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Women's Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present
by Lisa Grunwald Stephen J. AdlerHistorical events of the last three centuries come alive through these women's singular correspondences--often their only form of public expression. In 1775, Rachel Revere tries to send financial aid to her husband, Paul, in a note that is confiscated by the British; First Lady Dolley Madison tells her sister about rescuing George Washington's portrait during the War of 1812; one week after JFK's assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy pens a heartfelt letter to Nikita Khrushchev; and on September 12, 2001, a schoolgirl writes a note of thanks to a New York City firefighter, asking him, "Were you afraid?" The letters gathered here also offer fresh insight into the personal milestones in women's lives. Here is a mid-nineteenth-century missionary describing a mastectomy performed without anesthesia; Marilyn Monroe asking her doctor to spare her ovaries in a handwritten note she taped to her stomach before appendix surgery; an eighteen-year-old telling her mother about her decision to have an abortion the year after Roe v. Wade; and a woman writing to her parents and in-laws about adopting a Chinese baby. With more than 400 letters and over 100 stunning photographs, Women's Letters is a work of astonishing breadth and scope, and a remarkable testament to the women who lived--and made--history.
Women's Life Writing and the Practice of Reading: She Reads to Write Herself (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing)
by Valérie Baisnée-Keay Corinne Bigot Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni Claire BazinThis collection of essays offers a stimulating insight into the practice of reading and the relationship between reading and writing in women’s life writing texts such as memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, travel logs, and graphic memoirs. It covers a great variety of writers from literary classics such as Virginia Woolf to the authors of slave narratives. Some essays focus on how literary texts help frame a narrative of the self, acting as models and counter models; others insist on the role of literature in resisting imposed gendered and ethnic identities. The essays also show that female writers use reading to deepen their relationship to the rest of the world. While reading is often represented as central to life and aesthetic experience, the collection stresses that there is no single or universal approach to reading in women’s life writing. Taking into account debates about life writing, the collection opens new fields of investigation and fully participates in current scholarly conversations in the field.
Women's Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World (Women And Gender In The Early Modern World Ser.)
by Rosilie HernándezContaining essays from leading and recent scholars in Peninsular and colonial studies, this volume offers entirely new research on women's acquisition and practice of literacy, on conventual literacy, and on the cultural representations of women's literacy. Together the essays reveal the surprisingly broad range of pedagogical methods and learning experiences undergone by early modern women in Spain and the New World. Focusing on the pedagogical experiences in Spain, New Spain (present-day Mexico), and New Granada (Colombia) of such well-known writers as Saint Teresa of à vila, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and MarÃa de Zayas, as well as of lesser-known noble women and writers, and of nuns in the Spanish peninsula and the New World, the essays contribute significantly to the study of gendered literacy by investigating the ways in which women”religious and secular, aristocratic and plebeian”became familiarized with the written word, not only by means of the education received but through visual art, drama, and literary culture. Contributors to this collection explore the abundant writings by early modern women to disclose the extent of their participation in the culture of Spain and the New World. They investigate how women”playwrights, poets, novelists, and nuns” applied their education both to promote literature and to challenge the male-dominated hierarchy of church and state. Moreover, they shed light on how women whose writings were not considered literary also took part in the gendering of Hispanic culture through letters and autobiographies, among other means, and on how that same culture depicted women's education in the visual arts and the literature of the period.
Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by Jill R. EhnennThe first full-length study to focus exclusively on nineteenth-century British women while examining queer authorship and culture, Jill R. Ehnenn's book is a timely interrogation into the different histories and functions of women's literary partnerships. For Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and 'Kit' Anstruther-Thomson; Somerville and Ross (Edith Somerville and Violet Martin); Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell; and Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the couple who wrote under the pseudonym of 'Michael Field', collaborative life and work functioned strategically, as sites of discursive resistance that critique Victorian culture in ways that would be characterized today as feminist, lesbian, and queer. Ehnenn's project shows that collaborative texts from such diverse genres as poetry, fiction, drama, the essay, and autobiography negotiate many limitations of post-Enlightenment patriarchy: Cartesian subjectivity and solitary creativity, industrial capitalism and alienated labor, and heterosexism. In so doing, these jointly authored texts employ a transgressive aesthetic and invoke the potentials of female spectatorship, refusals of representation, and the rewriting of history. Ehnenn's book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of Victorian literature and culture, women's and gender studies, and collaborative writing.
