Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Women's Studies

In this collective biography one of the preeminent historians of her generation retrieves the work and lives of the few who preceded her in writing the history of women in the South.

A book that will greatly enhance understanding of the situation of single women in the nineteenth-century South, An Evening When Alone presents the journals of four very different women who, although their lives were worlds apart, each lived and wrote in the South during the years 1827-67. Intimate and revealing, these journals provide refreshing insight into the joys and travails of -ordinary- single women in the nineteenth century South: courtship, disappointed love, illness, the gratifications and pains of female friendship, the grief of the Civil War, the ambivalences of family life,...

Twenty contributors consider violence in the works of such acclaimed writers as Adrienne Rich, Harriet Jacobs, Virgnia Woolf, and Audre Lorde, and such too little known authors as Senegal's Mariama Ba and Aminata Sow Fall, Lebanon's Etel Adnan, and the Jamaican Sistren Collective. The cross-cultural range of works encompasses many forms of violence, overt and covert: sexual abuse, the colonial experience, the ravages of cancer, hostility between mothers and daughters, warfare. The contributors look at the variety of responses to violence and address the costs of breaking cultural taboos...

Twenty contributors consider violence in the works of such acclaimed writers as Adrienne Rich, Harriet Jacobs, Virgnia Woolf, and Audre Lorde, and such too little known authors as Senegal's Mariama Ba and Aminata Sow Fall, Lebanon's Etel Adnan, and the Jamaican Sistren Collective. The cross-cultural range of works encompasses many forms of violence, overt and covert: sexual abuse, the colonial experience, the ravages of cancer, hostility between mothers and daughters, warfare. The contributors look at the variety of responses to violence and address the costs of breaking cultural taboos...

Interested in preserving her family folklore, Jeannie B. Thomas recorded detailed oral histories from her mother and two grandmothers. While analyzing the tapes of these sessions, she notices the inappropriate laughter often accompanied the retelling of painful stories. In this book, Thomas combines these personal narratives with original scholarship drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva to uncover meaning behind the startling presence of unconventional laughter in women's histories.

Interested in preserving her family folklore, Jeannie B. Thomas recorded detailed oral histories from her mother and two grandmothers. While analyzing the tapes of these sessions, she notices the inappropriate laughter often accompanied the retelling of painful stories. In this book, Thomas combines these personal narratives with original scholarship drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva to uncover meaning behind the startling presence of unconventional laughter in women's histories.

In Writing Home, Mary Suzanne Schriber offers the first comprehensive analysis of the large body of U.S. women's travel literature written betwen the pre-Civil War years and World War I. Examining almost a century's worth of published book-length accounts, ranging from travel diaries of ordinary women to the narratives of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton, Schriber argues persuasively for the importance of gender considerations in the reading of a travel texts. She discusses the differences between men's and women's constructions, in writing, and their experiences abroad.

Wives of the Leopard explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and...

Wives of the Leopard explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and...

When Thomas Jefferson moved his victorious Republican administration into the new capital city in 1801, one of his first acts was to abolish any formal receptions, except on New Year's Day and the Fourth of July. His successful campaign for the presidency had been partially founded on the idea that his Federalist enemies had assumed dangerously aristocratic trappings--a sword for George Washington and a raised dais for Martha when she received people at social occasions--in the first capital cities of New York and Philadelphia. When the ladies of Washington City, determined to have their...

When Thomas Jefferson moved his victorious Republican administration into the new capital city in 1801, one of his first acts was to abolish any formal receptions, except on New Year's Day and the Fourth of July. His successful campaign for the presidency had been partially founded on the idea that his Federalist enemies had assumed dangerously aristocratic trappings--a sword for George Washington and a raised dais for Martha when she received people at social occasions--in the first capital cities of New York and Philadelphia. When the ladies of Washington City, determined to have their...

After its conquest in 331 B.C., Egypt became the center of the Hellenistic world, attracting men and women from other parts of the Mediterranean area. In this cosmopolitan and mobile society, Greek women of the ruling class had unprecedented opportunities and were able to employ some of the legal freedoms enjoyed by their Egyptian counterparts.

Using evidence from a wide array of sources including literature, papyri, inscriptions, coins, and terra-cotta figurines, Sarah Pomeroy discusses women ranging from queens such as Arsino? II and Cleopatra VII to Jewish slaves working on a Greek...