Women in History Books - Page 2

A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1297-1344

Judith Bennett

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

An Excellent Primer for Medieval History 4 out of 5 stars.
14 of 14 people found this review helpful.

I recently read this book for a history class and have to say that the book is very enjoyable. It's brevity and clarity make it a great introduction to medieval history. Cecilia Penifader was a well-to-do peasant woman living in Brigstock, England in the early 14th century. Bennett uses Cecilia to introduce the reader to all aspects of peasant life in this time period. There are in-depth studies of economics, religion, living conditions, and gender roles, as well as other interesting facets of peasant life. Bennett also makes sure to include some interesting little tidbits, such as the role of contraception during this period.

One of the best things to be said about this book is how Bennett highlights terms that the reader is most likely to not be familiar with. These words are listed in a handy glossary in the back of the book. Most people aren't familiar with terms such as heliot, so this addition to the book is very helpful. As mentioned above, the brevity and clarity of the book go a long way to making the text more enjoyable. The book foregoes footnotes and endnotes, which would certainly help the non-scholars who can't stand wading through tons of citations. There are also some nice diagrams that help the reader visualize various aspects of peasant life.

The lack of footnotes and endnotes is a problem for the historian and student, such as myself. I wouldn't go so far as the other reviewer here and pan the entire book, but that reviewer certainly has a point. Bennett also relies on inference more than she probably should. Although her deductions seem sound, her conclusions, backed up with more evidence and properly cited, would have been much appreciated.

I think this is an excellent survey text that would make a nice addition to any library. After reading the book, the reader can readily picture Cecilia and feel as if they almost know her, and any book that can accomplish that is always worth a read.

Editorial Review:

This history of medieval village life is told through the experiences of Cecilia Penifader, a peasant woman who lived on one English manor in the early fourteenth century. This truly unique book offers a wealth of insight into medieval peasant society, bringing many of the characteristics of a time and a people to life. Short and readable, it is an ideal text for undergraduate teaching, suitable for courses in Western civilization, medieval history, women's history, and English history.

Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years : Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times

Elizabeth Wayland Barber

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Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> Design & Decorative Arts -> Textile & Costume

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

One of the best books I've ever read 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 12 people found this review helpful.

Anyone interested in so-called gender studies, textiles, prehistory, or just in regular people ought to read this book. The authoress, in incredibly simple language (she can't REALLY be an academic, can she?), tells the story of women and the textile work that has (pre-) historically been theirs. Bringing the insight that only a practicing weaver or spinner could have to the dusty world of archeology, she sweeps the reader into the homes of real people. Lots of metaphors, but honestly, it's that kind of book: rich. I only wish I could read it again for the first time.

Incredible history of women and fiber art 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

As a fiber artist, I am very interested in the history of fiber. Elizabeth Barber's "Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years" is fantastic, both as a history of the use of fibers and as a history of working women. I learned a great deal about women's role in society from her research, and it makes me proud to be a modern woman working with fiber, just as my ancestors did. Highly recommended!

Editorial Review:

Drawing on the latest archaeological and technological research, this intriguing study of women's history explores the relationship between the development of the fiber arts and women's roles in society.

Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary Of A Southern Woman

Charles East

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Born into one of the best families of Baton Rouge, Sarah Morgan was not yet twenty when she began her diary in January 1862, nine months after the start of the Civil War. She was soon to experience a coming-of-age filled with the turmoil and upheaval that devastated the wartime South. She set down the Remarkable events of the war in a record that remains one of the most vivid, evocative portrayals in existence of a time and place that today make up a crucial chapter in our national history.

Sarah Morgan herself emerges as one of the most memorable nineteenth-century women in fiction or nonfiction, a young woman of intelligence and fortitude, as well as of high spirits and passion, who questioned the society into which she was born and the meaning of the war for ordinary families like her own and for the divided nation as a whole.

