Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Women

Increase is Lia Purpura's chronicle of her pregnancy, the birth of her son, Joseph, and the first year of his life. She recounts her journey with the heightened awareness of a mother-to-be and through the eyes of a poet, from the moment she confirms her pregnancy as "A blue X slowly crosses itself, first one arm, then the other in the small white window of the test," through "the X of his crossed feet in sleep" as her child's world begins. Purpura's sensibility transcends the facts of personal experience to enfold the dramatically changing shape of a larger, complex...

First published in 1958 and selected by the "New York Times" as one of the best books of the year, Willie Mae is a first-person account of a black woman's life and her experiences as a domestic worker in a succession of southern households in the first half of the century.

Powerful and poignant, sometimes funny and always honest, Willie Mae is a testament to the courage and strength of a generation of women who struggled to survive with dignity and humanity in the years before the civil rights movement.

This first book-length treatment of the life and work of Christine Frederick (1883-1970) reveals an important dilemma that faced educated women of the early twentieth century. Contrary to her professional role as home efficiency expert, advertising consultant, and consumer advocate, Christine Frederick espoused the nineteenth-century ideal of preserving the virtuous home--and a woman's place in it. In an effort to reconcile her desire to succeed in the public sphere of modernization and consumerism with the knowledge that most middle-class Americans still held traditional beliefs about...

This collection of seventeen fascinating biographies, produced by the Mississippi Women's History Project, is an important step toward gaining the state's women their deserved place in its written record. The women whose absorbing life stories are told here range from Felicite Girodeau of old Natchez, who was both a person of color and a slaveholder, to Vera Mae Pigee, who "mothered" the civil rights movement in the Mississippi Delta. Some of the women are well known, others were prominent in their time but have since faded into obscurity, and a few have never received the attention they...

This collection of seventeen fascinating biographies, produced by the Mississippi Women's History Project, is an important step toward gaining the state's women their deserved place in its written record. The women whose absorbing life stories are told here range from Felicite Girodeau of old Natchez, who was both a person of color and a slaveholder, to Vera Mae Pigee, who "mothered" the civil rights movement in the Mississippi Delta. Some of the women are well known, others were prominent in their time but have since faded into obscurity, and a few have never received the attention they...

Near the end of her classic wartime account, Susie King Taylor writes, "there are many people who do not know what some of the colored women did during the war." For her own part, Taylor spent four years--without pay or formal training--nursing sick and wounded members of a black regiment of Union soldiers. In addition, she worked as a camp cook, laundress, and teacher. Written from a perspective unique in the literature of the Civil War, "Reminiscences of My Life in Camp" not only chronicles daily life on the battlefront but also records interactions between blacks and whites, men and...

A mother writes to her faraway daughter: "I keep all your letters. Someday you might want to do something with them." Those words foretold "Shared Histories," although neither woman would live to see the book. This is the first known published collection of letters to include correspondence between civilian family members on both sides of the Atlantic during World War II. Separated for most of their adult lives, Virginia Dickinson Reynolds and her daughter, Virginia Potter, wrote to each other for nearly forty years. This selection from their long exchange is filled with unguarded...

A mother writes to her faraway daughter: "I keep all your letters. Someday you might want to do something with them." Those words foretold "Shared Histories," although neither woman would live to see the book. This is the first known published collection of letters to include correspondence between civilian family members on both sides of the Atlantic during World War II. Separated for most of their adult lives, Virginia Dickinson Reynolds and her daughter, Virginia Potter, wrote to each other for nearly forty years. This selection from their long exchange is filled with unguarded...

"Surrendered Child" is Karen Salyer McElmurray's raw, poignant account of her journey from her teen years, when she put her newborn child up for adoption, to adulthood and a desperate search for the son she never knew. In a patchwork narrative interwoven with dark memories from her childhood, McElmurray deftly treads where few dare--into a gritty, honest exploration of the loss a birth mother experiences.

The year was 1973, a time of social upheaval, even in small-town Kentucky, where McElmurray grew up. More than a story of time and place, however, this is about a girl who, at the age...

About a week after the Montgomery Bus Boycott] started a white woman who understood and sympathized with the Negroes' efforts wrote a letter to the editor . . . comparing the bus protest with the Gandhian movement in India. Miss Juliette Morgan, sensitive and frail, did not long survive the rejection and condemnation of the white community, but before she died in the summer of 1957 the name of Mahatma Gandhi was well-known in Montgomery.--Martin Luther King Jr., from "Stride toward Freedom"

From 1936 to 1957 in letters published in Alabama's major daily newspapers as well as in essays...

"The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge" is the compelling story of an ordinary woman rising to meet extraordinary challenges in nineteenth-century Georgia. Dolly Lunt Burge's full life was remarkable for the range of roles she filled and the variety of her experiences. That her life coincided with critical transformations in America and that she recorded her experiences within this historical context make her diary all the more noteworthy.

Burge moved from Maine to Georgia with her physician husband in the 1840s. By the time she began her diary at age thirty, Dolly had lost her husband and her...