Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Women

This is the story of how America's first women soldiers helped win World War I, earned the vote, and fought the US Army. In 1918 the US Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France. They were masters of the latest technology: the telephone switchboard. General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, demanded female "wire experts" when he discovered that inexperienced doughboys were unable to keep him connected with troops under fire.

Valkyries: the female supernatural beings that choose who dies and who lives on the battlefield. They protect some, but guide spears, arrows, and sword blades into the bodies of others. Viking myths about valkyries attempt to elevate the banality of war - to make the pain and suffering, the lost limbs and deformities, the piles of lifeless bodies of young men, glorious and worthwhile. Rather than their death being futile, it is their destiny and good fortune, determined by divine beings.

When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief. Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. In this groundbreaking reconsideration of the Civil War, the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning invites us to see America's bloodiest conflict not just as pitting brother against brother but as a woman's war.

In The Silver Women, Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the Panama Canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans.

The year was 1832, a cholera pandemic raged, and the French royal family was in exile, driven out by yet another revolution. From a drafty Scottish castle, the duchesse de Berry - the mother of the 11-year-old heir to the throne - hatched a plot to restore the Bourbon dynasty. For months, she commanded a guerilla army and evaded capture by disguising herself as a man. But soon she was betrayed by her trusted advisor, Simon Deutz, the son of France's Chief Rabbi.

Valerie Andre was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1922. From an early age, she wanted to fly, but as a woman, she faced challenges. While boys could receive government-funded flight lessons, Andre had to pay for hers by tutoring. During World War II, she left Strasbourg against German prohibitions in order to study medicine in Paris, where she completed her studies under threat of arrest by the Gestapo. Assigned to an army hospital in Saigon in French Indochina in the late 1940s, Andre trained as a neurosurgeon.

One of the world's most multicultural cities, 20th-century Cairo was a magnet for the ambitious and talented. During the 1920s and '30s, a vibrant music, theater, film, and cabaret scene flourished, defining what it meant to be a "modern" Egyptian. Women came to dominate the Egyptian entertainment industry - as stars of the stage and screen but also as impresarias, entrepreneurs, owners, and promoters of a new and strikingly modern entertainment industry.

The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American, and Carol Berkin shows us that women played a vital role throughout the struggle. Berkin takes us into the ordinary moments of extraordinary lives. We see women boycotting British goods in the years before independence, writing propaganda that radicalized their neighbors, raising funds for the army, and helping finance the fledgling government. We see how they managed farms, plantations, and businesses while their men went into battle.

Even without the right to vote, members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy proved to have enormous social and political influence throughout the South - all in the name of preserving Confederate culture. Karen L. Cox's history of the UDC, an organization founded in 1894 to vindicate the Confederate generation and honor the Lost Cause, shows why myths surrounding the Confederacy continue to endure.

Sorrowful widows, vengeful jezebels, innocent maidens, wronged lovers, former slaves, the odd axe-murderess—America's female ghosts differ widely in background, class, and circumstance. Yet one thing unites them: their ability to instill fascination and fear, long after death. Here are the stories behind some of the best-known among them, as well as the lesser-known—though no less powerful. A Haunted History of Invisible Women offers a unique lens on the role these ghostly legends play both within the spook-seeking corners of our minds and in the consciousness of a nation.

Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position. By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation, Wood won her case: In 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500.

In these moving stories of Angelina Grimke Weld, wife of abolitionist Theodore Weld; Varina Howell Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis; and Julia Dent Grant, wife of Ulysses S. Grant, Carol Berkin reveals how women understood the cataclysmic events of their day. Their stories, taken together, help reconstruct the era of the Civil War with a greater depth and complexity by adding women's experiences and voices to their male counterparts.

From the 1910 disappearance of New York heiress Dorothy Arnold to the 1977 vanishing of teenager Simone Ridinger, author Brunelle details both famous and lesser-known cases that remain unsolved.

In 1928, Rosina Harrison arrived at the illustrious household of the Astor family to take up her new position as personal maid to the infamously temperamental Lady Nancy Astor, who sat in Parliament, entertained royalty, and traveled the world. "She's not a lady as you would understand a lady" was the butler's ominous warning. But what no one expected was that the iron-willed Lady Astor was about to meet her match in the no-nonsense, whip-smart girl from the country.

In 1858 a German princess who had been recently inducted into the convent of Sant'Ambrogio in Rome wrote a frantic letter to her cousin, a confidant of the Pope, claiming that she was being abused and that she feared for her life. What the subsequent investigation by the Church's Inquisition uncovered were the extraordinary secrets of Sant'Ambrogio and the illicit behavior of the convent's beautiful, young mistress, Maria Luisa.

Between the 12th and 15th centuries in Europe, not all women fit the stereotype of passive housewife and mother. Many led bold and dynamic lives. In this collection of historical portraits, Maria Teresa Brolis tells the fascinating tales of fashion icons, art clients, businesswomen, saints, healers, lovers, and pilgrims - both famous and little known - who challenge conventional understandings of the medieval female experience. Drawing on evidence from literary works and archival documents, Brolis pieces together an intricate overview of 16 women's lives.

Women's soccer is a game that has often been relegated to the margins in a world fixated on gender differences above passion and talent. It is a game that could attract 50,000 fans to a stadium in the 1920s, was later banned by England's Football Association grounds for being "unsuitable for females," and has emerged as a global force in the modern era with the US Women's National Team leading the charge. A Woman's Game traces this arc of changing attitudes, increasing professionalism, and international growth.

The first woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, there was no one like Effa Manley in the sports world of the 1930s and 1940s. She was a sophisticated woman who owned a baseball team. She never shrank from going head to head with men, who dominated the ranks of sports executives. That her life story remained unchronicled for so long can only be attributed to one thing: her team, the Newark Eagles, belonged to the Negro Leagues. Author James Overmyer brings to light new details regarding Effa Manley's fascinating story.

Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women's reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. Wellington's timely–and deeply researched–account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States' adoption industry.

Fearless Women tells the story of women who dared to take destiny into their own hands. They were feminists and antifeminists, activists and homemakers, victims of abuse and pathbreaking professionals. Inspired by the nation's ideals and fueled by an unshakeable sense of right and wrong, they wouldn't take no for an answer. In time, they carried the country with them. Elizabeth Cobbs gives voice to fearless women on both sides of the aisle, most of whom considered themselves patriots.