Now published in its entirety for the first time, Sarah Morgan's classic account brings the Civil War and the Old South to life with all the freshness and immediacy of great literature.

Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich

Alison Owings

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

An Important Book Causing Fascination and Soul-Searching 4 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

I agree with just about all the comments of all the other reviewers of this book, both positive and critical. The author interviewed a wide array of German women that lived through the Third Reich and were able to tell about it during the time she interviewed them (mostly the mid-to-late '80s). I am as upset about the treatment of Jews in the Holocaust as anyone, yet I agree with the reviewer who pointed out that the author focused all the passion of her interviews just about exclusively to this topic. I would have very much liked to have seen more about other aspects of lives and decisions made during the Third Reich, such as the people giving up their civil rights so quickly after the Nazis were in power and then so soon after that there was no such thing as free speech and I don't know what it was like in Germany before the Nazis, but there was definitely zero freedom of the press during the Third Reich. One thing I learned that I did not know before was that people would be arrested for even the barest comment that Germany might not win the war (not to mention any criticism of Jewish stores being boycotted). Shoot, a person could be arrested apparently just for showing any outward sign of compassion to Jews or prisoners and informers were everywhere. Anyhow, it is fascinating reading and I would recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about this era of history. I had not realized some things before I read this book, such as the role of women in Nazi Germany. Women were definitely repressed far beyond what I had realized before. The most frustrating thing for me in reading this book was the poor translations (or poor editing of translations). There were sentences that no matter how many times I read them, they simply did not make any sense to me at all. Also, often words or phrases were left untranslated, and knowing no German myself, this too was frustrating, nicht? I also would have liked to hear less of the personal slant of the author's perspective. All in all, though, I think I would have given this book 5 stars if it has been edited to reasonable readability. Yes, some of the German style of pigeon-English would have been lost, but then again, these women (or most of them) were not speaking English anyhow; they were speaking German, and what they said was translated into English. Why not translated into a more readable English? I believe a lot more people would read and benefit from reading this book had that been the case. I love the diversity of the women interviewed -- not only in social status and roles they played during the Third Reich but also their different ways of coping and different attitudes toward life. Some lived in great fear; others made little room in their hearts or minds for fear, because they were too busy doing what was clear they must do -- whether hiding a Jew or whatever. Very interesting stuff and terribly relevant even today in a world that still has not yet learned how to come to terms with its problems without war and the crimes endemic of war.

Editorial Review:

Twenty-nine German women recall memories of the Third Reich. What they have to say will surprise Americans, just as they surprised the women themselves. Not since Marcel Ophuls' controversial film The Sorrow and the Pity have we been on such intimate terms with "the enemy."

Living My Life (Penguin Classics)

Emma Goldman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Enjoyable book, fun to read, informative 5 out of 5 stars.
18 of 19 people found this review helpful.

I could not disagree more with Goldman's ultimate philosophical conclusions, but I enjoyed this book, and volume II as well. Her essential humanity emerges, and it is a good case study and an interesting read, historically, philosophically and personally. She is no Mark Twain or Billy Faulkner, but her life was interesting and her prose adequately conveys the milieu she became enmeshed in. A fair degree of antecedent historical knowledge is necessary to fully enjoy this book, but you most likely have that or you wouldn't be reading about Emma to begin with. If you don't, or find that you are getting lost in the history and sequence, it would pay to do a little research to better understand what she lived through. It will also help you spot bias on Goldman's part. I heartily recommend this book. It is informative, enlightening and entertaining to boot.

Editorial Review:

Anarchist, journalist, drama critic, advocate of birth control and free love, Emma Goldman was the most famous—and notorious—woman in the early twentieth century. This abridged version of her two-volume autobiography takes her from her birthplace in czarist Russia to the socialist enclaves of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Against a dramatic backdrop of political argument, show trials, imprisonment, and tempestuous romances, Goldman chronicles the epoch that she helped shape: the reform movements of the Progressive Era, the early years of and later disillusionment with Lenin’s Bolshevik experiment, and more. Sounding a call still heard today, Living My Life is a riveting account of political ferment and ideological turbulence.

