A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A LitReactor Best Book of the Year • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month "A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped, silenced, and shamed her: everyday misogyny, puritanical expectations regarding female sexuality and maternal sacrifice, and male oppression." —Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness. Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress "being good" in order to reclaim your own life.

Throughout the mid-1800s, outsiders, including many Euro-Americans, arrived in what is now northwest Washington. As they interacted with Samish, Lummi, S’Klallam, Sto:lo, and other groups, some of the men sought relationships with young local women. Hoping to establish mutually beneficial ties, Coast and Interior Salish families arranged strategic cross-cultural marriages. Some pairs became lifelong partners while other unions were short. These were crucial alliances that played a critical role in regional settlement and spared Puget Sound’s upper corner from the tragic conflicts other regions experienced. Accounts of the men, who often held public positions--army officer, Territorial Supreme Court justice, school superintendent, sheriff--exist in a variety of records. Some, like the nephew of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, were from prominent eastern families. Yet across the West, the contributions of their native wives remain unacknowledged. The women’s lives were marked by hardships and heartbreaks common for the time, but the four profiled--Caroline Davis Kavanaugh, Mary Fitzhugh Lear Phillips, Clara Tennant Selhameten, and Nellie Carr Lane--exhibited exceptional endurance, strength, and adaptability. Far from helpless victims, they influenced their husbands and controlled their homes. Remembered as loving mothers and good neighbors, they ran farms, nursed and supported family, served as midwives, and operated businesses. They visited relatives and attended ancestral gatherings, often with their children. Each woman’s story is uniquely hers, but together they and other intermarried women helped found Puget Sound communities and left lasting legacies. They were peace weavers. Author Candace Wellman hopes to shatter stereotypes surrounding these relationships. Numerous collaborators across the United States and Canada--descendants, local historians, academics, and more--graciously participated in her seventeen-year effort.

Virginia Woolf introduced us to the “Angel in the House”, now prepare to meet... The Bitch In the House. This e-book includes an exclusive excerpt from The Bitch is Back: Older, Wiser, and Getting Happier, a second collection of essays from nine of the contributors featured in The Bitch in the House and from sixteen captivating new voices. Women today have more choices than at any time in history, yet many smart, ambitious, contemporary women are finding themselves angry, dissatisfied, stressed out. Why are they dissatisfied? And what do they really want? These questions form the premise of this passionate, provocative, funny, searingly honest collection of original essays in which twenty-six women writers—ranging in age from twenty-four to sixty-five, single and childless or married with children or four times divorced—invite readers into their lives, minds, and bedrooms to talk about the choices they’ve made, what’s working, and what’s not. With wit and humor, in prose as poetic and powerful as it is blunt and dead-on, these intriguing women offer details of their lives that they’ve never publicly revealed before, candidly sounding off on: • The difficult decisions and compromises of living with lovers, marrying, staying single and having children • The perpetual tug of war between love and work, family and career • The struggle to simultaneously care for ailing parents and a young family • The myth of co-parenting • Dealing with helpless mates and needy toddlers • The constrictions of traditional women’s roles as well as the cliches of feminism • Anger at laid-back live-in lovers content to live off a hardworking woman’s checkbook • Anger at being criticized for one’s weight • Anger directed at their mothers, right and wrong • And—well—more anger... “This book was born out of anger,” begins Cathi Hanauer, but the end result is an intimate sharing of experience that will move, amuse, and enlighten. The Bitch in the House is a perfect companion for your students as they plot a course through the many voices of modern feminism. This is the sound of the collective voice of successful women today-in all their anger, grace, and glory. From The Bitch In the House: “I believed myself to be a feminist, and I vowed never to fall into the same trap of domestic boredom and servitude that I saw my mother as being fully entrenched in; never to settle for a life that was, as I saw it, lacking independence, authority, and respect.” —E.S. Maduro, page 5 “Here are a few things people have said about me at the office: ‘You’re unflappable.’ ‘Are you ever in a bad mood?’ Here are things people—okay, the members of my family—have said about me at home: ‘‘Mommy is always grumpy.’ ‘Why are you so tense?’ ‘You’re too mean to live in this house and I want you to go back to work for the rest of your life!’” —Kristin van Ogtrop, page 161 “I didn’t want to be a bad mother I wanted to be my mother-safe, protective, rational, calm-without giving up all my anger, because my anger fueled me.” — Elissa Schappell, page 195

"Today, only twenty percent of Americans are wed by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly sixty percent in 1960. The Population Reference Bureau calls it a 'dramatic reversal.' [This book presents a] portrait of contemporary American life and how we got here, through the lens of the single American woman, covering class, race, [and] sexual orientation, and filled with ... anecdotes from ... contemporary and historical figures"--

In this study the author analyses similarities, differences and contradictions in the cultural norms about gender expressed in proverbs she has found in oral and written sources from over 150 countries. Grouping the proverbs into categories as the female body, love, sex, childbirth and the female power, the author examines shared patterns in ideas about women and how men see them.

In a day and age when couples live in meaningful relationships without a legal or religious contract of marriage and when the divorce rate among those who choose to marry hovers between 50 and 60 percent, a book on marriage may seem to be an anachronism. However, Mrs. Howell draws on her experience of two successful marriages that spanned more than fifty-eight years. She offers her sage and insightful advice to anyone contemplating going into matrimony, to those considering getting a divorce, or even more tragic, to those who continue to live in a union that is not fulfilling. Marriage was instituted by God, not by mankind. Biblical principles teach us how to achieve productive, satisfying, and long lasting marriages. This book is an analogy of a physical house and a wedded relationship. Many couples put more time and thought into building their dream house than they do in building their marriage. The reader will examine the laying of the foundation through the framing of the structure. In architecture, each step is predicated on the successful implementation of that specific part of the build that came before it. It is imperative that careful attention is given to each part in order to attain the dream result. Widowed again, with a twinkle in her eye, Mrs. Howell states, Im looking for number three so I can start a new house.

This groundbreaking book examines the diverse manifestations of homosexuality in various historical periods and non-Western cultures. The distinguished authors examine Kimam male ritualized homosexual behavior, Mexican homosexual interaction in public contexts, male homosexuality and spirit possession in Brazil, and much more.