*A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick 2015* 'A poignant tale of one person's transgender journey.' - Heat Luke Livingstone is a lucky man. He's a respected solicitor, a father and grandfather, a pillar of the community. He has a loving wife and an idyllic home in the Oxfordshire countryside. Yet Luke is struggling with an unbearable secret, and it's threatening to destroy him. All his life, Luke has hidden the truth about himself and his identity. It's a truth so fundamental that it will shatter his family, rock his community and leave him outcast. But Luke has nowhere left to run, and to continue living, he must become the person - the woman - he knows himself to be, whatever the cost. 'Move over Jodi Picoult. New Zealand-based author Charity Norman has the same clever knack of taking an issue and examining it from all angles, to see the effect it has on everyone involved.' New Zealand Herald

Winner of the Association of Women in Slavic Studies Heldt Prize Winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society History and Humanities Book Award Honorable mention for the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize Book Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) This groundbreaking work in women's history explores the lives of Uzbek women, in their own voices and words, before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Drawing upon their oral histories and writings, Marianne Kamp reexamines the Soviet Hujum, the 1927 campaign in Soviet Central Asia to encourage mass unveiling as a path to social and intellectual "liberation." This engaging examination of changing Uzbek ideas about women in the early twentieth century reveals the complexities of a volatile time: why some Uzbek women chose to unveil, why many were forcibly unveiled, why a campaign for unveiling triggered massive violence against women, and how the national memory of this pivotal event remains contested today.

An in-depth look at the many ways women around the world helped shape modern photography from the 1920s to the 1950s as they captured images of a radically changing world During the 1920s the New Woman was easy to recognize but hard to define. Hair bobbed and fashionably dressed, this iconic figure of modernity was everywhere, splashed across magazine pages or projected on the silver screen. A global phenomenon, she embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art--including photography. This groundbreaking, richly illustrated book looks at those "new women" who embraced the camera as a mode of expression and made a profound impact on the medium from the 1920s to the 1950s. Thematic chapters explore how women emerged as a driving force in modern photography, bringing their own perspective to artistic experimentation, studio portraiture, fashion and advertising work, scenes of urban life, ethnography and photojournalism. Featuring work by 120 photographers, this volume expands the history of photography by critically examining an international array of canonical and less well-known women photographers, from Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange and Lola Álvarez Bravo to Germaine Krull, Tsuneko Sasamoto and Homai Vyarawalla. Against the odds, these women produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.

In fin-de-siècle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside the home. Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women active in journalism and the theater, including Marguerite Durand, founder of the women's newspaper La Fronde; the journalists Séverine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted gender roles. The existence of La Fronde itself was such an act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well about the same subjects as men—even about the volatile Dreyfus Affair. When female reporters for La Fronde put on disguises to get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was exposed as a choice, not a destiny. Lively, sophisticated, and persuasive, Disruptive Acts will be a major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of cultural studies, gender studies, and the theater.

By comparing fictional representations with "real" New Women in late-Victorian Britain, Sally Ledger makes a major contribution to an understanding of the "Woman Question" at the end of the century. Chapters on imperialism, socialism, sexual decadence, and metropolitan life situate the "revolting daughters" of the Victorian age in a broader cultural context than previous studies.

American Catholic women rarely surface as protagonists in histories of the United States. Offering a new perspective, Kathleen Sprows Cummings places Catholic women at the forefront of two defining developments of the Progressive Era: the emergence of the "New Woman" and Catholics' struggle to define their place in American culture. Cummings highlights four women: Chicago-based journalist Margaret Buchanan Sullivan; Sister Julia McGroarty, SND, founder of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., one of the first Catholic women's colleges; Philadelphia educator Sister Assisium McEvoy, SSJ; and Katherine Eleanor Conway, a Boston editor, public figure, and antisuffragist. Cummings uses each woman's story to explore how debates over Catholic identity were intertwined with the renegotiation of American gender roles.