The Hollywood Babylon-like story of the short-lived, Valentino-like crooner.

Representations of Catholic women appear with surprising frequency in the literature of post-Reformation England. Playwrights and poets from William Shakespeare to Andrew Marvell invoke the figure of the nun to powerful and often perplexing effect, and...

"If you’ve never read it, read it now." —Arianna Huffington, O, The Oprah Magazine Landmark, groundbreaking, classic—these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a...

Theda Perdue examines the roles and responsibilities of Cherokee women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time of intense cultural change. While building on the research of earlier historians, she develops a uniquely complex view of the...

"Magnificent . . . A tour de force of literature and love."--Vogue "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is raucous. It hums with a dark refulgence from its first pages. . . . Singular and electric . . . [Winterson's] life with her adoptive parents...

The predominant cultural expectation for women in medieval and Renaissance Europe, as propagated and institutionalized by both the literate aristocracy and the medieval Church, was quite straightforward. The ideal woman was to be chaste and obedient,...

Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or...

Tchaikovsky's final symphony has fascinated generations of music lovers since its first performance just over a century ago. Professor Jackson explores sensitively and without prejudice the question of the Pathétique's program and its relation to...

A collection of "first-rate frontline journalism" from the Spanish Civil War to US actions in Central America "by a woman singularly unafraid of guns" (Vanity Fair). For nearly sixty years, Martha Gellhorn's fearless war correspondence made her a leading...

Elisabeth Kehoe brings to life a sweeping, three-generational saga of the remarkable Jerome sisters -- among the most glamorous women of their time -- whose well-chosen marriages to British aristocracy represented the first of such transatlantic unions...

Catherine Millet's best-selling The Sexual Life of Catherine M. was a landmark book--a portrait of a sexual life lived without boundaries and without a safety net. Described as "eloquent, graphic--and sometimes even poignant" by Newsweek, and as...

In these four artfully crafted essays, Patrick Geary explores the way ancient and medieval authors wrote about women. Geary describes the often marginal role women played in origin legends from antiquity until the twelfth century. Not confining himself...

Through the publication of her bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe became one of the most internationally famous and important authors in nineteenth-century America. Today, her reputation is more complex, and Uncle Tom's Cabin has been...