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(Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969); Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Social ism, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976). And for all those ages twenty-one to twenty-eight who, like my re search assistants, never took a women’s history class (usual recollection: It was “gay”; “it had this stigma”; “it was passé”), here is a brief beginner’s reading list of the second twentieth century feminist outburst, a movement that, like it or not, continues to shape all female lives.

Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine, 1969); Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner, eds., Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on Women (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, eds., Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (New York/London: Basic Books, 1971), (see especially famed sociologist Jesse Bernard’s “The Paradox of the Happy Marriage”); Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (complete with diagrams for the revolution) (New York: William Morrow, 1970); Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial, 1979); the brilliant but scattered opus by “individualist” and celebrity feminist Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971); Juliet Mitchell, Women’s Estate (New York: Vintage, 1973); Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage, 1970); Mary Wollstonecraft, On the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Women and Men (1898; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; New York: Lau rel/Dell, 1983), and Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1952; New York: Vintage, 1989).

Major cultural overviews:

There are a few academics who break through and, without sacrificing the beauty and complexity of their argument, write their studies in colloquial English. To put single women in context I relied on three scholarly works. First, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s erudite and imaginative essay collection, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Another essential work is Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Anchor, 1988). And Lois Banner’s American Beauty (New York: Knopf, 1983) is a well-researched and amusing book on beauty culture and a must-read for anyone with an interest in the tangled evolution of female style.

Image and advertising:

For advertising in the nineteenth century, Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Ox ford University Press, 1996); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979); George Burton Hotchkiss and Richard B. Franken, The Leadership of Advertised Brands (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1923); John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972); Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Ideas and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). The best and most amusing feminist media survey of the postwar years is Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1994); also Joan Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997).

On film:

The two best books on women in film, both published in 1973, approach the subject from differing perspectives. Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies & the American