Don't Mess With Historian Mary Beard

In addition to being a classics professor at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Newnham College, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of ancient literature, Mary Beard is also a best-selling author whose most recent opus, >SPQR, shines a fresh light on ancient Roman history. She’s also the host of various TV programs, such as Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed. All of which would make you think she’s not one to be messed with when it comes to arguing over the past. But that doesn’t stop game mansplainers from having a crack...

Read More Here @ SBS Guide

Buchi Emecheta, Nigerian Novelist, Dies at 72

Buchi Emecheta, Nigerian Novelist, Dies at 72 - The New York Times

Buchi Emecheta, a British-based Nigerian writer who, in “Second-Class Citizen,” “The Joys of Motherhood” and other novels, gave voice to African women struggling to reconcile traditional roles with the demands of modernity, died on Jan. 25 at her home in London. She was 72.  The cause was dementia, her son Sylvester Onwordi wrote in the British magazine New Statesman.

Ms. Emecheta (pronounced BOO-chee em-EH-cheh-tah) came to the attention of British readers in the early 1970s when New Statesman began running her accounts of the travails of a young Nigerian woman in London. Adah, a thinly disguised version of the author, lived in a dreary apartment, worked menial jobs to support her young children and abusive husband, studied at night and weathered the slights meted out by a racist society. Buoyed by ambition and pluck, she remained undaunted.

“In the Ditch,” a novel based on those columns, appeared in 1972.  With the publication two years later of a second Adah novel, “Second-Class Citizen,” critics in Britain and the United States hailed the arrival of an important new African writer. Like her immediate predecessor Flora Nwapa, Ms. Emecheta revealed the thoughts and aspirations of her countrywomen, shaped by a patriarchal culture but stirred by the modern promise of freedom and self-definition.

Obit: Barbara Mertz (Elizabeth Peters)

From UT San Diego:

Barbara Mertz, an erstwhile Egyptologist better known to millions of readers as Barbara Michaels or Elizabeth Peters, the noms de plume on the covers of her dozens of top-selling historical mysteries and romantic thrillers, died Aug. 8 at her home near Frederick, Md. She was 85.

Her daughter, Elizabeth Mertz, confirmed her death and said she did not yet know the cause.

She wrote two scholarly books on ancient Egypt in the 1960s but was unable to find employment in academia. When she turned to fiction, she discovered that she had a talent, and that readers had an appetite, for particular tales of historical intrigue.

By weaving the curiosities of ancient Egypt, archaeology and other rarefied fields into her fiction, Dr. Mertz produced one crowd-pleasing yarn after another.

Three Women & Hadassah

From Naperville Sun:

A hundred years ago, New Yorker Henrietta Szold traveled to Palestine and saw they had no access to medical care. She returned to the United States and started Hadassah, now the largest Jewish women’s organization in the world.

More recently, when Marlene Levine moved from Columbus, Ohio, to Minnesota for her husband’s job, she called on the Hadassah membership to help her make friends. After a move to Naperville, she is now the president of the DuPage/Will Hadassah chapter.

And Melanie Benjamin wanted to, “Tell the stories of strong women, who tried, but not always succeeded to live the lives they were told they couldn’t live because of their gender, the time or their condition.”

Abandoned Women

From the Daily Record:

THEY are the women history has chosen to forget – the 2500 Scots banished to Tasmania for the pettiest of crimes.

Today, for the first time, we can reveal the stories Scotland was too ashamed to tell – and celebrate the women cruelly sentenced to exile on the other side of the world.

Not only did these formidable females survive the treacherous journey and years of servitude, many went on to become model citizens once free and the mothers of a new nation.

In her new book, Abandoned Women, historian Lucy Frost remembers these long-forgotten women. More than 12,500 British convicts were banished to Van Diemen’s Land – Tasmania – between 1803 and 1853. A fifth were Scots women.

Review - Calling Invisible Women

Review of "Calling Invisible Women" by Ben Steelman at Star News Online:

Ever since H.G. Wells' 1897 novel, the notion of invisibility has been like catnip for writers and filmmakers.

Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" used invisibility as a metaphor for discrimination and for white America's blindness. H.F. Saint, in "Memoirs of an Invisible Man" (1987), used invisibility to probe the yuppie lifestyle. "Hollow Man," the 2000 Paul Verhoeven film starring Kevin Bacon, seemed to posit that invisibility might prompt an otherwise normal man to become a serial rapist.

But what about the Invisible Woman? Except for Marvel Comics, which promoted the Fantastic Four's "Invisible Girl" to adult status some years back, the idea hasn't been kicked around that much.

So Tennessee author Jeanne Ray is almost plowing virgin soil with her new novel "Calling Invisible Women" – and she's harvesting a bumper crop.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, "Calling Invisible Women" takes the perspective of a woman of a certain age – specifically, 54-year-old Clover Hobart, a sometime garden columnist for her hometown paper in Ohio.

Émilie du Châtelet

From the Daily Maverick:

Émilie du Châtelet could possibly be one of the greatest female intellectuals, mathematicians and thinkers in history, but the love of Voltaire’s life who contributed significantly to the Enlightenment all but vanished from the history books. That is until science author David Bodanis stumbled across her and decided to ensure she wouldn’t be forgotten.

One of her greatest accomplishments was the translation of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). The achievement is remarkable when one realises that she made what is considered one of the greatest texts in the history of science accessible and that, three and a half centuries after it was originally published, it still remains the standard French translation.

Author & Historian Kate Williams

From the Guardian:

Could historian Kate Williams be the next Doctor Who? She can build her own Tardis, after all. Sitting in the Edwardian elegance of her north London house, the academic and novelist confides: "When I was a child one of my first games was a time machine which I made for my brother – a big box covered in silver and bits of cellophane. I'd close him up in it and joggle him and say, 'We're in Victorian times now... and now we're in Egyptian times and I can see all these pyramids and pharaohs.' He was like, 'Let me out.'"

These days her methods are more "bluestocking" than Blue Peter, as she puts it. Williams studies overlooked or crassly simplified women and reveals their complexity, intelligence and significance to history. Her first book, England's Mistress, was about Emma Hamilton, who became the mistress of Lord Nelson and was, as Williams says, "from nowhere, the poorest strata of society, intended for nothing more than being a ballast to the industrial revolution." When Williams discovered a letter by her "it was as if a whole heart had been betrayed on to the page."

The next, Becoming Queen, was about the youth of Queen Victoria, and soon, Williams will release Young Elizabeth, a biography of the present queen.

Dangerous Ambition

Press Release:

Born in the early 1890s on opposite sides of the Atlantic, these brilliant and ambitious women, Rebecca West, an English journalist, novelist, and critic, and Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist and first female head of a U.S. news bureau in Europe, defied convention to achieve unprecedented fame in a male-dominated era. Susan Hertog—author of the critically acclaimed Anne Morrow Lindberg, Her Life—delves deep into the complex life and legacy of two early feminists who tried to have it all in her new remarkable dual biography DANGEROUS AMBITION, Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson: New Women in Search of Love and Power (Ballantine Books Hardcover; November 8, 2011).

By the mid-twentieth century, West and Thompson both reached astounding levels of professional achievement. Thompson was considered by FDR and Churchill to be the most influential woman in America. West, a formidable journalist, literary critic, and biographer by the age of 20, and a novelist and literary theorist by 30, was hailed across the English-speaking world for her literary genius. But even as their careers prospered, their personal relationships shattered. Drawn to men equally ambitious and hungry for love—Thompson to Sinclair Lewis, West to H. G. Wells—their relationships with their husbands and their sons would be sacrificed for the sake of their work. They broke the old rules and charted new waters; their lives tell the story of the price women paid for ambition and success.

The first book to impressively link the lives of West and Thompson, DANGEROUS AMBITION introduces readers to two women who were hugely important and respected in their day, and speaks to 21st century women and men as they struggle to reinvent their roles as parents and professionals.

About the Author:

Susan Hertog was born in New York City and graduated from Hunter College. After earning her MFA from Columbia University, she became a freelance journalist and photographer. She is the author of one previous book, Anne Morrow Lindberg, Her Life. She lives in Manhattan with her family.

