By Candace Bailey (NHC Fellow, 2019–20) Southern women of all classes, races, and walks of life practiced music during and after the Civil War. Candace Bailey examines the history of southern women through the lens of these musical pursuits, uncovering the ways that music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory help us understand its meaning in … Continued
By Alice Kessler-Harris (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) This collection represents the thirty-year intellectual trajectory of one of today’s leading historians of gender and labor in the United States. The seventeen essays included in Alice Kessler-Harris’s Gendering Labor History are divided into four sections, narrating the evolution and refinement of her central project: to show gender’s fundamental importance to … Continued
Edited by Elizabeth A. Clark (NHC Fellow, 1988–89; 2001–02), Judith M. Bennett, Jean F. O’Barr, B. Anne Vilen, and Sarah Westphal-Wihl Focusing on medieval women with a wide range of occupations and life-styles, the interdisciplinary essays in this collection examine women’s activities within the patriarchal structures of the time. Individual essays explore women’s challenges to … Continued
Edited by Anne Firor Scott (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 1980–81)
By Lilian R. Furst (NHC Fellow, 1988–89)
Edited by Judith A. Byfield (NHC Fellow, 2007–08), LaRay Denzer, and Anthea Morrison This volume builds on and extends current discussions of the construction of gendered identities and the networks through which men and women engage diaspora. It considers the movement of people and ideas between the Caribbean and the Nigerian hinterland. The contributions examine … Continued
By Harriet Guest (NHC Fellow, 1989–90) During the second half of the eighteenth century, the social role of educated women and the nature of domesticity were the focus of widespread debate in Britain. The emergence of an identifiably feminist voice in that debate is the subject of Harriet Guest’s new study, which explores how small … Continued
By Stephanie J. Shaw (NHC Fellow, 1995–96) Stephanie J. Shaw takes us into the inner world of American black professional women during the Jim Crow era. This is a story of struggle and empowerment, of the strength of a group of women who worked against daunting odds to improve the world for themselves and their … Continued
By Alice Kessler-Harris (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) Lillian Hellman was a giant of twentieth-century letters and a groundbreaking figure as one of the most successful female playwrights on Broadway. Yet the author of The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic is today remembered more as a toxic, bitter survivor and literary fabulist, the woman of whom Mary McCarthy said, … Continued
By Jan Goldstein (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy offers a rare window into the inner life of a person ordinarily inaccessible to historians: a semiliterate peasant girl who lived almost two centuries ago, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Eighteen-year-old Nanette Leroux fell ill in 1822 with a variety of incapacitating nervous symptoms. … Continued