front cover of The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England
The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England
Mary Astell
Iter Press, 2013
This book is the most mature and comprehensive statement of Mary Astell’s religious and philosophical views. It also represents the culmination of Astell’s feminist project to teach her fellow women how to lead useful lives of virtue and wisdom. The main purpose of this work is to instruct women about the ultimate nature of reality, the true source of happiness, their duties and obligations to God, and about “how best to live” and how to treat other people. This volume offers the first complete modern version of the 1717 second edition. It provides a fully modernized text, a scholarly introduction, biographical and bibliographical information, general historical-intellectual background, and definitions of obscure and archaic terms.
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Daughter in Retrograde
A Memoir
Courtney Kersten
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
When she isn't eavesdropping on family gossip or gazing at taxidermy squirrels in smoky dives, Courtney Kersten charts the uncertainty of her midwestern homeland by looking to the stars and planets. As a teen she had plunged deep into the worlds of signs, symbols, and prophecy. But as her mother—her traveling companion into these spheres—lies dying, Kersten must learn to navigate without the person who always lit the way. Their last journey together, to swim in a Wisconsin lake, is a bittersweet, darkly comic, poignant climax to this transformative memoir.
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Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore
The Story of a Woman Who Decided to be a Puta
Gabriela Leite
Duke University Press, 2024
In the early 1970s, while living at home with her conservative, middle-class family and studying at the University of São Paulo, Gabriela Leite decided to become a sex worker. From her first client in a tiny room in downtown São Paulo to the launch of an exuberant clothing line designed for sex workers in Rio de Janeiro thirty years later, Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore tells the fascinating story of Leite’s bold and unique life in her own words. After helping organize Brazil’s first protests of sex workers against police brutality, she moved to Rio de Janeiro where she quickly became ensconced in the city’s storied red-light district. From there, Leite built a national network of politicized sex workers, worked for HIV/AIDS prevention efforts, and participated in Brazil’s robust new civil society after it returned to democracy in 1985 after a twenty-one-year military dictatorship. Insistent on advocating for the sex worker’s comprehensive human rights, Leite pioneered an irreverent grassroots Latin American feminism, which critiqued moral hypocrisies and Christian conservatism while affirming pleasure, joy, and agency. Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore also includes a foreword by artist and activist Carol Leigh.
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Daughter of Damascus
A Memoir
By Siham Tergeman
University of Texas Press, 1993

Daughter of Damascus presents a personal account of a Syrian woman's youth in the Suq Saruja ("old city") quarter of Damascus in the 1940s. Siham Tergeman wrote this book to preserve the details of a "genuine Arab past" for Syrian young people. In it, she relates the customs pertaining to marriage, birth, circumcision, and death. She writes of Ramadan festivities, family picnics to the orchards of the Ghuta, weekly trips to the public bath, her school experiences, Damascene cooking, peddlers' calls, and proverbs. She includes the well-known dramatic skits, songs, and tales of the Syrian Hakawati storytellers. And, through the words of her father, she describes the difficult period when Syrians were involved in the Balkans War and World War I. All this wealth of ethnographic detail is set in real-life vignettes that make the book lively and entertaining reading.

Little has been published about modern Syrian social life. In this English translation of an Arabic memoir originally published in Syria in 1978, Tergeman appeals to a wide audience. General readers will find a charming story, while scholars can find source material for university courses in anthropology, sociology, family and women's studies, and Middle Eastern area studies. The introduction by anthropologist Andrea Rugh portrays Syrian social life for Western readers and points out some of the nuances that might escape the attention of those unacquainted with Arab culture.

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The Daughter of Man
L. J. Sysko
University of Arkansas Press, 2023

"This whip-smart collection is a playful celebration of feminine power.”
Publisher’s Weekly

"What a beautiful book.”
—Ross Gay

"With the verve of Alice Fulton and the panache of Gerald Stern, Sysko keens into the canon, a welcome voice. Sing, indeed, heavenly muse.”
—Alan Michael Parker

Finalist for the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Selected by Patricia Smith

The Daughter of Man follows its unorthodox heroine as she transforms from maiden to warrior—then to queen, maven, and crone—against the backdrop of suburban America from the 1980s to today. In this bold reframing of the hero’s journey, L. J. Sysko serves up biting social commentary and humorous, unsparing self-critique while enlisting an eccentric cast that includes Betsy Ross as sex worker, Dolly Parton as raptor, and a bemused MILF who exchanges glances with a young man at a gas station. Sysko’s revisions of René Magritte’s modernist icon The Son of Man and the paintings of baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, whose extraordinary talent was nearly eclipsed after she took her rapist to trial, loom large in this multifaceted portrait of womanhood. With uncommon force, The Daughter of Man confronts misogyny and violence, even as it bursts with nostalgia, lust, and poignant humor.

