In this exuberant allegory, bestselling memoir and self-help author Martha Beck takes readers into the wild parts of the world and the human psyche. The story of Diana, Herself helps every reader chart a course for awakening to greater joy, adventure, and purpose.

When first published in 1975, Him/Her/Self was a pathbreaking book. At a time when scholars were just beginning to explore women's history, Peter Filene expanded his inquiry to include both both genders. He was the first to claim the men, too, had a history grounded in gendered experience. Since then much has changed, not only in the lives and attitudes of American men and women, but in the ways that historians think about gender. But Him/Her/Self remains the only book that analyzes the interactions between American men and women comprehensively during the past century. In this third edition, Filene brings his concise and forceful analysis of 20th-century gender history up to the present. He describes the new men's movements of the 1980s and 1990s, ranging from pro-feminist to anti-feminist. He expands his discussion of the gay and lesbian experience, especially in the years since AIDS. He assesses the women's movement, weighing both its achievements and the antifeminist reactions of the past quarter-century. Finally, he enlarges the conceptual scope of the book, focusing not only on social roles of men and women but also on their dynamic sense of identity—of self in historical time. "When Him/Her/Self first appeared, women's history was in its infancy. Gender as a category of analysis was barely a glow on the scholarly horizon, and the idea that manhood was a topic of historical investigation was practically unimagined. In that early dawn of feminist scholarship, Peter Filene's pioneering work was a godsend. It was essential reading for both undergraduate and graduate students eager to understand the workings of gender in history and desperate for models of scholarship that broke the mold of 'traditional' historical writing. Peter Filene's path breaking study did both."—Elaine Tyler May, from the Foreword

Sally J. Freedman was ten when she made herself a movie star. She would have been happy to reach stardom in New Jersey, but in 1947 her older brother Douglas became ill, so the Freedman family traveled south to spend eight months in the sunshine of Florida. That’s where Sally met her friends Andrea, Barbara, Shelby, Peter, and Georgia Blue Eyes—and her unsuspecting enemy, Adolf Hitler. Dear Chief of Police: You don’t know me but I am a detective from New Jersey. I have uncovered a very interesting case down here. I have discovered that Adolf Hitler is alive and has come to Miami Beach to retire. He is pretending to be an old Jewish man... While she watches and waits, and keeps a growing file of letters under her bed, Sally’s Hitler will play an important—though not quite starring—role in one of her grandest movie spectaculars.

Frida Kahlo stepped into the limelight in 1929 when she married Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. She was twenty-two; he was forty-three. Hailed as Rivera’s exotic young wife who “dabbles in art,” she went on to produce brilliant paintings but remained in her husband’s shadow throughout her life. Today, almost six decades after her untimely death, Kahlo’s fame rivals that of Rivera and she has gained international acclaim as a path-breaking artist and a cultural icon. Cutting through “Fridamania,” this book explores Kahlo’s life, art, and legacies, while also scrutinizing the myths, contradictions, and ambiguities that riddle her dramatic story. Gannit Ankori examines Kahlo’s early childhood, medical problems, volatile marriage, political affiliations, religious beliefs, and, most important, her unparalleled and innovative art. Based on detailed analyses of the artist’s paintings, diary, letters, photographs, medical records, and interviews, the book also assesses Kahlo’s critical impact on contemporary art and culture. Kahlo was of her time, deeply immersed in the issues that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, as this book reveals, she was also ahead of her time. Her paintings challenged social norms and broke taboos, addressing themes such as the female body, gender, cross-dressing, hybridity, identity, and trauma in ways that continue to inspire contemporary artists across the globe. Frida Kahlo is a succinct and powerful account of the life, art and legacy of this iconic artist.

