Heilbrun's important investigation into issues of identity for 20th-century American women probes the problem with past models and the ongoing task of creating new ones today. "Essential reading for anyone interested not only in the future of womanhood but in the stimulating possibilities for liberation of both sexes".--Chicago Tribune Book World.

Carolyn Heilbrun's important investigation into issues of identity for twentieth-century American women: the problem with past role models, ways to construct new ones.

Home to established African American institutions and communities, Washington, D.C., offered women in the New Negro movement a unique setting for the fight against racial and gender oppression. Colored No More traces how African American women of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century made significant strides toward making the nation's capital a more equal and dynamic urban center. Treva B. Lindsey presents New Negro womanhood as a multidimensional space that included race women, blues women, mothers, white collar professionals, beauticians, fortune tellers, sex workers, same-gender couples, artists, activists, and innovators. Drawing from these differing but interconnected African American women's spaces, Lindsey excavates a multifaceted urban and cultural history of struggle toward a vision of equality that could emerge and sustain itself. Upward mobility to equal citizenship for African American women encompassed challenging racial, gender, class, and sexuality status quos. Lindsey maps the intersection of these challenges and their place at the core of New Negro womanhood.

Challenging Images of Women and the Media: Reinventing Women’s Lives, edited by Theresa Carilli and Jane Campbell, collects fifteen articles addressing the status of women through an examination of depictions of women in the media. This in-depth study shows how mixed messages from the media muddle attempts at breaking the “glass screen,” causing women to constantly question their role in global culture. With cake ads followed by diet commercials, the media’s depiction of women is both confusing and contradictory. While more and more women have begun to contribute to the media as respected anchors, talk show hosts, and commentators, these portrayals are often counteracted by music videos and reality television shows such as Jersey Shore. This collection seeks to analyze these depictions and their effects on women and culture. The contributors to this anthology hail from such diverse locations as Japan, Australia, Pakistan, India, China, Bulgaria, and the United States. With this global focus, Challenging Images of Women in the Media scrutinizes issues of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality through a study of gendered media portrayals. By challenging the status quo of media images, the contributors to this essential volume invite a dialogue about women’s lives.

Preeminent feminist critic Carolyn G. Heilbrun's life experience echoes that of a generation of professional women, often isolated and marginalized within inhospitable institutions. Incorporating interviews with friends, colleagues, and Heilbrun herself, author Susan Kress illuminates Heilbrun's various public identities and places her in the context of the developing women's movement.

What are the patterns dominating women’s lives today? What are the issues which confront women in their relationships, their work, and their families? From adolescence and adult partnerships, through motherhood, to growing old Women’s Lives, originally published in 1990, explores themes which are central to women’s experience, focusing on areas such as growing up, women on their own, sexuality, bringing up children, and family relationships. Sue Llewelyn and Kate Osborne argue that a multi-faceted approach is needed to understand a woman’s life, taking in not only her personal psychology but also the social context in which she lives. The authors are both clinical psychologists with an interest in psychotherapy, and they draw on their own direct experience of working with women in distress, as well as on feminist writing, novels, and autobiographies to illustrate their arguments. Each chapter presents a detailed case history, highlighting an important aspect of women’s lives, and demonstrates the increased understanding to be gained from a combined approach using social psychology, feminist ideas, and psychodynamic insights. Designed for a wide readership, including psychologists, doctors, social workers, counsellors, and nurses, Women’s Lives will also be of great value to people on women’s studies courses and to those seeking a greater understanding of themselves or others.

The most universal civilian privation in World War II Britain, the blackout possessed many symbolic meanings. Among its complicated implications for filmmakers was a stigmatization of film spectacle--including the display of "Hollywood women," whose extravagant appearance connoted at best unpatriotic wastefulness and at worst collaboration with the enemy. Exploring the wartime breakdown of conventional gender roles on the screen and in the audience, Antonia Lant demonstrates that many British films of the period signaled their national cinematic identity by diverging from the notion of the Hollywood star, the mainstay of commercial American motion pictures, replacing her with a deglamourized, mobilized heroine. Nevertheless, the war machine demanded that British films continue to celebrate stable and reassuring gender roles. Contradictions abounded, both within film narratives and between narrative and "real life." Analyzing films of all the major wartime studios, the author scrutinizes the efforts of realist and melodramatic texts to confront women's wartime experiences, including conscription. By combining study of contemporary posters, advertisements, propaganda notices, and cartoons with consideration of recent feminist theoretical work on the cinema, spectatorship, and history, she has produced the first book to examine the relationships among gender, cinema, and nationality as they are affected by the stresses of war. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.