Lisa Fine - Böcker

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, communities in the Downriver region of the Detroit River have forged an enduring claim to the well-being of waterways that are central to where they live, work, and play.Lisa M. Fine examines important moments in the ongoing efforts of the area's citizens to create a humane and habitable environment. Her analysis shows how people preserved wetlands and the river by working through sportsmen's organizations, appealing to state agencies, and forming grassroots movements. Fueled by enduring connections to place, local unions fought a proposed nuclear power plant in the 1950s. Years later, steel workers facing the steamroller of deindustrialization tried to preserve their communities by purchasing their own company. The ties that bind gave a unique character to activism in the Downriver region, challenging stereotypes of working-class attitudes toward the environment.A creative merger of labor and environmental history, Downriver Detroit shows that working people have a right to live in and protect the places they love.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, communities in the Downriver region of the Detroit River have forged an enduring claim to the well-being of waterways that are central to where they live, work, and play.Lisa M. Fine examines important moments in the ongoing efforts of the area's citizens to create a humane and habitable environment. Her analysis shows how people preserved wetlands and the river by working through sportsmen's organizations, appealing to state agencies, and forming grassroots movements. Fueled by enduring connections to place, local unions fought a proposed nuclear power plant in the 1950s. Years later, steel workers facing the steamroller of deindustrialization tried to preserve their communities by purchasing their own company. The ties that bind gave a unique character to activism in the Downriver region, challenging stereotypes of working-class attitudes toward the environment.A creative merger of labor and environmental history, Downriver Detroit shows that working people have a right to live in and protect the places they love.

The Feminine Mystique (1963) is a powerful critique of women’s roles in contemporary American society. Drawing on new scholarship in the social sciences, Betty Friedan attacked a wide range of institutions—among them women’s magazines, women’s colleges, and advertisers—for promoting a one-dimensional image of women as happy housewives. This image, Friedan suggested, created a “feminine mystique,” a belief that “fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949—the housewife-mother.” The book soon became a national best seller, with over a million copies sold.This Norton Critical Edition of Friedan’s phenomenal book traces its cultural and historical significance over its first fifty years. The text of The Feminine Mystique is accompanied by an introduction and is fully annotated.Friedan’s book is the product of her early life as an activist, a student, and an intellectual while also drawing on her own experiences as a wife and mother. “Origins and Influences” includes writings that helped shape the author’s ideas about women and society. These works are topically organized: “Childhood World,” “Intellectual Influences,” “Domesticity and ‘Momism’ during the Cold War,” “Popular-Front Feminism,” “The Power of the Feminine Mystique on Betty Friedan?,” and finally, “Female Labor Force Participation Trends in the Twentieth Century.” Among the authors included are Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, Friedrich Engels, Margaret Mead, Amram Scheinfeld, and Simone de Beauvoir.The 1960s was a time of great upheaval in America with sweeping changes throughout society including women’s rights, civil rights, peace movements, environmental movements, student activism, and the sexual revolution. It was also a time when a number of American Jewish intellectuals, including Friedan, made comparisons between American life and Nazi destruction. “The Turn of the Sixties: Political, Intellectual, and Cultural Ferment” provides readers with an understanding of The Feminine Mystique’s contemporary context through relevant U.S. government documents and through the voices of, among others, Eleanor Roosevelt, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Helen Gurley Brown, and Bruno Bettelheim.More impressive than even The Feminine Mystique’s best-seller status and the debate it sparked in the national press is its broader cultural significance. Hundreds of women wrote to Friedan about how the book affected them personally. “Impact” includes a selection of these letters from the Betty Friedan Papers, along with feminist writings from the second (Pauli Murray, Robin Morgan, Bella Abzug) and third (Rebecca Walker, Naomi Wolf, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards) waves of feminism, and the backlash against the movement and The Feminine Mystique (Phyllis Schlafly).The book also includes a section on the scholarship on The Feminine Mystique, with excerpts from scholars such as Daniel Horowitz, Joanne Meyerowitz, Ruth Rosen, and Stephanie Coontz. Analyses of Betty Friedan as a historian, the evolution of her ideas, and the legacy of The Feminine Mystique on its fiftieth anniversary are included.A Chronology of Betty Friedan’s life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

The Reo Motor Car Company operated in Lansing, Michigan, for seventy years, and encouraged its thousands of workers to think of themselves as part of a factory family. Reo workers, most typically white, rural, native-born Protestant men, were dubbed Reo Joes. These ordinary fellows had ordinary aspirations: job security, decent working conditions, and sufficient pay to support a family. They treasured leisure time for family activities (many sponsored by the company), hunting, and their fraternal organizations. Even after joining a union, Reo Joes remained loyal to the company and proud of the community built around it. Lisa M. Fine tells the Reo story from the workers' perspective on the vast social, economic, and political changes that took place in the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Lisa Fine explores their understanding of the city where they lived, the industry that employed them, and the ideas about work, manhood, race, and family that shaped their identities.The Story of Reo Joe is, then, a book about historical memory; it challenges us to reconsider what we think we know about corporate welfare, unionization, de-industrialization, and working-class leisure.