PLEASE NOTE: ALL CITATIONS ARE IN MLA 7 FORMAT. THE PREFERRED FORMAT IS MLA 8. SEE OWL PURDUE FOR PROPER CITATIONS.
Books
Berebitsky, Julie. Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
Berebitsky recounts the actual experiences of female and male office workers; draws on archival sources ranging from the records of investigators looking for waste in government offices during World War II to the personal papers of Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown and Ms. magazine founder Gloria Steinem; and explores how popular sources—including cartoons, advertisements, advice guides, and a wide array of fictional accounts—have represented wanted and unwelcome romantic and sexual advances. This range of evidence and the study’s long scope expose both notable transformations and startling continuities in the interplay of gender, power and desire at work. -Amazon
Collins, Gail. When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women, from 1960 to the Present. New York: Little Brown & Co.,2009.
When Everything Changed begins in 1960, when most American women had to get their husbands’ permission to apply for a credit card. It ends in 2008 with Hillary Clinton’s historic presidential campaign. This was a time of cataclysmic change, when, after four hundred years, expectations about the lives of American women were smashed in just a generation. -Amazon
Davis, Flora. Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America since 1960. New York : Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Presents the story of the struggles and triumphs of thousands of activists who achieved ‘half a revolution’ between 1960 and 1990. This book presents a grass-roots view of the small steps and giant leaps that have changed laws and institutions as well as the prejudices and unspoken rules governing a woman’s place in American society. -Amazon
Davis, Kathy. The Making of “Our Bodies Our Selves: How Feminism Travels. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Davis provides a grounded analysis of how feminist knowledge and political practice actually travel, and she shows how the process of transforming Our Bodies, Ourselves offers a glimpse of a truly transnational feminism, one that joins the acknowledgment of difference and diversity among women in different locations with critical reflexivity and political empowerment. -Amazon
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. 50th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.
Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire. -Amazon
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
In this work of feminist literary criticism the authors explore the works of many major 19th-century women writers. They chart a tangible desire expressed for freedom from the restraints of a confining patriarchal society and trace a distinctive female literary tradition. –Amazon
Katzman, David M. Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrialized America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
“A pioneering study … turns inside out our image of the turn-of-the-century household, by forcing us to confront the feelings of the women who ran it from the kitchen and the laundryroom.” -Amazon
Lehman, Katherine J. Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture. Lawrence, KS. : University Press of Kansas, 2011.
Lehman’s book focuses on the “single girl”—an unmarried career woman in her 20s or 30s—to show how this character type symbolized sweeping changes in women’s roles. Analyzing films and programs against broader conceptions of women’s sexual and social roles, she uncovers deep-seated fears in a nation accustomed to depictions of single women yearning for matrimony. -Amazon
Meyerowitz, Joanne J. Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960. Phliadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994.
This collection of fifteen revisionist essays charts new directions in American women’s history and provides connections to scholarship that, until recently, has focused primarily on the years before 1945 and after 1960. The contributors explore the work and activism of postwar American women and also point to the contradictions and ambiguities in postwar concepts of gender. –Amazon
Articles
Coontz, Stephanie. “Why Mad Men is TV’s Most Feminist Show.” Washington Post, October 10,2010. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/08/AR2010100802662.html
De La Torre, Miguel A. “Mad Men, Competitive Women, And Invisible Hispanics.” Journal Of Feminist Studies In Religion (Indiana University Press) 28.1 (2012): 121-126. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Aug. 2016.
Dijkstra, Sandra. “Simone De Beauvoir and Betty Friedan: The Politics of Omission.” Feminist Studies 6.2 (1980): 290-303. Web.
Germain, Rosie. “READING THE SECOND SEX IN 1950s AMERICA.” The Historical Journal, vol. 56, no. 4, 2013., pp. 1041-
Gordon, Michael, and Shankweiler Penelope J. “Different Equals Less: Female Sexuality in Recent Marriage Manuals .” Journal of Marriage and Family 33.3 (1971): 459-66. Web
“The New Housewife Blues.” Time 109.11 (1977): 82. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Aug. 2016.
“The Roots of Home.” Time 75.25 (1960): 16. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Aug. 2016.
Stevenson, Adlai. A Purpose for Modern Woman. September 1955, Smith College, Northampton, MA. Commencement Address.
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