Books like The Essential Ellen Willis by Ellen Willis

Betty Friedan’s 1963 classic uncovers the invisible barriers that kept women confined to domestic roles, sparking a cultural awakening that reshaped ideas about equality and personal fulfillment in the United States.

A pioneering oral‑history study of Buffalo’s working‑class lesbian community from the 1930s to the 1960s, revealing how black and white women shaped social change through butch‑fem culture, work, and resistance.

What is happening to pop music and pop culture? Synthesizers, samplers and MDI systems have allowed anyone with basic computing skills to make music. Exchange is now automatic and weightless with the result that the High Street record store is dying. MySpace, Twitter and You Tube are now more important publicity venues for new bands than the concert tour routine. Unauthorized consumption in the form of illegal downloading has created a financial crisis in the industry. The old postwar industrial planning model of pop, which centralized control in the hands of major record corporations, and divided the market into neat segments, is dissolving in front of our eyes. This book offers readers a comprehensive guide to understanding pop music today. It provides a clear survey of the field and a description of core concepts. The main theoretical approaches to the analysis of pop are described and critically assessed. The book includes a major investigation of the revolutionary changes in the production, exchange and consumption of pop music that are currently underway.

Trainwreck explores how women’s public conduct has been judged from Mary Wollstonecraft to Billie Holiday and modern figures, revealing the lasting cultural stereotypes and the shifting limits of acceptable behavior.

Updated and expanded edition of the classic reference standard for urban legends and myths