Women Change The World

Issues of gender equality and sexuality manifest themselves in a variety of ways and in all cultures.

Please use this partial list of recent books on sexuality and gender equality to find the most up to date thinking and writing on the roles of women in our world.

Title: Recent Books on Sexuality and Gender Equality

Framed by Gender:  How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World
Cecilla L. Ridegeway
In an advanced society like the U.S., where an array of processes work against gender inequality, how does this inequality persist? Integrating research from sociology, social cognition and psychology, and organizational behavior, Framed by Gender identifies the general processes through which gender as a principle of inequality rewrites itself into new forms of social and economic organization.

Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities
Johnnetta B. Cole; Beverly Gay-Sheftall
In the Black community, rape, violence against women, and sexual harassment are as much the legacy of slavery as is racism. In Gender Talk Johnnetta Betsch Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall argue powerfully that the only way to defeat this legacy is to focus on the intersection of race and gender.

Gender Equality : Dimensions of Women’s Equal Citizenship
Linda C. McClain; Joanna L. Grossman
Citizenship is the common language for expressing aspirations to democratic and egalitarian ideals of inclusion, participation, and civic membership. However, there continues to be a significant gap between formal commitments to gender equality and equal citizenship – in the laws and constitutions of many countries, as well as in international human rights documents – and the reality of women’s lives. This volume presents a collection of original works that examine this persisting inequality through the lens of citizenship

Re-imagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race and Finding Home
Anita Hill
Through the stories of remarkable African American women, including her own great-great-grandmother, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and Baltimore beauty-shop owner and housing-crisis survivor Anjanette Booker, Anita Hill demonstrates that the inclusive democracy our Constitution promises must be conceived with home in mind. From slavery to the Great Migration to the subprime mortgage meltdown, Reimagining Equality takes us on a journey that sparks a new conversation about what it means to be at home in America and presents concrete proposals that encourage us to reimagine equality.

Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Pakistan
Rashida Pate
Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Pakistan provides an overview of the legal and practical changes which have been introduced to improve the deteriorating condition of women in Pakistan. The book presents a critical analysis of the continuous and increasing misinterpretations of the principles of Islam through legal acceptance, and discusses laws which have been recently changed and have an effect on women’s lives, including the Criminal Procedure Code 1898, the Pakistan Penal Code 1860, and introduction of the death penalty for gang-rape.

Gender Equality and Inequality in Rural India: Blessed with a Son
Carol Vlassoff
As India strives to improve overall social and economic conditions and gender relations through policies such as the abolishment of dowry, increasing the legal age at marriage, and promoting educational opportunities for girls, serious challenges remain, especially in rural areas. Gender Equality and Inequality in Rural India focuses on the extent to which economic development has resulted in positive changes in women’s empowerment and reproductive health, as well as in sex preference.

Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Class: Dimensions of Inequality
Susan J. Ferguson
The content is framed around the themes of identity, experiences of race, class, gender or sexuality, difference, inequality, and social change or personal empowerment, with historical context threaded throughout to deepen the reader’s understanding. With engaging readings and cutting-edge scholarship the collection is not only refreshingly contemporary but also relevant to students’ lives.

Gender Equality in the Welfare State?
Gillian Pascall
The book analyses the male breadwinner model in terms of care, work, time, income and power, providing a framework for chapters which ask about policies and practices for gender equality in each of these. This new approach to analysis of gender equality in social welfare contextualises national policies and debates within comparative theoretical analysis and data, making the volume interesting to a wide audience.

Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change
Raewyn W. Connell
What does social equality mean now, in a world of markets, global power and new forms of knowledge? In this new book, Raewyn Connell combines vivid research with theoretical insight and radical politics to address this question. The focus moves across gender equality struggles, family change, class and education, intellectual workers, and the global dimension of social science, to contemporary theorists of knowledge and global power, and the political dilemmas of today’s left.

