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Winner of the Humanities in Translation Prize

The Book of Mating is a masterfully translated collection of stories in which Indonesian women explore the full spectrum of mating: marital, sexual, and spiritual; forced and free; transcendent, ruinous, and mundane. Laksmi Pamuntjak portrays both the constraints and opportunities facing women caught between the enduring restrictions of local norms and hierarchies and the tantalizing promises of globalized modern life, between internalized myths and social realities.

An experimental melding of Pamuntjak’s creative, journalistic, and activist work, these stories read as urgent dispatches from the Indonesian archipelago and diaspora—and as universal narratives of women’s lived experiences. Annie Tucker’s nuanced translation takes us from the prison island of Buru and the Bogor Botanical Gardens to Paris’s Left Bank, offering a polyphonic testament to the universal fight for women’s autonomy over their bodies and their lives.

In the nineteenth century, Woman's Exchanges formed a vast national network that created economic alternatives for financially vulnerable women in a world that permitted few respectable employment options. Many remain in business. 

Kathleen Waters Sander delves into the history of Woman's Exchanges and looks at the women who led the organizations—and those who used them to stave off poverty. One of the nation's oldest continuously operating voluntary movements, Exchanges like the Philadelphia Ladies' Depository and the Dorcas Society were fashionable, popular shops where women who had fallen on hard times could sustain themselves. By selling their handiwork on consignment, they not only earned money but avoided the stigma of seeking public employment. As Sander shows, Exchanges evolved into an important forum for entrepreneurial growth. They also provide an example of how women used the voluntary sector, which had so successfully served as a conduit for their political and social reforms, to advance opportunities for economic independence.

As the number of women in the U.S. Senate grows, so does the number of citizens represented by women senators. At the same time, gender remains a key factor in senators’ communications to constituents as well as in news media portrayals of senators. Focusing on 32 male and female senators during the 2006 congressional election year, Kim L. Fridkin and Patrick J. Kenney examine in detail senators’ official websites, several thousand press releases and local news stories, and surveys of 18,000 citizens to discern constituents’ attitudes about their senators.

The authors conclude that gender role expectations and stereotypes do indeed constrain representational and campaign messages and influence news coverage of both candidates and elected senators. Further, while citizens appear to be less influenced by entrenched stereotypes, they pay more attention to female senators’ messages and become more knowledgeable about them, in comparison to male senators.

Reexamines the contested geopolitical landscape of the lower Mississippi River Valley in 1740s, centering Choctaw perspectives 

Matthew J. Sparacio’s comprehensive history, The Choctaw Civil War: Women, Justice, and Sovereignty in the Native South, delivers a rich portrait of eighteenth-century Choctaw life and recasts the Native South as a region shaped by Choctaw decisions. 

In the 1730s and 1740s, the Choctaw Nation leveraged competing European imperial agendas while establishing reciprocal diplomatic ties with other tribes, including their neighboring “brothers,” the Chickasaws. Choctaws drew strength from their multifaceted understanding of sovereignty: connections to land, contributions to society through work, generosity, respect, kinship obligations, and justice. A series of attacks on Choctaw women, however, tested the limits of justice and obligation within and between Choctaw communities. Mounting pressures from both Louisiana and South Carolina added to this factionalism, ultimately leading to civil war. 

Relying on Chahta anumpa (“Choctaw language”) training and tribal histories, gender theory, and ethnohistorical methods, Sparacio highlights women’s contributions to Choctaw society and governance. Intense eighteenth-century debates over justice, kinship, and responsibility created several Choctaw movements for justice that still inspire efforts in Oklahoma and Mississippi to end the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons’ crisis. Tribal and bodily sovereignty shaped the Native South and will shape its future. 

The Choctaw Civil War is a major reinterpretation of Choctaw history and the colonial South. This will be a must-read for historians, scholars of the Native South, and anyone interested in sovereignty movements today.
 

