Penn Press is celebrating Women’s History Month by sharing a collection of books in women’s history and studies that we have published in the past six years—and through the end of March, we’re offering 40% off all titles in the collection, plus free shipping on orders over $40! Today’s post showcases a handful of highlights from the collection. Browse the list below, and use code PENN-WHM2024 at checkout to receive your discount.
Through the Morgue Door
Colette Brull-Ulmann and Jean-Christophe Portes
A young Jewish medical intern finds, to her horror, that the Rothschild Hospital has become a waystation for the death trains to Auschwitz—but not for the children she helps whisk away to safety through a clandestine hospital network. A true account of the ignominious assault on the Jewish spirit in 1940s Paris and the life of a courageous woman.
A Home Away from Home
Tyesha Maddox
A Home Away from Home examines the significance of mutual aid societies to the Caribbean immigrant experience in the twentieth century. These societies facilitated further immigration through their networks, provided various forms of support, fostered a shared West Indian ethnic identity, and strengthened kinship networks with those back home.
Counseling Women
Julia Kowalski
Drawing on ethnographic research at counseling centers in Jaipur, Rajasthan, Julia Kowalski reassesses Western liberal feminism’s notions of what it means to have agency and retheorizes the role of interdependence in gendered violence and inequality as not only a site of vulnerability but a potential source of strength.
Pan American Women
Megan Threlkeld
In Citizens of the World, Megan Threlkeld profiles nine women who between 1900 and 1950 invoked world citizenship to demand participation in shaping the global polity and to express women’s obligation to work for peace and equality.
Undoing Slavery
Kathleen M. Brown
Undoing Slavery excavates medical and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Facing many challenges to their goal of restoring embodied self-sovereignty to the enslaved, abolitionists learned that legal rights alone, while necessary, were not sufficient either to protect or heal the bodies of African-descended people from the consequences of slavery and racism.
Heroines and Local Girls
Pamela L. Cheek
In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women’s writing as a distinct, transnational category in Britain and Europe over the long eighteenth century, characterized by stories about heroines who transcend their gendered destiny.
Artificial Life After Frankenstein
Eileen M. Hunt
Beginning with Mary Shelley’s great novels, Frankenstein and The Last Man, Eileen M. Hunt’s Artificial Life After Frankenstein reveals the techno-political stakes of modern political science fiction and brings them to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century.
A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy
Jacques Dalarun, Sean L. Field and Valerio Cappozzo
A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy presents the text of the Life of the Blessed Clare of Rimini in English translation for the first time. It tells the story of a controversial woman, set against the background of her roiling city, her star-crossed family, and the tumultuous political and religious landscape of her age.
Dispossessed Lives
Marisa J. Fuentes
Vividly recounting the lives of enslaved women in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados, and their conditions of confinement through urban, legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, authorities, and the archive, Marisa J. Fuentes challenges how histories of vulnerable and invisible subjects are written.
Divorce, American Style
Suzanne Kahn
Divorce, American Style contests the frequent claim that marriage has become a more flexible legal status over time. Enduring ideas about marriage and the family continue to have a powerful effect on the structure of a wide range of social programs in the United States.
Frontiers of Gender Equality
Edited by Rebecca J. Cook
Frontiers of Gender Equality introduces new and different discourses about the wrongs of gender discrimination and explains the multiple dimensions of gender equality. The book provides retrospective views of the struggles to eliminate gender discrimination in national and international contexts and suggests areas of future research.
“Ethel’s Love-Life” and Other Writings
Margaret J. M. Sweat
Edited and with an introduction by Christopher Looby
“Ethel’s Love-Life” and Other Writings presents an annotated edition of what’s sometimes called the first American “lesbian” novel, with an introduction by Christopher Looby, as well as a collection of author Margaret J. M. Sweat’s poetry and her published essays on Charlotte Brontë, George Sand, the novel, and the friendships of women.
Contested Bodies
Sasha Turner
Contested Bodies explores how the end of the transatlantic trade impacted Jamaican slaves and their children. Examining the struggles for control over biological reproduction, Turner shows how central childbearing was to the organization of plantation work, the care of slaves, and the development of their culture.
