*Women's Studies Research

From the 1930s to the 1980s, women pursued answers to problems that are increasingly pressing today: how to balance work and family and how to address growing economic inequalities. The Other Women's Movement traces the impact of labor reformers from the 1940s into the feminist movement of the present.

While many feminist and queer movements are designed to challenge sexism, they often simultaneously police gender and sexuality—sometimes just as fiercely as the mainstream. Among LGBTQ activists, there is a long history of lesbians and gay men dismissing bisexuals, transgender people, and other gender and sexual minorities. In each case, exclusion is based on the premise that certain ways of being gendered or sexual are more legitimate, natural, or righteous than others. Serano advocates for a new approach to fighting sexism that avoids these pitfalls and offers new ways of thinking about gender, sexuality, and sexism that foster inclusivity rather than exclusivity.

Long before Rosa Parks became famous, she was an advocate for social justice who worked as an investigator for the NAACP branch office in Montgomery, Alabama, specializing in cases involving black women who had been sexually assaulted by white men—cases that often went untried. This never-before-told history of the civil rights movement examines how it was in part started in protest against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men who used economic intimidation, sexual violence, and terror to derail the freedom movement throughout the Jim Crow era.