Author - Alice Hoffman

From the Alice Hoffman website:

"Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952 and grew up on Long Island. After graduating from high school in 1969, she attended Adelphi University, from which she received a BA, and then received a Mirrellees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which she attended in 1973 and 74, receiving an MA in creative writing.  She currently lives in Boston. "

The Dovekeepers

AD70 Roman troops sacked Jerusalem, destroying the Second Temple and hunting down those few who managed to flee the city. Some took refuge with the Sacarii, Jewish rebels led by Eleazar ben Ya'ir in Herod's hill fortress of Masada, with the settlement eventually swelling to accommodate more than 900 fighters and refugees.

The Red Garden

Beautifully crafted, shimmering with magic, a transforming glimpse into small town America, presenting us with 300 years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty and redemption in a web of tales where characters lives are intertwined by fate and by their own actions.

Lady Elizabeth Dacre's Erotic Poem

From Huffington Post:

A crude love poem written almost 450 years ago by a Roman Catholic woman and sent to a Protestant scholar who served Edward VI has been discovered in the back of a book by a British academic.

When Professor Treharne took her class of undergraduates on a tour of medieval literature in the library of West Virginia University, she thought she was introducing another year of eager literature students to the familiar wonders of Chaucer.

Instead, tucked into a 1561 edition of the poet’s work, she was about to discover what she now believes to be the only known Latin love poem written by an Englishwoman until the 18th century.

After translating the poem Treharne discovered that the poem was penned by Lady Elizabeth Dacre, a married Catholic woman, and addressed to Sir Anthony Cooke, a Protestant and tutor to King Edward VI. During this time it was common for lustful Tudor men to pen verses to woo the objects of their affection but extremely unusual for a lady to do the same.

The Discovery of Jeanne Baret

In 1766, Jeanne Baret, the daughter of illiterate French peasants, disguised herself as a teenage boy in order to join the first French expedition to circumnavigate the world. She signed on as assistant to the famous botanist Philibert Commerson—who also happened to be her lover. The journey made the twenty-six-year-old, known as “Jean Baret” to her shipmates, the first woman to ever sail around the globe. Yet very little is known about this extraordinary woman, whose accomplishments were considered—when they were considered at all—to be subversive, even impossible for someone of her sex and class.

In THE DISCOVERY OF JEANNE BARET: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe (Broadway Books; December 6, 2011), acclaimed author and professor Glynis Ridley upends the myths about Jeanne Baret’s pioneering journey. When Ridley began researching Baret’s life, she quickly noticed that certain implausible “facts” kept appearing. Most glaringly, almost every published source asserted that no one, not even Baret’s cabinmate and longtime lover Commerson, realized her sex until the ships made landfall in Tahiti, eighteen months into the voyage. According to the accepted story, the officers and men of the ship were greeted by Tahitian women offering sexual favors, while Baret found herself surrounded by a group of native men who easily saw through her disguise.

Unraveling the conflicting accounts recorded by Baret’s crewmates, Ridley played historical detective to piece together the real story: how Baret’s true identity was in fact widely suspected within just a couple of weeks of embarking, and the painful consequences of those suspicions; a newly discovered notebook, written in Baret’s own hand, that proves her scientific acumen; the thousands of specimens she collected, most famously the showy vine bougainvillea; and her awkward, sometimes dangerous interactions with the men on the ship, including the well-meaning commander who covered up the truth about Baret and downplayed her accomplishments.

Because Baret was a working-class woman, the French establishment found it easy to dismiss her scientific contributions. Not even a single plant that she discovered is named for her, and she was quietly written out of history—until now. Anchored in impeccable original research and endowed with indelible characters and exotic settings, THE DISCOVERY OF JEANNE BARET offers this forgotten heroine a chance to bloom at long last.

REVIEW

From the New York Journal of Books

"When you consider that the entire historical record for Jeanne Baret comprises little more than a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, a death certificate, and a handful of mentions in other people’s journals, Glynis Ridley’s achievement in producing an entire biography of the woman is quite something. Not just that, but Ridley’s skills as a researcher give us such a strong impression of the times Baret lived in, the people who surrounded and influenced her, and the geography through which she traveled, that, for most of the book, we hardly notice, or care."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Glynis Ridley is a professor of English at the University of Louisville and a British citizen. Her previous book, Clara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe, won the Institute of Historical Research (University of London) Prize.