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Daughter of the Cold War
Grace Kennan Warnecke
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
Grace Kennan Warnecke's memoir is about a life lived on the edge of history. Daughter of one of the most influential diplomats of the twentieth century, wife of the scion of a newspaper dynasty and mother of the youngest owner of a major league baseball team, Grace eventually found her way out from under the shadows of others to forge a dynamic career of her own.

Born in Latvia, Grace lived in seven countries and spoke five languages before the age of eleven. As a child, she witnessed Hitler’s march into Prague, attended a Soviet school during World War II, and sailed the seas with her father. In a multi-faceted career, she worked as a professional photographer, television producer, and book editor and critic. Eventually, like her father, she became a Russian specialist, but of a very different kind. She accompanied Ted Kennedy and his family to Russia, escorted Joan Baez to Moscow to meet with dissident Andrei Sakharov, and hosted Josef Stalin’s daughter on the family farm after Svetlana defected to the United States. While running her own consulting company in Russia, she witnessed the breakup of the Soviet Union, and later became director of a women’s economic empowerment project in a newly independent Ukraine.

Daughter of the Cold War is a tale of all these adventures and so much more. This compelling and evocative memoir allows readers to follow Grace's amazing path through life – a whirlwind journey of survival, risk, and self-discovery through a kaleidoscope of many countries, historic events, and fascinating people.
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Daughter of the Empire State
The Life of Judge Jane Bolin
Jacqueline A. McLeod
University of Illinois Press, 2016
This long overdue biography of the nation's first African American woman judge elevates Jane Matilda Bolin to her rightful place in American history as an activist, integrationist, jurist, and outspoken public figure in the political and professional milieu of New York City before the onset of the modern Civil Rights movement.

Bolin was appointed to New York City's domestic relations court in 1939 for the first of four ten-year terms. When she retired in 1978, her career had extended well beyond the courtroom. Drawing on archival materials as well as a meeting with Bolin in 2002, historian Jacqueline A. McLeod reveals how Bolin parlayed her judicial position to impact significant reforms of the legal and social service system in New York.

Beginning with Bolin's childhood and educational experiences at Wellesley and Yale, Daughter of the Empire State chronicles Bolin's relatively quick rise through the ranks of a profession that routinely excluded both women and African Americans. Deftly situating Bolin's experiences within the history of black women lawyers and the historical context of high-achieving black New Englanders, McLeod offers a multi-layered analysis of black women's professionalization in a segregated America.

Linking Bolin's activist leanings and integrationist zeal to her involvement in the NAACP, McLeod analyzes Bolin's involvement at the local level as well as her tenure on the organization's national board of directors. An outspoken critic of the discriminatory practices of New York City's probation department and juvenile placement facilities, Bolin also co-founded, with Eleanor Roosevelt, the Wiltwyck School for boys in upstate New York and campaigned to transform the Domestic Relations Court with her judicial colleagues. McLeod's careful and highly readable account of these accomplishments inscribes Bolin onto the roster of important social reformers and early civil rights trailblazers.

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Daughter of the Revolution
The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline Hopkins
Dworkin, Ira
Rutgers University Press, 2007

Pauline E. Hopkins (1859–1930) came to prominence in the early years of the twentieth century as an outspoken writer, editor, and critic. Frequently recognized for her first novel, Contending Forces, she is currently one of the most widely read and studied African American novelists from that period.

While nearly all of Hopkins’s fiction remains in print, there is very little of her nonfiction available. This reader brings together dozens of her hard-to-find essays, including longer nonfiction works such as Famous Men of the Negro Race and The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century, some of which are published here for the first time in their entirety.

