Despite women's many gains in the political, economic, and social spheres, equality remains elusive—and in some areas, ground is being lost. Why? Why does the pay gap between women and men persist? Why is sexual harassment and assault so prevalent in schools and universities? Why are efforts to diminish women's individual autonomy, restricting their access to reproductive health    More >

Scholars and pundits alike have spent more than a little time speculating about why Hillary Clinton lost the presidency to Donald Trump in 2016. Their conclusions may differ, but few would disagree that Clinton's nomination by a major party changed the political landscape in significant ways—nor that the results of the 2016 election provoked a large number of women to run for office at    More >

Avengers. PerSisters. The pink wave. And even badasses. These terms have been used to refer to the unprecedented number of female candidates who ran for elected office in the United States in 2018. Barbara Burrell explores this phenomenon—in the context of women's candidacies for election to the US House of Representatives—discussing who the women were, why they chose to run,    More >

From Brazil to Bangladesh, Liberia to Switzerland, Malta to the Marshall Islands, more and more women are rising to the top level of political leadership. What can we learn from this?  What kinds of conditions and political institutions pave the way for a woman's ascendance to power? Are there common pathways to power? How much do family ties matter? Is political activism and important    More >

Heda Margolius Kovály (1919–2010) endured both the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and the brutality of Czechoslovakia's postwar Stalinist government. Her husband, after surviving Dachau and Auschwitz and becoming Czechoslovakia's deputy minister of foreign trade, was convicted of conspiracy in the infamous 1952 Slansky trial and then executed. This clear-eyed memoir of her life    More >

Drawing on her own experiences, Tumi Mampane provides deep insights into the daily lives of women in a South African Pentecostal community. Equally, she relates those insights to Black/African feminist and womanist theory. Her autoethnographic study exposes the complexities and contestations that exist not only in Charismatic discourses, but also in the relationships that the community's women    More >

When Lauretta Ngcobo died in 2015, Africa lost a significant literary talent, freedom fighter, and feminist voice. Ngcobo was one of the pioneering writers who first published novels in English from the vantage point of black women. Along with Bessie Head and Miriam Tlali, she showed the world, through her fiction, what it was like to be a black woman in apartheid South Africa. Barbara Boswell    More >