Nancy F. Cott— As family-centered production gave ground to market-oriented production and individual wage earning, school-teaching became a more important financial resource for young women. Both common schools and private seminaries and academies multiplied during the early national period, creating more frequent opportunities for employment. During the early decades of
Lorri Glover— During the long war—at once a civil and a guerilla conflict—armed bands ransacked homes and ravaged communities at will, with impunity. Combatants made little distinction between civilians and soldiers, so that the front lines bled into the home front. Armies and vigilant mobs burned fields and slaughtered livestock
Follow @MHarrisPerry Follow @MHPShow “Citizenship is more than an individual exchange of freedoms for rights,” writes Melissa V. Harris-Perry, professor, writer and television host, in Sister Citizen. “It is also membership in a body politic, a nation, and a community.” In Sister Citizen, now available in paperback, Harris-Perry looks at
Ivan Lett— Typically I reserve this space for books acquired through our London office, but my subject here is largely still about England, all the same. In fact, much of the literature discussed in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, by Sandra Gilbert and
It is 1919, the First World War has just ended, and people are at a genuine loss— but in Bedford, a group of middle-class English women have a solution: they form a new religion. They choose Mabel Barltrop, a widow recently released from the asylum, as their leader. They name
From ancient Babylonian princesses and rebellious medieval nuns to Nineteenth-century New England mill girls and the women of modern day Afghanistan, women readers have sparked controversy in every era of human history. In her new book, The Woman Reader, Belinda Jack traces the stories of these women, which are marked
From the Cro-Magnon cave to the digital bookstore, Belinda Jack covers a lot of ground in her new book, The Woman Reader, the first to address the controversies associated with women’s reading throughout history, and to show how vastly different women’s reading experiences have often been compared to those of men.
Today, cases of reported sexual harassment in government offices, businesses, and universities are ubiquitous. Yet in Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire, Julie Berebitsky reminds the reader that the very concept of “sexual harassment” is a fairly new one. At least as long as there
Melissa Harris-Perry must be busy. A professor of political science at Tulane University, a columnist for The Nation, and frequent guest and host on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show, she has spent the last few months giving interviews—on everything from her take on the new movie The Help to her politics—in