Virginia Women

The exploration of the history of Virginia women through the lives of exemplary and remarkable individuals. Seventeen essays written by established and emerging scholars recover the stories and voices of a diverse group of women.

Virginia Women is the first of two volumes exploring the history of Virginia women through the lives of exemplary and remarkable individuals. This collection of seventeen essays, written by established and emerging scholars, recovers the stories and voices of a diverse group of women, from the seventeenth century through the Civil War era. Placing their subjects in their larger historical contexts, the authors show how the experiences of Virginia women varied by race, class, age, and marital status, and also across both space and time. Some essays examine the lives of well-known women—such as First Lady Dolley Madison—from a new perspective. Others introduce readers to relatively obscure historical figures: the convicted witch Grace Sherwood; the colonial printer Clementina Rind; Harriet Hemings, the enslaved daughter of Thomas Jefferson. Essays on the frontier heroine Mary Draper Ingles and the Civil War spy Elizabeth Van Lew examine the real women behind the legends. Altogether, the essays in this collection offer readers an engaging and personal window onto the experiences of women in the Old Dominion.

How did Virginia become the amazing state that it is today you may wonder? Virginia's Remarkable Women: Daughters, Wives, Sisters, and Mothers Who Shaped History recognizes the women who shaped the Old Dominion. The lives of female teachers, writers, entrepreneurs, and artists from across the state are illuminated through short biographies. Discover fifteen extraordinary women from Virginia's past, including Pocahontas, Martha Washington, Dolley Madison, travel writer Anne Newport Royall, pioneering banker Maggie Lena Walker, Civil War spies Belle Boyd and Elizabeth Van Lew, and poet Anne Spencer.

This is the first biography to concentrate exclusively on Woolf's close and inspirational friendships with the key women in her life, including the caregivers of her Victorian childhood who instilled in her a lifelong battle between creativity and convention: her taciturn sister, Vanessa Bell; enigmatic artist Dora Carrington; complex writer Katherine Mansfield; aristocratic novelist Vita Sackville-West; and riotous, militant composer Ethel Smyth.

America has an array of women writers who have made history--and many of them lived, died and were buried in Virginia. Gothic novelists, writers of westerns and African American poets, these writers include a Pulitzer Prize winner, the first woman writer to be named poet laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the first woman to top the bestseller lists in the twentieth century. Mary Roberts Rinehart was a best-selling mystery author often called the "American Agatha Christie." Anne Spencer was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance. V.C. Andrews was so popular that when she died, a court ruled that her name was taxable, and the poetry of Susan Archer Talley Weiss received praise from Edgar Allan Poe. Professor and cemetery history enthusiast Sharon Pajka has written a guide to their accomplishments in life and to their final resting places.

In 1920, Virginia's General Assembly refused to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to grant women the vote. Virginia's suffragists lost. Or did they? When the thirty-sixth state ratified the amendment, women gained voting rights across the nation. Virginia suffragists were a part of that victory, although their role has been nearly forgotten. They marched in parades, rallied at the state capitol, spoke to crowds on street corners, staffed booths at fairs, lobbied legislators, picketed the White House and even went to jail. The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia reveals how women created two statewide organizations to win the right to vote. At the centenary of the movement, these remarkable women can at last be recognized for their important contributions.

This classic study of Black Carib culture and its preservation through ancestral rituals organized by older women now includes a foreword by Constance R. Sutton and an afterword by the author. "One of the outstanding studies of this genre. . . . Refreshingly, the book has good photographs, as well as strong endnotes and bibliography, and very useful tables, figures, maps, and index." -- Choice "An outstanding contribution to the literature on female-centered bilateral kinship and residence." -- Grant D. Jones, American Ethnologist "A richly detailed account of a contemporary culture in which older women are important, valued, and self-respecting." -- Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly "A combination of competent research, interwoven themes, and an easily readable, sometimes beautifully evocative, prose style." -- Heather Strange, The Gerontologist

Virginia Valian uses concepts and data from psychology, sociology, economics, and biology to explain the disparity in the professional advancement of men and women. Why do so few women occupy positions of power and prestige? Virginia Valian uses concepts and data from psychology, sociology, economics, and biology to explain the disparity in the professional advancement of men and women. According to Valian, men and women alike have implicit hypotheses about gender differences—gender schemas—that create small sex differences in characteristics, behaviors, perceptions, and evaluations of men and women. Those small imbalances accumulate to advantage men and disadvantage women. The most important consequence of gender schemas for professional life is that men tend to be overrated and women underrated. Valian's goal is to make the invisible factors that retard women's progress visible, so that fair treatment of men and women will be possible. The book makes its case with experimental and observational data from laboratory and field studies of children and adults, and with statistical documentation on men and women in the professions. The many anecdotal examples throughout provide a lively counterpoint.