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I, Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome—an exhibition and catalog produced by the Yale University Art Gallery—provided the first comprehensive study of the lives of Roman women as revealed in Roman art. Responding to the popular success of the exhibit and catalog, Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson here gather ten additional essays by specialists in art history, history, and papyrology to offer further reflections on women in Roman society based on the material evidence provided by art, archaeology, and ancient literary sources.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Cornelius C. Vermeule, Rolf Winkes, Mary T. Boatwright, Susan Wood, Eve D'Ambra, Andrew Oliver, Diana Delia, and Ann Ellis Hanson. Their essays, illustrated with black-and-white photos of the art under discussion, treat such themes as mothers and sons, marriage and widowhood, aging, adornment, imperial portraiture, and patronage.

The rules may differ from country to country, but the dating game is a universal constant.

After years of searching for Mr. Right in living-room meetings arranged by family or friends, Ghada Abdel Aal, a young Egyptian professional, decided to take to the blogosphere to share her experiences and vent her frustrations at being young, single, and female in Egypt. Her blog, I Want to Get Married!, quickly became a hit with both men and women in the Arab world. With a keen sense of humor and biting social commentary, Abdel Aal recounts in painful detail her adventures with failed proposals and unacceptable suitors. There's Mr. Precious, who storms out during their first meeting when he feels his favorite athlete has been slighted, and another suitor who robs her in broad daylight, to name just a few of the characters she runs across in her pursuit of wedded bliss.

I Want to Get Married! has since become a best-selling book in Egypt and the inspiration for a television series. This witty look at dating challenges skewed representations of the Middle East and presents a realistic picture of what it means to be a single young woman in the Arab world, where, like elsewhere, a good man can be hard to find.

As a diary writer imagines shadow readers rifling diary pages, she tweaks images of the self, creating multiple readings of herself, fixed and unfixed. When the readers and potential readers are husbands and publishers, the writer maneuvers carefully in a world of men who are quick to judge and to take offense. She fills the pages with reflections, anecdotes, codes, stories, biographies, and fictions. The diary acts as a site for the writer’s tension, rebellion, and remaking of herself.

In this book Martinson examines the diaries of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Violet Hunt, and Doris Lessing’s fictional character Anna Wulf, and shows that these diaries (and others like them) are not entirely private writings as has been previously assumed. Rather, their authors wrote them knowing they would be read. In these four cases, the audience is the author’s male lover or husband, and Martinson reveals how knowledge of this audience affects the language and content in each diary. Ultimately, she argues, this audience enforces a certain “male censorship” which changes the shape of the revelations, the shape of the writer herself, making it impossible for the female author to be honest in writing about her true self.

Even sophisticated readers often assume that diaries are primarily private. This study interrogates the myth of authenticity and self-revelation in diaries written under the gaze of particular peekers.

The updated edition of Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition, an in-depth exploration of Lupino’s film and television directing work, provides close readings of the films and TV episodes Lupino directed and accounts for the history of Lupino’s reception, continuing into the mid-2020s, in media and film scholarship. The book gives readers a fuller understanding of Lupino’s major contribution to the history of American cinema and media. The revisions update this book, the first on Lupino’s directing, to address recent scholarship on Lupino’s work and reinforce her abiding relevance for cinephiles and film scholars. It incorporates scholarly and popular culture references to Lupino in the last seven years. Updates include a foreword by writer and film critic Imogen Sara Smith, whose work in film scholarship and the public arena has drawn attention to Lupino and the importance of gender to film noir. Authors Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman have added a complete list of the TV episodes Lupino directed in the 1950s and '60s, as well as an updated epilogue.  

This new edition addresses how our views of Lupino’s innovative cinema and her prodigious contributions to classic television have been taken up by others, proving that Lupino, whose reputation has waxed and waned since the middle of the twentieth century, is here to stay as a major figure in the history of American media.