Original and rich, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck is an essential and entertaining reexamination of an enduring Hollywood star.

In her first year of marriage (1864-1865) to General George Armstrong Custer, Libbie Custer witnessed the Civil War firsthand. Her experiences of danger, hardship, and excitement made ideal material for a book, one that she worked on for years in later life but ultimately never published.

In this volume, Arlene Reynolds has produced a readable narrative of Libbie Custer's life during the war years by chronologically reconstructing Libbie's original, unpublished notes and diaries found in the archives of the Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument. In these reminiscences, Libbie Custer adds striking, eloquent details to the Civil War story as she describes her life both in camp and in Washington. Her stories of incidents such as fording a swollen river sidesaddle on horseback, dancing at the Inaugural Ball near President Lincoln, and watching the massive review of the Army of the Potomac after the surrender have the engrossing quality of a well-written novel.

For general readers and students of women's history, this book tells a fascinating story of a sheltered girl's maturation into a courageous woman in the crucible of war. And for both devotees and detractors of her husband, it offers an intimate glimpse into his youth, West Point years, and early military service.

The voice behind the legend—Zelda Fitzgerald in her own words.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald has long been perceived as the tragic "other half" of the Scott and Zelda legend. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, the high-spirited tomboy turned flapper was talented in dance, painting, and writing but lived in the shadow of her husband's success. Her writing can be experienced on its own terms in Matthew Bruccoli's meticulously edited The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald.

The collection includes Zelda's only published novel, Save Me the Waltz, an autobiographical account of the Fitzgeralds' adventures in Paris and on the Riviera; her celebrated farce, Scandalabra; eleven short stories; twelve articles; and a selection of letters to her husband, written over the span of their marriage, that reveals the couple's loving and turbulent relationship.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald has long been an American cultural icon. The Collected Writings affirms her place as a writer and as a symbol not only of the Lost Generation but of all generations as she struggled to define herself through her art.

A balanced, sensitive study of the history of comfort women in Singapore during World War II.
 
“Comfort women” or ianfu is the euphemism used by the Japanese military for the women they compelled to do sex work in the Second World War, and has become the term generally used in English to discuss the subject. The role of comfort women in the Japanese empire during World War II remains an important and emotional topic around the world. Most scholarship concentrates on Korean comfort women, with less on their counterparts in Japan, China, and Taiwan, and even less on Southeast Asia. That gap persists despite widespread knowledge of the elaborate series of comfort stations, or comfort houses, that were organized by the Japanese administration across Singapore during the Occupation from 1942 to 1945. So why, the author asks, did no former comfort women from Singapore come forward and tell their stories when others across Asia began to do publicly in the 1990s? 

To understand this silence, this book offers a detailed examination of the sex industry serving the Japanese military during the wartime occupation of Singapore: the comfort stations, managers, procuresses, girls, and women who either volunteered or were forced into service and in many cases sexual slavery. Kevin Blackburn then turns from history to the public presence of the comfort women in Singapore’s memory, including newspapers, novels, plays, television, and touristic heritage sites, showing how comfort women became known in Singapore during the 1990s and 2000s. Bringing great care, balance, and sensitivity to a difficult subject, Blackburn helps to fill an important gap in our understanding of this period.
 

In the Western imagination, the Middle Eastern harem was a place of sex, debauchery, slavery, miscegenation, power, riches, and sheer abandon. But for the women and children who actually inhabited this realm of the imperial palace, the reality was vastly different. In this collection of translated memoirs, three women who lived in the Ottoman imperial harem in Istanbul between 1876 and 1924 offer a fascinating glimpse "behind the veil" into the lives of Muslim palace women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The memoirists are Filizten, concubine to Sultan Murad V; Princess Ayse, daughter of Sultan Abdulhamid II; and Safiye, a schoolteacher who instructed the grandchildren and harem ladies of Sultan Mehmed V. Their recollections of the Ottoman harem reveal the rigid protocol and hierarchy that governed the lives of the imperial family and concubines, as well as the hundreds of slave women and black eunuchs in service to them. The memoirists show that, far from being a place of debauchery, the harem was a family home in which polite and refined behavior prevailed. Douglas Brookes explains the social structure of the nineteenth-century Ottoman palace harem in his introduction.