Julia Taft - Humanitarian & Notable Women

I received a review copy of Ann Blackman's "Off To Save The World: How Julia Taft Made a Difference" and am certainly glad that I had the opportunity to read and review this book.

From the promo:

In Off to Save the World Blackman paints a mosaic of a witty, determined and idealistic woman who not only ran some of the most dramatic relief efforts of her generation, but also influenced the debate at home as the international spotlight moved from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to the collapse of the Soviet Union to ethnic conflicts in Africa and the former Yugoslavia.

Taft, who married into a famous Republican family, dedicated herself to restoring honor and dignity to those far less fortunate than herself. Starting in 1975 when she was 32 years old, Taft directed the task force that managed the resettlement of refugees from the Vietnam War. Over the years, she basically invented the way the United States government responds to natural and man-made disasters around the world, and continued to direct many relief efforts. 

For more than three decades, Julia Taft was one of the United States’ top humanitarian relief experts, friend and ally of the world’s most impoverished people. She was, simply put, a legend in her field.

I read this tome of barely 140 pages in a day - it was such an easy, free flowing work that was hard to put down - the more I read, the more I had to discover more about Julia. It is more in the style of anecdotal memoir not a full blown biography bogged down with facts and more facts.  It is concise and each stage of Julia's amazing life is covered in enough detail to succinctly convey the author's point.

Julia was one of the first women to embark upon a career devoted to the care and welfare of others.  Humanitarian work had not the priority nor the publicity it has today.  Julia threw herself wholeheartedly into her work and brought the plight of those less fortunate to the forefront.

Highly recommended for all those interested in the accomplishments of this extraordinary woman.

Obituary from the New York Times

About the author:

In her long career as a news correspondent for TIME magazine and the Associated Press, Blackman covered American politics, social policy, the changing role of women, cultural trends and the powerful personalities that make up Washington society. While with TIME, Blackman spent three years in Moscow as a foreign correspondent. Her assignments at the AP included the Watergate hearings, presidential politics, the Iranian hostage crisis and the assassinations attempts on Governor George Wallace and President Ronald Reagan.

Her earlier books include Seasons of Her Life: A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright (Scribner/Simon & Schuster, 1998); The Spy Next Door(co-author) about the secret life of FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen (Little Brown, 2002), and Wild Rose, the story of Civil War spy Rose O’Neale Greenhow. (Random House, 2005).

Beatrix Potter Versus Winston Churchill

From the Telegraph:

Children's author Beatrix Potter has finally won a 100-year-long battle against a noisy sea plane - winning sweet revenge over her arch-nemesis Winston Churchill.

In 1911 she furiously penned a strongly worded letter against the testing of a Britain's first successful sea plane, called 'Waterbird', over and on her treasured Lake Windermere, in the Lake District, blasting: "Those who want noise go to Blackpool."

Despite her loud opposition the tests went ahead on 25th November 1911 after Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, ignored her pleas and pressed on with Edward Wakefield's unique aircraft.

But plans to celebrate the centenary of that maiden flight and landing this Friday using a different sea plane were sunk when air enthusiasts lost a council application to temporarily lift Windermere's 10mph speed limit - which was introduced in 2005 and inspired by Potter's years of conservation campaigning.

Deare Sister - Letters of Historical Women

Deare Sister - a work of fiction consisting of letters that might have been written by such historical women as Lady Godiva, Milton’s daughter, Rubens’ model, Mozart’s mother, Freud’s wife, Plato’s students, and others.

As Chris says: "In fact, I chose women who, for whatever reasons, probably didn’t write such a letter, or any letter, or anything at all for that matter. Or if they did, it hasn’t survived (at least, not in the easily accessible pre-internet mainstream). In this way then, I did not presume to speak for anyone who could and did speak for herself. These pieces are not so much what the characters really would’ve said but what I think they should’ve said."

