Susan Staves’s venture in feminist critical legal history is a comprehensive account of the changing laws governing married women’s property and a critical analysis of those laws and the ideology behind them. Staves offers an argument differing sharply from conventional appraisals of rule change as “progress.” She shows that, although there was a brief period in the mid-eighteenth century when contract law was applied to women’s rights to own and dispose of property, the results were socially intolerable, and the courts soon retreated to the older patriarchal structures that deprived married women of full ownership of property.

These patriarchal structures had always functioned to facilitate the transmission of significant property from male to male. Entitlements of women were designed to provide them with subsistence for themselves and minor children dependent upon them and to prevent their becoming an expense to the community. In examining several species of married women’s property—dower, jointure, pin money, and separate maintenance allowances—Staves shows that, despite the supposed importance of the of precedent in the legal system, judges had considerable room to maneuver and acted on their own ideological biases.

This story is packed with human interest and illustrative anecdote. Staves uses vivid examples from literature of the times, including plays such as Vanbrugh’s Relapse, Congreve’s Way of the World, and Sheridan’s School for Scandal, and novels like Tom Jones and Pride and Prejudice. Her book will interest a diverse audience of historians, legal scholars, students of eighteenth-century culture and literature, and general readers concerned with women’s issues.

Hawthorne’s greatest romance, The Scarlet Letter, is often simplistically seen as a timeless tale of desire, sin, and redemption. In his introduction, Michael J. Colacurcio argues that The Scarlet Letter is a serious historical novel. If Hawthorne’s fiction rigorously and faithfully subjects Hester and Dimmesdale to the limits of seventeenth-century possibility, it nonetheless looks forward to the better, brighter world of Margaret Fuller and Fanny Fern, of Charles Fourier and John Humphrey Noyes.

The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The Scarlet Letter in the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

What does it mean to belong to a place, to be truly rooted and grounded in the place you call home? How do you commit to a marriage, to a full partnership with another person, and still maintain your own separate identity? These questions have been central to Susan Wittig Albert's life, and in this beautifully written memoir, she movingly describes how she has experienced place, marriage, and aloneness while creating a home in the Texas Hill Country with her husband and writing partner, Bill Albert.

Together, Alone opens in 1985, as Albert leaves a successful, if rootless, career as a university administrator and begins a new life as a freelance writer, wife, and homesteader on a patch of rural land northwest of Austin. She vividly describes the work of creating a home at Meadow Knoll, a place in which she and Bill raised their own food and animals, while working together and separately on writing projects. Once her sense of home and partnership was firmly established, Albert recalls how she had to find its counterbalance—a place where she could be alone and explore those parts of the self that only emerge in solitude. For her, this place was Lebh Shomea, a silent monastic retreat. In writing about her time at Lebh Shomea, Albert reveals the deep satisfaction she finds in belonging to a community of people who have chosen to be apart and experience silence and solitude.

Changing occupational patterns during the 1920s and 1930s opened up new opportunities to women in a variety of fields. In a fresh approach to the history of women, Winifred D. Wandersee explores how the family, work, and family values took on new shapes during this critical period. By the 1920s, the increase in consumerism, encouraged by high production and mass advertising, had redefined the idea of an acceptable standard of living. For some, it was not possible to achieve this standard on the income of one wage earner, and women's employment outside the home became increasingly necessary. For most women, Wandersee shows, this trend to outside work was a reflection not of feminist ideology but of women's commitment to family values.

Wandersee finds that economic demands exerted even less influence on women than did societal and domestic demands. The proportion of married women who were gainfully employed during the 1920s, for example, was never more than 25 percent of all wives. Those who adapted to a joint economic and domestic role usually did so because their need was great, or their employment opportunity was favorable, or their value system stressed the material comfort of the family at the expense of traditional concepts of women's roles. Wandersee relates the experiences of these last two groups of women to the long-range changes in values and life-styles that have culminated in the American family of today.