Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Women

In 1919, at the age of thirty-one, Helen Clay Frick inherited $38 million, becoming the richest single woman in America. These riches, however, came at a price. Helen's tumultuous early life was shaped by her father's infamy as a union strikebreaker and the ensuing attempt on his life, her mother's debilitating depression, and the death of her older sister and newborn brother about a year apart. Despite these events, Helen built a luminous legacy through her lifelong commitment to social welfare, the environment, and a supreme devotion to the visual arts.

Helen's philanthropy touched the...

Ida Tarbell's generation called her "a muckraker" (the term was Theodore Roosevelt's, and he didn't intend it as a compliment), but in our time she would have been known as "an investigative reporter," with the celebrity of Woodward and Bernstein. By any description, Ida Tarbell was one of the most powerful women of her time in the United States: admired, feared, hated. When her History of the Standard Oil Company was...

In 1917 Mabel Sterne, patron of the arts and spokeswoman for the New York avant-garde, came to the Southwest seeking a new life. This autobiographical account, long out-of-print, of her first few months in New Mexico is a remarkable description of an Easterner's journey to the American West. It is also a great story of personal and philosophical transformation. The geography of New Mexico and the culture of the Pueblo Indians opened a new world for Mabel. She settled in Taos immediately and lived there the rest of her life. Much of this book describes her growing fascination with Antonio...

Mildred Clark Cusey was a whore, a madam, an entrepreneur, and above all, a survivor. The story of Silver City Millie, as she referred to herself, is the story of one woman's personal tragedies and triumphs as an orphan, a Harvey Girl waitress on the Santa Fe railroad, a prostitute with innumerable paramours, and a highly successful bordello businesswoman. Millie broke the mold in so many ways, and yet her life's story of survival was not unlike that of thousands of women who went West only to find that their most valuable assets were their physical beauty and their personality. Petite at...

Sara Velazquez came to the United States alone when the youngest of her four children was ten, and found ways to get all of them and her husband from Mexico to Orange County. Sharon Risley earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1990--twenty-six years after a teenage pregnancy destroyed her plans to go from high school to art school. Mimi Lopez was alone on Thanksgiving 1985 when her...

These three journeys take theater critic Margaret Croyden to a Polish forest retreat devised by experimental theater director Jerzy Grotowski, through intensive sessions at a Catskills ashram with Hindu guru Baba Muktananda, and, finally, to a spiritual teacher in an Israel divided by both the metaphor and the reality of war. Each experience, powerfully evoked, arouses memories of Croyden's past - her long forgotten childhood with her Jewish family in Brooklyn, her youthful dreams and aspirations, and her adult search for fulfillment and spiritual transendence. Each experience brings her...

Why did Life Magazine dub her "the most hated woman in America"?

Did she unravel the moral fiber of America or defend the Constitution?

They found her heaped in a shallow grave, sawed up, and burned. Thus ended Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the articulate "atheist bitch" whose 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case ended school prayer. Her Christian-baiting lawsuits spanned three more decades; she was on TV all over the country, foul-mouthed, witty, and passionate, launching today's culture wars over same-sex marriage and faith-based initiatives.

She was a man-hater who loved sex, a...

What does it mean to tell a life story? Can it truly be done? Is there a single version of -truth- to be told about a person's life?

In this complex and fascinating book, Dorothy Danner of Mobile, Alabama, emerges as an intriguing example of Sartre's -universal singular.- Born into a wealthy and well-established Southern family, she bears and reflects many of the marks of her gender, social place,...

Long out of print and now published together for the first time, these three volumes of autobiography of the Cornish author and schoolteacher Anne Treneer cover the period from her birth at Gorran in 1891 to her retirement from teaching in 1948.

The first volume, School House in the Wind, covers her early childhood in Cornwall until 1906. Cornish Years takes her to Truro, Exmouth and Exeter, and from there to Camborne, Liverpool and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. A Stranger in the Midlands covers the years between 1931 and 1947, when she taught at King Edwards High School for Girls in...