The Essence of the Aristocratic Woman


Book Description

This is for the woman who is evolving to greatness. The essence of who she is, is to know the sophistication of her spiritual DNA. She unapologetically refuses to live her life beneath who God says she is. I reiterate, who she is. God saw all he had created and said it was good. She's the epitome of the purist's nature of the aristocratic woman.




Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832-1867


Book Description

Aristocratic women flourished in the Victorian literary world, their combination of class privilege and gendered exclusion generating distinctively socialized modes of participation in cultural and political activity. Their writing offers an important trope through which to consider the nature of political, private and public spheres.




English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550


Book Description

This work, based on archival research, combines a collective portrait of aristocratic women with an analysis of the particular, class-specific form of patriarchy and gender relations that flourished among the upper classes in Yorkist and early Tudor England.




Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain


Book Description

This study of gender and power in Victorian Britain is the first book to examine the contribution made by women to the public culture of the British aristocracy in the 19th century. Based on a wide range of archival sources, it explores the roles of aristocratic women in public life, from their country estates to the salons of Westminster and the royal court. Reynolds also shows that a partnership of authority between men and women was integral to aristocratic life, thus making an important contribution to the "separate spheres" debate. Moreover, she reveals in full the crucial role that these women played at all levels of political activity--from local communities to the national electoral process. The book is both a lively portrait of women's experiences in modern Britain and a corrective to the view of the upper-class Victorian woman as a passive social butterfly.




A World Without Women


Book Description

In this groundbreaking work of history, David Noble examines the origins and implications of the masculine culture of Western science and technology. He begins by asking why women have figure so little in the development of science, and then proceeds—in a fascinating and radical analysis—to trace their absence to a deep-rooted legacy of the male-dominated Western religious community. He shows how over the last thousand years science and the practice and institutions of higher learning were dominated by Christian clerics, whose ascetic culture from the late medieval period militated against the inclusion of women in scientific enterprise. He further demonstrates how the attitudes that took hold then remained more or less intact through the Reformation, and still subtly permeate out thinking despite the secularization of learning. Noble also describes how during the first millennium and after, women at times gained amazingly broad intellectual freedom and participated both in clerical activities and in scholarly pursuits. But, as Noble shows, these episodic forays occurred only in the wake of anticlerical movements within the church and without. He suggest finally an impulse toward “defeminization” at the core of the modern scientific and technological enterprise as it work to wrest from one-half of humanity its part in production (the Industrial Revolution’s male appropriation of labor) and reproduction (the millennium-old quest for the artificial womb). An important book that profoundly examine how the culture of Western Science came to be a world without women.




The Essence of Style


Book Description

What makes fashionistas willing to pay a small fortune for a particular designer accessory -- a luxe handbag, for example? Why is it that people all over the world share the conviction that a special occasion only becomes really special when a champagne cork pops -- and even more special when that cork comes from a bottle of Dom Pérignon? Why are diamonds the status symbol gemstone, instantly signifying wealth, power, and even emotional commitment? One of the foremost authorities on seventeenth-century French culture provides the answer to these and other fascinating questions in her account of how, at one glittering moment in history, the French under Louis XIV set the standards of sophistication, style, and glamour that still rule our lives today. Joan DeJean explains how a handsome and charismatic young king with a great sense of style and an even greater sense of history decided to make both himself and his country legendary. When the reign of Louis XIV began, his nation had no particular association with elegance, yet by its end, the French had become accepted all over the world as the arbiters in matters of taste and style and had established a dominance in the luxury trade that continues to this day. DeJean takes us back to the birth of haute cuisine, the first appearance of celebrity hairdressers, chic cafes, nightlife, and fashion in elegant dress that extended well beyond the limited confines of court circles. And Paris was the magical center -- the destination of travelers all across Europe. As the author observes, without the Sun King's program for redefining France as the land of luxury and glamour, there might never have been a Stork Club, a Bergdorf Goodman, a Chez Panisse, or a Cristophe of Beverly Hills -- and President Clinton would never have dreamed of holding Air Force One on the tarmac of LAX for an hour while Cristophe worked his styling genius on the president's hair. Written with wit, dash, and élan by an author who knows this astonishing true story better than virtually anyone, The Essence of Style will delight fans of history and everybody who wonders about the elusive definition of good taste.




