To celebrate Women’s History Month taking place throughout March, and International Women’s Day on the 8th March, we’ve put together a reading list featuring new, forthcoming and bestselling Women’s History titles from MUP.
All the books featured below are 50% for the whole month, simply add WHM22 at the checkout.
This book explores how theories of embodiment, the gesture, hysteria and subjectivity can deepen our understanding of New York abstract painting. Providing readings of paintings by Krasner and examining images of Pollock and Frankenthaler at work, it builds a bridge between the New York artist-women and their other, Marilyn Monroe.
Women art workers and the Arts and Crafts movement
Women Art Workers provides a new social and cultural history of the Arts and Crafts movement which offers unprecedented insight into how women constructed alternative, creative lifestyles and disseminated the ethos of the social importance of the Arts and Crafts across new local, national, and international spheres of influence.
This groundbreaking book highlights a generation of women who made art as a way of defining a culture of experimental thought and practice, against the backdrop of the French women's movement or Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (1970-81)
Coining the term "Jugoslovenka" to designate the unique history of Yugoslav women's resistance to patriarchy during and after socialism, this book shows how Yugoslavia's anti-fascist, transnational and feminist legacies manifest in performance, conceptual, video and activist works.
A crucial resource for specialists and students seeking to enrich their understanding of the relationship between gender politics and visual culture.
Gender, artWork and the global imperative
A theoretically astute overview of key developments in art and its contexts since the 1990s
A timely and coherent collection on conversion studies of the Early Modern period, considering themes of conversion, materiality, embodiment and early modern spaces across and beyond Europe.
The life of Una Marson, 1905-65
This is an original, full length biography of Britain's first twentieth-century black feminist - Una Marson - poet, playwright, and social activist and BBC broadcaster.
Una Marson is recognised today...
This is the unpublished autobiography of Kitty Marion, an actress, music hall performer, suffragette arsonist and campaigner in the American birth control movement. Written in the 1930s, Marion's story of activism offers a unique insight into a lifetime dedicated to the improvement of women's lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
A collection of essays on the legendary actress that uses archival sources in the US and UK to re-examine her attitude to acting and the public perception of her work.
Unearths new evidence to provide a richer understanding of the life of the Labour minister Ellen Wilkinson
'The World' and other unpublished works of Radclyffe Hall
Presents a wide range of previously unpublished works by Radclyffe Hall.
An original history of 13 women from the interwar years, who successfully challenged male dominance in a wide range of occupations from mountaineering, to motoring and humanitarian activism. Through their diaries, letters and other personal writings, we see the strategies they used to break free from domesticity and into the active, public world.
This book on internationally acclaimed film director Chantal Akerman provides an illuminating overview of her filmmaking and an in-depth analysis of her multi-faceted film style.
Analysing Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker's Doctor Who as a regendered, inclusive brand, this book features original interviews with cast/crew. It offers in-depth analysis of recent episodes and examines fans' reactions to the era, exploring how the experience economy displaced Who's public-service potential until lockdown restored it.
Actress, singer, indie icon and fashion muse, Charlotte Gainsbourg has left her mark on the cultural landscape through her daring artistic choices and creative collaborations. This book traces the development of her star persona while simultaneously interrogating transmedia and transnational stardom.
This is the first book on the celebrated films of director Claire Denis ('Chocolat', 'Beau Travail', 'Trouble Every Day'), one of the most remarkable filmmakers to come to prominence in the last 20 years. An essential read for students and specialists in contemporary French cinema.
The first full-length monograph in English devoted to one of the most acclaimed and controversial directors in contemporary cinema
Dobson provides detailed critical analysis of films by Dominique Cabrera, Laetitia Masson, Noémie Lvovsky and Marion Vernoux, and presents common threads including the possible construction of social intimacy, the political demystification of romance narratives and the role of nostalgia in contemporary French cinema.
A new edition of Jill Liddington's classic work on Anne Lister's extraordinary diaries, which inspired Gentleman Jack
Sexual Progressives is a major new study of the feminists and socialists who campaigned against the moral conservatism of Victorian Scotland. Drawing on a range of sources, from letters and diaries to radical newspapers and utopian novels, its arguments disrupt current understandings of progressive thought and behaviour in fin de siecle Britain.