This book examines early modern texts that portray Mary Tudor’s girlhood and betrothal to a foreign prince, her brief marriage to the aging king of France, and her untimely widowhood, as well as retrospective accounts that depict her life in France, her relationships with her husband and his heir apparent, and her surreptitious romance and clandestine marriage to an English duke. Here, texts from England are put into conversation with a significant body of work that was written in French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin, culminating in an examination of a novel from North America that passed itself off as a genuine sixteenth-century memoir. Author JoAnn DellaNeva also examines a spectrum of extra-literary texts—such as dialogues, popular songs, letters, speeches, portraiture, tapestries, fashion, jewelry, and book illuminations—for the ways they too helped shape Mary’s image. In so doing, she analyzes the intersection of history and literature, demonstrating how porous the borders between these disciplines can be. Through a series of close readings that are informed by an examination of the cultural context behind these texts, Imagining Mary Tudor, Queen of France seeks to explain how Mary’s fictional biography proved to be so slippery, vacillating between portrayals of her as a virtuous, generally powerless woman and as a wily and wicked minx.

Recovering the life of a woman who believed science could and should change the world

In May 1921, Marie Curie stood at Carnegie Hall and accepted a prize named for a woman she had never met. Ellen Swallow Richards had been dead for ten years, but her network of college-educated women had raised $2,000 to fund Curie’s research into the medical uses of radium. In Pursuit of a Useful Science offers a richly layered biography of Richards: the first woman to study and teach at MIT—a pioneer of nutrition science, water chemistry, sanitation, and what would now be called science communication.

At the heart of this book is Richards’s defining conviction that science should be useful—applied to the everyday problems of real people, from baking bread to safe drinking water to the management of sewage—and communicated clearly to the public. She tested nutrition science in a public kitchen, researched sewage treatment at a physical water treatment plant, and proved that women could study science without threat to their health at MIT’s Woman’s Laboratory. She published over one hundred works for public audiences, organized exhibits and lectures, and at the end of her life gathered her wide-ranging work into one of the first scientifically informed calls to protect the natural environment.

As Serenity Sutherland shows, Richards grappled with the gap between scientific authority and everyday practice, even as she rarely confronted how her own assumptions shaped the knowledge she advanced. Drawing on extensive archival sources, this study situates Richards within the expanding role of women in science and the rising cultural authority of scientific expertise in American life.

Drawing on the rich resources of The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition, a DVD version of Lincoln's complete legal papers, In Tender Consideration scans the full range of family woes that antebellum Americans took to the law. Deserted wives, destitute widows, jilted brides with illegitimate children, and slandered women brought their cases before the courts, often receiving a surprising degree of sympathy and support.

Through the stories of dozens of individuals who took legal action to obtain a divorce, contest a will, prosecute a rapist, or assert rights to family property, this volume illuminates the legal status of women and children in Illinois and their experiences with the law in action. Contributors document how the courts viewed children and how they responded to inheritance, custody, and other types of cases involving children or their interests. These cases also highlight Lincoln's life in law, placing him more clearly within the context of the legal culture in which he lived and raising intriguing questions about the influence of his legal life on his subsequent political one.

In 1869, at a moment when women were largely barred from public life and professional opportunities, Harriet Tenney stepped into Michigan’s State Capitol and made history. As the first woman to hold a full-time position in the State of Michigan’s government, she spent the next twenty-two years reshaping not only Michigan’s libraries, but the nation’s understanding of what women could achieve in public service.

Appointed and reappointed by seven governors from both political parties, Tenney built one of the country’s most respected state libraries. She dramatically expanded its collections, established professional standards that became models for libraries across the country, and mentored a generation of women librarians who followed in her path. She also founded Michigan’s first state museum, ensuring that historical artifacts, portraits, and documents would be preserved for future generations; today, tens of thousands of people each year visit and study the objects she collected and curated.

Tenney’s impact radiated far beyond the Capitol. Under her leadership, the state librarianship itself became recognized as a “woman’s position”—a remarkable shift in an era when women's work remained largely invisible. In Lansing, she founded the Woman’s Club as well as the Lansing Library and Literary Association, which evolved into the Capital Area District Library system.