"Grace Fong has written a wonderful history of female writers’ participation in the elite conventions of Chinese poetics. Fong’s recovery of many of these poets, her able exegesis and elegant, analytical grasp of what the poets were doing is a great read, and her bilingual presentation of their poetry gives the book additional power. This is a persuasive and elegant study." —Tani Barlow, author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism "In this quietly authoritative book, Grace Fong has brought a group of women poets back to life. Previously ignored by scholars because of their marginal status or the inaccessibility of their works, these remarkable writers now speak to us about the sensualities, pains, satisfactions, and sadness of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Professor Fong—a superb translator of Chinese poetry, prose, and criticism—has rendered the works of these women in a way that is true both to our theoretical concerns and theirs." —Dorothy Ko, author of Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding "Professor Fong approaches the poetry of Ming-Qing upper-class women as a social-cultural activity that allowed these women to manifest their agency and assert their own subjectivity against the background of virtual and actual networks of fellow female poets. As the distillation of more than ten years of research by one of the leading scholars in this field, this work is a timely contribution that eminently deserves our attention. Given the inclusion of translations of some of the texts discussed, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to the reading of women’s poetry of the Ming-Qing period." —Wilt Idema, Harvard University Herself an Author addresses the critical question of how to approach the study of women’s writing. It explores various methods of engaging in a meaningful way with a rich corpus of poetry and prose written by women of the late Ming and Qing periods, much of it rediscovered by the author in rare book collections in China and the United States. The volume treats different genres of writing and includes translations of texts that are made available for the first time in English. Among the works considered are the life-long poetic record of Gan Lirou, the lyrical travel journal kept by Wang Fengxian, and the erotic poetry of the concubine Shen Cai. Taking the view that gentry women’s varied textual production was a form of cultural practice, Grace Fong examines women’s autobiographical poetry collections, travel writings, and critical discourse on the subject of women’s poetry, offering fresh insights on women’s intervention into the dominant male literary tradition. The wealth of texts translated and discussed here include fascinating documents written by concubines—women who occupied a subordinate position in the family and social system. Fong adopts the notion of agency as a theoretical focus to investigate forms of subjectivity and enactments of subject positions in the intersection between textual practice and social inscription. Her reading of the life and work of women writers reveals surprising instances and modes of self-empowerment within the gender constraints of Confucian orthodoxy. Fong argues that literate women in late imperial China used writing and reading to create literary and social communities, transcend temporal-spatial and social limitations, and represent themselves as the authors of their own life histories.

One of a series of top-quality fiction for schools. When her mother is killed, Comfort goes to live with her grandparents in a village in Kent. She has settled happily, despite being the only black child in this community, when her father asks her to live with him in Ghana.

Sure to take its place alongside the literary landmarks of modern feminism, Elaine Showalter's brilliant, provocative work chronicles the roles of feminist intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the present. With sources as diverse as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Scream 2, Inventing Herself is an expansive and timely exploration of women who possess a boundless determination to alter the world by boldly experiencing love, achievement, and fame on a grand scale. These women tried to work, travel, think, love, and even die in ways that were ahead of their time. In doing so, they forged an epic history that each generation of adventurous women has rediscovered. Focusing on paradigmatic figures ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller to Germaine Greer and Susan Sontag, preeminent scholar Elaine Showalter uncovers common themes and patterns of these women's lives across the centuries and discovers the feminist intellectual tradition they embodied. The author brilliantly illuminates the contributions of Eleanor Marx, Zora Neale Hurston, Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mead, and many more. Showalter, a highly regarded critic known for her provocative and strongly held opinions, has here established a compelling new Who's Who of women's thought. Certain to spark controversy, the omission of such feminist perennials as Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Virginia Woolf will surprise and shock the conventional wisdom. This is not a history of perfect women, but rather of real women, whose mistakes and even tragedies are instructive and inspiring for women today who are still trying to invent themselves.

A scathing critique of the legal status of women and their property rights in nineteenth-century America, Rebecca Harding Davis's 1878 novel A Law Unto Herself chronicles the experiences of Jane Swendon, a seemingly naïve and conventional nineteenth-century protagonist struggling to care for her elderly father with limited financial resources. In order to continue care, Jane seeks to secure her rightful inheritance despite the efforts of her cousin and later her husband, a greedy man who has tricked her father into securing her hand in marriage. Appealing to middle-class literary tastes of the age, A Law Unto Herself elucidated for a broad general audience the need for legal reforms regarding divorce, mental illness, inheritance, and reforms to the Married Women's Property Laws. Through three fascinating female characters, the novel also invites readers to consider evolving gender roles during a time of cultural change.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.