This is the first study of women's leading contribution to animal protection in nineteenth-century Britai
Examines the links between beauty and politics in the Anglophone Caribbean
Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries
Magdalen history has long been marginalised. Even as women's activism and contributions are included in new histories of the revolutionary era, the lives of women regarded as marginal are still excluded. This collection examines how Magdalen history can contribute to a more nuanced, inclusive understanding of post-independence Irish history.
Intimacy and injury offers an original perspective on the #MeToo movement from South Africa and India. It overturns the dominance of western debates on #MeToo by foregrounding diverse southern feminist takes on the possibilities and limits of this movement in the global south.
Gender and punishment in Ireland
In the decades after Irish independence, 292 women were prosecuted for murder, facing the threat of conviction and death sentencing. Within a rising atmosphere of hostility to women, moral rigidity, sexual repression and Catholic Church control, this book explores the meanings and responses to women's lethal violence in postcolonial Ireland.
This book recounts a little-known history of an estimated 2,000 children born to black GIs and white British women in World War II. Stories from over 50 of these children, alongside many photographs, reveal the racism and stigma of growing up in what was then a very white country.
Women, workplace protest and political identity in England, 1968-85
This book revisits women's workplace protest from an historical perspective to deliver a new account of working-class women's political identity in England between 1968 and 1985.
This book analyses how three artists - Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero and Mary Kelly - worked with the visual dimensions of language in the 1960s and 1970s.
This book explores the contribution that five conservative, voluntary and popular women's organisations made to women's lives and to the campaign for women's rights throughout the period 1928-64.
During the Algerian War the French army engaged in the 'emancipation' of Muslim women, to subvert the nationalist movement while inflicting widespread violence. This contradictory, catastrophic policy, as in contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, revealed the failure of imposed Westernisation and triggered an Islamist backlash against women's rights.
Practicing shame explores how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to secure their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against shame. The book transforms our understanding of the construction of femininity in the past and offers a new framework for thinking about honourable womanhood now and in the years to come.
This book studies Crimean War nursing from a transnational perspective setting nursing in the five combatant armies into the wider context of European statecraft.
This book uses original oral history material and secretive Vatican papers to explore the sexual and religious experiences of Catholic women in post-war England. It offers a fresh perspective on the idea that 'sex killed God', reframing dominant approaches to the histories of sex, religion and social change.
This book covers the role played by British female doctors in the medicalisation of birth control and family planning at the national and transnational level between 1920-70. Drawing on a wide range of archived and published medical materials, Rusterholz sheds light on the strategies British female doctors used to position themselves as experts and leaders in birth control and family planning research and practice.
Women of war examines the FANY as a case study of gender modernity using newspapers, memoirs, diaries, letters interviews, photographs and poetry. While these New Women challenged the limits of convention in terms of behaviour, dress and role, they were simulataneously deepy conservative, upholding imperialist, unionist and anti-feminist values.
Explores Indian gender issues through diverse sources including letters, memoirs, fiction, housekeeping manuals, and forgotten texts from the colonial archives.
This book recovers the significant contribution made by women to museums, not just in obvious roles such as workers, but also as donors, visitors, volunteers and patrons. It suggests that women persistently...
Learning femininity in colonial India, 1820-1932
Provides a unique longitudinal study of women in colonial India, examining their life experiences and how their position changed, both personally and professionally, over more than a century of British rule.
British women of the Eastern Front
This book explores the experiences and contributions of British women performing active service across the Eastern Front in Serbia, Russia and Romania during the First World War, focusing on representation of that experience though a range of written records.
This study investigates the 'exceptional' staging of the life of Catherine of Siena by a female actor and a female patron in 1468 Metz. Integrating new approaches to drama, gender and patronage, it offers an original paradigm of female performance that positions women at the core of public culture.