Through these works, along with two juvenile essays from the 1870s, a personal letter, and two speeches, readers encounter a voice that is committed to constructing an international discourse on race, recovering the militant abolitionist tradition to combat Jim Crow, celebrating black political participation during and after the Reconstruction era, articulating the connections between race and labor, and insisting on equal rights for women.  Hopkins’s writing will challenge contemporary scholars to rethink their understanding of black activism and modernity in the early twentieth century.

 

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Daughter of the Vine
A Vintner's Tale
Summerskill, Mimi LaFollette
Rutgers University Press, 1996
The inspiring and beautifully written memoir of a fascinating woman who, with her family, worked to make their dream of a vineyard into a reality.

Buy land, girl, buy land. You will never  go hungry if you have land, advised Mimi LaFollette Summerskill's grandfather. So she and her husband John purchased a 30Ðacre farm just north of Princeton, New Jersey. After an initial try at cattle farming, the novice farmers decided to try their hands at wine making. Literally. In the spring of 1979, the family planted 2,000 Seyval Blanc seedlings. After months of research, soil testing, charting weather patterns, pruning, fertilizing, picking, pressing, filtering, bottling, and labeling, the LaFollette Vineyard and Winery was born.

Learning the ins and outs of actual wine making turned out to be one of the smaller difficulties the family faced. Until the passage of the Farm Winery Act of 1981, only seven New Jersey farms were licensed to operate a winery. Once that hurdle was passed and the vineyard duly licensed by the state, the federal government stepped in. The Summerskills had to pass inspection by the Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms for a federal license. Then the family had to save their farm from the New Jersey Department of Transportation, who planned to run a major highway right through the vineyard.

 Learning each and every step along the way, the Summerskills produced success. Today, people around the state enjoy the fruits of the Summerskill's labor.

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From Mother and Daughter
Poems, Dialogues, and Letters of Les Dames des Roches
Madeleine and Catherine des Roches
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Among the best-known and most prolific French women writers of the sixteenth century, Madeleine (1520–87) and Catherine (1542–87) des Roches were celebrated not only for their uncommonly strong mother-daughter bond but also for their bold assertion of poetic authority for women in the realm of belles lettres. The Dames des Roches excelled in a variety of genres, including poetry, Latin and Italian translations, correspondence, prose dialogues, pastoral drama, and tragicomedy; collected in From Mother and Daughter are selections from their celebrated oeuvre, suffused with an engaging and enduring feminist consciousness.
 
Madeleine and Catherine spent their entire lives in civil war–torn Poitiers, where a siege of the city, vandalism, and desecration of churches fueled their political and religious commentary. Members of an elite literary circle that would inspire salon culture during the next century, the Dames des Roches addressed the issues of the day, including the ravages of religious civil wars, the weak monarchy, education for women, marriage and the family, violence against women, and the status of women intellectuals. Through their collaborative engagement in shared public discourse, both mother and daughter were models of moral, political, and literary agency.
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Manon's World
A Hauntology of a Daughter in the Triangle of Alma Mahler, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel
James Reidel
Seagull Books, 2020
At once a narrative biography and a medical history, Manon’s World tells the story of a haunted young woman caught in the middle of a love triangle in interwar Germany.

Manon Gropius (1916–1935) was the daughter of Alma Mahler, the widow of Gustav Mahler, and the architect Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, and the stepdaughter of the writer Franz Werfel. In Manon’s World, James Reidel explores the life and death of a child at the center of a broken love triangle. The story takes a unique course, describing a peripheral figure but in a context where her significance and centrality in the lives of her famous parents and circles comes into relief. Reidel reveals a neglected and fascinating life in a world gone by—Vienna, Venice, and Berlin of the interwar years.
 
Not just a narrative biography, Manon’s World is also a medical history of the polio that killed Manon and a personal cultural history of the aspirations projected on her—and seen as lost by such keen observers as Elias Canetti, who devoted two chapters of his Nobel Prize–winning memoirs to his encounters with Manon and her funeral. That event led Alban Berg to dedicate his signature Violin Concerto “to an angel.” Reidel reveals a more complex image of a young woman who desired to be an actress and artist in her own right despite being her mother’s intended protégé, an inspiration to her father who rarely saw her, and her stepfather Franz Werfel, who obsessively wrote her into his novels, beginning with The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and as a revenant in all the books that followed.
 
