Same, Different, Equal: Rethinking Single-Sex Schooling, Rosemary C. Salomone (Yale University Press, 2003)

As a law professor with a background in educational law and an alumna of an all-girls high school, Salomone was drawn into the national debate over single-sex education when the Supreme Court struck down the Virginia Military Institute's all-male admissions policy. From that experience emerged her thoughtful and thought-provoking interdisciplinary study of single-sex education and the intersections of educational policy and research, constitutional and civil rights law, and competing visions of gender equality in education. Mindful of hard-won and on-going battles for gender and racial equity, Salomone carefully distinguishes the current single-sex education movement, one focused on meeting the educational, emotional, and social needs of both girls and boys, from the elitist "finishing schools" or "bastions of male privilege" that once dominated the single-sex educational landscape. Same, Different, Equal begins with profiles of three single-sex schools in Harlem, Philadelphia, and Baltimore and complicates the discussion of single-sex education by highlighting the intersections of gender, race, and class in the lives of the schools' inner-city students. In subsequent chapters, Salomone works to untangle the controversy over single-sex education, sorting through the competing feminist theories of equality, research on gender and education, and the judicial and legislative narratives that inform the larger debate. At the core of Same, Different, Equal is a careful and critical examination of the research on same-sex education. Salomone concludes by arguing that single-sex programs have a place in public schools as one of several options in order to serve the needs of a diverse study population. "Within single sex education," she writes, "the principles of liberty (in the form of choice) and equality (in the form of equal educational opportunity) are clearly reconcilable and mutually reinforcing despite assertions to the contrary." $29.95 cloth. (Yale University Press, PO Box 209040, New Haven, CT 06520-9040; www.yale.edu/yup/)

Citizen, Mother, Worker: Debating Public Responsibility for Child Care after the Second World War, Emilie Stoltzfus (University of North Carolina Press, 2003)

Emilie Stotlzfus' engaging history of postwar debates about publicly funded child care provides a historical context for the status of child care in the U.S. today and, in the process, explicates the intersections of citizenship, motherhood, and labor. Stoltzfus highlights how the public meaning of motherhood and its relationship to wage work either confined women to domesticity or relegated them to secondary positions in the workforce. In the postwar years, however, women who wanted or needed to remain in the job market rather than return to low-paying jobs or unpaid domestic labor advocated for the continuation of the publicly funded child care that made it possible for them to work outside the home. Stoltzfus uses case studies of child care debates in Cleveland, the District of Columbia, and California to draw attention to the major barriers to publicly funded child care--the funding, eligibility, and justification of such programs--and the difficulty of navigating those barriers. In the last case, the California activists' ability to define early childhood education as a benefit to any young child, not just as a stopgap program for children in needy families, and their ability to define maternal employment outside domestic or family need contributed to their success in securing permanent funding for public child care. However, the prevailing view of public child care funding as an alternative to cash aid for poor single mothers became the primary justification for the program and thus denied public child care to most children of two-parent families. Since the postwar years, publicly funded child care has come to be similarly tied with welfare reform, rather than a social right of wage-earning citizens. $19.95 paper. (University of North Carolina Press, PO Box 2288, Chapel Hill, NC 27515-2288; uncpress.unc.edu/)

Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education, edited by James T. Sears

The Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education, a new international, peer-review journal, seeks to publish research studies, scholarly papers, and practitioner-oriented essays directly related to educational policy, professional practice, curriculum development, and pedagogy from the elementary through the college level. With contributing authors from Canada, China, Great Britain, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States, the Journal lives up to its billing as an international publication. The Journal's first issue offers research- and practice-based articles on wide-ranging topics, from the same-sex desires of physical education teachers to teaching about sexuality and gender in Appalachia, the needs of transgender college students, and homosexuality and human rights in Japan. While the array of topics in the first issue promises to interest readers with similarly diverse concerns, it also leaves the journal unfocused. As the Journal develops, theme issues, such as the upcoming focus on gay-straight alliances, may well bring it more coherence. Regular sections include educators' descriptions of exemplary programs and practices, book and Web site reviews, and reports on recent research. This unique journal provides a much- needed forum for integrating theory, practice, and research and for making queer connections across educational levels and international and cultural borders. $45.00/volume. (Haworth Press Order Entry Dept., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904; www.jtsears.com/jglie.htm)