McCamon, Holly, Verta Taylor, Jo Reger, and Rachel Einwohner (eds). 2017. The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women’s Social Movement Activism. Oxford University Press.

Over the course of thirty-seven chapters, including an editorial introduction, this handbook provides a comprehensive examination of scholarly research and knowledge on a variety of aspects of women’s collective activism in the United States, tracing both continuities and critical changes over time. Women have played pivotal and far-reaching roles in bringing about significant societal change, and women activists come from an array of different demographics, backgrounds and perspectives, including those that are radical, liberal, and conservative. The chapters in the handbook consider women’s activism in the interest of women themselves as well as actions done on behalf of other social groups.

The volume is organized into five sections. The first looks at U.S. Women’s Social Activism over time, from the women’s suffrage movement to the ERA, radical feminism, third-wave feminism, intersectional feminism and global feminism. Part two looks at issues that mobilize women, including workplace discrimination, reproductive rights, health, gender identity and sexuality, violence against women, welfare and employment, globalization, immigration and anti-feminist and pro-life causes. Part three looks at strategies, including movement emergence and resource mobilization, consciousness raising, and traditional and social media. Part four explores targets and tactics, including legislative forums, electoral politics, legal activism, the marketplace, the military, and religious and educational institutions. Finally, part five looks at women’s participation within other movements, including the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, labor unions, LGBTQ movement, Latino activism, conservative groups, and the white supremacist movement.

The 1972-2016 General Social Survey cumulative file is now available on our website (http://gss.norc.org/). As of Wednesday April 5, it is also available on the GSS Data Explorer (https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/).

New GSS Trends Feature: Already available on the GSS Data Explorer you will find the new GSS Key Trends feature.  This dynamic visualization function is designed to provide both researchers and the general public with unprecedented capacity to create graphic views of key trends and user responses over time.

Kathrin, Zippel. 2017. Women in Global Science Advancing Academic Careers through International Collaboration. Stanford University Press.

Scientific and engineering research is increasingly global, and international collaboration can be essential to academic success. Yet even as administrators and policymakers extol the benefits of global science, few recognize the diversity of international research collaborations and their participants, or take gendered inequalities into account. Women in Global Science is the first book to consider systematically the challenges and opportunities that the globalization of scientific work brings to U.S. academics, especially for women faculty.

Kathrin Zippel looks to the STEM fields as a case study, where gendered cultures and structures in academia have contributed to an underrepresentation of women. While some have approached underrepresentation as a national concern with a national solution, Zippel highlights how gender relations are reconfigured in global academia. For U.S. women in particular, international collaboration offers opportunities to step outside of exclusionary networks at home. International collaboration is not the panacea to gendered inequalities in academia, but, as Zippel argues, international considerations can be key to ending the steady attrition of women in STEM fields and developing a more inclusive academic world.

You can connect to Zippel’s recent blogs:
Women and the World in Academia
Sexual Harassment in Research Abroad

Smith, Christi M. 2016. Reparation and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education. University of North Carolina Press.

This is the first book to reveal the nineteenth-century struggle for racial integration on U.S. college campuses. As the Civil War ended, the need to heal the scars of slavery, expand the middle class, and reunite the nation engendered a dramatic interest in higher education by policy makers, voluntary associations, and African Americans more broadly. Through a detailed analysis of archival and press data, Christi M. Smith demonstrates that pressures between organizations–including charities and foundations–and the emergent field of competitive higher education led to the differentiation and exclusion of African Americans, Appalachian whites, and white women from coeducational higher education and illuminates the actors and the strategies that led to the persistent salience of race over other social boundaries.

Reparation and Reconciliation was recently the focus of a profile in Inside Higher Ed. 

Smith, Robert B. 2017. Social Structure and Voting in the United States. Springer.

This book advances theorizing and research in political sociology drawing upon the writings of Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Juan Linz, Paul Lazarsfeld, and other sociologists and political scientists.  To study how ideologies and social structure affect voting decisions, this book applies contemporary statistical modeling methods: multilevel models, structural equation models, and domain analysis.  The SAS data sets and SAS code can be downloaded from the Springer website for replication, reanalysis, and study.  The coda suggests how the findings bear on the recent election of Donald Trump.