| First edition | |
| Author | Marianne Githens Jewel Prestage |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Nonfiction |
| Published | 1977 |
| Publisher | David McKay Publications |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 428 |
| ISBN | 9780679303336 |
| OCLC | 2957830 |
A Portrait of Marginality is a 1977 book edited by Marianne Githens and Jewel Prestage on the political behavior of American women. It is an anthology of 22 papers on women's participation or lack of it in American politics. It includes a section specifically on African American women in politics.
The book was met by a positive reception. A review in Contemporary Sociology concluded that the book "provides a needed addition to the growing literature on the political woman." [1]
Diane Kincaid of the Western Political Quarterly wrote that the volume "will stand as a milestone in marking the shift from description and prescription to empirical explanation and theoretical development." Kincaid added that the section on African American women" succeeds in vividly challenging the easy subsumption of "black women" into "all women" as a political behavior group." [2]
Jane S. Jaquette of Occidental College calls the book a "welcome addition to the sparse literature of the field," concluding that it is an "essential anthology." [3]
The volume was reviewed in Social Work, Canadian Journal of Political Science , and Polity. [4] [5] [6]
James Gardner March was an American political scientist, sociologist, and economist. A professor at Stanford University in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford Graduate School of Education, he is best known for his research on organizations, his seminal work on A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, and the organizational decision making model known as the Garbage Can Model.

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis is a book by the biologist E. O. Wilson. It helped start the sociobiology debate, one of the great scientific controversies in biology of the 20th century and part of the wider debate about evolutionary psychology and the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology. Wilson popularized the term "sociobiology" as an attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviour such as altruism, aggression, and the nurturing of the young. It formed a position within the long-running nature versus nurture debate. The fundamental principle guiding sociobiology is that an organism's evolutionary success is measured by the extent to which its genes are represented in the next generation.
Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage. Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, physical appearance, and height. These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing.
The following events related to sociology occurred in the 1990s.
Jack Nusan Porter is an American writer, sociologist, human rights and social activist, and former treasurer and vice-president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He is a former assistant professor of social science at Boston University and a former research associate at Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute. He is a research associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, doing research on Israeli-Russian relations, especially the life of Golda Meir, as well as doing work on mathematical and statistical models to predict genocide and terrorism and modes of resistance to genocide. His most recent books are Is Sociology Dead?, Social Theory and Social Praxis in a Post-Modern Age, The Genocidal Mind, The Jew as Outsider, and Confronting History and Holocaust.
Thomas Nixon Carver was an American economics professor.
George Andrew Lundberg was an American sociologist.
Carol Christine Smart is a feminist sociologist and academic at the University of Manchester. She has also conducted research about divorce and children of divorced couples.
Zillah R. Eisenstein is an American political theorist and gender studies scholar and Emerita Professor of the Department of Politics at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. Specializing in political and feminist theory; class, sex, and race politics; and construction of gender, Eisenstein is the author of twelve books and editor of the 1978 collection Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, which published the Combahee River Collective statement.
Everett Carll Ladd, Jr. was an American political scientist based at the University of Connecticut. He was best known for his analysis and collection of public opinion polls. He directed the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut; the Center's mission is to collect and preserve the reports and the original raw computerized data of polls and surveys since the 1930s. At his death, he had amassed 14,000 surveys from many countries. He was also an expert on the opinions and careers of social scientists.
Eleanor Harriet Bernert Sheldon was an American sociologist who was president of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) from 1972 to 1979, and was one of the key pioneers in the use of social indicators in sociology. In the 1970s, as multinational corporations recognized the need to appoint women to their boards of directors, Sheldon became the first woman to serve on the boards of several major companies, including Citibank, Mobil, Heinz, and Equitable Holdings.
Fields, Factories, and Workshops is an 1899 book by anarchist Peter Kropotkin that discusses the decentralization of industries, possibilities of agriculture, and uses of small industries. Before this book on economics, Kropotkin had been known for his militant activity in behalf of international anarchism and writings on Siberian geography. Through the book, he sought to connect anarchism with science, based on sociological tendencies. The book was compiled from essays he had published in Nineteenth Century and Forum between 1888 and 1890. The book was first published in 1899 by Houghton-Mifflin (Boston) and Hutchinson (London) to favorable reviews among Britons. It has since been republished in multiple editions: Swan Sonnenschein (London) and Putnam in 1901, 1904, 1907, 1909, and Nelson (London) and Putnam in 1913 and 1919. Reproductions of the first and second editions appeared in 1968. A later edition, edited by Colin Ward for Harper & Row, released in 1974 with more contemporary illustrations as Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow.

Marianne Githens was an American political scientist, feminist, and author. She was an Elizabeth Conolly Todd Distinguished Professor and the co-founder of the Women's Study Program at Goucher College. In 1977, she co-authored the anthology A Portrait of Marginality.
The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia is a 1976 book by James C. Scott on the nature of subsistence ethics in peasant cultures. He asserts that peasants prefer the stability of state or landlord protection of minimal subsistence over the risky instability of self-subsistence, producing a feudal moral economy. Where colonialism and introductions of market economies interfere with this arrangement, peasants will rebel, separate from concerns about fluctuating quality of life. Scott cites three 1930s rebellions as examples: Cochinchina, the Burmese Saya San Rebellion, and the Vietnamese Nghệ-Tĩnh Soviets.
Jewel Limar Prestage was an American political scientist, citizen activist, educator, mentor, and author. She is the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate in political science in the United States. Prestage mentored many others in her field, which is how she received the title, "The Mother of Black Political Science." Prestage conducted ample research on African Americans' role in the political process. In 1977, she co-authored the anthology A Portrait of Marginality, which examines the political socialization of Black women.
Richard Wallace Mansbach is an American political scientist.
Kay Lehman Schlozman is an American political scientist, currently the J. Joseph Moakley Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Schlozman has made fundamental advancements to the study of participation in American politics, and was a pioneer in the field of gender and politics. Her contributions include the theory of civic voluntarism, several landmark studies on the relationship between access to resources and different types of political participation, and related investigations into the nature of civic culture. Schlozman has one of the highest citation counts of any political scientist, including being among the top 50 most cited active political scientists and top 10 most cited women in the discipline. She worked closely with Sidney Verba for nearly 50 years, first as his student and then as his collaborator.
Diane Frances Divers Kincaid Blair was an American political scientist who specialized in the politics and government of Arkansas as well as on women and politics. She was a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas from 1968 to 1997. She befriended Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton shortly after their arrival in Fayetteville, and was appointed to several public service positions by a succession of governors of Arkansas, including Bill Clinton. Blair remained close to the Clintons throughout her life, including working as a researcher on both of Bill Clinton's presidential campaigns. As President, Bill Clinton appointed Blair to chair the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society, at the University of Arkansas, was named after her.
Marjorie J. Lansing was an American political scientist and activist. She developed and popularized the idea of a gender gap in voting, in which certain candidates or issues tend to receive different levels of support from women as they do from men. She was a professor of political science at Eastern Michigan University in the 1970s and 1980s, and she taught the first course in women's studies at Eastern Michigan University. Lansing ran for a number of different public offices in Michigan.
Alan Fraser "Foo" Davies was an Australian political scientist and author, known for his quip that Australians have a "talent for bureaucracy" and for his work on the relation between bureaucracy and public service. A professor at the University of Melbourne, Davies wrote a series of highly influential books on Australian politics.