Enjoy a fascinating and sometimes humorous glimpse into the lives of over one hundred, 19th-century Victorian era American women who refused to whittle themselves down to the Victorian model of proper womanhood. Included in Wild Women are 50-black-and-white photos from the era.
During the Victorian era a woman's pedestal was her prison.
"Women should not be expected to write, or fight, or build, or compose scores. She does all by inspiring man to do all." ─ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There is nothing more dangerous for a young woman than to rely chiefly upon her intellectual powers, her wit, her imagination, her fancy." ─ Godey's Lady's Book magazine
"...join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights' with all its attendant horrors on which her poor feeble sex is bent." ─ Queen Victoria of England
But, scores of nineteenth-century American women chose to live life on their terms. In this book you will meet women who refused to remain on a Victorian pedestal.
In San Francisco a courtesan appeared as a plaintiff in court, suing her clients for fraud. In Montana a laundress in her seventies decked a gentleman who refused to pay his bill. A forty-three-year-old schoolteacher plunged down Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel. A frail lighthouse keeper pulled twenty-two sinking sailors out of the ocean off Rhode Island. A pair of Colorado madams fought a public pistol duel over their mutual beau. Two lady lovebirds were legally wed in Michigan. An ad hoc abolitionist spirited away scores of slaves on the Underground Railroad. A Secessionist spy swallowed a secret message as she was arrested, claiming that no one could capture her soul.
Readers of books for women such as Women Who Run with the Wolves or Badass Affirmations will love this book about Victorian women who refused to accept the gender roles of their day.
"A classic, for a reason" - Celeste Ng via Twitter
In her award-winning book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form--an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities--immigrant, female, Chinese, American. As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother's "talk stories." The fierce and wily women warriors of her mother's tales clash jarringly with the harsh reality of female oppression out of which they come. Kingston's sense of self emerges in the mystifying gaps in these stories, which she learns to fill with stories of her own. A warrior of words, she forges fractured myths and memories into an incandescent whole, achieving a new understanding of her family's past and her own present.
The dramatic, brutally honest, and ultimately triumphant sequel to the bestselling American Book Award winner "Lakota Woman," this book continues Mary Brave Bird' s courageous story of life as a Native American in a white-dominated society.
This is a powerful, moving, at times shocking account of three generations of Chinese women, as compelling as Amy Tan. --Mary Morris. An evocative, often astonishing view of life in a changing China. -- The New York Times
Here she found the peace and aloneness she sought--and partly feared. The journal records the renewing of her life and work in this place.
So begins Sue Bender's story, the captivating and inspiring true story of a harried urban Californian moved by the beauty of a display of quilts to seek out and live with the Amish. Discovering lives shaped by unfamiliar yet comforting ideas about time, work, and community, Bender is gently coaxed to consider, Is there another way to lead a good life?
Her journey begins in a New York men's clothing store. There she is spellbound by the vibrant colors and stunning geometric simplicity of the Amish quilts spoke directly to me, writes Bender. Somehow, they went straight to my heart.
Heeding a persistent inner voice, Bender searches for Amish families willing to allow her to visit and share in there daily lives. Plain and Simple vividly recounts sojourns with two Amish families, visits during which Bender enters a world without television, telephone, electric light, or refrigerators; a world where clutter and hurry are replaced with inner quiet and calm ritual; a world where a sunny kitchen glows and no distinction was made between the sacred and the everyday.
In nine interrelated chapters--as simple and elegant as a classic nine-patch Amish quilt--Bender shares the quiet power she found reflected in lives of joyful simplicity, humanity, and clarity. The fast-paced, opinionated, often frazzled Bender returns home and reworks her crazy-quilt life, integrating the soul-soothing qualities she has observed in the Amish, and celebrating the patterns in the Amish, and celebrating the patterns formed by the distinctive patches of her own life.
Charmingly illustrated and refreshingly spare, Plain and Simple speaks to the seeker in each of us.
This is the little book that started a revolution, making women's voices heard, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social scientific theorizing about women. Its impact was immediate and continues to this day, in the academic world and beyond. Translated into sixteen languages, with more than 700,000 copies sold around the world, In a Different Voice has inspired new research, new educational initiatives, and political debate and helped many women and men to see themselves and each other in a different light.Carol Gilligan believes that psychology has persistently and systematically misunderstood women their motives, their moral commitments, the course of their psychological growth, and their special view of what is important in life. Here she sets out to correct psychology's misperceptions and refocus its view of female personality. The result is truly a tour de force, which may well reshape much of what psychology now has to say about female experience."
Describes seven steps towards discovering one's true spiritual identity, and provides exercises and meditations
In this anthology, prominent contemporary theorists assess the benefits and dangers of postmodernism for feminist theory. The contributors examine the meaning of postmodernism both as a methodological position and a diagnosis of the times. They consider such issues as the nature of personal and social identity today, the political implications of recent aesthetic trends, and the consequences of changing work and family relations on women's lives. Contributors: Seyla Benhabib, Susan Bordo, Judith Butler, Christine Di Stefano, Jane Flax, Nancy Fraser, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock, Andreas Huyssen, Linda J. Nicholson, Elspeth Probyn, Anna Yeatman, Iris Young.