Between 1954 and 1962, Algerian women played a major role in the struggle to end French rule in one of the most violent wars of decolonisation of the twentieth century. Our Fighting Sisters is the first in-depth exploration of what happened to these women after independence in 1962.
The mobility of the Second World War, brought on by 'technological advances in destructive capabilities' needed new type of medical service. Success meant that expert care was needed near the frontline.
Women drinking out in Britain since the early twentieth century
Offers a way of conceptualising how women's drinking habits changed over more than a century in Britain.
In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and writing master class, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller's life and the questions which run through it.
Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë's life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Brontë's first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work has endured in so many different forms and contexts.
Drawing upon previously unseen archival material, this book brings to life the story of the Actresses' Franchise League from 1908-1958, building a picture of this diverse, exciting and innovative organisation that opens up and extends previous scholarship of the suffrage movement, and of political and feminist networks in twentieth century theatre.
The book offers five interlinked portraits of Irish women artists and political figures: Edna O'Brien, Sinéad O'Connor, Nuala O'Faolain, Bernadette McAliskey and Anne Enright.
Featuring essays by leading scholars of surrealism, this book offers the first sustained critical inquiry into the multifaceted writing of women associated with surrealism, and highlights howthis oeuvre intersects with and contributes to contemporary debates on gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment.
The poems of Elizabeth Siddal in context
Every Siddal poem is close read alongside works by Rossetti, Swinburne, Ruskin, Tennyson and Keats and with reference to prevailing cultural, political and religious contexts to give the most comprehensive analysis yet of this enigmatic, previously undervalued poetic voice.
Women poets of the English Civil War
Featuring modernised spelling and detailed explanatory notes, this anthology of Civil War-era women poets is perfect for students of English literature and early modern studies.
Swoon is the first extensive study of literary swooning, homing in on swooning's rich history as well as its potential to provide new insights into the contemporary. It offers an exciting new approach the history of the body alongside the history of literary response.
Women of letters writes a new history of English women's intellectual worlds using their private letters as evidence of hidden networks of creative exchange. The book argues that many women of this period engaged with a life of the mind and demonstrates the dynamic role letter-writing played in the development of ideas.
Victorian touring actresses provides a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century theatre and the careers of previously neglected British women who had once starred at home and abroad. Chapters explore debuts, establishing a name, working life in the UK, touring North America, long-distance colonial touring, management, offstage life and ageing.
This is the first academic book ever written on women and body hair. The study argues that body hair plays a central role in constructing masculinity and femininity and sexual and cultural identitiesThe chapters each analyse through a specific focus how body hair underpins ideas of the 'cultural' and 'natural' in western culture.
This book presents cutting-edge historical and cultural essays in the field of women, theatre and performance. It explore women's networks of professional practice in the performance industries between 1900 and 1950, with a focus on women's sense and experience of professional agency in an industry largely controlled by men.
Phipps argues that the mainstream movement against sexual violence embodies a political whiteness
which both reflects its demographics and limits its revolutionary potential.
This book makes the case for an inclusive form of socialist feminism that puts multiply disadvantaged women at its heart. It moves feminism beyond contemporary disputes, including those between some feminists and some trans women. Its combination of accessibility, new thinking and academic rigour will make it attractive to a wide market.
Violence against women's health in international law
Taking the Hippocratic paradigm as backbone of the analysis, the book conceptualises a new notion under international law, 'violence against women's health', which allows the reader to reflect on two interrelated dimensions of violence, the horizontal 'inter-personal' and the vertical 'State policies' ones, and on obligations States must abide by.
Table for one: A critical reading of singlehood, gender and time is the first book to consider the profound relationship between singlehood and time.
Rethinking Right-wing Women traces the mobilization of women for the UK Conservative Party from the period before their enfranchisement to Theresa May. As party workers and organisers, MPs and leaders, and as voters, women have been fundamental to the success of the Conservative Party.
Women and ETA is the first book-length study of women in radical Basque nationalism. It uses a unique body of oral history interviews to examine the history of women as supporters and direct participants in ETA, including violence, from 1959 to the period before ETA's declaration of a permanent ceasefire in March 2006.