Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey

Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey
Author: Lillian Schlissel
Publisher: Schocken
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2011-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307803171

An expanded edition of one of the most original and provocative works of American history of the last decade, which documents the pioneering experiences and grit of American frontier women.

A Day at a Time

A Day at a Time
Author: Margo Culley
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
Total Pages: 364
Release: 1985
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780935312515

Gathers diary selections, describes the historical background of each writer, and discusses the changing function and content of diaries.

Women's Letters

Women's Letters
Author: Lisa Grunwald
Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Total Pages: 833
Release: 2009-01-21
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0307493334

Historical events of the last three centuries come alive through these women’s singular correspondences—often their only form of public expression. In 1775, Rachel Revere tries to send financial aid to her husband, Paul, in a note that is confiscated by the British; First Lady Dolley Madison tells her sister about rescuing George Washington’s portrait during the War of 1812; one week after JFK’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy pens a heartfelt letter to Nikita Khrushchev; and on September 12, 2001, a schoolgirl writes a note of thanks to a New York City firefighter, asking him, “Were you afraid?” The letters gathered here also offer fresh insight into the personal milestones in women’s lives. Here is a mid-nineteenth-century missionary describing a mastectomy performed without anesthesia; Marilyn Monroe asking her doctor to spare her ovaries in a handwritten note she taped to her stomach before appendix surgery; an eighteen-year-old telling her mother about her decision to have an abortion the year after Roe v. Wade; and a woman writing to her parents and in-laws about adopting a Chinese baby. With more than 400 letters and over 100 stunning photographs, Women’s Letters is a work of astonishing breadth and scope, and a remarkable testament to the women who lived–and made–history. From the Hardcover edition.

This Day

This Day
Author: Joni B. Cole
Publisher: Beyond Words
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Drawn from an extraordinary project in which over 500 women from all walks of life kept "day diaries" on a single day, the collective voices in THIS DAY reach across experiential, cultural, geographical, and socioeconomic boundaries. While the deliciously intimate details satisfy even the most shameless curiosity, most importantly, THIS DAY reveals the extraordinary in the ordinary - those moments that occur throughout any given day, and illuminate who we really are as individuals, as women, and as Americans.

Emilie Davis’s Civil War

Emilie Davis’s Civil War
Author: Judith Giesberg
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2016-06-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0271064315

Emilie Davis was a free African American woman who lived in Philadelphia during the Civil War. She worked as a seamstress, attended the Institute for Colored Youth, and was an active member of her community. She lived an average life in her day, but what sets her apart is that she kept a diary. Her daily entries from 1863 to 1865 touch on the momentous and the mundane: she discusses her own and her community’s reactions to events of the war, such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the assassination of President Lincoln, as well as the minutiae of social life in Philadelphia’s black community. Her diaries allow the reader to experience the Civil War in “real time” and are a counterpoint to more widely known diaries of the period. Judith Giesberg has written an accessible introduction, situating Davis and her diaries within the historical, cultural, and political context of wartime Philadelphia. In addition to furnishing a new window through which to view the war’s major events, Davis’s diaries give us a rare look at how the war was experienced as a part of everyday life—how its dramatic turns and lulls and its pervasive, agonizing uncertainty affected a northern city with a vibrant black community.

Keep the Days

Keep the Days
Author: Steven M. Stowe
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2018-04-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 146964097X

Americans wrote fiercely during the Civil War. War surprised, devastated, and opened up imagination, taking hold of Americans' words as well as their homes and families. The personal diary—wildly ragged yet rooted in day following day—was one place Americans wrote their war. Diaries, then, have become one of the best-known, most-used sources for exploring the life of the mind in a war-torn place and time. Delving into several familiar wartime diaries kept by women of the southern slave-owning class, Steven Stowe recaptures their motivations to keep the days close even as war tore apart the brutal system of slavery that had benefited them. Whether the diarists recorded thoughts about themselves, their opinions about men, or their observations about slavery, race, and warfare, Stowe shows how these women, by writing the immediate moment, found meaning in a changing world. In studying the inner lives of these unsympathetic characters, Stowe also explores the importance—and the limits—of historical empathy as a condition for knowing the past, demonstrating how these plain, first-draft texts can offer new ways to make sense of the world in which these Confederate women lived.

