The author of Pink Think takes on a twentieth-century icon: the college girl. A geek who wears glasses? Or a sex kitten in a teddy? This is the dual vision of the college girl, the unique American archetype born when the age-old conflict over educating women was finally laid to rest. College was a place where women found self-esteem, and yet images in popular culture reflected a lingering distrust of the educated woman. Thus such lofty cultural expressions as Sex Kittens Go to College (1960) and a raft of naughty pictorials in men’s magazines. As in Pink Think, Lynn Peril combines women’s history and popular culture—peppered with delightful examples of femoribilia from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1970s—in an intelligent and witty study of the college girl, the first woman to take that socially controversial step toward educational equity.
Strippers, zombies, fugitives and jewel thieves. These were just some of the characters who inhabited the weird, wild films of director Stephen C. Apostolof in the 1960s and 1970s. But Apostolof's own life was every bit as improbable as the plots of his lurid movies. Escaping the clutches of the communists in his native Bulgaria, he came to America in 1952 and decided on a whim to reinvent himself as a Hollywood filmmaker, right down to the cigars, sunglasses and Cadillacs. He produced a string of memorable sexploitation classics, including the infamous Orgy of the Dead. Along the way, he married three times, fathered five children and forged a personal and professional relationship with the notorious Ed Wood, Jr. Drawing on rare archival material and interviews with those who knew him best, this first biography of Apostolof chronicles the life and career of a cult film legend.
Throughout the twentieth century, popular songs, magazine articles, plays, posters, and novels alternated between representing intelligence as empowering and as threatening. In Inventing the Egghead, Aaron Lecklider cracks open this paradox by examining representations of intelligence to reveal brainpower's stalwart appeal and influence.
Experts address key issues—from attitudes and behaviors to harassment and homophobia—related to sexuality among college students. With essays by a wide range of knowledgeable contributors, Sex in College: The Things They Don't Write Home About draws on recent research to examine just about every aspect of its intriguing subject. The book begins with general chapters that offer historical, cross-cultural, and theoretical perspectives on college students' sexual attitudes and behaviors. One chapter offers a framework for understanding the unique developmental perspective of young adults. Another chapter explores the research methods used to study college students' sexual practices. Subsequent chapters cover: dating and intimacy on campus, the perspective of young adults about love, sexuality education and classes, and sexual orientation. The darker side of college sexuality is also examined in chapters centering on such topics as infidelity in college dating relationships, homophobia and sexual harassment on campus, sexual risk-taking and sexually transmitted infections, sexual problems and dysfunction among young adults, and sexual assault among college students.
At twenty-three, Wendy Shalit punctured conventional wisdom with A Return to Modesty, arguing that our hope for true lasting love is not a problem to be fixed but rather a wonderful instinct that forms the basis for civilization. Now, in Girls Gone Mild, the brilliantly outspoken author investigates an emerging new movement. Despite nearly-naked teen models posing seductively to sell us practically everything, and the proliferation of homemade sex tapes as star-making vehicles, a youth-led rebellion is already changing course. In Seattle and Pittsburgh, teenage girls protest against companies that sell sleazy clothing. Online, a nineteen-year-old describes her struggles with her mother, who she feels is pressuring her to lose her virginity. In a small town outside Philadelphia, an eleventh-grade girl, upset over a “dirty book” read aloud in English class, takes her case to the school board. These are not your mother’s rebels. In an age where pornography is mainstream, teen clothing seems stripper-patented, and “experts” recommend that we learn to be emotionally detached about sex, a key (and callously) targeted audience–girls–is fed up. Drawing on numerous studies and interviews, Shalit makes the case that today’s virulent “bad girl” mindset most truly oppresses young women. Nowadays, as even the youngest teenage girls feel the pressure to become cold sex sirens, put their bodies on public display, and suppress their feelings in order to feel accepted and (temporarily) loved, many young women are realizing that “friends with benefits” are often anything but. And as these girls speak for themselves, we see that what is expected of them turns out to be very different from what is in their own hearts. Shalit reveals how the media, one’s peers, and even parents can undermine girls’ quests for their authentic selves, details the problems of sex without intimacy, and explains what it means to break from the herd mentality and choose integrity over popularity. Written with sincerity and upbeat humor, Girls Gone Mild rescues the good girl from the realm of mythology and old manners guides to show that today’s version is the real rebel: She is not “people pleasing” or repressed; she is simply reclaiming her individuality. These empowering stories are sure to be an inspiration to teenagers and parents alike.
