Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Women's History
As three recent films show—one on the atomic bomb, one on women defense workers during the Second World War, one on the government arts projects of the thirties —this history of our times offers film makers arresting opportunities.
The sexual habits of American women, examined half a century before Kinsey
The nineteenth century was, according to the stereotype, ashamed and fearful of all things sexual. It was an era when, as one visitor to America swore, teachers put “modest little trousers with frills at the bottom” over the “limbs” of their pianos.
One of Ruth Snyder’s Crimes Was Murder
In 1925 a woman named Ruth Snyder too up with a salesman—a corset and brassiere salesman to be exact—and together on March 20, 1927, they murdered her husband in his bed. Months later, they were both electrocuted.
Although it has been disparaged as “General Washington’s Sewing Circle,” this venture was the first nationwide female organization in America
When news that the British had taken Charleston, South Carolina, reached Philadelphia in May of 1780, merchants and government officials reacted to the disaster by taking steps to support the inflated Pennsylvania currency and solicit funds to pay new army re
She was “one of the most active and most reliable of the many secret woman agents of the Confederacy.”
She began her career as a spy and ended it as an actress, and there are no two professions more thickly larded with myth and lies. At least one historian, despairing of seeing anything real behind the mists, concluded that she had never lived at all.
Unschooled and uncompromising, she founded her own faith
Mary Baker Eddy was, against all odds, one of the most influential women of her age. Born into unpromising circumstances, she never mastered the limited education that was available to her. She lacked literary talent and any real vocation for family life.
How a Crash Program Developed an Efficient Oral Contraceptive in Less Than a Decade
A good beginning for this story is a meeting in early 1951 of three remarkable people—the greatest feminist of our age, a great philanthropist who was as notably eccentric as she was fantastically wealthy, and a biological scientist whose subsequent world fam
Ernest Hemingway and His World
by Anthony Burgess Charles Scribner’s Sons, 144 pages, photographs, $10.95
“Viewed purely in the abstract, I think there can be no question that women should have equal rights with men …I would have the word ‘obey’ used no more by the wife than by the husband.”
”I first saw her on October 18, 1878, and loved her as soon as I saw her sweet, fair young face.
Soujourner Truth's mission was “testifyin’ concerning the wickedness of this ‘ere people.”
IMAGES OF SWEETHEARTS, WIVES, AND MOTHERS HAVE OFTER BEEN USED TO INSPIRE PATRIOTIC FERVOR
“O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand Between their lov’d homes and the war’s desolation…”
In forty years of scraping and scrapping for women’s rights, Abigail Scott Duniway never lost her nerve or wicked tongue
Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender.
An interview with the famed suffragette, Alice Paul
Beset with ailments, Victorian women found solace, in more ways than one, in a new panacea—hydropathy
A century and a half ago American women faced a very different life prospect than today. Without dependable birth-control techniques they could expect to spend their prime years bearing children.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, an extraordinary member of an extraordinary family, always claimed that God wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin
She had been brought up to make herself useful. And always it suited her.
The prevailing Colonial feeling toward female education was unanimously negative. Learning to read was the first feminist triumph.
Could I have died a martyr in the cause, and thus ensured its success, I could have blessed the faggot and hugged the stake.” The cause was state support for female education, the would-be Saint Joan was Emma Willard, and the rhetorical standards of the 1820’
One day in 1869 the gentlemen of the territorial legislature amused themselves by enacting the first woman-suffrage law. They trusted in a veto from the governor
“I do not admit that a woman can draw like that,” said Degas when he saw one of her pictures
At eight o’clock on the evening of June 14, 1926, a very old woman—blind and suffering from advanced diabetes—died in her chateau on the edge of the tiny village of Mesnil-Theribus, some thirty miles northwest of Paris.
Poe’s witticism was not meant kindly, but it was actually a compliment. Without doubt Margaret Fuller stood first among women of the nineteenth century.
A shy Yankee named Hannah Adams never thought of herself as liberated, but she was our first professional female writer.
If they should care to, the leaders of Women’s Liberation may add Miss Hannah Adams, born in 1755, to their roster of distinguished women. She was probably the first native American woman to earn a living as a professional writer.
Proud and independent, the farm girls of New England helped build an industrial Eden, but its paternalistic innocence was not to last
Legend says the frontier was “hell on women,” but the ladies claim they had the time of their lives
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