Women's Lives
by Carolyn G. HeilbrunEve has been supposed to have remarked to Adam as they left the garden, my dear, we are in a state of transition, and of course they were. It is no coincidence that Eve delivers this line. While humanity in every era and stage in history has been marked by a strong sense of itself as being in a state of transition, women have always had a particularly close relationship to changeable terrain. In their quest for self knowledge, boundaries, and names, women have found themselves between varying cultural demands. In one view, perhaps the dominant one, the only way to gain positive status is to fit appropriately into approved categories: appropriately beautiful, appropriately young, appropriately thin, appropriately successful. In another view, the view compellingly expressed by Carolyn Heilbrun, women must abandon the appropriate and seek out the liminel. The word limen means threshold. To be in a state of liminality is to be poised upon uncertain ground, on the brink of leaving one condition or country or self to enter upon another. When recognized, liminality offers women freedom to be or become themselves.In Women's Lives: The View from the Threshold Carolyn Heilbrun looks at the biographies and memoirs of women who have wrestled with their own betwixt and betweenness (in the process altering the face of literature, and the world): George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Gloria Steinem. She reveals the ways in which feminism has changed our perceptions of these lives. Surprising explorations of the positions which launch women into uncertain ground extend these lectures outside the academic purview.Each year the Alexander lectureship invites a distinguished scholar to the University of Toronto to give a course of public lectures on the subject of English Literature. These four lectures from the 1997 series put Carolyn Heilbrun in a line of distinguished scholarly work with such previous lecturers as Walter Ong, Robertson Davies, and Northrop Frye. But Heilbrun, within this distinguished genealogy, reworks the very notion of the line, creating a new pattern of writing and approaching literary culture, just as the women whose lives she examines have done. The reader will come out of this experience moved, refreshed, and inspired to create rather than take a position. Disclaimer: Excerpt from the poem "Where Did I Leave Off" by Virginia Hamilton Adair on pages 65-66 removed at the request of the rights holder
Women's Negotiations and Textual Agency in Latin America, 1500-1799 (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)
by Mónica Díaz Rocío Quispe-AgnoliEven though women have been historically underrepresented in official histories and literary and artistic traditions, their voices and writings can be found in abundance in the many archives of the world where they remain to be uncovered. The present volume seeks to recover women’s voices and actions while studying the mechanisms through which they authorized themselves and participated in the creation of texts and documents found in archives of colonial Latin America. Organized according to three main themes, "Censorship and the Body," "Female Authority and Legal Discourse," and "Private Lives and Public Opinions," the essays in this collection focus on women’s knowledge and the discursive traces of their daily concerns found in various colonial genres. Herein we consider women not only as agents of history, but rather as authors of written records produced either by their own hand or by means of dictations, collaborations, or rewritings of their oral renditions. Inhabiting the territories of the Iberian colonies from Peru to New Spain, the women studied in this volume come from different ethnic and social backgrounds, from African slaves to the indigenous elite and to those who arrived from Iberia and were known as "Old Christians." Finally, we have prepared this volume in hopes that the readers will find a particular appeal in archival sources, in lesser-known documents, and in the processes involved in the circulation of knowledge and print culture between the 1500s and the late 1700s.
Women's Playwriting and the Women's Movement, 1890-1918 (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Anna FarkasThe influence of the women’s movement has long been a scholarly priority in the study of British women’s drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but previous scholarship has largely clustered around two events: the New Woman in the 1890s and the suffrage campaign in the years before the First World War. Women’s Playwriting and the Women’s Movement, 1890–1918 is the first designated study of British women’s drama from a period of exceptional productivity and innovation for female playwrights. Both the British theatre and women’s position within British society underwent fundamental changes in this period, and this book shows how female dramatists carefully negotiated their position in the heated debates about women’s rights that occurred at this time, while staking out a place for themselves in an evolving theatrical landscape. Farkas also identifies the women’s movement as a key influence on the development of female-authored drama between 1890 and 1918, but argues that scholarly prioritizing of the "radicalism" of work associated with the New Woman and the suffrage campaign has had a distorting effect in the past. Ideal for scholars of British and Victorian theatre, Women’s Playwriting and the Women’s Movement, 1890–1918 offers a new perspective which emphasizes the complexity of women playwrights’ engagement with first-wave feminism and links it to the diversification of the British theatre in this period.
Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology
by Jane DowsonWhere were the women of the so-called `Auden Generation'?During this era of rapidly changing gender roles,social values and world politics,women produced a rich variety of poetry.But until now their work has largely been lost or ignored;in Women's Poetry of the 1930s Jane Dowson finally redresses the balance and recovers women's place in the literary history of the interwar years.This comprehensive and beautifully edited collection includes: *Previously uncollected poems by authors such as Winifred Holtby and Naomi Mitchison *Poems which are now out of print,such as those by Vita Sackville-West and Frances Cornford *Poems previously neglected by poets including Ann Ridler and Sylvia Townsend Warner *An extensive critical introduction and individual biographies of each poet Poetry lovers,students and scholars alike will find Women's Poetry of the 1930s an invaluable resource and a collection to treasure.
