Download or read book Memoirs from the Women s Prison written by Nawāl Saʻdāwī and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-11-18 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If Kafka had been a feminist, his prisoner might have had Nawal el Sa'adawi's feistiness, maybe, like her, he would have hoed a prison garden, led veiled and unveiled cellmates in rebellious calisthenics, strategized with a murderess to foil state illogic. This book gives me hope, even makes me laugh."—Cynthia Enloe, author of The Morning After
Download or read book Once Upon a Life written by Temsula Ao and published by Zubaan. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in 1945 in the Assamese town of Jorhat, Temsula Ao, her father's favourite of his six daughters, remembers her childhood as a time of happiness. The sudden loss of both parents mean that the orphaned children were left to fend for themselves as best they could. Desperately poor, emotionally scarred, lonely and often hungry, the young Temsula made up for her lack of resources with courage and determination. From these unpromising beginnings, Ao went on to become one of Northeast India's best known writers and to build a distinguished teaching career, serving as Director of the Northeast Zone Cultural Centre, and finally, Dean of the School of Humanities and Education, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong. Temsula Ao describes her memoir as 'an attempt to exorcise my own personal ghosts from a fractured childhood that was ripped apart by a series of tragedies... [it] is about love and what it is like to be deprived of it.' For her readers, Ao’s memoir gives not only an insight into her role as a leading figure in the Northeast, but is also a moving account of a writerly life. Published by Zubaan.
Download or read book The Glass Castle written by Jeannette Walls and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-01-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A triumphant tale of a young woman and her difficult childhood, The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience, redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and wonderfully vibrant. Jeannette Walls was the second of four children raised by anti-institutional parents in a household of extremes.
Download or read book A Matter of Choices written by Fay Ajzenberg-Selove and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the author became a nuclear physicist, the number of women in the field could be counted on one hand. In this memoir, she reveals her difficult journey to international recognition in physics. She is frank about the ways being a woman has made a difference in her opportunities and choices as a scientist--and how, by being a woman, she has made a difference in the world of physics.
Download or read book 500 Great Books by Women written by Erica Bauermeister and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1994 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often poorly represented in buyers' guides, women's books are now covered in this articulate and intentionally eclectic reader's guide. Covering a wealth of remarkable novels, narratives, biographies, and more, this resource for general readers offers more than 500 entries--capturing the flavor of each book. Includes seven cross-referenced indexes.
Download or read book Moravian Women s Memoirs written by and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1997-05-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Moravian Women's Memoirs is made up of the autobiographical writings of thirty of the women who lived in the major North American Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at varying points in the eighteenth century. What follows are their memoirs, fascinating documents that contain insights into the lives of the women and men who lived in the Moravian communities in North America. . . . These Moravian women's memoirs reveal the intersection of the private and the public spheres of their lives. They are records of their spiritual paths in a world that in most cases challenged the bounds of knowledge inherited from their parents."—from the Preface
Download or read book Till My Tale Is Told written by Semen Samuilovich Vilenskiĭ and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-11-13 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How extraordinary it is that compassion and tenderness may flourish in the cruellest conditions; how stubbornly and bravely people survive them. This is not a depressing book but an inspiriting and encouraging one." —Doris Lessing "The sixteen life stories are riveting. . . . testimony to the complexity of the human spirit[,] to miracles of survival and endurance in the most hellish of conditions. . . . Till My Tale Is Told remind[s] us of the importance of remembrance and testimony about this particularly brutal chapter of human history." —The Women's Review of Books Arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, trial and sentencing, transport, labor camps, internal exile, sometimes release, often followed by re-arrest and re-imprisonment and, for those who outlived Stalin, eventual reprieve and rehabilitation these are the outlines of the experiences recorded by 16 courageous Russian women whose moving testimonies, most of them written in secret and at great personal risk, are presented here.
Download or read book Memoirs of a Woman Doctor written by Nawal El Saadawi and published by Saqi. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young Egyptian woman clashes with her traditional family when she chooses a career in medicine. Rather than submit to an arranged marriage and motherhood, she cuts her hair short and works fiercely to realise her dreams. At medical school, she begins to understand the mysteries of the human body. After years of denying her own desires, the doctor begins a series of love affairs that allow her to explore her sexuality – on her own terms.
Download or read book Memoir of a Debulked Woman Enduring Ovarian Cancer written by Susan Gubar and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2012 New York Times Book Review Notable Book "Staggering, searing…Ms. Gubar deserves the highest admiration for her bravery and honesty." —New York Times Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, Susan Gubar underwent radical debulking surgery, an attempt to excise the cancer by removing part or all of many organs in the lower abdomen. Her memoir mines the deepest levels of anguish and devotion as she struggles to come to terms with her body’s betrayal and the frightful protocols of contemporary medicine. She finds solace in the abiding love of her husband, children, and friends while she searches for understanding in works of literature, visual art, and the testimonies of others who suffer with various forms of cancer. Ovarian cancer remains an incurable disease for most of those diagnosed, even those lucky enough to find caring and skilled physicians. Memoir of a Debulked Woman is both a polemic against the ineffectual and injurious medical responses to which thousands of women are subjected and a meditation on the gifts of companionship, art, and literature that sustain people in need.
