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Italians were the largest group of immigrants to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, and hundreds of thousands led and participated in some of the period's most volatile labor strikes. Jennifer Guglielmo brings to life the Italian working-class women of New York and New Jersey who helped shape the vibrant radical political culture that expanded into the emerging industrial union movement. Tracing two generations of women who worked in the needle and textile trades, she explores the ways immigrant women and their American-born daughters drew on Italian traditions of protest to form new urban female networks of everyday resistance and political activism. She also shows how their commitment to revolutionary and transnational social movements diminished as they became white working-class Americans.

Women Will Votecelebrates the 2017 centenary of women's right to full suffrage in New York State. Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello highlight the activism of rural, urban, African American, Jewish, immigrant, and European American women, as well as male suffragists, both upstate and downstate, that led to the positive outcome of the 1917 referendum. Goodier and Pastorello argue that the popular nature of the women's suffrage movement in New York State and the resounding success of the referendum at the polls relaunched suffrage as a national issue. If women had failed to gain the vote in New York, Goodier and Pastorello claim, there is good reason to believe that the passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment would have been delayed. Women Will Votemakes clear how actions of New York's patchwork of suffrage advocates heralded a gigantic political, social, and legal shift in the United States. Readers will discover that although these groups did not always collaborate, by working in their own ways toward the goal of enfranchising women they essentially formed a coalition. Together, they created a diverse social and political movement that did not rely solely on the motivating force of white elites and a leadership based in New York City. Goodier and Pastorello convincingly argue that the agitation and organization that led to New York women's victory in 1917 changed the course of American history.

In this essential contribution to twentieth-century political history, Julie A. Gallagher documents six decades of politically active black women in New York City who waged struggles for justice, rights, and equality not through grassroots activism but through formal politics._x000B__x000B_In tracing the paths of black women activists from women's clubs and civic organizations to national politics--including appointments to presidential commissions, congressional offices, and even a presidential candidacy--Gallagher also articulates the vision of politics the women developed and its influence on the Democratic party and its policies. Deftly examining how race, gender, and the structure of the state itself shape outcomes, she exposes the layers of power and discrimination at work in all sectors of U.S. society. _x000B__x000B_Taking a long historical view across the twentieth century, Black Women and Politics in New York City is arranged chronologically, beginning with the fight for suffrage and rights in the first two decades of the century and moving through strides made and political opportunities seized during the Great Depression, the World War II era, resistance in the 1950s, and feminism and civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Gallagher examines the career of political trailblazer Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress and the first to run for president on a national party ticket, with extensive attention to the efforts of generations of politically active black women who came before her._x000B__x000B_Gallagher's study of African American women in New York City politics adds to the growing body of scholarship on the civil rights struggle and revises twentieth-century women's history, particularly feminist activism, to include African American women who hitherto have been excluded from the narrative. Sensitively and insightfully offering revision and expansion of the accepted interpretations of black feminism to include liberal reformers, Gallagher draws on an impressive array of sources to highlight the struggles black women waged through formal politics for themselves, their communities, and broader ideals of equality.

Born shortly before the Civil War, activist and reformer Fannie Barrier Williams (1855-1944) became one of the most prominent educated African American women of her generation. Hendricks shows how Williams became raced for the first time in early adulthood, when she became a teacher in Missouri and Washington, D.C., and faced the injustices of racism and the stark contrast between the lives of freed slaves and her own privileged upbringing in a western New York village. She carried this new awareness to Chicago, where she joined forces with black and predominantly white women's clubs, the Unitarian church, and various other interracial social justice organizations to become a prominent spokesperson for Progressive economic, racial, and gender reforms during the transformative period of industrialization. By highlighting how Williams experienced a set of freedoms in the North that were not imaginable in the South, this clearly-written, widely accessible biography expands how we understand intellectual possibilities, economic success, and social mobility in post-Reconstruction America.