These three memoirs, written across a half century and by women of differing social classes, offer a fuller and richer portrait of the Ottoman imperial harem than has ever before been available in English.

The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is Sarah Orne Jewett's most popular book. In its elegantly constructed sketches, a worldly, anonymous writer spends the summer in a tiny Maine fishing village where she hopes to find peace and solitude. As she gains the acceptance and trust of her hosts, the community's power and complexity are slowly revealed. While its episodes portray the difficulty and loneliness of rural life, they also display its dignity and strength, particularly as expressed in the bonds between women: mothers, daughters, and friends.

This centennial edition contains a facsimile of the original text, thereby restoring the novel to Jewett's own version, which had been considerably altered in other published versions, plus four related stories. Further enhancing the importance of this volume is editor Sarah Way Sherman's introduction, which includes a sketch of Jewett's life and professional development, a commentary on textual accuracy, and a discussion of the book's themes and techniques as well as its historical context.

Carlson analyzes the situations of several women of varying historical stature, from the insanity trials of Mary Todd Lincoln and Lizzie Borden's trial for the brutal slaying of her father and stepmother, to lesser-known trials involving insanity, infidelity, murder, abortion, and interracial marriage. The insanity trial of Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard, the wife of a minister, resulted from her attempts to change her own religion, while a jury acquitted Mary Harris for killing her married lover, suggesting that loss of virginity to an adulterous man was justifiable grounds for homicide. The popular conception of abortion as a "woman's crime" came to the fore in the case of Ann Loman (also known as Madame Restell), who performed abortions in New York both before and after it became a crime. Finally, Alice Rhinelander was sued for fraud by her new husband Leonard for "passing" as white, but the jury was more moved by the notion of Alice being betrayed as a woman by her litigious husband than by the supposed defrauding of Leonard as a white male. Alice won the case, but the image of womanhood as in need of sympathy and protection won out as well.

At the heart of these cases, Carlson reveals clearly just how narrow was the line that women had to walk, since the same womanly virtues that were expected of them--passivity, frailty, and purity--could be turned against them at any time. These trials of popular status are especially significant because they reflect the attitudes of the broad audience, indicate which forms of knowledge are easily manipulated, and allow us to analyze how the verdict is argued outside the courtroom in the public and press. With gripping retellings and incisive analysis of these scandalous criminal and civil cases, this book will appeal to historians, rhetoricians, feminist researchers, and anyone who enjoys courtroom drama.

Tracing multivalent words of nineteenth-century French print culture

The production of printed text changed radically over the course of the nineteenth century: Everything from the material used to make paper to the gender of the people assembling books shifted. Examining ten key terms as they took on new meanings in the world of print, Cary Hollinshead-Strick shows how the words, borrowed to name technical transformations, reveal the social expectations surrounding the birth of industrial print culture. Through these homonyms she connects papermaking to both Renaissance ceramics and fin-de-siècle japonisme, reveals the politics behind typos and the reasons women went to work in Parisian suburbs, shows how newspaper formats mapped onto rural and urban forms of entertainment and food, and explores the fantasy that information itself could be gathered and distributed in reliable, comprehensive ways.

By lingering over the resonances set in motion when ordinary words like canard and filet became terms for modern media formats, this book situates communication practices in the social, economic, and political environments that gave rise to them. This innovative approach not only elucidates nineteenth-century French print culture’s influence on the literature of the period but also invites us to consider the relationships between contemporary forms of information, media, labor, and language.

If you like the fiction of Henry James, the psychology of his brother William, and have a taste for Gothic mysteries you will enjoy The Dark Sister. The novel is a curious mixture of the Victorian repressiveness about sex, intricate stories within stories, and Jewish humor.