Download or read book Women Aren t Supposed to Fly written by Harriet Hall and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2008-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This irreverent romp through the worlds of medicine and the military is part autobiography, part social history, and part laugh-out-loud comedy. When the author graduated from medical school in 1970, only 7% of America's doctors were women, and very few of those joined the military. She was the second woman ever to do an Air Force internship, the only woman doctor at David Grant USAF Medical Center, and the only female military doctor in Spain. She had to fight for acceptance: even the 3 year old daughter of a patient told her father, "Oh, Daddy! That¿s not a doctor, that's a lady." She was refused a radiology residency because they subtracted points for women. She couldn¿t have dependents: she was paid less than her male counterparts, she couldn't live on base, and her civilian husband was not even covered for medical care or allowed to shop on base. After spending six years as a General Medical Officer in Franco's Spain, she became a family practice specialist and a flight surgeon, doing everything from delivering babies to flying a B-52. Along the way, she found time to buy her own airplane and learn to fly it (in that order) and to have two babies of her own. She retired as a full colonel. As a rare woman in a male-dominated field, she encountered prejudice, silliness, and even frank disbelief. Her sense of humor kept her afloat; she enlivened the solemnity of her job with antics like admitting a spider to the hospital and singing "The Mickey Mouse Club March" on a field exercise. This book describes her education and career. She tells an entertaining story of what it was like to be a female doctor, flight surgeon, pilot, and military officer in a world that wasn't quite ready for her yet. The title is taken from her first cross-country solo flight: when she closed out her flight plan, the man at the desk said, "Didn't anybody ever tell you women aren't supposed to fly?"
Download or read book Difficult Women written by David Plante and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Plante's dazzling portraits of three influential women in the literary world, now back in print for the first time in decades. Difficult Women presents portraits of three extraordinary, complicated, and, yes, difficult women, while also raising intriguing and, in their own way, difficult questions about the character and motivations of the keenly and often cruelly observant portraitist himself. The book begins with David Plante’s portrait of Jean Rhys in her old age, when the publication of The Wide Sargasso Sea, after years of silence that had made Rhys’s great novels of the 1920s and ’30s as good as unknown, had at last gained genuine recognition for her. Rhys, however, can hardly be said to be enjoying her new fame. A terminal alcoholic, she curses and staggers and rants like King Lear on the heath in the hotel room that she has made her home, while Plante looks impassively on. Sonia Orwell is his second subject, a suave exploiter and hapless victim of her beauty and social prowess, while the unflappable, brilliant, and impossibly opinionated Germaine Greer sails through the final pages, ever ready to set the world, and any erring companion, right.
Download or read book In the Country of Women written by Susan Straight and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of NPR's Best Books of the Year “Straight’s memoir is a lyric social history of her multiracial clan in Riverside that explores the bonds of love and survival that bind them, with a particular emphasis on the women’s stories . . . The aftereffect of all these disparate stories juxtaposed in a single epic is remarkable. Its resonance lingers for days after reading.” —San Francisco Chronicle In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self–proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close–knit Sims family, Straight—and eventually her three daughters—heard for decades the stories of Dwayne’s female ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post–slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Straight’s mother–in–law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Susan’s family, too, reflects the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward—from Switzerland, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California. A Pakistani word, biraderi, is one Straight uses to define a complex system of kinship and clan—those who become your family. An entire community helped raise her daughters. Of her three girls, now grown and working in museums and the entertainment industry, Straight writes, “The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival.” “Certain books give off the sense that you won’t want them to end, so splendid the writing, so lyrical the stories. Such is the case with Southern California novelist Susan Straight’s new memoir, In the Country of Women . . . Her vibrant pages are filled with people of churned–together blood culled from scattered immigrants and native peoples, indomitable women and their babies. Yet they never succumb . . . Straight gives us permission to remember what went before with passion and attachment.” ––Los Angeles Times
Download or read book Memoirs of Victorian Working Class Women written by Florence s. Boos and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first to identify a significant body of life narratives by working-class women and to demonstrate their inherent literary significance. Placing each memoir within its generic, historical, and biographical context, this book traces the shifts in such writings over time, examines the circumstances which enabled working-class women authors to publish their life stories, and places these memoirs within a wider autobiographical tradition. Additionally, Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women enables readers to appreciate the clear-sightedness, directness, and poignancy of these works.