The Burgermeister's Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century German Town

Steven E. Ozment

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Love, Religion, Sex, Greed, and Germans--Can't Be Beat!! 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

There are few stretches of the imagination by which Anna Büschler can be called typical of her time and place. First, she was a member of the embryonic bürger urban middle class in a society that was overwhelmingly rural and peasant. Secondly, she had the audacity consistently, and vocally, to defy authority. And finally, but most importantly by the standards that early modern historians, there is actually a fairly large record of what she did and what historian Steven Ozment argues was the consuming passion of her life: undoing the wrong done to her by her father disinheriting her in 1527. Through Ozment's interweaving of the social, political, and legal minefield which Anna was forced to navigate in her attempt to redress the wrong done to her by her father--an extremely interesting man in his own write--after he found a cache of love letters she both wrote and received. The reader is also given a bird's eye view into the workings of a fairly typical German town during the renaissance, Swabian Hall, and how its residents felt about the operation of the legal system in her regards. This is micro-history at its best.

Anna Büschler should have been able to enjoy as comfortable a life as a middle class woman was able to have by sixteenth century standards by the time she was thirty years old. Instead, she found herself locked in her father's home, perpetually chained to a table leg. The chain of events that led her to this unhappy situation begins with interpretations of her past behavior. By her father's account, the legendary bürgermeister of Hall who had twenty years before brazenly petitioned the Holy Roman Emperor on behalf of the common people of Hall, the sexual relationships she had with a member of the local nobility and a mercenary were enough for him to label her as poisonous snake--imbued with the moral character of a whore. By her interpretation, she behaved as she did because her father had shirked his paternal duties and had not found a suitable suitor for her. After escaping from his clutches, Anna began a quarter century long fight to be compensated for the wrong he had done to her which would ultimately climax with the large cross section of Hall society which knew her interpreting her actions.

Ozment's brilliance lies in how he explains Anna's behaviors in the light of sixteenth century moral and legal norms. While Anna was cavorting with her lovers, she was also playing with fire hot enough to consume her completely, and thoroughly burn her father's reputation. By modern standards, and the standards of several centuries preceding the sixteenth, the punishments for premarital sex were draconian in their treatment of the people who engaged in it. Furthermore, the reputations, and often livelihoods, of parents who were exposed as having promiscuous children could be completely destroyed by their behavior. These facts go a long way in describing the extremity of Hermann Büschler's initial banishment of his daughter from his home and then a bold, brazen, and extralegal kidnapping of her after she began legal proceedings against her father. What it does not explain is why a man with such large reputation takes such an action when he certainly had a political future to think about. Ozment thankfully does not dwell on the possibility of incestuous behavior between the two of them because he can not marshal the evidence for any such argument, but it is a question that he nonetheless raises.

Throughout the narrative, Anna rightly comes of as rebellious, strong willed, and nonconformist in her behaviors. But, it is after she escapes from her father's imprisonment that the metal of her character becomes the most visible. She constantly and consistently fought against the marginalization which her disinheritance and her status as a woman imposed upon in every venue that she could gain a hearing in--even initially receiving a 5,000 gulden judgment against the city of Hall for its allowing her to be kept captive in her father's home under extremely suspect circumstances. Though this judgment would be overturned upon appeal and would have to spend the rest of her life fighting in the courts gain any of the money which she felt entitled to--and then only after she had found husbands who were willing to represent her and follow her through the murky recesses of 16th German law. Though only to a limited degree, Anna's story shows that women were not completely at the mercy of men during what is being increasingly regarded as one of the nadirs of women's status in the European history. As the court records which Ozment musters show though, Anna was not the only one, male or female, who questioned this status at least with regard to her.

