In 1985, Deborah Gray White wrote A’rn’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, arguably one of the most important works in American social history. White related a simple story – the routine of enslaved black women’s lives, and the dangers and opportunities found in that mundanity. Historiographically, A’rn’t I a Woman? pushed back against scholars like Herbert Gutman and Eugene Gen...

This article combines information from fathers' rights Web sites with demographic, historical, and other information to provide an empirically based analysis of fathers' rights advocacy in the United States. Content analysis discerns three factors that are central to the groups' rhetoric: representing domestic violence allegations as false, promoting presumptive joint custody and decreasing chi...

This paper combines unique individual-level information on ballot votes with state-level data on expenditures to provide new evidence on how women suffrage has affected government spending. Using data from the last country in Europe to adopt suffrage, Switzerland, we demonstrate two main results. First, women suffrage has changed the scope of government much more than its size. Women are more l...

Domestic violence severely decreases women’s health and well-being, thus the question of why many battered women stay with their abusive mates is puzzling. I offer possible evolutionary logic behind battered women’s decision to stay, by suggesting hitherto unrecognized potential reproductive benefits of staying in abusive relationships. The logic suggests that battered women should have more so...

The sameness/difference approach constitutes much research in addressing the low participation of women in computer science. In this paper, I will describe the differences between these two approaches and suggest an alternative, feminist Participatory Action Research. This approach may provide clues on how to design interventions to engage women in the production of technology.

Analyses of survey results from a random sample of women bloggers (N = 298) show three motivations drive women to use social media – information, engagement, and recreation. The recreation motivation outweighs the other two motivations in predicting frequency of social media use. However, when differences between Facebook, Twitter, and other social media were considered, results show women blog...

Past research suggests that women alter their behaviors during periods of high fertility to attract mates. Consistent with this notion, the current research examined the interpersonal style, as defined by the interpersonal circumplex, men tend to find most attractive in potential mates and the change in women’s interpersonal styles across the menstrual cycle. In Study 1, a sample of 101 single ...

We carried out a cross-sectional study with cluster random sampling to study the status of wife abuse in Esfahan from April to July 2002. We interviewed 386 married women using a standard questionnaire. Mean age was 35.7 years (range 15-78 years). Prevalence of wife abuse was 36.8%; incidence was 29.3%. Types of abuse included inattention to wife's feelings 44.8%, threatening to prevent communi...