Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey

Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey PDF

Author: Lillian Schlissel

Publisher: Schocken

Published: 2011-08-03

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0307803171

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An expanded edition of one of the most original and provocative works of American history of the last decade, which documents the pioneering experiences and grit of American frontier women.

Women's Letters

Women's Letters PDF

Author: Lisa Grunwald

Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback

Published: 2009-01-21

Total Pages: 833

ISBN-13: 0307493334

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Historical events of the last three centuries come alive through these women’s singular correspondences—often their only form of public expression. In 1775, Rachel Revere tries to send financial aid to her husband, Paul, in a note that is confiscated by the British; First Lady Dolley Madison tells her sister about rescuing George Washington’s portrait during the War of 1812; one week after JFK’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy pens a heartfelt letter to Nikita Khrushchev; and on September 12, 2001, a schoolgirl writes a note of thanks to a New York City firefighter, asking him, “Were you afraid?” The letters gathered here also offer fresh insight into the personal milestones in women’s lives. Here is a mid-nineteenth-century missionary describing a mastectomy performed without anesthesia; Marilyn Monroe asking her doctor to spare her ovaries in a handwritten note she taped to her stomach before appendix surgery; an eighteen-year-old telling her mother about her decision to have an abortion the year after Roe v. Wade; and a woman writing to her parents and in-laws about adopting a Chinese baby. With more than 400 letters and over 100 stunning photographs, Women’s Letters is a work of astonishing breadth and scope, and a remarkable testament to the women who lived–and made–history. From the Hardcover edition.

Looking for the New Deal

Looking for the New Deal PDF

Author: Elna C. Green

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9781570036583

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"Rife with palpable misery and often pleading with desperate urgency, the hundreds of letters assembled in Looking for the New Deal paint a bleak and accurate portrait of the female experience among Floridians during the Great Depression. Searching for help at a time when desperation overwhelmed America, women in Florida shared the same goal as their counterparts elsewhere in the country - they wanted work. In pursuit of a means to provide for their families, these women doggedly, often naively, wrote letters asking for relief assistance from agencies, charities, and state and federal government officials. In this volume Elna C. Green gathers more than three hundred letters written by Floridians that reveal the immediacy and intensity of their plight. The voices of women from all walks of life - black and white, rural and urban, old and young, historically poor and newly impoverished - testify to the determination and ingenuity invoked in facing trying times."--BOOK JACKET.

The Letters of a Victorian Madwoman

The Letters of a Victorian Madwoman PDF

Author: John S. Hughes

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780872498402

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Andrew Sheffield's letters help us better understand the full range of behavior among women in the Victorian South & the limits of Southern womanhood near the end of the nineteenth century.

Private Pages

Private Pages PDF

Author: Penelope Franklin

Publisher: Ballantine

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13:

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A rare and valuable glimpse into the lives of American women--through their diaries, published here for the first time By turns delightful, poignant, and heartbreaking, these diary entries explore inner landscapes, telling of love, marriage, and motherhood, of religion and family obligation, of the need to break free, to improve oneself, and to make something of one's life. In Private Pages we meet a devoted student in Minneapolis in the 1920s, grappling with the issues of her a≥ a Midwestern farm wife stuck in a loveless marriage in the 1890s; a Depression-era Berkeley, California, woman writing for her unborn grandchildren; a Southern Jewish woman at the end of the Civil War; a professional writer falling in love; and eight others, all of whom touch us in unique ways as we come to know them intimately through their diaries. Customs and technologies change, but human emotions endure. From a turn-of-the-century thirteen-year-old with a schoolgirl crush on a teacher to an elderly nineteenth-century Quaker at the end of her life, each of these women strikes a chord of sympathy and understanding in us, for their concerns are, after all, very like our own.

Writing Women's Lives

Writing Women's Lives PDF

Author: Susan Corey

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 1999-08-03

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13:

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The 69 selections in this volume are for the most part the voices of women who saw themselves not as inhabiting a separate and enclosed sphere but as coworkers, often but not always in specialized female tasks, in a common enterprise: tending fields, raising children, coping with the stresses of wartime. Some of the women here have written and acted demanding full partnership in the social institutions that they were expected to sustain mostly as subordinates. Together, the entries give a rich depiction of an American womanhood that, even when perceived by husbands, politicians, and scholars as the other, was a participant in a history committed, at least in theory, to equality.

A Faithful Heart

A Faithful Heart PDF

Author: Emmala Reed

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9781570035456

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Emmala Reed's journals from 1865 and 1866 present a detailed account of life in western South Carolina as war turned to reconstruction. Reed's postwar writings are particularly important given their rarity - many Civil War diarists stopped writing at war's end. Also unlike many diarists of the period, Reed lived in a small town rather than on a plantation or in an urban center.

Keep the Days

Keep the Days PDF

Author: Steven M. Stowe

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-04-02

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 146964097X

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Americans wrote fiercely during the Civil War. War surprised, devastated, and opened up imagination, taking hold of Americans' words as well as their homes and families. The personal diary—wildly ragged yet rooted in day following day—was one place Americans wrote their war. Diaries, then, have become one of the best-known, most-used sources for exploring the life of the mind in a war-torn place and time. Delving into several familiar wartime diaries kept by women of the southern slave-owning class, Steven Stowe recaptures their motivations to keep the days close even as war tore apart the brutal system of slavery that had benefited them. Whether the diarists recorded thoughts about themselves, their opinions about men, or their observations about slavery, race, and warfare, Stowe shows how these women, by writing the immediate moment, found meaning in a changing world. In studying the inner lives of these unsympathetic characters, Stowe also explores the importance—and the limits—of historical empathy as a condition for knowing the past, demonstrating how these plain, first-draft texts can offer new ways to make sense of the world in which these Confederate women lived.

Baghdad Diaries

Baghdad Diaries PDF

Author: Nuha al-Radi

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0307424901

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In this often moving, sometimes wry account of life in Baghdad during the first war on Iraq and in exile in the years following, Iraqi-born, British-educated artist Nuha al-Radi shows us the effects of war on ordinary people. She recounts the day-to-day realities of living in a city under siege, where food has to be consumed or thrown out because there is no way to preserve it, where eventually people cannot sleep until the nightly bombing commences, where packs of stray dogs roam the streets (and provide her own dog Salvi with a harem) and rats invade homes. Through it all, al-Radi works at her art and gathers with neighbors and family for meals and other occasions, happy and sad. In the wake of the war, al-Radi lives in semi-exile, shuttling between Beirut and Amman, travelling to New York, London, Mexico and Yemen. As she suffers the indignities of being an Iraqi in exile, al-Radi immerses us in a way of life constricted by the stress and effects of war and embargoes, giving texture to a reality we have only been able to imagine before now. But what emanates most vibrantly from these diaries is the spirit of endurance and the celebration of the smallest of life’s joys.