Celebrating Women’s History

It may be the end of March, but it’s never too late to celebrate! For this year’s Women’s History Month we wanted to offer a reading list highlighting our Partner Network press titles about women and cultural, historical, and socioeconomic explorations of feminism and gender studies. Enjoy!

Invoking Flora Nwapa: Nigerian Women Writers, Femininity and Spirituality in World Literature

By Paula Uimonen

Stockholm University Press, 2020

Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966) was the first internationally published novel in English by a female African writer. By invoking Flora Nwapa, this monograph draws attention to Nigerian women writers in world literature, with an emphasis on femininity and spirituality.

Don’t Be Quiet, Start a Riot! Essays on Feminism and Performance

By Tiina Rosenberg

Stockholm University Press, 2016

This collection of essays investigates elements of the human voice and performance, and their implications for gender and sexuality. The chapters address affect, pleasure, and memory in the enjoyment of musical and theatrical performance. Rosenberg also examines contemporary feminist performance, anti-racist interventions, activist aesthetics, and political agency especially with regard to feminist and queer interpretations of opera and theatre.

Framtidens Kvinnor: Mognad och Medborgarskap i Svenska Flickböcker 1832–1921

By Maria Andersson

Kriterium, 2021

The future woman — what would she be like? And what would be her place in society? These questions were explored through stories about girls’ upbringing and education in nineteenth and early twentieth century literature for girls.

Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia

By Shenila Khoja-Moolji

University of California Press, 2018

In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, Shenila Khoja-Moolji traces the figure of the ‘educated girl’ to examine the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns in colonial India and Pakistan.

Unjust Conditions: Women’s Work and the Hidden Cost of Cash Transfer Programs

By Tara Patricia Cookson

University of California Press, 2018

Unjust Conditions follows the lives and labors of poor mothers in rural Peru, richly documenting the ordeals they face to participate in mainstream poverty alleviation programs. With a poignant voice and keen focus on ethnographic research, Tara Patricia Cookson turns the reader’s gaze to women’s care work in landscapes of grossly inadequate state investment, cleverly drawing out the tensions between social inclusion and conditionality.

The Pitfalls of Protection: Gender, Violence, and Power in Afghanistan

By Torunn Wimpelmann

University of California Press, 2017

Since the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, violence against women has emerged as the single most important issue for Afghan gender politics. The Pitfalls of Protection, based on research conducted in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2015, locates the struggles over gender violence in local and global power configurations.

Bubbles and Machines: Gender, Information and Financial Crises

By Micky Lee

University of Westminster Press, 2019

Current literature has neglected finance and capital’s gendered aspect — even the ideology of a ‘crisis’. This book develops four themes: women as resources in financial markets and as producers of values; gender ideology and unequal distribution; machine production and distribution of financial information and the varied actuality of markets. Working with case histories of tulipmania, microcredit, Wall Street reporting and the role of ‘screens’, Bubbles and Machines argues that rather than calling financial crises human-made or inevitable they should be recognized as technological.