Across the country, there’s a youth-led rebellion challenging the status quo. In Seattle and Pittsburgh, teenage girls protest against companies that sell sleazy clothing. Online, a nineteen-year-old describes her struggles with her mother, who she feels is pressuring her to lose her virginity. In a small town outside Philadelphia, an eleventh-grade girl, upset over a “dirty book” read aloud in English class, takes her case to the school board. These are not your mother’s rebels. Drawing on numerous studies and interviews, the brilliant Wendy Shalit makes the case that today’s virulent “bad girl” mindset truly oppresses young women. She reveals how the media, one’s peers, and even parents can undermine girls’ quests for their authentic selves, and explains what it means to break from the herd mentality and choose integrity over popularity. Written with sincerity and upbeat humor, The Good Girl Revolution rescues the good girl from the realm of mythology and old manners guides to show that today’ s version is the real rebel. Society may perceive the good girl as “mild,” but Shalit demonstrates that she is in fact the opposite. The new female role models are not “people pleasing” or repressed; they are outspoken and reclaiming their individuality. These empowering stories are sure to be an inspiration to teenagers and parents alike. Join the conversation at www.thegoodgirlrevolution.com
This book explores how deans of women actively fostered feminism in the mid-twentieth century through a study of the career of Dr. Emily Taylor, the University of Kansas dean of women from 1956-1974. Sartorius links feminist activism by deans of women with labor activism, the New Left movement, and the later rise of women's studies as a discipline.
In this work the various ways that social, economic, and cultural factors influence the identities and educational aspirations of rural working-class Appalachian learners are explored. The objectives are to highlight the cultural obstacles that impact the intellectual development of such students and to address how these cultural roadblocks make transitioning into college difficult. Throughout the book, the author draws upon his personal experiences as a first-generation college student from a small coalmining town in rural West Virginia. Both scholarly and personal, the book blends critical theory, ethnographic research, and personal narrative to demonstrate how family work histories and community expectations both shape and limit the academic goals of potential Appalachian college students.
Since the mid-twentieth century, the United States has seen a striking shift in the gender dynamics of higher educational attainment as women have come to earn college degrees at higher rates than men. Women have also made significant strides in terms of socioeconomic status and political engagement. What explains the progress that American women have made since the 1960s? While many point to the feminist movement as the critical turning point, this book makes the case that women's movement toward first class citizenship has been shaped not only by important societal changes, but also by the actions of lawmakers who used a combination of redistributive and regulatory higher education policies to enhance women's incorporation into their roles as American citizens. Examining the development and impact of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the Higher Education Act of 1965, and Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, Deondra Rose in Citizens By Degree argues that higher education policies represent a crucial-though largely overlooked-factor shaping the progress that women have made. By significantly expanding women's access to college, they helped to pave the way for women to surpass men as the recipients of bachelor's degrees, while also empowering them to become more economically independent, socially integrated, politically engaged members of the American citizenry. In addition to helping to bring into greater focus our understanding of how Southern Democrats shaped U.S. social policy development during the mid-twentieth century, Rose's analysis recognizes federal higher education policy as an indispensible component of the American welfare state.
New England blossomed in the nineteenth century, producing a crop of distinctively American writers along with distinguished philosophers and jurists, abolitionists and scholars. A few of the female stars of this era-Emily Dickinson, Margaret Fuller, and Susan B. Anthony, for instance-are still appreciated, but there are a number of intellectual women whose crucial roles in the philosophical, social, and scientific debates that roiled the era have not been fully examined. Among them is the astronomer Maria Mitchell. She was raised in isolated but cosmopolitan Nantucket, a place brimming with enthusiasm for intellectual culture and hosting the luminaries of the day, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Sojourner Truth. Like many island girls, she was encouraged to study the stars. Given the relative dearth of women scientists today, most of us assume that science has always been a masculine domain. But as Renee Bergland reminds us, science and humanities were not seen as separate spheres in the nineteenth century; indeed, before the Civil War, women flourished in science and mathematics, disciplines that were considered less politically threatening and less profitable than the humanities. Mitchell apprenticed with her father, an amateur astronomer; taught herself the higher math of the day; and for years regularly "swept" the clear Nantucket night sky with the telescope in her rooftop observatory. In 1847, thanks to these diligent sweeps, Mitchell discovered a comet and was catapulted to international fame. Within a few years she was one of America's first professional astronomers; as "computer of Venus"-a sort of human calculator-for the U.S. Navy's Nautical Almanac, she calculated the planet's changing position. After an intellectual tour of Europe that included a winter in Rome with Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mitchell was invited to join the founding faculty at Vassar College, where she spent her later years mentoring the next generation of women astronomers. Tragically, opportunities for her students dried up over the next few decades as the increasingly male scientific establishment began to close ranks. Mitchell protested this cultural shift in vain. "The woman who has peculiar gifts has a definite line marked out for her," she wrote, "and the call from God to do his work in the field of scientific investigation may be as imperative as that which calls the missionary into the moral field or the mother into the family . . . The question whether women have the capacity for original investigation in science is simply idle until equal opportunity is given them." In this compulsively readable biography, Renee Bergland chronicles the ideological, academic, and economic changes that led to the original sexing of science-now so familiar that most of us have never known it any other way. "The best thing in its line since Dava Sobel's Longitude. Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science tells a great, if too little known, story of an intellectual woman in 19th century New England. And it is beautifully told: I simply could not put it down. Anyone who cares about women's education in America should read this compelling and indispensable book." -Robert D. Richardson, author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism "Renee Bergland recounts the story of Maria Mitchell's life and work in glorious and careful detail. One feels and hears the sounds of Mitchell's native Nantucket, her adopted Vassar, and comes to understand how one of the 'gentler sex' advanced astronomy in her day." -Londa Schiebinger, author of Has Feminism Changed Science?
