can you prove innocence when you’ve already been found guilty?

Hill Women

Hill Women
Author: Cassie Chambers
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-01-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1984818929

After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong “hill women” who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region. “Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.”—BookPage (starred review) “A gritty, warm love letter to Appalachian communities and the resourceful women who lead them.”—Slate Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County, Kentucky, is one of the poorest places in the country. Buildings are crumbling as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women find creative ways to subsist in the hills. Through the women who raised her, Cassie Chambers traces her path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains. Chambers’s Granny was a child bride who rose before dawn every morning to raise seven children. Granny’s daughter, Ruth—the hardest-working tobacco farmer in the county—stayed on the family farm, while Wilma—the sixth child—became the first in the family to graduate from high school. Married at nineteen and pregnant with Cassie a few months later, Wilma beat the odds to finish college. She raised her daughter to think she could move mountains, like the ones that kept her safe but also isolated from the larger world. Cassie would spend much of her childhood with Granny and Ruth in the hills of Owsley County. With her “hill women” values guiding her, she went on to graduate from Harvard Law. But while the Ivy League gave her opportunities, its privileged world felt far from her reality, and she moved home to help rural Kentucky women by providing free legal services. Appalachian women face issues from domestic violence to the opioid crisis, but they are also keeping their towns together in the face of a system that continually fails them. With nuance and heart, Chambers breaks down the myth of the hillbilly and illuminates a region whose poor communities, especially women, can lead it into the future.

Where Women Are Kings

Where Women Are Kings
Author: Christie Watson
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2015-04-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1590517105

“An intense cross-cultural story of love” about an adopted Nigerian boy who can’t shake his beliefs that his birth mother loves him—and that he’s possessed by a wizard. Elijah, 7 years old, is covered in scars and has a history of disruptive behavior. Taken away from his birth mother, a Nigerian immigrant in England, Elijah is moved from one foster parent to the next before finding a home with Nikki and her husband, Obi. Nikki believes that she and Obi are strong enough to accept Elijah’s difficulties—and that being white will not affect her ability to raise a black son. They care deeply for Elijah and, in spite of his demons, he begins to settle into this loving family. But as Nikki and Obi learn more about their child’s tragic past, they face challenges that threaten to rock the fragile peace they’ve established, challenges that could prove disastrous. “ . . . an unforgettable story that will make your chest tighten, your eyes leak and your heart lurch.” —InStyle

Women, Men, and the Whole Damn Thing

Women, Men, and the Whole Damn Thing
Author: David Leser
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2021-01-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1643136291

A brilliant, impassioned, unflinching account of the firestorm of #MeToo, how we got there, and where we must now go. In Women, Men, and the Whole Damn Thing, author David Leser presents an essential and incisive investigation, unearthing the roots of misogyny, its inextricable links to the patriarchy, and how history brought us to the #MeToo movement and the wave of incandescent female rage that is sweeping the world. Crucially, he also interrogates his own psyche, privilege, and culpability as he bears witness to the “collective wound of the world” and asks how we can move towards healing and profound and permanent change. This book calls on men (yes, all men) to be accountable for their contribution to the continuing oppression of women by the patriarchal structures that have dominated our culture historically and through to the present. He argues that misogyny and female oppression is the greatest moral issue of our times and we are all responsible for dismantling the structures which cause such oppression. This book is his journey into how to grapple with both the personal and collective aftermath of #MeToo and the new future. Including interviews with Tina Brown, Zainab Salbi, Marlene Schiappa, and Helen Garner, among other globally recognized names, Women, Men, and the Whole Damn Thing is a bold, honest, and self-searching global overview of the cultural moment of misogyny that we exist in and, perhaps, a way to move forward.

The Women I Love

The Women I Love
Author: Francesco Pacifico
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2021-12-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374720886

A provocative and bracing send-up of modern masculinity, from the author of Class and The Story of My Purity Marcello, an editor and poet, is on the brink of his forties. Like everyone in his life, including his sister-in-law, he’s writing a novel. This novel. This novel will be about women. Love. Growing older. Maybe even taking responsibility. But unfortunately for Marcello, the women in his life resist definition. They flit and flicker constantly between archetype and actuality: sirens and saviors, subordinates and savants, vixens and villains. So Marcello cannot write plainly about love. Instead, he tries to write into the complexities of his many relationships: Eleonora, the junior editor, his former protegeé and sometime lover; Barbara, his claustrophobic girlfriend; his estranged gay sister; his elegant mother. Fresh, frank, and painfully cool, Francesco Pacifico’s The Women I Love dives nakedly into gender, sex, and power. Set in a vivid and alcoholic Italy, it acknowledges and subverts the narrow ways canonical male writers gaze at, and somehow fail to see, women—illuminating the possibility of equity between people in love, in bed, in work, and in life.