With a new afterword

“I feel somehow that of all the writing I am doing, my diary is the most important.” So wrote the beloved and bestselling author, poet, and playwright Carol Lynn Pearson in her 1979 diary. Several years before, she recorded, “I feel the imperative of history. . . . Add that to my being a household word to many and I cannot escape the feeling that in many years there might be a number of people interested in these pages.” That time has now come.  

 Unbeknownst to almost everyone but herself, Pearson kept a near-daily diary since she was a teenager, recording her remarkable story in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mormon America. In this first of a four-volume series, Pearson chronicles her love for her church but also her troubling experiences and concerns with its patriarchy, historic doctrine of polygamy, omission of a feminine divine, and homophobia. Readers will rejoice with her as her first book of poetry, Beginnings, sells an astonishing 150,000+ copies and puts her on the map in the 1960s, empathize with her as she watches her church help kill the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, and mourn with her as her mixed-orientation marriage ends and she cares for her former husband in her home as he dies of AIDS in the 1980s. The sensitive-girl-turned-strong-woman who emerges in these diaries insists that we move from patriarchy into partnership, change our destructive policies towards Queer people, and invite God the Mother back into our heavenly family.

Of these years of her life, poet, writer, and feminist Carol Lynn Pearson says, “The plot thickens, as all good plots do. My life and your life—if we are brave enough—move into areas that we had not anticipated. We feel sometimes that we want to run back to safer ground, but life has decided otherwise and so we take those next steps. Volume two of my diaries gives us a closeup of the years 1990 to 2002, bringing us an abundance of both joy and distress.”

Throughout the 1990s, Pearson records and laments her church’s efforts to punish scholars and activists while celebrating the success of her books and one-woman play, Mother Wove the Morning. Along the way, she comforts the suffering, endures terrible personal loss, and witnesses the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11. “Bless everyone who fights for what is right,” she writes.  Few have fought harder than Carol Lynn Pearson.

Proposition 8, the 2008 California ballot initiative that overturned the state’s legalization of same-sex marriage, looms large in volume 3 of Carol Lynn Pearson’s diaries. The intense lobbying in favor of the measure by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints caused widespread protests against the church and rifts within congregations, families, and friendships that felt like they might never heal. Pearson documented it all. 

When she learned through friends close to church leaders that members of the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve Apostles were shocked by the backlash, she wondered, “How do 15 prophets, seers, and revelators not see this coming when the rest of us did?”

A lifelong feminist, Pearson’s diaries also reveal her concerns for gender equality. She chronicles her observations of Ordain Women, a movement by a group of Latter-day Saint feminists who lobbied to change the church’s all-male priesthood. At the end of this volume, Pearson takes on yet another issue: the ongoing Mormon doctrine that polygamy is practiced in the eternities. Pearson heard from thousands of women who feared that they would be forced to share their husbands in the afterlife. The pain of these women propelled her forward into her next book project, challenging the doctrine of “eternal polygamy.”

Even as she faced her own struggles, Pearson buoyed up those around her. She took phone calls, answered letters, and comforted visitors who were hurting because of the church’s policies. She was, for many, a symbol of hope. 

This fourth and final volume of The Diaries of Carol Lynn Pearson is full of contradictions as it covers turbulent world events and intimate details in her life. Pearson remains a beacon of light and hope for many, even as she struggles with her own sorrows. 

She embarks on a new project that consumes her: the Latter-day Saint doctrine that polygamy will exist in the afterlife. Pearson also continues to document contemporaneous events in the modern history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including the church’s November 2015 policy that discriminated against LGBTQ+ members and their children. She has both a grassroots perspective as a member of a California congregation and special insight into the decisions of LDS leadership, thanks to friends who keep her informed of what’s happening at the highest levels of the church.