Notes from a Colored Girl

Notes from a Colored Girl
Author: Karsonya Wise Whitehead
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2014-05-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1611173531

This historical biography provides a scholarly analysis of the personal diaries of a young, freeborn mulatto woman during the Civil War years. In Notes from a Colored Girl, Karsonya Wise Whitehead examines the life and experiences of Emilie Frances Davis through a close reading of three pocket diaries she kept from 1863 to 1865. Whitehead explores Davis’s worldviews and politics, her perceptions of both public and private events, her personal relationships, and her place in Philadelphia’s free black community in the nineteenth century. The book also includes a six-chapter historical reconstruction of Davis’s life. While Davis’s entries provide brief, daily snapshots of her life, Whitehead interprets them in ways that illuminate nineteenth-century black American women’s experiences. Whitehead’s contribution of edited text and original narrative fills a void in scholarly documentation of women who dwelled in spaces between white elites, black entrepreneurs, and urban dwellers of every race and class. Drawing on scholarly traditions from history, literature, feminist studies, and sociolinguistics, Whitehead investigates Davis’s diary both as a complete literary artifact and in terms of her specific daily entries. With few primary sources written by black women during this time in history, Davis’s diary is a rare and extraordinarily valuable historical artifact.

This Day in the Life

This Day in the Life
Author: Joni B. Cole
Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA)
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2005
Genre: Creative nonfiction
ISBN: 1400082323

Women from all walks of life recorded their reality on a single day, resulting in this collection of 35 complete "day diaries" and hundreds of excerpts written on Tuesday, June 29, 2004. The diarists reveal the surprising common connections.

The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker

The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker
Author: Elaine Forman Crane
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2011-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812206827

The journal of Philadelphia Quaker Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker (1735-1807) is perhaps the single most significant personal record of eighteenth-century life in America from a woman's perspective. Drinker wrote in her diary nearly continuously between 1758 and 1807, from two years before her marriage to the night before her last illness. The extraordinary span and sustained quality of the journal make it a rewarding document for a multitude of historical purposes. One of the most prolific early American diarists—her journal runs to thirty-six manuscript volumes—Elizabeth Drinker saw English colonies evolve into the American nation while Drinker herself changed from a young unmarried woman into a wife, mother, and grandmother. Her journal entries touch on every contemporary subject political, personal, and familial. Focusing on different stages of Drinker's personal development within the domestic context, this abridged edition highlights four critical phases of her life cycle: youth and courtship, wife and mother, middle age in years of crisis, and grandmother and family elder. There is little that escaped Elizabeth Drinker's quill, and her diary is a delight not only for the information it contains but also for the way in which she conveys her world across the centuries.

Notes from a Black Woman's Diary

Notes from a Black Woman's Diary
Author: Kathleen Collins
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062800965

Relatively unknown during her life, the artist, filmmaker, and writer Kathleen Collins emerged on the literary scene in 2016 with the posthumous publication of the short-story collection Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Said Zadie Smith, “To be this good and yet to be ignored is shameful, but her rediscovery is a great piece of luck for us.” That rediscovery continues in Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary, which spans genres to reveal the breadth and depth of the late author’s talent. The compilation is anchored by more of Collins’s striking short stories, which explore the ways in which relationships both are formed and come undone. Also collected here is the work Collins wrote for the screen and stage, including the screenplay of her pioneering film Losing Ground and the script for The Brothers, which powerfully illuminate the particular joys, challenges, and heartbreaks rendered by the African American experience. And finally, it is in Collins’s raw and prescient diaries that her nascent ideas about race, gender, marriage, and motherhood first play out on the page. By turns empowering, exuberant, sexy, and poignant, Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary is a brilliant compendium of the works of an inimitable talent, and a rich portrait of a writer hard at work.