Women's Political Communication in Africa: Issues and Perspectives (Contributions to Political Science)
by Sharon Adetutu OmotosoThis book examines women’s political communication in Africa, capturing previously unheard women’s voices, and presenting detailed information on overlooked communication strategies and forms of power relations employed by African women and women of African descent. By examining the disputes, accomplishments and/or setbacks experienced by women in political spaces, it underscores feminist intersections of political communication in Africa. It also explores the glamor, humor, harmony and tact that women as state and non-state actors have contributed to Africa’s political landscape through the realities of female soft power. The book addresses issues concerning how and why women do and should participate in politics; at what level they have employed political communication strategies; and which types. It also questions ideas and ideals that have guided or continue to guide feminist political communication in Africa’s growing democracy. Lastly, it highlights African women’s conscious approach and rejuvenated interest in developing their communication skills and strategies given their vital role in state-building.
Women's Political Writings, 1610-1725 Vol 1
by Mihoko Suzuki Susan Wiseman Hilda L SmithIncludes a variety of women's political writings from the Seventeenth Century. This collection highlights the principles inherent in female political action in its many and varied forms, from women's Civil War petitioning, to the efforts of Quaker women to reform prisons.
Women's Political Writings, 1610-1725 Vol 2
by Mihoko Suzuki Susan Wiseman Hilda L SmithIncludes a variety of women's political writings from the Seventeenth Century. This collection highlights the principles inherent in female political action in its many and varied forms, from women's Civil War petitioning, to the efforts of Quaker women to reform prisons.
Women's Political Writings, 1610-1725 Vol 3
by Mihoko Suzuki Susan Wiseman Hilda L SmithIncludes a variety of women's political writings from the Seventeenth Century. This collection highlights the principles inherent in female political action in its many and varied forms, from women's Civil War petitioning, to the efforts of Quaker women to reform prisons.
Women's Political Writings, 1610-1725 Vol 4
by Mihoko Suzuki Susan Wiseman Hilda L SmithIncludes a variety of women's political writings from the Seventeenth Century. This collection highlights the principles inherent in female political action in its many and varied forms, from women's Civil War petitioning, to the efforts of Quaker women to reform prisons.
Women's Romantic Theatre and Drama: History, Agency, and Performativity
by Keir ElamAs theatre and drama of the Romantic Period undergo a critical reassessment among scholars internationally, the contributions of women as playwrights, actresses, and managers are also being revalued. This volume, which brings together leading British, North American, and Italian critics, is a crucial step towards reclaiming the importance of women's dramatic and theatrical activities during the period. Writing for the theatre implied assuming a public role, a hazardous undertaking for women who, especially after the French Revolution, were assigned to the private, primarily domestic, sphere. As the contributors examine the covert strategies women used to become full participants in the public theatre, they shed light on the issue of women's agency, expressed both through the writing of highly politicized or ethicized drama, as in the case of Elizabeth Inchbald or Joanna Baillie, and through women's professional practice as theatre managers and stage producers, as in the case of Elizabeth Vestris and Jane Scott. Among the topics considered are women's history plays, domesticity, ethics and sexuality in women's closet drama, the politics of drama and performance, and the role of women as managers and producers. Specialists in performance studies, Romantic Period drama, and women's writing will find the essays both challenging and inspiring.
Women's Somatic Training in Early Modern Spanish Theater (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)
by Elizabeth Marie PetersenDrawing from early modern plays and treatises on the precepts and practices of the acting process, this study shows how the early modern Spanish actress subscribed to various somatic practices in an effort to prepare for a role. It provides today's reader not only another perspective to the performance aspect of early modern plays, but also a better understanding of how the woman of the theater succeeded in a highly scrutinized profession. Elizabeth Marie Cruz Petersen examines examples of comedias from playwrights such as Lope de Vega, Luis Vélez de Guevara, Tirso de Molina, and Ana Caro, historical documents, and treatises to demonstrate that the women of the stage transformed their bodies and their social and cultural environment in order to succeed in early modern Spanish theater. Women's Somatic Training in Early Modern Spanish Theater is the first full-length, in-depth study of women actors in seventeenth-century Spain. Unique in the field of comedia studies, it approaches the topic from a performance perspective, using somaesthetics as a tool to explain how an artist's lived experiences and emotions unite in the interpretation of art, reconfiguring her "self" via the transformation of habit.
