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Like her art, Marilyn Monroe was rooted in paradox: She was a powerful star and a childlike waif; a joyful, irreverent party girl with a deeply spiritual side; a superb friend and a narcissist; a dumb blonde and an intellectual. No previous biographer has recognized-much less attempted to analyze-most of these aspects of her personality. Lois Banner has. With new details about Marilyn's childhood foster homes, her sexual abuse, her multiple marriages, her affairs, and her untimely death at the age of thirty-six, Marilyn is, at last, the nuanced biography Monroe fans have been waiting for.
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This book examines the broad themes that have shaped women's experiences in the United States from 1890 to the present day, as well as how a wide variety of women have both created and responded to shifting, often controversial cultural, political, and social roles. - Publisher.
A look at the life and career of Marilyn Monroe via her archive of artifacts, letters, and documents.
A uniquely revealing biography of two eminent twentieth century American women. Close friends for much of their lives, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead met at Barnard College in 1922, when Mead was a student, Benedict a teacher. They became sexual partners (though both married), and pioneered in the then male-dominated discipline of anthropology. They championed racial and sexual equality and cultural relativity despite the generally racist, xenophobic, and homophobic tenor of their era. Mead’s best-selling Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), and Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), Race (1940), and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (...
Exploring the intersections of biography and autobiography, East and West, faith and reason, Finding Fran tells the story of two high school friends who took radically different paths: Lois Banner became an academic feminist, while Fran Huneke converted to Islam, joining the mystical Sufi Order and moving to Egypt.
One of the silver screen’s greatest beauties, Greta Garbo was also one of its most profound enigmas. A star in both silent pictures and talkies, Garbo kept viewers riveted with understated performances that suggested deep melancholy and strong desires roiling just under the surface. And offscreen, the intensely private Garbo was perhaps even more mysterious and alluring, as her retirement from Hollywood at age thirty-six only fueled the public’s fascination. Ideal Beauty reveals the woman behind the mystique, a woman who overcame an impoverished childhood to become a student at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Academy, an actress in European films, and ultimately a Hollywood star. Chronicling ...
And we see the emergence that followed of the idealized, domesticated, and sentimentalized nuclear family centered around the mother--and the concurrent vilification or mockery of the older unmarried woman, which continues to the present. Banner provides new perspective on such subjects as goddess-young god stories in ancient religions, witchcraft, menopause, changes in male and female dress, the rise of the grandmother as a social type, and affectionate and erotic relationships through history, particularly between older women and younger men. She contemplates the mature women portrayed in high and popular art, from Penelope in the Odyssey and the Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales to Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. She writes about attempts over the centuries to mute the voices of older women--and about those who could not be silenced, from Sappho to Elizabeth I, from the women of France's eighteenth-century salons to nineteenth-century reformers and twentieth-century writers.
From the Blurb: In this groundbreaking chronicle of the beginning of woman's emancipation Barbara Berg refutes the traditional interpretation that the women's movement emerged from the experiences of female abolitionists. Instead, she place the inception of feminism in the earliest years of the nineteenth century. Dr. Berg finds its roots in the complex responses to intricate social change that accompanied the urbanization of America, maintaining that the rise of the industrial city precipitated the subordination of women. Quietly tucked inside, the woman was expected to preserve the home as a haven of peacefulness and order-an artificial environment to compensate for the jarring world outsi...