March 8th is International Women’s Day, and to recognize the ongoing struggle for equal rights for women across the world, UC Press is spotlighting books that shine light on the issues facing women in America and across the globe.
Fighting Mad
Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade
edited by Krystale E. Littlejohn and Rickie Solinger
The essayists and change agents gathered in Fighting Mad represent a remarkable breadth of expertise: activists and artists, academics and abortion storytellers, health care professionals and legislators, clinic directors and lawyers, and so many more. They discuss abortion restrictions and strategies to provide care, the impacts of criminalization, efforts to protect the targeted, shortcomings of the past, and visions for the next generation. Fighting Mad captures for the social and historical record the vigorous resistance happening in the early post-Roe moment to show that there are millions on the ground fighting to secure a better future.
Accidental Sisters
Refugee Women Struggling Together for a New American Dream
by Kimberly Meyer and Alia Altikrity
with a foreword by Ilhan Omar
Accidental Sisters follows five refugee women in Houston, Texas, as they navigate a program for single mothers overseen by Alia Altikrity, a former refugee from Iraq. Grounded in the words of these women—Mina from Iraq, Mendy from Sudan, Sara and Zara from Syria, and Elikya from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—this book recounts their lives in their mother countries, how they were forced to flee, and their struggles to find belonging in an epicenter of refugee resettlement.
Twelve Feminist Lessons of War
by Cynthia Enloe
Twelve Feminist Lessons of War draws on firsthand experiences of war from women in places as diverse as Ukraine, Myanmar, Somalia, Vietnam, Rwanda, Algeria, Syria, and Northern Ireland to show how women’s wars are not men’s wars. With her engaging trademark style, Cynthia Enloe demonstrates how patriarchy and militarism have embedded themselves in our institutions and our personal lives.
America, Goddam
Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice
by Treva B. Lindsey
America, Goddam explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today. Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis, Black feminist historian Treva B. Lindsey starkly assesses the forms and legacies of violence against Black women and girls, as well as their demands for justice for themselves and their communities. Combining history, theory, and memoir, America, Goddam renders visible the gender dynamics of anti-Black violence.
Abortion Pills Go Global
Reproductive Freedom across Borders
by Sydney Calkin
Taking a bold and unique geographic approach, this book follows these pills as they are manufactured and transported by feminist activists from India to Ireland, Northern Ireland, Poland, and the United States. Sydney Calkin shows that the growing availability of abortion pills in places with restrictive laws means more people have access to self-managed healthcare. Abortion Pills Go Global looks ahead to see how the broader politics of abortion could shift in response to this global movement—one that looks not to laws for protection but to on-the-ground feminist mobilizations across borders.
Sisters in the Mirror
A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism
by Elora Shehabuddin
Muslim women, like other women around the world, have been engaged in their own struggles for generations: as individuals and in groups that include but also extend beyond their religious identity and religious practices. The modern and globally enmeshed Muslim world they navigate has often been at the weaker end of disparities of wealth and power, of processes of colonization and policies of war, economic sanctions, and Western feminist outreach. Importantly, Muslims have long constructed their own ideas about women’s and men’s lives in the West, with implications for how they articulate their feminist dreams for their own societies.
Stretching from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era to the War on Terror present, Sisters in the Mirror shows how changes in women’s lives and feminist strategies have consistently reflected wider changes in national and global politics and economics.