Through it all, Pearson mourns when she says goodbye to longtime friends who die. In July 2026, after she completed her diary project, death finally came for Carol Lynn Pearson after 86 years. Her unique voice cannot be replicated.

Judith Malina’s newly restored diaries from a critical early decade in her personal, artistic, and political development

Judith Malina’s diaries from 1947 to 1957 are brought back into print in this volume, which charts her cofounding of The Living Theatre with husband and lifelong artistic partner Julian Beck. In these diaries, she narrates her developing political commitments and her expansive collaborations and personal relationships, as well as a moving account of her time in prison with activist Dorothy Day. This new edition features Kate Bredeson’s comprehensive introduction, which offers a detailed examination of Malina’s life and work in this period, along with additional historical context of these years and never-before-published photographs from Malina’s personal archives.

The Diaries of Judith Malina is a four-volume set that publishes for the first time together the edited diaries of radical theater director, actor, and activist Judith Malina from 1947 to 1971, the most influential period of her remarkable and storied career. A committed anarchist and pacifist, Malina made theater as a way to stoke revolutionary action. Her diaries showcase her political and social observations, cultural commentary, self-reflection, and wit. This expertly prepared set invites us to recognize Malina for her accomplishments not only as an artist and an activist but as one of the great literary diarists.
 

A previously unpublished volume of diaries recording Judith Malina’s extraordinary life and career in a moment of cultural revolution

Judith Malina’s diaries from the pivotal years of 1958 to 1968 are presented here in print for the first time. Meticulously edited and with an essential introduction by Kate Bredeson that offers a detailed discussion of Malina’s life and works during this period, the volume includes additional historical context and never-before-published photographs from Malina’s personal archives, as well as an illuminating foreword by Living Theatre archivist and longtime company member Tom Walker. This decade covers some of the most important years of Malina’s life and in the history of The Living Theatre, from career-defining productions of The Connection and The Brig to the company’s self-imposed European exile, when they created their signature works, including Paradise Now, Antigone, and Frankenstein.

The Diaries of Judith Malina is a four-volume set that publishes for the first time together the edited diaries of radical theater director, actor, and activist Judith Malina from 1947 to 1971, the most influential period of her remarkable and storied career. A committed anarchist and pacifist, Malina made theater as a way to engage in revolutionary action. Her diaries showcase her political and social observations, cultural commentary, self-reflection, and wit. This expertly prepared set invites us to recognize Malina for her accomplishments not only as an artist and an activist but as one of the great literary diarists.
 

A newly restored edition of Judith Malina’s legendary diaries narrating a key moment of social, political, and cultural upheaval

Originally published by Judith Malina as The Enormous Despair, this slim, gripping collection of diaries from a pivotal period between 1968 and 1969 follows The Living Theatre’s return to the United States after their years of self-exile in Europe, their increasing notoriety and frequent arrests, and their cross-country touring. In these pages, Malina wrestles with the company’s artistic and political efforts during a moment of societal crisis and grapples with their future. Kate Bredeson’s introduction contextualizes Malina’s life and work in this period, while additional historical context and never-before-published photographs add new detail and depth to a stirring account of American social and political history. 

The Diaries of Judith Malina is a four-volume set that publishes for the first time together the edited diaries of radical theater director, actor, and activist Judith Malina from 1947 to 1971, the most influential period of her remarkable and storied career. A committed anarchist and pacifist, Malina made theater as a way to engage in revolutionary action. Her diaries showcase her political and social observations, her cultural commentary, her self-reflection, and her wit. This expertly prepared set invites us to recognize Malina for her accomplishments not only as an artist and an activist but as one of the great literary diarists.
 

Judith Malina’s never-before-published diaries describing a period of profound personal and professional transformation

The years 1969 to 1971 saw The Living Theatre’s greatest rupture, reckoning with its desire to leave its defining productions from the 1960s behind and move forward with new artistic works and practices. In these previously unpublished diaries, Judith Malina recounts these pivotal years, describing her transformative time in Brazil, including her experiences of daily life in jail while awaiting trial with her company members. This meticulously edited volume includes Kate Bredeson’s introduction, examining Malina’s life and work in this period, as well as additional historical context and never-before-published photographs. Living Theatre member Ilion Troya offers a foreword that provides new context for understanding the volume’s historical significance.