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Married To A Daughter Of The Land
Spanish-Mexican Women And Interethnic Marriage In California, 1820-80
Maria Raquel Casas
University of Nevada Press, 2009
The surprising truth about intermarriage in 19th-Century California. Until recently, most studies of the colonial period of the American West have focused on the activities and agency of men. Now, historian María Raquél Casas examines the role of Spanish-Mexican women in the development of California. She finds that, far from being pawns in a male-dominated society, Californianas of all classes were often active and determined creators of their own destinies, finding ways to choose their mates, to leave unsatisfactory marriages, and to maintain themselves economically. Using a wide range of sources in English and Spanish, Casas unveils a picture of women’s lives in these critical decades of California’s history. She shows how many Spanish-Mexican women negotiated the precarious boundaries of gender and race to choose Euro-American husbands, and what this intermarriage meant to the individuals involved and to the larger multiracial society evolving from California’s rich Hispanic and Indian past. Casas’s discussion ranges from California’s burgeoning economy to the intimacies of private households and ethnically mixed families. Here we discover the actions of real women of all classes as they shaped their own identities. Married to a Daughter of the Land is a significant and fascinating contribution to the history of women in the American West and to our understanding of the complex role of gender, race, and class in the Borderlands of the Southwest.
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Susa Young Gates
Daughter of Mormonism
Romney Burke
Signature Books, 2022
Brigham Young had over 50 wives and 56 children, but none has better name recognition than daughter Susa Young Gates (1856–1933). Yet she, like so many women of Mormonism's past, has remained a mystery to most church members. In Susa Young Gates, Romney Burke paints a portrait of a strong woman who rose to prominence within the church, fought for the rights of women throughout the country, yet dealt with personal trials and her share of heartbreak.

The divorce of Susa from her first husband was so traumatic that she never again mentioned that union or his name in public. Eight of her 13 children died before adulthood. She was unable to reconcile her older sister's departure from the LDS Church and conversion to Catholicism. Yet, despite her trials, Susa found fulfillment in her faith through service, as a prolific writer—co-authoring with her daughter Leah Dunford Widtsoe the 1930 biography of her father, Life Story of Brigham Young, founding the Young Woman's Journal in 1889, the Relief Society Magazine in 1915, and in her associations with such prominent women's advocates as Susan B. Anthony. 
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Tatiana Romanov, Daughter of the Last Tsar
Diaries and Letters, 1913–1918
Helen Azar
Westholme Publishing, 2016
Translated for the First Time in English with Annotations by a Leading Expert, the Romanov Family’s Final Years Through the Writings of the Second Oldest Daughter

Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia was the second of the four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. Long recognized by historians as the undisputed “beauty” of the family, Tatiana was acknowledged for her poise, her elegance, and her innate dignity within her own family. Helen Azar, translator of the diaries of Olga Romanov, and Nicholas B. A. Nicholson, Russian Imperial historian, have joined together to present a truly comprehensive picture of this extraordinarily gifted, complex, and intelligent woman in her own words. Tatiana Romanov, Daughter of the Last Tsar: Diaries and Letters, 1913–1918, presents translations of material never before published in Russian or in English, as well as materials never published in their entirety in the West.

The brisk, modern prose of Tatiana’s diary entries reveals the character of a young woman who was far more than the sheltered imperial beauty as she previously has been portrayed. While many historians and writers describe her as a cold, haughty, and distant aristocrat, this book shows instead a remarkably down-to-earth and humorous young woman, full of life and compassion. A detail-oriented and observant participant in some of the most important historical events of the early twentieth century, she left firsthand descriptions of the tercentenary celebrations of the House of Romanov, the early years of Russia’s involvement in World War I, and the road to her family’s final days in Siberian exile. Her writings reveal extraordinary details previously unknown or unacknowledged. Lavishly annotated for the benefit of the nonspecialist reader, this book is not only a reevaluation of Tatiana’s role as more than just one of four sisters, but also a valuable reference on Russia, the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the people closest to the Grand Duchess and her family.
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