You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
Gathers diary selections, describes the historical background of each writer, and discusses the changing function and content of diaries.
In Mere Equals, Lucia McMahon narrates a story about how a generation of young women who enjoyed access to new educational opportunities made sense of their individual and social identities in an American nation marked by stark political inequality between the sexes. McMahon’s archival research into the private documents of middling and well-to-do Americans in northern states illuminates educated women’s experiences with particular life stages and relationship arcs: friendship, family, courtship, marriage, and motherhood. In their personal and social relationships, educated women attempted to live as the "mere equals" of men. Their often frustrated efforts reveal how early national Ameri...
This Veritas edition of Nancy Cott's acclaimed study includes a new introduction by the author, situating the work for a new generation of readers. "Elegant and convincing. . . . Better than any other work available, The Bonds of Womanhood describes both the classic attitudes of the nineteenth century toward women and the opposition to the oppression of women in the historical context from which they grew."--Willie Lee Rose, New York Review of Books "A lovely, gentle, scholarly, and valuable book."--Doris Grumbach, New York Times Book Review
Elizabeth Smith, a learned British woman born in the momentous year 1776, gained transnational fame posthumously for her extensive intellectual accomplishments, which encompassed astronomy, botany, history, poetry, and language studies. As she navigated her place in the world, Smith made a self-conscious decision to keep her many talents hidden from disapproving critics. Therefore, her rise to fame began only in 1808, when her posthumous memoir appeared. In this elegantly written biography, Lucia McMahon reconstructs the places and social constellations that enabled Smith’s learning and adventures in England, Wales, and Ireland, and traces her transatlantic fame and literary afterlife acro...
Following the American Revolution, the majority of Connecticut's religious societies tore down their boxy eighteenth-century meetinghouses and replaced them with something totally different: spired churches with an elaborate entrance portico on one of the shorter facades. These new buildings signaled a change in how these Christians conceptualized worship space, and in their fundamental understanding of the relationship between the spiritual and material aspects of their lives. Because these new churches evoked a much-beloved myth of tightly-bound communities sharing democratic values and faith in God, they have often been romanticized as emblems of a bygone era of pastoral serenity. Yet, Ne...
None