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  Here and There, A Story of Women’s Internationalism, 1948-1953

  Elisabeth Armstrong

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  Gita and Betty: An Internationalist Love Story

  Elisabeth Armstrong

  "Gita and Betty: An Internationalist Love Story" is part of Faith in the Masses: a collection of 12 essays by historians and activist-scholars on various aspects of the 100-year history of the CPUSA. The essays in this book demonstrate the Communist Party, USA's century long commitment to equality, workers' rights, peace, and socialism. They highlight the struggle for African American equality, Black liberation, and women's rights, and place athletic, cultural, and literary activities well within the scope of CPUSA work. This book asserts that the CPUSA played a leading role in the social and economic justice struggles of the 20th century. Included in this collection are three essays that challenge the narrative dominant within traditional academic circles that the CPUSA became a marginal political force post-1956. Faith in the Masses adds the historiography of the CPUSA with a discussion of Communist involvement in the 1960s and 1970s youth and student upsurge, peace, civil rights, and the movement for environmental sustainability.

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  Sexual Harassment Law: History, Cases, and Practice

  Jennifer Ann Drobac, Carrie N. Baker, and Rigel C. Oliveri

  Sexual Harassment Law: History, Cases, and Practice is the only comprehensive textbook covering the origins and development of U.S. sexual harassment law in employment, education, housing, prisons, and the military. Beginning with the first sexual harassment cases in the early 1970s and extending through the contemporary #MeToo movement, this book examines statutory law, federal regulations, case law, and legal reasoning. In addition to careful analysis of relevant law, this textbook reviews topics such as street harassment, online harassment, extra-legal responses to misconduct, mandatory arbitration, and nondisclosure agreements.

  The text also examines media coverage and public discourse on sexual harassment, from the 1991 Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings to the 2018 Blasey-Ford/Kavanaugh hearings. Focusing on how the intersections of gender, race, class, and citizenship status shape people’s experience of sexual harassment, the book considers how institutional power enables sex-based harassment and creates barriers to legal relief. Accessible to law students as well as undergraduate students, the book considers the effectiveness of laws against sex-based harassment and reviews current proposals to strengthen these laws by expanding coverage and closing loopholes.

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  Fighting the US Youth Sex Trade: Gender, Race, and Politics

  Carrie N. Baker

  Campaigns against prostitution of young people in the United States have surged and ebbed multiple times over the last fifty years. Fighting the US Youth Sex Trade: Gender, Race, and Politics examines how politically and ideologically diverse activists joined together to change perceptions and public policies on youth involvement in the sex trade over time, reframing 'juvenile prostitution' of the 1970s as 'commercial sexual exploitation of children' in the 1990s, and then as 'domestic minor sex trafficking' in the 2000s. Based on organizational archives and interviews with activists, Baker shows that these campaigns were fundamentally shaped by the politics of gender, race and class, and global anti-trafficking campaigns. The author argues that the very frames that have made these movements so successful in achieving new laws and programs for youth have limited their ability to achieve systematic reforms that could decrease youth vulnerability to involvement in the sex trade.

  • This book is accessible and interdisciplinary
  • Analyzes historical context, social movement organizations, legal and policy developments, representation and discourse
  • Uses an intersectional, feminist analysis that centers considerations of gender, race, and class

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  Gender and Neoliberalism : The All India Democratic Women’s Association and Globalization Politics

  Elisabeth Armstrong

  This book describes the changing landscape of women's politics for equality and liberation during the rise of neoliberalism in India. Between 1991 and 2006, the doctrine of liberalization guided Indian politics and economic policy. These neoliberal measures vastly reduced poverty alleviation schemes, price supports for poor farmers, and opened India's economy to the unpredictability of global financial fluctuations. During this same period, the All India Democratic Women's Association, which directly opposed the ascendance of neoliberal economics and policies, as well as the simultaneous rise of violent casteism and anti-Muslim communalism, grew from roughly three million members to over ten million. Beginning in the late 1980s, AIDWA turned its attention to women's lives in rural India. Using a method that began with activist research, the organization developed a sectoral analysis of groups of women who were hardest hit in the new neoliberal order, including Muslim women, and Dalit (oppressed caste) women. AIDWA developed what leaders called inter-sectoral organizing, that centered the demands of the most vulnerable women into the heart of its campaigns and its ideology for social change. Through long-term ethnographic research, predominantly in the northern state of Haryana and the southern state of Tamil Nadu, this book shows how a socialist women's organization built its oppositional strength by organizing the women most marginalized by neoliberal policies and economics. Source: Publisher

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  The Women's Movement against Sexual Harassment

  Carrie N. Baker

  The Women's Movement Against Sexual Harassment examines how a diverse grassroots social movement created public policy on sexual harassment in the 1970s and 1980s. The collaboration of women from varying racial, economic, and geographic backgrounds strengthened the movement by representing the perspectives and activism of a broad range of women. Based on interviews and voluminous original research, this book is the first to show how the movement against sexual harassment fundamentally changed American life in ways that continue to advance women's opportunities today.

  • An interdisciplinary exploration of the emergence of the movement against sexual harassment in the late 20th century
  • Based on extensive original research from legal records, activist organizations and interviews with early activists, speaking out for the first time
  • A narrative of how 'ordinary' women, through distinct efforts that reflected their diverse backgrounds and experiences, collectively transformed the way we approach sexual harassment