Download or read book Memoirs of a Barren Woman written by C. Celeste Marshall and published by Heavenly Light Press. This book was released on 2017-10-20 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faith and fasting are a combination often overlooked in the Christian world. Memoirs of a Barren Woman takes you on the ten-year faith and fasting journey of a woman waiting on God to fulfill a promise.Celeste¿s desire to be a mother burned in her heart, and despite all the odds, would not go away. Doctors told her she could never conceive a child, and the promise from God seemed impossible. Ten years of annual fasting, preceded a specific three-day fast, regarding a medical procedure and two days prior to surgery, Celeste made a last minute life-changing decision. Her life transformed in an instant, and God¿s promise was fulfilled.Whether you are praying for an unsaved loved one, a dream that seems impossible, a marriage that seems broken beyond repair, or something so personal that only you and God know, Memoirs of a Barren Woman is a story that will build faith as you wait for your own divine miracle from God.
Download or read book In Defense of Women written by Nancy Gertner and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A champion of women’s rights reflects on her illustrious career litigating groundbreaking cases on reproductive rights, sexual harassment, and violence against women In the boys’ club climate of 1975, Nancy Gertner launched her career fighting a murder charge on behalf of antiwar activist Susan Saxe, one of the few women to ever make the FBI’s Most Wanted List. What followed was a storied span of groundbreaking firsts, as Gertner threw herself into criminal and civil cases focused on women’s rights and civil liberties. Gertner writes, for example, about representing Clare Dalton, the Harvard Law professor who famously sued the school after being denied tenure, and of being one of the first lawyers to introduce evidence of Battered Women’s Syndrome in a first-degree murder defense. She writes about the client who sued her psychiatrist after he had sexually preyed on her, and another who sued her employers at Merrill Lynch—she had endured strippers and penis-shaped cakes in the office, but the wildly skewed distribution of clients took professional injury too far. All of these were among the first cases of their kind. Gertner brings her extensive experience to bear on issues of long-standing importance today: the general evolution of thought regarding women and fetuses as legally separate entities, possibly at odds; the fungible definition of rape and the rights of both the accused and the victim; ever-changing workplace attitudes and policies around women and minorities; the concept of abetting crime. “With wit, heart, and honesty, Gertner . . . looks back on the decades just after feminism’s Third Wave, when issues like abortion for poor women, shield laws for rape victims, ‘battered wife syndrome,’ and the rights of lesbians to adopt children were unconventional, to say the least.” —Renee Loth, The Boston Globe “This is a fascinating memoir of a life lived in the law with passion, guts, humor, and great skill.” —Linda Greenhouse, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and author of Before Roe v. Wade
Download or read book As Long as Life written by Mary Canaga Rowland and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not only was Dr. Mary Canaga Rowland one of the first woman doctors in America, she was one of the few who practiced in the rough and tumble world of the Wild West. This is the fascinating autobiography of one woman's unique life as pioneer physician and single mother at the turn of the century.
Download or read book Fictions of Femininity written by Edith Sarra and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Japanese memoir literature began over a thousand years ago, its greatest practitioners being women of the middle ranks whose literary talents won many of them positions as ladies-in-waiting at the Heian imperial court. As female writers they both inhabited and helped create a discursive world obsessed with the arts of concealment and self-display, the perils and possibilitieserotic, political, and literaryof real and metaphorical peepholes. As memoirists they were virtuosos in the exacting art of feminine self-representation. Fictions of Femininity explores the Heian memoirists creations of themselves in four texts: Kagero nikki (The Kagero Memoir, after 974), Makura no soshi (The Pillow Book, after 994), Sarashina nikki (The Sarashina Memoir, after 1058), and Sanuki no suke nikki (The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid, after 1108). Essays on the individual memoirs pursue a dual interest, asking how each text works as a rhetorical construct and how it reflects the authors negotiations with Heian fictions about women and writing. Letting the memoirs themselves set the terms for exploring gender constructions, Fictions of Femininity addresses a spectrum of related issues. The reading of The Kagero Memoir probes two traditional avenues of feminine expression: the writing of waka and the discourse of Buddhist nunhood. Two essays on The Sarashina Memoir reveal a fine weave of literary, religious, and autoerotic fantasies, highlighting the intellectual gifts of a memoirist long misread as naive and girlish. The essay on The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid examines the use of spirit possession as metaphor for commemorative writing, tracing the balancing act its author performed in the midst of political intrigues at court. The relationship between the memoir and voyeurism takes center stage in the closing essay on The Pillow Book, which compares its authors treatment of the thematics of seeing and being seen with that of her chief rival, Murasaki Shikibu, creator of The Tale of Genji. Taken together, the essays in this book underscore the diversity of the Heian memoirists responses to their roles as women and as writers in one of the most unusual epochs of Japanese history.
