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The texts available here in English for the first time open a window into the lives of three early modern Frenchwomen as they explore the common themes of family, memory, sin, and salvation. The Regrets of Marguerite d’Auge (1600), the Memoirs of Renée Burlamacchi (1623), and the Genealogy of Jeanne du Laurens (1631), taken from different genres of historical writings, raise important questions: Why and how did female authorship find its way into the historical record? How did these voices escape the censorship and prejudice against female publication? In a time of extreme religious conflict, how did these women convey their views on controversial issues such as primacy of grace, indulgences, and salvation without disrupting the gender expectations of the era?

Gail Hosking Gilberg's father was a hero, a valiant soldier decorated posthumously with the Medal of Honor, a man who served his country throughout his entire adult life. But Charles Hosking was a mystery to his daughter. He was killed in Vietnam a week after her seventeenth birthday. She buried the war, the protests, the medal, and her military upbringing along with her father, so much so that she felt cut off from herself. It took more than twenty years for her to recognize the stirrings of a father and a daughter not yet at peace.

Gilberg began a journey—two journeys really—to find out who her father was and in the process to find herself. She explored her buried rage, shame, and silence, and examined how war had shaped her life. In studying the photo albums that her father had left behind, Gilberg found that the photographs demanded that she give voice to her feelings, then release her silent words, words that had no meaning in war for her father yet had all the meaning in the world for her. The result was an epiphany. The photographs became the roads she took in and out of war, and her words brought her father home. Snake's Daughter reveals the crossroads where a soldier father's life and a daughter's life connect.

Snake's Daughter is an arresting and anguished narrative that gives voice to an experience Gail Hosking Gilberg shares with thousands of Americans, including military “brats” whose parents served their country and often gave their lives in the process.

Sophocles II contains the plays “Ajax,” translated by John Moore; “The Women of Trachis,” translated by Michael Jameson; “Electra,” translated by David Grene; “Philoctetes,” translated by David Grene; and “The Trackers,” translated by Mark Griffith.

Many years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. The updated third editions of these classic works were designed to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.

In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.

In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.

Southern Womanhood and Slavery is the first full-length biography of Louisa S. McCord, one of the most intriguing intellectuals in antebellum America. The daughter of South Carolina planter and politician Langdon Cheves, and an essayist in her own right, McCord supported unregulated free trade and the perpetuation of slavery and opposed the advancement of women’s rights. This study examines the origins of her ideas.

Leigh Fought constructs an exciting narrative that follows McCord from her childhood as the daughter of a state representative and president of the Bank of the United States through her efforts to accept her position as wife and mother, her career as an author and plantation mistress, and the Union invasion of South Carolina during the Civil War, to the end of her life in the emerging New South. Fought analyzes McCord’s poetry, letters, and essays in an effort to comprehend her acceptance of slavery and the submission of women. Fought concludes that McCord came to a defense of slavery through her experience with free labor in the North, which also reinforced her faith in the paternalist model for preserving social order.

McCord’s life as a writer on “unfeminine” subjects, her reputation as strong-minded and masculine, her late marriage, her continued ownership of her plantation after marriage, and her position as the matron of a Civil War hospital contradicted her own philosophy that women should remain the quiet force behind their husbands. She lived during a time of social flux in which free labor, slavery, and the role of women underwent dramatic changes, as well as a time that enabled her to discover and pursue her intellectual ambitions. Fought examines the conflict that resulted when those ambitions clashed with McCord’s role as a woman in the society of the South.

McCord’s voice was an interesting, articulate, and necessary feminine addition to antebellum white ideology. Moreover, her story demonstrates the ways in which southern women negotiated through patriarchy without surrendering their sense of self or disrupting the social order. Engaging and very readable, Southern Womanhood and Slavery will be of special interest to students of southern history and women’s studies, as well as to the general reader.

Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.

When Tennessee became the thirty-sixth and final state needed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920, giving women the right to vote, one group of women expressed bitter disappointment and vowed to fight against “this feminist disease.” Why this fierce and extended opposition? In Splintered Sisterhood, Susan Marshall argues that the women of the antisuffrage movement mobilized not as threatened homemakers but as influential political strategists.
    Drawing on surviving records of major antisuffrage organizations, Marshall makes clear that antisuffrage women organized to protect gendered class interests. She shows that many of the most vocal antisuffragists were wealthy, educated women who exercised considerable political influence through their personal ties to men in politics as well as by their own positions as leaders of social service committees. Under the guise of defending an ideal of “true womanhood,” these powerful women sought to keep the vote from lower-class women, fearing it would result in an increase in the “ignorant vote” and in their own displacement from positions of influence. This book reveals the increasingly militant style of antisuffrage protest as the conflict over female voting rights escalated. Splintered Sisterhood adds a missing piece to the history of women’s rights activism in the United States and illuminates current issues of antifeminism.

The typical female sports fan remains very different from her male counterparts. In their insightful and engaging book, Sportista, Andrei S. Markovits and Emily Albertson examine the significant ways many women have become fully conversant with sports—acquiring a knowledge of and passion for them as a way of forging identities that until recently were quite alien to women.
 
Sportista chronicles the relationship that women have developed with sports in the wake of the second wave of feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The changes women athletes have achieved have been nothing short of revolutionary. But, as Markovits and Albertson argue, women’s identities as sports fans, though also changed in recent decades, remain notably different from that of men. Sportista highlights the impediments to these changes that women have faced and the reality that, even as bona fide fans, they “speak” sports differently from and remain largely unaccepted by men.

In the series Politics, History and Social Change, edited by John C. Torpey

Standing Our Ground: Women, Environmental Justice, and the Fight to End Mountaintop Removal examines women’s efforts to end mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. Mountaintop removal coal mining, which involves demolishing the tops of hills and mountains to provide access to coal seams, is one of the most significant environmental threats in Appalachia, where it is most commonly practiced.

The Appalachian women featured in Barry’s book have firsthand experience with the negative impacts of Big Coal in West Virginia. Through their work in organizations such as the Coal River Mountain Watch and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, they fight to save their mountain communities by promoting the development of alternative energy resources. Barry’s engaging and original work reveals how women’s tireless organizing efforts have made mountaintop removal a global political and environmental issue and laid the groundwork for a robust environmental justice movement in central Appalachia.