A retelling of Anna's story to the degree which Ozment was capable would not have been possible were it not for the fact that dozens of her letters between her lovers and herself as well as the depositions from the legal proceedings she used had not survived to the present. In this respect, Ozment has a leg up on other early modern historians because of a relative cornucopia of evidence. Where the extremely good micro-historical biographies written by Natalie Z. Davis and Carlo Ginzburg ultimately have to invoke some very imaginative connections to close their works, Ozment simply does not. For that reason alone he deserves to be read.

Editorial Review:

Examines the tragic sixteenth-century battle between Anna Bu+a5schler and her powerful father, burghermeister of the imperial German city of Schwa+a5bisch Hall, which resulted from her secret love affairs with two men.

Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives

Natalie Zemon Davis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Three fascinating lives 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Davis takes the reader deep into the lives of three quite different European women of the 1600s, showing how they courageously face family and career challenges. Each story is amazing. Catholic widow Marie Guyart goes to the wilderness of Canada to help found the Quebec branch of the Ursuline teaching order. Jewish mother of 14 children, Glikl von Hameln is a successful business woman, both as her husband's chief assistant and as a widow. Divorced Protestant Maria Merian supports herself and her daughters through her engravings based on her own ecological observations of caterpillars native to Europe and northern South America. I particularly enjoyed learning about Merian because I have been impressed by her elegant work which I have seen in a number of museums including the National Museum of Woman in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Editorial Review:

In this fascinating book, Natalie Zemon Davis retrieves individual lives from historical obscurity to give readers a window onto the early modern world. Profiling three women--one Jewish, one Catholic, one Protestant--whose memoirs and writings make for a spellbinding tale, the author tells readers more about the life of early modern Europe than many an official history. 41 halftone illustrations.

The Power of Style

Annette Tapert, Diana Edkins

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

a brilliant short history of self-invention 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful.

In 'The Power of Style,' writer Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins, then curator of photography at Conde Nast, have created a short history of self-invention --- specifically, the transformation of English, French and American women into society figures and "style icons." You may know nothing about most of these women except their names: Daisy Fellowes, Rita Lydig, Millicent Rogers, Pauline de Rothschild, Mona Bismarck, Elsie de Wolfe. Others you know mostly as auras: Diana Vreeland, Coco Chanel, the Duchess of Windsor and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Good. The less you know, the better.

Why do I say this? Because if you have your nose pressed against the glass at all, you see only the woman in a dress --- not how she got there and the price she paid to get what she thought she wanted. In other words, you see someone who, if you're honest, you might like to be, just as you once fantasized about being a princess. But you're not a kid any more. You know that life is deals. You may even suspect that rich men aren't always so nice to their women. And so, reading 'Power of Style' fresh, you can have a pure reaction --- some admiration, to be sure, but also pity, also compassion.

Dailsy Fellowes, for instance. She married a prince, who "did her the favor of dying during World War I." (They'd had three children. One was like her husband, Daisy said. The other was "like me but without guts." And the third "was the result of a horrible man called Lischmann." Pretty blunt, huh? But then, seeing a pretty child in the park, she asked the nanny, "Whose is that?" The nanny replied, "Yours, Madame.") On her yacht, she liked to hurl dinner overboard, shouting "Oh my, it's gone bad!" What was great about her? Her fashion sense. Whatever she wore, others wanted --- even the necklace she had made of corks. And she could write: "Isn't it time you let your furs out for an airing?" And her baubles were so brilliantly designed that jewelers would go to the opera and train binoculars on her neck, then rush home to make copies. But then there were human qualities. Her husband went broke; she quietly replenished his funds. She paid for cosmetic surgery for less rich friends. When she wrote a book, an orphanage got the royalties. A complex woman.

