Offers advice on diet, exercise, sexuality, and self-image for middle aged women. Includes the Prime Time Workout.

From Girl to Woman examines the coming-of-age narratives of a diverse group of American women writers, including Annie Dillard, Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Mary McCarthy, and explores the crucial role of such narratives in the development of American feminism. Women have long known that identity is complex and contradictory, but in the twentieth century their coming-of-age narratives finally voice this knowledge. Addressing a variety of themes—awakening sexuality, the body's metamorphosis in puberty, consciousness of difference from males, and the socialization into feminine gender roles—these narratives reject the heroine's narrative ending in romance, allowing American women writers to create alternative subjectivities by rejecting the notion that identity is ever fixed. While activists have succeeded in winning legal battles that have changed the legal status of women, these narratives perform the cultural work of exposing the painful contradictions faced by women as they come of age.

“I am here. You will never be alone. We are dancing for you.” So begins Cutcha Risling Baldy’s deeply personal account of the revitalization of the women’s coming-of-age ceremony for the Hoopa Valley Tribe. At the end of the twentieth century, the tribe’s Flower Dance had not been fully practiced for decades. The women of the tribe, recognizing the critical importance of the tradition, undertook its revitalization using the memories of elders and medicine women and details found in museum archives, anthropological records, and oral histories. Deeply rooted in Indigenous knowledge, Risling Baldy brings us the voices of people transformed by cultural revitalization, including the accounts of young women who have participated in the Flower Dance. Using a framework of Native feminisms, she locates this revival within a broad context of decolonizing praxis and considers how this renaissance of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies confounds ethnographic depictions of Native women; challenges anthropological theories about menstruation, gender, and coming-of-age; and addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities.

Much of what we know about life in the medieval Islamic Middle East comes from texts written to impart religious ideals or to chronicle the movements of great men. How did women participate in the societies these texts describe? What about non-Muslims, whose own religious traditions descended partly from pre-Islamic late antiquity? Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt approaches these questions through Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). Using hundreds of everyday papers preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Eve Krakowski follows the lives of girls from different social classes—rich and poor, secluded and physically mobile—as they prepared to marry and become social adults. She argues that the families on whom these girls depended were more varied, fragmented, and fluid than has been thought. Krakowski also suggests a new approach to religious identity in premodern Islamic societies—and to the history of rabbinic Judaism. Through the lens of women’s coming-of-age, she demonstrates that even Jews who faithfully observed rabbinic law did not always understand the world in rabbinic terms. By tracing the fault lines between rabbinic legal practice and its practitioners’ lives, Krakowski explains how rabbinic Judaism adapted to the Islamic Middle Ages. Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt offers a new way to understand how women took part in premodern Middle Eastern societies, and how families and religious law worked in the medieval Islamic world.

In all of your gorgeous shades and hues, black girls, this book is for you! Stereotypes and images tell us how to dress and think, but what truly defines you? Have you ever looked in the mirror and felt that your weight, hair, or skin tone were inadequate and didnt measure up to others? Navigating through self-acceptance can be difficultnot to mention dealing with relationships and family dynamics. But through this book, you will discover that you are not alone. For Black Girls is about coming of age and taking control of your life and making choices that will set you on the path to self-discovery. For Black Girls will help you do the following: Discover the difference between your identity and stereotypes Develop life and career goals Appreciate your unique beauty and worth Use concrete tools to break destructive habits in relationships Make meaningful relationship goals Find strategies for time management Learn to be healthy and accept your body Identify what your spending habits say about you and how to change them It includes questions for individual/group reflection and discussions. As you take charge of your life, watch as you emerge and flourish into the beautiful young woman you were meant to be!

'In Jennifer Makumbi, we have a giant of literature living among us.' Peter Kalu, Jhalak Prize Judge Longlisted for the Diverse Book Awards, 2021 'Jennifer Makumbi is a genius storyteller.' Reni Eddo-Lodge A SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY MAIL, BBC CULTURE & IRISH INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR At once epic and deeply personal, the second novel from prize-winning author Jennifer Makumbi is an intoxicating mix of Ugandan folklore and modern feminism that will linger in the memory long after the final page. As Kirabo enters her teens, questions begin to gnaw at her – questions which the adults in her life will do anything to ignore. Where is the mother she has never known? And why would she choose to leave her daughter behind? Inquisitive, headstrong, and unwilling to take no for an answer, Kirabo sets out to find the truth for herself. Her search will take her away from the safety of her prosperous Ugandan family, plunging her into a very different world of magic, tradition, and the haunting legend of 'The First Woman'.

The book discusses a selection of coming-of-age narratives that offer a revisiting of the classic Bildungsroman heroine – the young white middle-class woman – and present her developments in postwar and postmillennial British literature. In terms of theoretical approaches, the study draws on works by the feminist critics whose incorporation of gender into the studies of the Bildungsroman resulted in the delineation of the female version of the genre, the female Bildungsroman and its specific twentieth-century variation, the feminist Bildungsroman. The selected coming-of-age novels present further transformations of the female Bildungsroman. The classic heroine of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bildung narratives reappears in twentieth-century novels as a modern girl who experiences a significant rise of feminist consciousness. In more recent works, she becomes a postfeminist girl who questions “victim feminism” and tests the potential of “girl power” to subvert the patriarchal tradition. Relating the postfeminist developments of the girl heroine to the influence of contemporary media culture, the book explores whether these literary representations of girlhood incorporate antifeminist backlash messages. It will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of literary and girls’ studies, particularly those who want to see new trends and issues in young adult fiction in the context of a literary tradition.