American Archives


Book Description

Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In American Archives Shawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like--or "should" look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle-class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as well as literary, scientific, and popular texts, enable her to demonstrate how new visual paradigms posed bodily appearance as an index to interior "essence." Ultimately we see how competing preoccupations over gender, class, race, and American identity were played out in the making of a wide range of popular and institutional photographs. Smith demonstrates that as the body was variously mapped and defined as the key to essentialized identities, the image of the white middle-class woman was often held up as the most complete American ideal. She begins by studying gendered images of middle-class domesticity to expose a transformation of feminine architectures of interiority into the "essences" of "blood," "character," and "race." She reads visual documents, as well as literary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pauline Hopkins, and Theodore Dreiser, as both indices of and forms of resistance to dominant images of gender, class, race, and national identity. Through this analysis Smith shows how the white male gaze that sought to define and constrain white women and people of color was contested and transformed over the course of the nineteenth century. Smith identifies nineteenth-century visual paradigms that continue to shape debates about the terms of American belonging today. American Archives contributes significantly to the growing field of American visual cultural studies, and it is unprecedented in explaining how practices of racialized looking and the parameters of "American looks" were established in the first place.




Aristocratic Women


Book Description




Women of the Gilte Legende


Book Description

This book is a prose translation of a selection of women saints' lives from the Gilte Legende, the Middle English version of Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea, one of the most influential books to come from the middle ages. Because of its popularity and subject matter, the Gilte Legende was widely read and used as a model for everyday life, including the education of women through examples set by early Christian martyrs. Many of the women saints spoke passionately about their convictions and defended their faith and their bodies to the death. For over 400 years, these amazing vernacular stories have been inaccessible to a wider audience. This book divides the lives of female saints into: the "ryght hooly virgins", who vocally defend their bodies against Roman persecution; "holy mothers", who give up their traditional role to pursue a life of contemplation; the 'repentant sinners', who convert and voice their defiance against a society that demanded silence in women; and the "holy transvestites", who cast off their gender identity to find absolution and salvation. Their lives reach through the ages to speak to a modern audience, academic and non-academic, forcing a re-examination of women's roles in the medieval period. LARISSA TRACY is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University and George Mason University. Series editor JANE CHANCE




The True Women Influencers of the Past


Book Description

Musaicum Books presents to you the world's iconic women characters in fiction and the real-life heroines in this power-packed meticulously edited and formatted collection: Fiction: Camilla (Fanny Burney) Maria; Or, The Wrongs of Woman (Mary Wollstonecraft) Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) Lady Macbeth of the Mzinsk District (Nikolai Leskov) Hester (Margaret Oliphant) Life in the Iron Mills (Rebecca Davis) Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James) Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy) Wives and Daughter (Elizabeth Gaskell) The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman) A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen) The Awakening (Kate Chopin) The Woman Who Did (Grant Allen) Miss Cayley's Adventures (Grant Allen) The Story of a Baby (Ethel Sybil Turner) New Amazonia (Elizabeth Corbett) A Daughter of the Land (Gene Stratton-Porter) The Iron Woman (Margaret Deland) My Ántonia (Willa Cather) The Song of the Lark (Willa Cather) The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton) Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser) Sisters (Ada Cambridge) Hagar (Mary Johnston) Samantha on the Woman Question (Marietta Holley) The Precipice (Elia Wilkinson Peattie) Voyage Out (Virginia Woolf) Parnassus on Wheels (Christopher Morley) The Job (Sinclair Lewis) Miss Lulu Bett (Zona Gale) The Rainbow (D. H. Lawrence) The Enchanted April (Elizabeth von Arnim) Fanny Herself (Edna Ferber) So Big (Edna Ferber)... Memoirs: Madame Vigée Lebrun Jane Austen Caroline Herschel Mrs. Seacole Elizabeth Cady Stanton My Own Story (Emmeline Pankhurst) Mother Jones Margaret Sanger Helen Keller Biographies: Lucretia Sappho Aspasia of Cyrus Portia Octavia Cleopatra Mariamne Julia Domna Zenobia Valeria Hypatia The Lady Rowena Roswitha the Nun Marie de France Laura de Sade Joan of Arc Catharine of Arragon Anne Boleyn Margaret Roper Mary, Queen of Scots The Pocahontas Queen Anne Maria Theresa Marie Antoinette Florence Nightingale Maria Mitchell Harriet Tubman Madame de Stael…