Women's Theatrical Memoirs, Part I Vol 1
by Sharon M Setzer Julia Swindells Sue McphersonBy the close of the Eighteenth Century, the theatrical memoir had become a popular and established genre. This ten-volume facsimile collection offers accounts of the late eighteenth-century stage, which provide insights into contemporary constructions of gender, sexuality and fame.
Women's Theatrical Memoirs, Part I Vol 2
by Sharon M Setzer Julia Swindells Sue McphersonBy the close of the Eighteenth Century, the theatrical memoir had become a popular and established genre. This ten-volume facsimile collection offers accounts of the late eighteenth-century stage, which provide insights into contemporary constructions of gender, sexuality and fame.
Women's Theatrical Memoirs, Part I Vol 3
by Sharon M Setzer Julia Swindells Sue McphersonBy the close of the Eighteenth Century, the theatrical memoir had become a popular and established genre. This ten-volume facsimile collection offers accounts of the late eighteenth-century stage, which provide insights into contemporary constructions of gender, sexuality and fame.
Women's Theatrical Memoirs, Part I Vol 4
by Sharon M Setzer Julia Swindells Sue McphersonBy the close of the Eighteenth Century, the theatrical memoir had become a popular and established genre. This ten-volume facsimile collection offers accounts of the late eighteenth-century stage, which provide insights into contemporary constructions of gender, sexuality and fame.
Women's Theatrical Memoirs, Part I Vol 5
by Sharon M Setzer Julia Swindells Sue McphersonBy the close of the Eighteenth Century, the theatrical memoir had become a popular and established genre. This ten-volume facsimile collection offers accounts of the late eighteenth-century stage, which provide insights into contemporary constructions of gender, sexuality and fame.
Women's Theatrical Memoirs, Part II vol 9
by Sharon M Setzer Julia Swindells Sue McPhersonBy the close of the eighteenth century, the theatrical memoir had become a popular and established genre. This ten-volume facsimile collection presents the lives of some of the most celebrated actresses of their day. These memoirs also provide insights into contemporary constructions of gender, sexuality and fame.
Women's Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Transfiguring the Faith of Their Fathers (Literature and Society in Victorian Britain #3)
by Julie MelnykFirst published in 1998. This collection of original essays identifies and analyzes 19th-century women's theological thought in all its diversity, demonstrating the ways that women revised, subverted, or rejected elements of masculine theology in creating theologies of their own. While women's religion has been widely studied, this is the only collection of essays that examines 19th-century women's theology as suchA substantial introduction clarifies the relationships between religion and theology and discusses the barriers to women's participation in theological discourse as well as the ways women overcame or avoided these barriers. The essays analyze theological ideas in a variety of genres. The first group of essays discusses women's nonfiction prose, including women's devotional writings on the Apocalypse; devotional prose by Christina Rossetti and its similarities to the work of Hildegard von Bingen; periodical prose by Anna Jameson and Julia Wedgwood; and the letters of Harriet and Jemima Newman, sisters of John Henry Newman. Other essays examine the novel, presenting analysis of the theologies of novelists Emma Jane Worboise, Charlotte M. Yonge, and Mary Arnold Ward. Further essays discuss the theological ideas of two purity reformers, Josephine Butler and Ellice Hopkins, while the final essays move beyond Victorian Christianity to examine spiritualist and Buddhist theology by womenThis collection will be important to students and scholars interested in Victorian culture and ideas-literary critics, historians, and theologians-and particularly to those in women's studies and religious studies.
Women's Travel Writings in Iberia Vol 1
by Stephen Bending Stephen Bygrave Eroulla Demetriou Jose Ruiz Mas Maria Antonia Lopez-Burgos del BarrioLisbon and the Pyrenees form the basis of this lively collection of firsthand accounts of travel within Portugal and Spain in the early nineteenth century.
Women's Travel Writings in Iberia Vol 2
by Stephen Bending Stephen Bygrave Eroulla Demetriou Jose Ruiz Mas Maria Antonia Lopez-Burgos del BarrioLisbon and the Pyrenees form the basis of this lively collection of firsthand accounts of travel within Portugal and Spain in the early nineteenth century.
Women's Travel Writings in Iberia Vol 3
by Stephen Bending Stephen Bygrave Eroulla Demetriou Jose Ruiz Mas Maria Antonia Lopez-Burgos del BarrioLisbon and the Pyrenees form the basis of this lively collection of firsthand accounts of travel within Portugal and Spain in the early nineteenth century.