Women's History Month

Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, "the complex confluence of identities--race, class, gender, and sexuality--systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.

The cultural and ethnic diversity of contemporary American society is represented in plays by women. These women playwrights of diverse backgrounds, however, are too infrequently seen on the stage or read in the classroom. This reference highlights the careers and work of more than 80 women playwrights whose writings portray the African American, Latina, Asian American and lesbian sensibility in the United States. Each profile includes a biographical sketch, a description of plays, a selected production history of each work, information on the availability of plays, awards won by the playwright, and a selected bibliography of critical articles and reviews.

Strange Fruit explores the story of the memorable civil rights ballad made famous by Billie Holiday in the late 1930s. The song's powerful, evocative lyrics-written by a Jewish communist schoolteacher who, late in life, adopted the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg-portray the lynching of a black man in the South. Holiday's performances sparked conflict and controversy wherever she went, and the song has since been covered by Lena Horne, Tori Amos, Sting, and countless others. Margolick's careful reconstruction of the story behind the song, portions of which have appeared in Vanity Fair, includes a discography of "Strange Fruit" recordings as well as newly uncovered photographs that capture Holiday in performance at Greenwich Village's Café Society.

The growth of Las Vegas that began in the 1940s brought an influx of both women and men looking to work in the expanding hotel and casino industries. In fact, for the next fifty years the proportion of women in the labor force was greater in Las Vegas than the United States as a whole. Joanne L. Goodwin's study captures the shifting boundaries of women's employment in the postwar decades with narratives drawn from the Las Vegas Women Oral History Project. These narratives show women in Las Vegas resisting preassigned roles, seeing their work as a testimony of skill, a measure of independence, and a fulfillment of needs. Overall, these stories of women who lived and worked in Las Vegas in the last half of the twentieth century reveal much about the broader transitions for women in America between 1940 and 1990

Holding the Line, Barbara Kingsolver's first non-fiction book, is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters. Hundreds of families held the line in the 1983 strike against Phelps Dodge Copper in Arizona.

Contentious Lives examines the ways popular protests are experienced and remembered, individually and collectively, by those who participate in them. Javier Auyero focuses on the roles of two young women, Nana and Laura, in uprisings in Argentina (the two-day protest in the northwestern city of Santiago del Estero in 1993 and the six-day road blockade in the southern oil towns of Cutral-co and Plaza Huincul in 1996) and the roles of the protests in their lives.

Women's Activism and Globalization is a broad and comprehensive collection that shows how women activists across the globe are responding to the forces of the new world order in their communities. The first person accounts and regional case studies provide a truly global view of women working in their communities for change. The essays examine women in urban, rural, and suburban locations around the world to provide a rich understanding of the common themes as well as significant divergences among women activists in different parts of the world.

Only seventeen women have won the Nobel Prize for Peace since it was first awarded in 1901. Hailing from all over the world, some of these women have held graduate degrees, while others barely had access to education. Some began their work young, some late in life. In this compelling book, Judith Stiehm narrates these women's varied lives in fascinating detail.