Junctures in Women's Leadership: Social Movements

Mary K. Trigg, Alison R. Bernstein

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780813566009
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813575438
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Business

2016  Choice  Outstanding Academic Title From Eleanor Roosevelt to feminist icon Gloria Steinem to HIV/AIDS activist Dazon Dixon Diallo, women have assumed leadership roles in struggles for social justice. How did these remarkable women ascend to positions of influence? And once in power, what leadership strategies did they use to deal with various challenges?    Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Social Movements explores these questions by introducing twelve women who have spearheaded a wide array of social movements that span the 1940s to the present, working for indigenous peoples’ rights, gender equality, reproductive rights, labor advocacy, environmental justice, and other causes. The women profiled here work in a variety of arenas across the globe: Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards, New York City labor organizer Bhairavi Desai, women’s rights leader Charlotte Bunch, feminist poet Audre Lorde, civil rights activists Daisy Bates and Aileen Clarke Hernandez, Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai, Nicaraguan revolutionary Mirna Cunningham, and South African public prosecutor Thuli Madonsela. What unites them all is the way these women made sacrifices, asked critical questions, challenged injustice, and exhibited the will to act in the face of often-harsh criticism and violence.   The case studies in Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Social Movements demonstrate the diversity of ways that women around the world have practiced leadership, in many instances overcoming rigid cultural expectations about gender. Moreover, the cases provide a unique window into the ways that women leaders make decisions at moments of struggle and historical change.   

Index

4Hs, 167

16th Street Baptist Church (Birmingham, Alabama), 123

Abernathy, Ralph, 123

Abland (South African development company), 226

ableism, intersection with sexism and classism, 98, 106

abortion, 103–104, 105–106, 148, 162–190. See also Planned Parenthood; reproductive rights/justice

abstinence-only sex education program, 179

Abzug, Bella, 152

acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). See HIV/AIDS

ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), 167, 172, 174

Adisa, Gamba. See Lorde, Audre

affirmative action, 196

AFL-CIO: Executive Council, 209; Local (3036), 204, 208–209

African diaspora, 132

African National Congress (ANC), 220, 222, 227–232

Afrikaner Nationalist Party, 220; Youth League (ANCYL), 230

“Afro-German,” 132

“After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” (Steinem), 104

Against the Rules, 225

age, 24, 67, 72

“Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” (Lorde), 134

agricultural workers, women as, 41

AIDS. See HIV/AIDS

Aileen C. Hernandez Associates, 73, 76

Alito, Samuel, 180

American Academy of Pediatrics, 180

American Airlines, 67

American Birth Control League, 178

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 92

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 180

America Votes, 183

Anderson, Marian, 4

Andrews, Julie, 102

anger, efficacy of, 119

antilynching legislation, 4

antiwar movement. See peace movement; Vietnam War

Antrobus, Peggy, 144

Anzaldúa, Gloria, 129–130

apartheid, xiii, 5, 120, 174, 182, 217–232...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword to the Series
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Eleanor Roosevelt: Negotiating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Daisy Bates: The NAACP
• Wangari Maathai: Kenyan Environmental and Democratic Movements
• Aileen Clarke Hernandez: Advocate for Black Women’s Leadership
• Mirna Cunningham: Indigenous Women and Revolutionary Change in Nicaragua
• Gloria Steinem: Getting the Message Out
• Audre Lorde: Black, Lesbian, Feminist, Mother, Poet Warrior
• Charlotte Bunch: Leading from the Margins as a Global Activist for Women’s Rights
• Dázon Dixon Diallo: Feminism and the Fight to Combat HIV/AIDS
• Cecile Richards: Leading Planned Parenthood in the New Millennium
• Bhairavi Desai: Organizing Immigrant Labor through a Feminist Lens
• Thuli Madonsela: Whispering Truth to Power
• Contributors
• Index