5th Edition
Unequal Sisters A Revolutionary Reader in U.S. Women’s History
Unequal Sisters has become a beloved and classic reader, providing an unparalleled resource for understanding women’s history in the United States today.
First published in 1990, the book revolutionized the field with its broad multicultural approach, emphasizing feminist perspectives on race, ethnicity, region, and sexuality, and covering the colonial period to the present day. Now in its fifth edition, the book presents an even wider variety of women’s experiences. This new edition explores the connections between the past and the present and highlights the analysis of queerness, transgender identity, disability, the rise of the carceral state, and the bureaucratization and militarization of migration. There is also more coverage of Indigenous and Pacific Islander women. The book is structured around thematic clusters: conceptual/methodological approaches to women’s history; bodies, sexuality, and kinship; and agency and activism.
This classic work has incorporated the feedback of educators in the field to make it the most user-friendly version to date and will be of interest to students and scholars of women’s history, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of race and ethnicity.
0. When and Where We Entered Unequal Sisters: A Revolutionary Reader in U.S. Women’s History I. Conceptualizing Women of Color History 1. Multi-generational Indigenous Feminisms: From F word to what Ifs 2. Venus in Two Acts 3. Raiz Fuerte: Oral History and Mexicana Farmworkers 4. Unpacking Our Mothers’ Libraries: Practices of Chicana Memory before and after the Digital Turn 5. Daughter of a Daughter: The Labor of Memorykeeping 6. bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans 7. Rechronicling Histories: Toward a Hmong Feminist Perspective 8. Sexuality, Migration, And The Shifting Line Between Legal And Illegal Status 9. Transgender: A Useful Category?: Or, How the Historical Study of "Transsexual" and "Transvestite" Can Help Us Rethink "Transgender" as a Category II. The Politics of the Body and Kinship 10. ‘[A]n Unpleasant Transaction on This Frontier’: Challenging Female Autonomy and Authority at Michilimackinac 11. The Narrative of Nancy, a Cherokee Woman 12. ‘[S]he could … spare one ample breast for the profit of her owner’: white mothers and enslaved wet nurses’ invisible labor in American slave markets 13. Mothering the ‘Useless’: Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery 14. The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830-1861 15. Open Secrets: Memory, Imagination, and the Refashioning of Southern Identity 16. ‘Crimes Which Startle and Horrify’: Gender, Age, and the Racialization of Sexual Violence in White American Newspapers, 1870-1900 17. Challenging Dissemblance in Pauli Murray Historiography, Sketching a History of the Trans New Negro 18. Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America 19. A History of Chamorro Nurse-Midwives in Guam and a 'Placental Politics' for Indigenous Feminism 20. Intergenerational Ties: Diné Memories of the Crownpoint Boarding School during the 1960s 21. Sex, Lies, and Agriculture: Reconstructing Japanese Immigrant Gender Relations in Rural California, 1900–1913 22. 'Up to My Elbows in Rice!’: Women Building Communities and Sustaining Families in Pre- 1965 Filipina/o America 23. A Dreadful Mosaic: Rethinking Gender Violence through the Lives of Indigenous Women Migrants III. Women of Color as Global Activists 24. ‘I'm a Radical Black Girl’: Black Women Unionists and the Politics of Civil War History 25. A Delicate Subject: Clemencia López, Civilized Womanhood, and the Politics of Anti-Imperialism 26. ‘Our Democracy and the American Indian’: Citizenship, Sovereignty, and the Native Vote in the 1920s 27. Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930 28. ‘A Picture of Peace’: Friendship in Interwar Pacific Women’s Internationalism 29. Transnational Pan-American Feminism: The Friendship of Bertha Lutz and Mary Wilhelmine Williams, 1926–1944 30. Elizabeth Peratrovich, the Alaska Native Sisterhood, and Indigenous Women’s Activism, 1945-1948 31. Ruth Reynolds, Solidarity Activism, and the Struggle against U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico 32. Engendering the Black Freedom Struggle: Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, California 33. Refocusing Chicana International Feminism: Photographs, Postmemory, and Political Trauma 34. Arab and Black Feminisms: Joint Struggle and Transnational Anti-Imperialist Activism 35. Guns and Motherhood: A Millennial Maternalism 36. Geographies of Difference: Transborder Organizing and Indigenous Women's Activism
Biography
Stephanie Narrow is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine.
Kim Cary Warren is an associate professor of History in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and an Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the School of Professional Studies at the University of Kansas.
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, Director of the Humanities Center and Center for Liberation, Anti-Racism, and Belonging, and Associate Dean for Research, Faculty Development, and Public Engagement.
Vicki L. Ruiz is Distinguished Professor of History and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
"A panoply of intricate histories, the fifth edition of Unequal Sisters presents women in dynamic movement: forging networks, engaging in political struggle, and challenging boundaries. Showcasing new directions in feminist thought, this vital reader brings the past into illuminating conversations with the present."
Valerie Matsumoto, Professor and George and Sakaye Aratani Chair on the Japanese American Incarceration, Redress and Community, UCLA
"With new essays, the fifth edition of Unequal Sisters is perhaps the strongest yet in terms of depth, breadth, and diversity of analysis. It is an exciting, vital mix of now-classic statements and cutting-edge work that brilliantly illuminates the complexities of ethnicity, race, class, region, gender, and sexuality. The anthology is undoubtedly among the very best in the field."
Michele Mitchell, author of Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction
"Grounded in the exploration of gender, race, class, and generational differences, this new edition of Unequal Sisters proves, yet again, that the field of Women’s History continues to be at the forefront of our collective desire to understand the ways that women's complex pasts remain deeply relevant for all those who struggle for equality and a just society today. Without a doubt, this book is essential reading for all!"
Suzanne Oboler, author of Latinos and Citizenship: The Dilemma of Belonging
"This new collection remains true to the original reader's foundation as a resource for understanding U.S. women's history and its complexities. In its coverage of women of color and additional diverse ways of being, it showcases an ever-wider range of women's experiences and agency from the past to the present. Attention to new concepts, topics and less known groups of women make it an indispensable tool for advancing an inclusive women’s history."
Shirley Hune, author and co-editor of Our Voices, Our Histories: Asian American and Pacific Islander Women
