Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Women

Few would argue that war has been a defining experience for people born in Europe and North America in the twentieth century. The degree to which war has been instrumental in improving women's social situation remains a vexed question, however. Conventional wisdom repeats the cliche that the Great War liberated women by allowing them to demonstrate their fitness for equality by recruiting them to work in men's jobs previously considered beyond their capabilities. In fact, their patriotic enthusiasm was used against them after the war, when they were seen to have profited from the deaths of...

Several decades after her death in 1968, Helen Keller remains one of the most widely recognized women of the twentieth century. But the fascinating story of her vivid political life--particularly her interest in radicalism and anti-capitalist activism--has been largely overwhelmed by the sentimentalized story of her as a young deaf-blind girl.

Keller had many lives indeed. Best known for her advocacy on behalf of the blind, she was also a member of the socialist party, an advocate of women's suffrage, a defender of the radical International Workers of the World, and a supporter of...

- My life] is so rich with blessings--an immense capacity of enjoyment, books, and beloved friends. . . . Most earnestly I pray the dear Heavenly Father that I may sometime make myself far more worthy of the love shown to me than I am now.-
--April 22, 1900 letter from Helen Keller to John Hitz, AFB

When Helen Keller died in 1968, at the age of eighty-eight years old, she was one of the most widely known women in the world. The overnight success of her biography, The Story of My Life, written at age twenty-three, made it obvious to Keller that she was endowed with a...

A daughter of John Gayle (lawyer and political leader who was governor of Alabama from 1831 to 1835), the devoted wife of Josiah Gorgas (chief of ordnance for the Confederacy), and the loving mother of William Crawford Gorgas (surgeon-general of the United States Army) and five other children Amelia Gayle Gorgas (1826-1913) was all these things "and" a fascinating person in her own right an antebellum Southern woman who made the transition to postbellum life and survived the difficult readjustments of the defeated South. Her biography is not just another account of a hero s daughter, wife,...

An annotated selection of unpublished letters by Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister.
Retrieved from seven different libraries, this corpus of letters was preserved by the Manning family chiefly for their value as records of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life and work; but they ironically also illuminate the life and mind of a fascinating correspondent and citizen of New England with incisive views and commentaries on her contemporaries, her role as a woman writer, Boston and Salem literary culture, and family life in mid-19th-century America.
This book illuminates Elizabeth's early life; the...

"The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women" is the first volume exclusively devoted to an examination of the significant role played by women as patrons in the evolution of medieval culture. The twelve essays in this volume look at women not simply as patrons of letters but also as patrons of the visual and decorative arts, of architecture, and of religious and educational foundations.

Patronage as a means of empowerment for women is an issue that underlies many of the essays. Among the other topics discussed are the various forms patronage took, the obstacles to women's patronage, and...

Recollections of a Southern Daughter recalls life in antebellum Liberty County, Georgia, a time and place best known today through the letters of the Charles Colcock Jones family, published in the classic Children of Pride, and the letters and journals of the Roswell King, Fanny Kemble, and Joseph LeConte families. In this memoir Cornelia Jones Pond gives an eyewitness account of how the privileged life of the southern slaveholding class was destroyed by a whirlwind of change.

Pond's narrative begins in 1834, when she was born to one of the Old South's wealthiest...

"An Un-American Childhood" is the thoughtful memoir of Ann Kimmage's experiences as a child and young woman in communist Czechoslovakia and China. In 1950, while McCarthyism reigned in America, Kimmage's parents, Abe and Belle Chapman, were active, loyal members of the American Communist Party. Her family lived in Queens, New York, until they were forced underground, illegally fleeing first to Mexico and ultimately Prague, Czechoslovakia, which at the time was in the early stages of its communist revolution. There, the Chapmans became the Capeks--a mystery to their new neighbors, but Czech...