Exploring Women's Studies - New book
Exploring Women's Studies: Looking Forward, Looking Back, a major new anthology that chronicles the rise of women's studies across the disciplines over a 30-year period, has just been published by Prentice Hall. Its editors are Carol Berkin, Professor of History at CUNY and a noted women's studies scholar; Judith L. Pinch, Senior Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; and Carole S. Appel, former Women's Studies Editor at the University of Illinois Press. Judith Pinch, who directed the program of Woodrow Wilson Women's Studies Fellowships for many years, was a member of SVHE's Executive Committee for several years. The twenty contributors to the book all held Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Grants in Women's Studies between 1974 and 2001.
The book brings together historians, anthropologists, literary critics, sociologists, art historians, and cinema scholars to examine and exemplify the evolution of women's studies as an academic discipline. The Woodrow Wilson program that funded their early research remains the first and only national program of its kind. As Anne Firor Scott, professor emerita of history at Duke, says in the book's introduction, "Underlying the new scholarship were precepts that could be summed up in two words: gender matters." In addition to scholarly articles, each chapter is prefaced by a brief autobiographical essay explaining why the author became interested in women's studies and how the field has changed over the years.
Contributors include Pulitzer Prize winner Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, on the lives and work of women in early New England;
Miriam Cohen, Professor of History at Vassar College, n the politics of gender and schooling in the Progressive Era;
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Professor of Women's studies and English at Spelman College on African feminism;
Martha Nell Smith, Professor of English and Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology on the Humanities, on how feminism and technology are transforming the humanities;
Shanshan Du, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University on sexual division of labor among the peoples of Southwest China.
Judith is also proud to say that one of the contributors is her daughter, Adela Pinch, Associate Professor of Women's Studies and English at the University of Michigan, writing on "Stealing Happiness: Women Shoplifters in Georgian England."
Review copies of the book, which is designed for scholars and students in women's studies courses and general readers interested in history, literature, and the social sciences, may be obtained by calling 1-800-526-0485 or visiting www.prenticehall.com.