Book Description

« Women's networks proliferated during the long nineteenth century in the Atlantic World and began spreading globally. Abetted by transformative changes in communication and transportation (the subject of the first chapter), women established links among themselves, sometimes informally, sometimes as part of formal organizations. Most goal-oriented networks, particularly those with social and political agendas, were personal, national or transnational in nature and inevitably excluded those who did not share the goal. Such activist networks and their influences are the main focus of Part One. Topics addressed include women's national and international networks in British temperance associations; British anti-slavery societies; Italian crime syndicates; the Istanbul region of the Ottoman Empire; Philippine suffragism, early twentieth-century Portuguese political organizations, and Great War relief efforts in France. The chapters in Part Two examine the diverse literary networks that women writers enjoyed, abided, or disdained during the long nineteenth century. Included are the themes of British female utopia and dystopia; how the work of some British women poets both affected and reflected the variety of networks in which they were enmeshed; the intensely personal networks of American writers Mary Moody Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, and Alice James; Salem witches reimagined as Romantic heroines by American novelists Caroline Rosina Derby and Ella Taylor; the efforts of Southern autobiographers Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Avery Meriwether early in the twentieth century to negotiate a place for themselves and the South in American national history; and the significance of women's networks present in the South and absent in Brazil as depicted in Evelyn Scott's 1923 memoir. »--