About Chris:

~ author

~ poet

~ scholar

~ voice of female consciousness

Visit Chris' website: http://www.chriswind.net/

Wendy & The Lost Boys

From the Washington Post:

Whatever flaws Lola Wasserstein had as a mother, she produced more than her share of extraordinary offspring. Her eldest, Sandra Meyer, was a top executive for American Express and Citicorp at a time when few women entered those boardrooms. Bruce Wasserstein pioneered the 1980s-style corporate takeover and became one of the richest men in the country (Forbes put him at #190). Georgette, who wanted a quiet life, runs a large country inn with her husband. Lola’s family was both dazzling and haunted by dark secrets and early deaths.

Wendy, the baby, became the first woman to win a (solo) Tony award for best play. In an astute new biography, “Wendy and the Lost Boys,” veteran reporter Julie Salamon fills in the history that produced a personality as extravagantly affable and intensely compartmentalized as Wendy Wasserstein. Eminently approachable, often unkempt, Wasserstein did not look like the sort of woman to keep complicated personal ledgers. When she died, at age 55, many of her closest friends discovered that each of them knew a different Wendy.

Christine Cole Catley

From the New Zealand Herald:

I was told she was a publisher and writer, but it would have been more accurate to say she was a general force in New Zealand letters and society over 60-odd years. She was a down-to-earth doyenne, and most recently, a North Shore nexus. She knew everybody over three or four generations - and approved enthusiastically of most - from Douglas Lilburn to Rena Owen ("a most determined woman, very funny. I like Rena a great deal"); Janet Frame to "lovely, lovely" Ranginui Walker; Denis Glover to Kevin Milne to James K. Baxter (and his mother).

She's done too much to even start listing here but, after her death at age 88 last Sunday (writing and publishing to the last), many of her achievements have been listed elsewhere. For Cole Catley belongs to a certain category of people whom I admire enormously, and facetiously canonise into a "Renaissance Pantheon": people who have the talent, but more importantly, the curiosity and the energy to be Of-All-Trades.

Notorious Australian Women

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Australians have made heroes of bushranger Ned Kelly, mutineer Fletcher Christian and cricketer Shane Warne but their female equivalents have failed to imprint themselves on the national psyche in the same way.

The 20 subjects of Notorious Australian Women were well known to their contemporaries but few are still household names. Some were justifiably notorious, others attracted attention simply for breaching social mores and some don't really deserve to be labelled notorious at all.

Kay Saunders has picked her subjects from early settlement (prisoner Mary Bryant, bushranger Mary Cockerill, freedom fighter Walyer), through the 19th century (shipwreck survivor Eliza Fraser, good-time girl Lola Montez, transvestite Ellen Tremayne) to the 20th century (including author Pamela Travers, designer Florence Broadhurst, crime boss Tilly Devine and journalist Lillian Roxon) and they are a diverse bunch.

First Ladies of Rome

From The Independent:

As Anneliese Freisenbruch admits in this excellent history, most of the Ancient Roman women discussed in her book "would never have come to historical notice if it were not for the men they married or the sons they gave birth to", such was the patriarchal society in which they existed.

There is hardly anything written by women of the era, and too many contrasting versions from male playwrights for Freisenbruch to be definitive. But these more sceptical portraits of women, often either vilified or venerated, are very welcome.

A Quiet Revolution

Review by Abbas Jaffer is Associate Editor of Altmuslimah:

The question of what Muslim women’s veiling means in America is a highly politicized, often antagonistic debate on television and in the public sphere. Provocative coverage has appeared innumerable times, including a NPR feature as well as a New York Times piece earlier this year. Altmuslimah has also published a number of articles, including “The politics of fashion,” and a series about women who have chosen to take off the veil (Part 1, Part 2). More recent journalistic and academic discussions have certainly been more nuanced and multifaceted than they previously were.

Leila Ahmed’s A Quiet Revolution is both an important and thought-provoking look at the rising visibility of veiling amongst Muslim women. What lies within is a history of the veil and its political meanings from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Ahmed consciously confronts some of her own preconceptions about what this phenomenon means, how wearing hijab rose to prominence amongst Muslim women in mid-century Egypt, and the ways in which this movement traveled and developed in the United States.

Instead of finding a history of modern veiling that reconciled with her previous thought, Leila Ahmed readily admits complicating her view upon undertaking research for this book.