Gender Equality and Men: Learning From Practice
Sandy Ruxton (Ed.)
This collection brings together fourteen articles by development practitioners and researchers worldwide and addresses a range of key issues, including: the value of including men in gender equality and anti-poverty work; the difficulties that are likely to arise — both for men and women — and how they can they be overcome; practical evidence from different spheres (e.g. in relation to sustainable livelihoods, gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health); lessons regarding the impact of including men in gender analysis and action; future strategies and directions for development organizations and practitioners.

The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women’s Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice
Kristin A Goss
Goss examines how women’s civic place has changed over the span of more than 120 years, how public policy has driven these changes, and why these changes matter for women and American democracy.

Women and Politics: The Pursuit of Equality
Lynne E. Ford
WOMEN AND POLITICS examines the pursuit of gender equality from two viewpoints: the legal equality doctrine, which emphasizes gender neutrality, and the fairness doctrine, which recognizes differences between men and women.

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
Cordelia Fine
Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men’s and women’s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men’s brains aren’t wired for empathy and women’s brains aren’t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men’s and women’s behavior. Instead of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.

The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality:  Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
Tracy Ore
This best-selling anthology surveys how and why the categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality are constructed, maintained, experienced, and transformed. The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality then moves beyond simply discussing various forms of stratification and the impact of these on members of marginalized groups by providing a thorough discussion of how such systems of stratification are formed, perpetuated, and interconnected.

Social Stratification:  Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective
David B. Grasky (ed.)
With income inequality on the rise and the ongoing economic downturn, the causes, consequences, and politics of inequality are undergoing a fundamental transformation. Updated and highly accessible, the fourth edition of Social Stratification provides refreshing take on existing theories, incorporates the latest data, and lends new perspectives to classic debates.

Inequality:  A Contemporary Approach to Race, Class, and Gender
Lisa A. Keister & Darby E. Southgate
This textbook reflects a hybrid approach to studying stratification. It addresses the knowledge accumulated by stratification scholars and challenges students to apply this information to their social world.

The Dean’s Bible: Five Purdue Women and Their Quest for Equality
Angie Klink
While it is focused on changing attitudes on one college campus, The Deans’ Bible sheds light on cultural change in America as a whole, exploring how each of the deans participated nationally in the quest for equality. The story rolls through the “picture-perfect,” suppressive 1950s, the awakening 1960s, women’s liberation, Title IX, 1980s AIDS and alcohol epidemics, the changing mores for the disabled, and ends in the twenty-first century.

Half the Sky:  Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
Nicholas D. Krsitoff, & Sheryl WaDun
From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.

Gender & Popular Culture
Katie Milestone & Anneke Meyer
This book examines the role of popular culture in the construction of gendered identities in contemporary society. It draws on a wide range of popular cultural forms – including popular music, newspapers and television – to illustrate how femininity and masculinity are produced, represented and consumed.

Angry White Men:  American Masculinity at the End of an Era
Michael Kimmel
The future of America is more inclusive and diverse. The choice for angry white men is not whether or not they can stem the tide of history: they cannot. Their choice is whether or not they will be dragged kicking and screaming into that inevitable future, or whether they will walk openly and honorably – far happier and healthier incidentally – alongside those they’ve spent so long trying to exclude.

Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue:  How To Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes
Christa Spears Brown
In this practical guide, developmental psychologist (and mother of two) Christia Spears Brown uses science-based research to show how over-dependence on gender can limit kids, making it harder for them to develop into unique individuals.

Elusive Equality:  Women’s Rights, Public Policy and the Law
Susan Mezey
All men may be created equal in the United States – but more than 30 years after Congress proposed the Equal Rights Amendment, can the same be said for women? Elusive Equality offers a clear understanding of how government institutions – the executive branch, Congress, and state legislatures, as well as the federal courts – affect the legal status of women.

Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice
Joan C. Trenton
Americans now face a caring deficit: there are simply too many demands on people’s time for us to care adequately for our children, elderly people, and ourselves. At the same time, political involvement in the United States is at an all-time low, and although political life should help us to care better, people see caring as unsupported by public life and deem the concerns of politics as remote from their lives. Caring Democracy argues that we need to rethink American democracy, as well as our fundamental values and commitments, from a caring perspective.