Sexual images saturate today's culture--and children will learn about sex somewhere. But research shows that they want to learn from the parents they trust. Talking about sex doesn't have to be a fear-filled challenge. The Focus on the Family® Guide to Talking with Your Kids about Sex shows parents how to talk with confidence to their kids about sex and sexuality. This candid resource is full of the latest information, practical insights, and age-appropriate answers to the questions parents and children ask about sex. Focus on the Family's Physicians Resource Council, along with research from The Medical Institute for Sexual Health provides parents with the tools and empowering encouragement they need in order to communicate more effectively and biblically about sex, self-control, and self-respect at every stage of a child's development.

Making Girls into Women offers an account of the historical emergence of "the lesbian" by looking at late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women's writing. Kathryn R. Kent proposes that modern lesbian identity in the United States has its roots not just, or even primarily, in sexology and medical literature, but in white, middle-class women’s culture. Kent demonstrates how, as white women's culture shifted more and more from the home to the school, workplace, and boarding house, the boundaries between the public and private spheres began to dissolve. She shows how, within such spaces, women's culture, in attempting to mold girls into proper female citizens, ended up inciting in them other, less normative, desires and identifications, including ones Kent calls "protolesbian" or queer. Kent not only analyzes how texts represent queer erotics, but also theorizes how texts might produce them in readers. She describes the ways postbellum sentimental literature such as that written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Emma D. Kelley eroticizes, reacts against, and even, in its own efforts to shape girls’ selves, contributes to the production of queer female identifications and identities. Tracing how these identifications are engaged and critiqued in the early twentieth century, she considers works by Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop, as well as in the queer subject-forming effects of another modern invention, the Girl Scouts. Making Girls into Women ultimately reveals that modern lesbian identity marks an extension of, rather than a break from, nineteenth-century women’s culture.

The Golden Girls, Designing Women, Living Single, Sex and the City, Girlfriends, Cashmere Mafia and Hot in Cleveland stand out as some of America's favorite television series. Their lovable "female foursome" characters engage in witty banter as they challenge American stereotypes about sex, love, family, work and community. These sitcoms and comedy-dramas live on as cable TV re-runs and through online fan communities, demonstrating mass appeal across generations of women and men. Connecting fan commentary with analysis by television scholars, this book explores the development of these series from the 1980s on, with a focus on the role of fan cultures in "reproducing" these popular American shows.

Identifying, illuminating and enhancing understanding of key aspects of women and girls' faith lives, The Faith Lives of Women and Girls represents a significant body of original qualitative research from practitioners and researchers across the UK. Contributors include new and upcoming researchers as well as more established feminist practical theologians. Chapters provide perspectives on different ages and stages of faith across the life cycle, from a range of different cultural and religious contexts. Diverse spiritual practices, beliefs and attachments are explored, including a variety of experiences of liminality in women’s faith lives. A range of approaches - ethnographic, oral history, action research, interview studies, case studies and documentary analysis - combine to offer a deeper understanding of women’s and girls' faith lives. As well as being of interest to researchers, this book presents resources to enhance ministry to and with women and girls in a variety of settings.

This critical collection brings together some of the best contemporary research on the perceived increase in girls' violence. With perspectives from the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, the work challenges official definitions and media representations of girls and violence. Contributors discuss whether violence by girls has actually increased, what kind of behavior by girls is classified as "violent," how attitudes toward girls' behavior have changed, in what contexts girls behave violently, and look at the links between girls' violence and the broader issues of the social construction and social control of adolescent femininities. With diverse essays representing different geographical and disciplinary perspectives, this book offers, at times, contradictory evidence and conflicting views. However, common concerns are clear and the reader is rewarded with a rich exploration of the struggles of girls and young women to take control of their lives in material and ideological conditions that continue to restrict their options and opportunities.

With a foreword by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards Girls Rock! explores the many ways women have defined themselves as rock musicians in an industry once dominated and controlled by men. Integrating history, feminist analysis, and developmental theory, the authors describe how and why women have become rock musicians—what inspires them to play and perform, how they write, what their music means to them, and what they hope their music means to listeners. As these musicians tell their stories, topics emerge that illuminate broader trends in rock's history. From Wanda Jackson's revolutionary act of picking up a guitar to the current success of independent artists such as Ani DiFranco, Girls Rock! examines the shared threads of these performers' lives and the evolution of women's roles in rock music since its beginnings in the 1950s. This provocative investigation of women in rock is based on numerous interviews with a broad spectrum of women performers—those who have achieved fame and those just starting bands, those playing at local coffeehouses and those selling out huge arenas. Girls Rock! celebrates what female musicians have to teach about their experiences as women, artists, and rock musicians.

This book compiles research on female crime and delinquency in Portugal in order to critically and reflectively explore interdisciplinary views on the link between gender, crime and delinquency. Contributions are organized into two main parts, with Part I dedicated to the relationship between women and crime, and Part II focused on female juvenile delinquency. Through the exploration of girls’ and women’s relationships with delinquency and crime, as well as with the justice system, this original and compelling collection highlights the heterogeneity of girls’ and women's experiences, whilst also underlining the convergences and divergences between them. Ultimately, Gomes and Duarte argue that understanding how women and girls explain their offending behaviours and how they relate to the criminal justice system is of the utmost importance for reforming social and legal policies. As such, this book will be of value not only for students, researchers and professionals of the social, behavioural and criminal sciences, but also for policy-makers seeking to provide greater efficiency in preventing crime and delinquency.