The prospect of New Yorkers electing their first Muslim mayor, come November, has ignited a rash of paranoid statements by right-wing US politicians, including Islamophobia--the irrational fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims. A Republican politician caricatured America's iconic Statue of Liberty wearing a burqa--an outer garment worn by some Muslim women that covers the entire body and face. But that internet meme, spreading across social media, was deleted after protests. And another right-winger falsely warned that Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic mayoral primary in June, may introduce the Islamic sharia law into the statute books of New York City's five boroughs--with adulterers stoned to death in public. If that punishment becomes a reality, one cynic jokingly predicted, New York may run out of stones--as once recounted about the fallout from sharia law in a sandy Middle Eastern desert kingdom. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump, not surprisingly, jumped into the fray dismissing Mamdani as \"a Communist lunatic.\" That remark was a grim reminder of the spread of \"McCarthyism\" in the US in the early 1950s: a campaign against alleged Communists in the US government and other institutions.

Rob Nixon in his 2011 book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor writes “[i]n a world permeated by insidious, yet unseen or imperceptible violence, imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear” (p. 15). Nixon talks about the power of literature to render spectacular environmental violence which has become mundane and thus largely invisible. He points to the writing of Kenyan environmentalist and politician Wangari Maathai as work which captures the notion of slow violence. In her writing, Maathai creates the sense of urgency that Greta Gaard argues is a key boundary condition for an ecopedagogy of children’s literature. This article explores seven illustrated biographies of Maathai. The article interrogates the extent to which the books capture what Rob Nixon describes as “slow violence”, that is violence that occurs slowly, over time, and which is often overlooked. The article also introduces the term precarious progress to describe the fragile nature of the change initiated after slow violence. Finally, the article also draws on Val Plumwood’s writing on place attachment and “shadow places” to explore how the Kenyan landscape is depicted as not mere object but subject in these texts and the way in which they work to foster a consciousness of place in their child readers.

Laurie Mercier documents influential women in Oregon’s labor movement between 1945 and 1970 and how their work at the state level intersected with national movements. According to Mercier, “union leaderships’ fixed belief in labor hierarchy reflected the stubborn ideology of the white male breadwinner,” and unions in the Pacific Northwest “emphasized physical strength and masculine solidarity in their defense of sex-segregated work.” As a result, little has been written about working-class women’s grassroot efforts following World War II to employ multi-pronged strategies for workplace reforms. In this research article, Mercier sheds light on some of those women and how their efforts helped shape a growing feminist movement that “accelerated the rate of change in working women’s lives.”

Jews arrived in America in the nineteenth century already less committed to Orthodoxy than they had been in previous generations. The Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment, the spread of Socialism, and the rise of Zionism all had an impact on Sabbath observance. Additionally, America's economic and cultural institutions, such as the six-day work week, made it extremely difficult for observant Jews to abstain from work on a Saturday. The Sabbath observance movement arose as a response to the low level of synagogue attendance, the decline in the number of families gathering for a Sabbath meal on Friday night, and Jewish men working and women shopping on Saturdays. Beginning in the 1870s, a series of Sabbath observance organizations were created, seeking to get Jewish employers to close their businesses and Jewish workers not to work on Saturdays. Key to their efforts was the establishment of employment bureaus to match Sabbath-observant employers with workers who were Sabbath-observant. Their success was quite limited. One after another the various Sabbath observance organizations failed for several reasons, including inadequate financial resources and a lack of enduring organizational strength, but mostly because of the emergence of the five-day work week and because the Jewish community was not committed to Sabbath observance.

The 'obesity epidemic' is widely accepted as a major public health threat in the United States. This paper provides a critical examination of the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity's action plan that is foundational to First Lady Michelle Obama's 'Let's Move!' campaign. The report reveals ideological anxieties about race, American citizenship, changing gender roles and women's bodies. The framing of obesity as a personal problem and individual failing reflects the merger of American individualism and neoliberalism. Self-regulation and responsibility (and the mother's responsibility for her children) are key in prescriptions to manage obesity, reflecting biopolitical techniques of governance and a new model of 'the healthy American citizen'. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]