This Month @ The Mundt: March

Two epochal developments profoundly influenced the history of the Atlantic world between 1770 and 1870-the rise of women's rights activism and the drive to eliminate chattel slavery. The contributors to this volume, eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines, investigate the intertwining histories of abolitionism and feminism on both sides of the Atlantic during this dynamic century of change. They illuminate the many ways that the two movements developed together and influenced one another. Approaching a wide range of transnational topics, the authors ask how conceptions of slavery and gendered society differed in the United States, France, Germany, and Britain; how women's activism reached across national boundaries; how racial identities affected the boundaries of women's activism; and what was distinctive about African-American women's participation as activists. Their thought-provoking answers provide rich insights into the history of struggles for social justice across the Atlantic world.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg stands as an incredibly important figure in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century feminism. While a growing number of admirers celebrate Justice Ginsburg's voice of dissent today, Ginsburg's rhetorical legacy reveals that she has long articulated a sharp and strategic voice of judicial dissent. This study contributes to a more complete understanding of her feminist legacy by detailing the unique contributions of her legal rhetoric.

Uncovers the truth behind the ideas, struggles, and eventually success of Black and Puerto Rican Nationalists regarding key feminist issues of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s While most people believe that the movement to secure voluntary reproductive control for women centered solely on abortion rights, for many women abortion was not the only, or even primary, focus. Jennifer Nelson tells the story of the feminist struggle for legal abortion and reproductive rights in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s through the particular contributions of women of color. She explores the relationship between second-wave feminists, who were concerned with a woman's right to choose, Black and Puerto Rican Nationalists, who were concerned that Black and Puerto Rican women have as many children as possible "for the revolution," and women of color themselves, who negotiated between them. Contrary to popular belief, Nelson shows that women of color were able to successfully remake the mainstream women's liberation and abortion rights movements by appropriating select aspects of Black Nationalist politics--including addressing sterilization abuse, access to affordable childcare and healthcare, and ways to raise children out of poverty--for feminist discourse.

Brown Beauty considers how the media created a beauty ideal for these women, emphasizing different representations and expressions of brown skin. Haidarali contends that the idea of brown as a "respectable shade" was carefully constructed through print and visual media in the interwar era. Throughout this period, brownness of skin came to be idealized as the real, representational, and respectable complexion of African American middle class women. Shades of brown became channels that facilitated discussions of race, class, and gender in a way that would develop lasting cultural effects for an ever-modernizing world. Building on an impressive range of visual and media sources--from newspapers, journals, magazines, and newsletters to commercial advertising--Haidarali locates a complex, and sometimes contradictory, set of cultural values at the core of representations of women, envisioned as "brown-skin." She explores how brownness affected socially-mobile New Negro women in the urban environment during the interwar years, showing how the majority of messages on brownness were directed at an aspirant middle-class. By tracing brown's changing meanings across this period, and showing how a visual language of brown grew into a dynamic racial shorthand used to denote modern African American womanhood, Brown Beauty demonstrates the myriad values and judgments, compromises and contradictions involved in the social evaluation of women. This book is an eye-opening account of the intense dynamics between racial identity and the influence mass media has on what, and who we consider beautiful.