March is Women’s History Month – a perfect time to celebrate all women around you with 10 gems from our catalog.
Arabella, The Female Quixote, is a truly mighty woman. After all, she can kill with a mere look! Or so she believes… Read the wonderful parody of “Don Quixote” by Charlotte Lennox, and who knows, maybe Arabella can be cured by her fiance?
Miss Sara Sampson has just eloped with Bellefont, who promised to marry her. Much to the dismay of her father, and to that of the former mistress of the unfaithful Bellefont. Listen to G. E. Lessing’s drama as a furious Marwood uses all female tricks to get her lover back.
In Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, the tables are turned: The female protagonist is the promiscuous one. Never before were the desires of a woman described so forthrightly, and the book promptly caused a scandal.
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin caused many scandals too: she was smoking and wearing trousers at a time women were not supposed to. And she was able to sustain herself as writer – The Devil’s Pool is one of here novels (also available in French) – but only by writing under the male pseudonym George Sand.
At least she grew up in a time when a formal education for women was not a complete taboo any longer. Until then, many a Woman in Science faced almost insurmountable obstacles, as described in their biographies through the centuries, collcted by John Augustine Zahm.
With education off the list, the next item was: voting. And, just as with abolition, the frontiers ran right through families, like in The Sturdy Oak, a novel in 14 chapters by just as many authors. It tells the story of a newlywed lawyer who is deadset against suffragists… until his wife discovers she might be one herself…
A somewhat more realistic description of the suffrage movement is Eighty Years and More, the memoirs of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the best known suffragists of the United States, who was at times also working in Great Britain.
Voltairine de Cleyre was an important leading figure in the American anarchist movement, and a renowned writer and poetess. Here, we put a selection of her Poems in the spotlight.
At this early time of women’s lib, women travelling the world alone slowly became more common. Go with Ida L. Pfeiffer on A Visit to the Holy Land, Egypt and Italy. The proceeds of this book funded her next adventure: Iceland.
If you don’t have a husband or children, and you’re neither intersted in politics nor in foreign lands, you are bound to become a grumpy, lonely woman, like The Third Miss Symons in F. M. Mayor’s story. Right?
Enjoy – and pamper yourself!
It’s too bad that “The Petticoat Commando” by Johanna Brandt wasn’t included in the selection for books for Women’s History Month. Seldom do we see a first hand account of women who worked behind enemy lines as spies and who were responsible for bringing to the attention of the world the atrocities comitted by the British forces buying the Boer War.
It would have been a good choice , but it wasn’t suggested There is a thread to make suggestions for the Staff Picks – all contributions are welcome : )
THE GIANT JOSHUA, by Maurine Whipple is one of the best novel ever written by an American woman in the 20th century. A historical novel of the trials and struggles of a Moman poligamist wife and also the dyre difficulties of feeding herself and her child and the terrible heartbreaks, while living in a sandy desert.
Thank you, Wilford, but this novel will remain in copyright in the US until 2037 and cannot therefore be recorded for LibriVox, as we can only record works that are out of copyright in the US.
Let’s hear it for Emma Goldman !