|
Women Studies
Recommended |
||
|
Not
for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton worked together for over half a century for
women's rights and were instrumental in keeping the
movement alive despite repeated defeats. Sadly, Anthony
is best remembered as "the woman on With contributions by noted historians Ann D. Gordon and Ellen Carol DuBois, and dozens of evocative contemporary photographs, "Not for Ourselves Alone" provides a view of the suffrage movement through the eyes of the women who fought hardest for it. "We are sowing winter wheat," Stanton confided to her diary, "which the coming spring will see sprout and which other hands than ours will reap and enjoy." Indeed, neither Stanton nor Anthony lived to be able to cast a ballot. But Burns and Ward have assured them of a larger place in the American memory--as is their right. |
|
|
Passionate
Minds: Women Rewriting the World In "Passionate Minds," Claudia Roth Pierpont lifts several artists out of their hagiographical limbo and eases others (even Mae West and Margaret Mitchell) away from cliche and the condescending chortle. Her 11 essays offer a fascinating mix of biography, analysis, and elegant aphorism. Yet Pierpont also lets her women speak for themselves, sometimes eloquently, often unexpectedly, as when Zora Neale Hurston writes, "Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry.... It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?" Pierpont is interested in both reality and reception: how these writers altered the world, but also how they have been viewed--their lives and visions disseminated and vitiated, ritually patronized, misinterpreted, and reinvented. As she declares, with typical wit: "There is hardly a woman here who would not be scandalized to find herself in company with most of the others. Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein and Mae West, Doris Lessing and Anais Nin, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty, Marina Tsvetaeva and Mary McCarthy: what could they possibly have in common?" Yet even while she proves that achievement and reputation don't necessarily go hand in hand, Pierpont makes it clear that all her subjects refused to make the easy concessions. |
|
|
Stepping
Up to Power: The Political Journey of American Women |
|
|
A
Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the As its title suggests, Sheila Rowbotham's "A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century" is a monumental study--scholarly, readable, well illustrated, well indexed--of Western women's experiences in the 20th century. As a feminist historian, Rowbotham is aware of the scope of her task, beginning her survey with the problems that have been crucial to the study of women's history as such: "Who and what gets into the record of the past? How do you start to document the everyday, the experience which leaves no written, or visual, trace?" With the exception of two chapters devoted to the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars--periods that saw key changes in the patterns of women's work, for example--the study is divided decade by decade, with distinct sections on Britain and the United States. Allowing for an awareness of the differences, as well as the cultural exchange, between Britain and the U.S., Rowbotham gives a fresh sense of the diverse history of contemporary feminism and some of the women--writers, critics, Hollywood icons, politicians, among others--who have contributed to it. Concluding with brief biographies of the key players and an extensive bibliography, the book is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to know more about women's recent history. |
|
|
Ladies
and Not-So-Gentle Women Born into New York City's Victorian
aristocracy and destined for the constricted lives
considered proper for genteel women, the ladies and
not-so-gentle women of this book invented new, more
fulfilling identities for themselves with all-American
aplomb. Bessy Marbury (1856-1933) was a pioneering play
agent who fostered the careers of such scandalous writers
as Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Her longtime
companion, Elsie de Wolfe (1858-1950), virtually invented
the field of interior decorating, making her name by
refining the tastes of the rich. Anne Morgan (1873-1952),
who began a passionate affair with Marbury in 1904, used
her privileged position as J.P. Morgan's daughter to
forcefully advocate the rights of working women; Morgan's
close friend Anne Harriman Vanderbilt (1859-1940)
surmounted such personal sorrows as the premature deaths
of two husbands and a daughter's mental illness by
devoting herself to charitable work on behalf of drug
addicts, prisoners, and soldiers. Veteran nonfiction
author Alfred Allan Lewis deftly juggles the interlocking
stories of these remarkable women (and just about every
famous name in New York society, the feminist movement,
the theater, and American government at the time) in an
atmospheric narrative studded with shrewd character
sketches and colorful anecdotes. He creates an |
|
