Margaret Finnegan's pathbreaking study of woman suffrage from the 1850s to the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 reveals how activists came to identify with consumer culture and employ its methods of publicity to win popular support through carefully crafted images of enfranchised women as "personable, likable, and modern."

Drawing on organization records, suffragists' papers and memoirs, and newspapers and magazines, Finnegan shows how women found it in their political interest to ally themselves with the rise of consumer culture--but the cost of this alliance was a concession of...

Penne Armour's bad day just keeps getting worse. First, she has to visit The Goddess Lounge, the notorious LA coffee house/knitting salon/menstrual palace decried by religious conservatives as a "man-hating elevator to hell." Then, she learns that her "inner goddess" is Venus, the goddess of love, the one goddess-if she believed in goddesses-that divorced-mom Penne would want nothing to do with. But when her ex-husband goes missing and she sets out to find him, maybe Venus is just what Penne needs to face down a one-eyed fashionista, a boar-taming olive-oil rancher, a hypnotic lounge lizard,...