'The Woman Who Toils' is a fascinating investigative journalism account conducted by two sisters, Bessie and Marie Van Vorst. In writing the book, they began an undercover investigation into women and child factory laborers by finding jobs in factories under aliases. Bessie worked in a plant in Perry, New York, a knitting mill near Buffalo, and a Pittsburgh pickle factory, among other places, using the name "Esther Kelly". Marie Van Vorst found employment in a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, and a cotton mill in Columbia, South Carolina, under the alias "Bell Ballard". In their book the Van Vorsts portrayed the troublesome working and living conditions they had observed, and their consequences for women and girls. Bessie appealed for a more compassionate attitude towards these employees. Van Vorst also noted that factory women enjoyed the independence afforded them by paid labor and therefore delayed marrying. "I never saw a baby nor heard of a baby while I was in town", Van Vorst wrote after nearly three weeks spent in Perry. She also discussed sociability and the discipline of factory work as a dangerous alternative to family unity.

“This powerful and diverse collection is perfect for fans of female-led fantasy stories. No damsels in distress to be found here.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) There’s nothing more powerful than a witch who believes in herself. Women accused of witchcraft. Fearsome girls with arcane knowledge. Toil & Trouble features fifteen stories of girls embracing their power, reclaiming their destinies, and using their magic to create, to curse, to cure, to kill . . . and to live. A young witch uses social media to connect with her astrology clients—and with a NASA-loving girl as cute as she is skeptical. A priestess of death investigates a ritualized murder. A bruja who cures lovesickness might need the remedy herself when she falls for an altar boy. A theater production is turned upside down by a visiting churel. A water witch uses her magic to survive the soldiers who have invaded her desert oasis. And in the near future, a group of girls accused of witchcraft must find their collective power . . . and destroy their captors. NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF A TEEN WITCH! Featuring stories by: Tehlor Kay Mejia Andrea Robertson Tess Sharpe Lindsay Smith Brandy Colbert Shveta Thakrar Robin Talley Nova Ren Suma Zoraida Córdova Brenna Yovanoff Kate Hart Jessica Spotswood Anna-Marie McLemore Emery Lord Elizabeth May “This collection brings together short, witchy stories from fifteen brilliant YA authors . . . It’s a whole lot of magical fun, and a definite must-read for all the witches in your life.” —Bustle “The collective impact is undeniably resounding.” —Booklist (starred review) “[A] provocative, eclectic collection.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

In Archives of Labor Lori Merish establishes working-class women as significant actors within literary culture, dramatically redrawing the map of nineteenth-century US literary and cultural history. Delving into previously unexplored archives of working-class women's literature—from autobiographies, pamphlet novels, and theatrical melodrama to seduction tales and labor periodicals—Merish recovers working-class women's vital presence as writers and readers in the antebellum era. Her reading of texts by a diverse collection of factory workers, seamstresses, domestic workers, and prostitutes boldly challenges the purportedly masculine character of class dissent during this era. Whether addressing portrayals of white New England "factory girls," fictional accounts of African American domestic workers, or the first-person narratives of Mexican women working in the missions of Mexican California, Merish unsettles the traditional association of whiteness with the working class to document forms of cross-racial class identification and solidarity. In so doing, she restores the tradition of working women's class protest and dissent, shows how race and gender are central to class identity, and traces the ways working women understood themselves and were understood as workers and class subjects.

Towards the end of the 1830s, large numbers of British working men and women rallied round the People's Charter in order to improve their living conditions through universal suffrage. Women's wide-ranging support of Chartism encompassed everything from extensive lecturing tours to domestic servicing of politically active menfolk. In this first full-length study of women's involvement in Chartism, the author demonstrates that, in their struggle, which lasted for more than a decade, Chartist men and women enforced in their own ranks standards of respectable man- and womanhood that were to shape working-class gender relations well into this century.

From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s, black-owned beauty shops served as crucial sites of resistance for civil rights activists. In these times of strained relations in the South, beauty became a signifier of power and affluence while it reinforced racial strife. Roberts examines a range of beauty products, practices, and rituals--cosmetics, hairdressing, clothing, and beauty contests--in settings that range from tobacco farms of the Great Depression to 1950s and 1960s college campuses. In so doing, she uncovers the role of female beauty in the economic and cultural modernization of the South. By showing how battles over beauty came to a head during the civil rights movement, Roberts sheds new light on the tactics southerners used to resist and achieve desegregation.

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