In the Charge of a Woman not only tells the story of Tenney’s achievements in expanding the role of women in the workforce; it also illuminates domestic and political life in nineteenth-century Michigan, revealing how one woman navigated, and transformed, a world built to exclude her.

In this collection of vignettes—heartbreaking and often humorous—Nealon explores caregiving as both sacred practice and human risk.

She looks back to her relationship with a father devastated by the early death of her brother; to tending men—some with AIDS, some drunk, some sober—living in Bowery flophouses; to confronting racism; to the quiet instruction of a dog who teaches attention by gazing back.

The essays ask what price we pay when we offer ourselves wholeheartedly to one another, and what it means to remain open to being more than human in a fractured world.

This book explores the way in which literature can be used to reinforce social power. Through rigorous readings of a series of antebellum plantation novels, Susan J. Tracy shows how the narrative strategies employed by proslavery Southern writers served to justify and perpetuate the oppression of women, blacks, and poor whites.

Tracy focuses on the historical romances of six authors: George Tucker, James Ewell Heath, William Alexander Caruthers, John Pendleton Kennedy, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and William Gilmore Simms. Using variations on a recurring plot—in which a young planter/hero rescues a planter's daughter from an “enemy” of her class—each of these novelists reinforced an idealized vision of a Southern civilization based on male superiority, white supremacy, and class inequality. It is a world in which white men are represented as the natural leaders of loyal and dependent women, grateful and docile slaves, and inferior poor whites. According to Tracy, the interweaving of these themes reveals the extent to which the Southern defense of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War was an argument not only about race relations but about gender and class relations as well.

One of the most memorable images of the British women’s suffrage movement occurred on June 4, Derby Day, 1913. As the field of horses approached a turning at Epsom, militant suffragette Emily Wilding Davison ducked out from under the railing and ran onto the track, reaching for the bridle of the King’s horse, and was killed in the collision. While her death transformed her into a heroine, it all but erased her identity. To identify what impelled Davison to suffer multiple imprisonments, to experience the torture of force-feedings and the insults of hostile members of the crowds who came to hear her speak, Carolyn P. Collette explores a largely ignored source—the writing to which Davison dedicated so much time and effort during the years from 1908 to 1913. Davison’s writing is an implicit apologia for why she lived the life of a militant suffragette and where she continually revisits and restates the principles that guided her: that woman suffrage was necessary to improve the lives of men, women, and children; that the freedom and justice women sought was sanctioned by God and unjustly withheld by humans whose opposition constituted a tyranny that had to be opposed; and that the evolution of human progress demanded that women become fully equal citizens of their nation in every respect— politically, economically, and culturally.

In the Thick of the Fight makes available for the first time the archive of published and unpublished writings of Emily Wilding Davison. Collette reorients both scholarly and public attention away from a single, defining event to the complexity of Davison’s contributions to modern feminist discourse, giving the reader a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of Davison’s suffrage writings.

Following the stories of twenty women connected to Oregon breweries before Prohibition, Inherited Work recognizes the overlooked contributions of the women who inherited, managed, and navigated Oregon’s brewing industry. At a time when recordkeeping and historical memory obscured their authority, these women were negotiating debt, managing workers, protecting property, arranging sales, supporting family wealth, and making strategic decisions about the future of their businesses.

Drawing on census records, probate files, property records, newspapers, court documents, and oral histories, Tiah Edmunson-Morton traces the legal and economic landscape of the time, demonstrating the conditions and decisions these women faced in managing their personal lives and livelihoods. From widows like Victoria Bauerlin, Johanna Behrens, and Mary Meller—who inherited not only property but also the financial terms that shaped what they could do next—to the matriarch of a brewing dynasty, Louisa Weinhard, Inherited Work reveals how their influence endured.

Today, women can be found throughout the industry as brewers and owners, as well as chemists, restaurant managers, bookkeepers, educators, graphic designers, and hop brokers. While their roles are more visible than they once were, the history of women in brewing remains incomplete. Who were these women? What did it mean to be part of the brewing industry at the turn of the century? And what changes when we bring their stories into the history of brewing?