The Diaries of Judith Malina is a four-volume set that publishes for the first time together the edited diaries of radical theater director, actor, and activist Judith Malina from 1947 to 1971, the most influential period of her remarkable and storied career. A committed anarchist and pacifist, Malina made theater as a way to engage in revolutionary action. Her diaries showcase her political and social observations, cultural commentary, self-reflection, and wit. This expertly prepared set invites us to recognize Malina for her accomplishments not only as an artist and an activist but as one of the great literary diarists.
 

For centuries, women who aspired to write had to enter a largely male literary tradition that offered few, if any, literary forms in which to express their perspectives on lived experience. Since the nineteenth century, however, women writers and readers have been producing "disobedient" counter-narratives that, while clearly making reference to the original texts, overturn their basic assumptions.

This book looks at both canonical and non-canonical works, over a variety of fiction and nonfiction genres, that offer counter-readings of familiar Western narratives. Nancy Walker begins by probing women's revisions of two narrative traditions pervasive in Western culture: the biblical story of Adam and Eve, and the traditional fairy tales that have served as paradigms of women's behavior and expectations. She goes on to examine the works of a wide range of writers, from contemporaries Marilynne Robinson, Ursula Le Guin, Anne Sexton, Fay Weldon, Angela Carter, and Margaret Atwood to precursors Caroline Kirkland, Fanny Fern, Mary De Morgan, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Edith Nesbit, and Evelyn Sharp.

Examine the creative, profound dialogue between medieval women and biblical traditions

The latest volume in the Bible and Women series examines the relationship between women and the Bible’s reception during the early Middle Ages (500–1100 CE) in both the Greek East and the Latin West. Essays focus on interactions between women and the Bible through biblical precepts on women and for women, biblical women as the subjects of action or objects of discussion, and writings by women that refer to the Bible as a moral authority. The women discussed in the volume range from the well-known—including the nuns Kassia in Byzantium and Hrosvita in the West; the aristocrat Dhuoda, author of a moral guide for her son; Gisela, the sister of Charlemagne and abbess of Chelles; and her niece Rotrude—to those who remain anonymous. Contributions also explore how the Old and New Testaments exercised influence on emerging Islam.

Features:

• Analysis of images of the Virgin Mary as a means of tracing the spread of her cult and feast days from East to West
• Exploration of the significance of classical culture for medieval women who composed poems for a Christian audience
• Evaluation of art as a means of establishing devotional relationships not necessarily mediated by the voices of preachers or the reading of texts
.

Prominent female voices in journalism provide critical perspectives on the challenges women face in today's news organizations, such as connecting with diverse audiences, educating readers about international issues and cultures, maintaining credibility, negotiating media consolidation and corporate pressures, and overcoming the persistent barriers to professional advancement. A powerful and complex assessment of how women are transforming the news industry, The Edge of Change explores how the news industry might implement further reforms aimed at creating a more inclusive journalistic community.

Contributors are Catalina Camia, Kathleen Carroll, Pamela J. Creedon, Paula Lynn Ellis, Helen E. Fisher, Dorothy Butler Gilliam, Ellen Goodman, Sharon Grigsby, Carol Guzy, Kirsten Scharnberg Hampton, Cathy Henkel, Pamela J. Johnson, Jane Kirtley, Jan Leach, Caroline Little, Wanda S. Lloyd, Arlene Notoro Morgan, June O. Nicholson, Geneva Overholser, Marty Petty, Deb Price, Donna M. Reed, Sandra Mims Rowe, Peggy Simpson, Margaret Sullivan, Julia Wallace, and Keven Ann Willey.