Or Diana Vreeland. We recall the one-time editor of Vogue for her ludicrous pronouncements --- "Pink is the navy blue of India" --- but almost no one knows how loyal she was to her husband, an empty suit who couldn't make a living and had a keen eye for other women. She pretended she was rich; in fact, she desperately needed to work. Her entire life was thus an act, and she was a brilliant performance artist, a kind of society impersonator. Which begins to suggest her extraordinary discipline. She had her shoes --- including the soles --- shined every day. She injected herself with vitamins. She famously arrived at her office at noon; in fact, her phone calls started at 8 AM. When she was fired, she kept her mouth shut. "I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity," she said. Complex, again.

These profiles are addictive; you want to read them, pen in hand, to mark the great bon mots, the gems of wisdom, the unbelievable stories --- and Ms. Tapert's sage conclusions. You will also savor the photographs, many never seen before; they are full of good ideas that today's designers would be shrewd to copy. Mostly, you will gain a deep appreciation of these social butterflies as professional women, careerists of a special kind.

A book of cautionary tales. A dream book. A chronicle of parallel lives. It's the same book --- but each woman will find her own meaning in it. Who would have thought that something as shallow as Society could have such depth?

Editorial Review:

Reveals the inner qualities of 14 remarkable women who define style in ways that have lasted for generations. Witty and fascinating excursions into the worlds of Coco Chanel, Pauline de Rothschild, Diana Vreeland, Elsie de Wolfe, and others are captured in lavish photographs and entertaining anecdotes. We discover not only the preeminent influence that these women held over fashion and culture, but also the wry, often poignant tales of their personal lives. Full-color photographs.

Daughter Of Persia: A Woman's Journey From Her Father's Harem Through the Islamic Revolution

Sattareh Farman Farmaian, Dona Munker

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 36 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

disappointed 2 out of 5 stars.
7 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This is a story of a remarkable person who lived a remarkable life and had great accomplishments. I salute her.

However, I found the book a little disappointing in the fact that the author spent so much time trying to make out the Qajar dynasty/extended family were all good and cultured (and by inference they could do nothing wrong), while the Pahlavi family were nothing but the opposite (and could do nothing right). The truth is often somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.

The author's personal biases and bitterness often ignored facts and detracted from the book.

The Tender Revelation of a Remarkable Life 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Monument to a charming woman's tenacity and common sense, this exceptionally enjoyable book also reveals a way of life, the customs and the transformations taking place in one of the world's most interesting and least known countries. Iran's fascinating modern history, from the Qajar period up to the Islamic revolution of 1979, is revealed here, in a most readable presentation.

Editorial Review:

The founder of the Tehran School of Social Work tells how she left the security of a Persian harem, attended the University of Southern California, and returned to Iran only to be arrested after the collapse of the Shah's regime. 15,000 first printing. Tour.

Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men After the First World War

Virginia Nicholson

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Almost three-quarters of a million British soldiers lost their lives during the First World War, and many more were incapacitated by their wounds, leaving behind a generation of women who, raised to see marriage as "the crown and joy of woman's life," suddenly discovered that they were left without an escort to life's great feast.
Drawing upon a wealth of moving memoirs, Singled Out tells the inspiring stories of these women: the student weeping for a lost world as the Armistice bells pealed, the socialite who dedicated her life to resurrecting the ancient past after her soldier love was killed, the Bradford mill girl whose campaign to better the lot of the "War spinsters" was to make her a public figure--and many others who, deprived of their traditional roles, reinvented themselves into something better. Tracing their fates, Nicholson shows that these women did indeed harbor secret sadness, and many of them yearned for the comforts forever denied them--physical intimacy, the closeness of a loving relationship, and children. Some just endured, but others challenged the conventions, fought the system, and found fulfillment outside of marriage. From the mill-girl turned activist to the debutante turned archeologist, from the first woman stockbroker to the "business girls" and the Miss Jean Brodies, this book memorializes a generation of young women who were forced, by four of the bloodiest years in human history, to stop depending on men for their income, their identity, and their future happiness. Indeed, Singled Out pays homage to this remarkable generation of women who, changed by war, in turn would change society.