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.

An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her. How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies--of strength, style, and creativity--shaped Woolf's path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf's French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thérèse de L'Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf's aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf. Her mother, Julia, and sistersStella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men--united in their love for one another and their disregard for women--into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.

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.

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.

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

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Virginia Woolf, to whom university admittance had been forbidden, watched the universities open their doors. Though she was happy that her sisters could study in university libraries, she cautioned women against joining the procession of educated men and being co-opted into protecting a “civilization” with values alien to women. Now, as Woolf’s disloyal (unfaithful) daughters, who have professional positions in Belgian universities, Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret, along with a collective of women scholars in Belgium and France, question their academic careers and reexamine the place of women and their role in thinking, both inside and outside the university. They urge women to heed Woolf’s cry—Think We Must—and to always make a fuss about injustice, cruelty, and arrogance.

America has an array of women writers who have made history--and many of them lived, died and were buried in Virginia.(/b> 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 best-seller lists in the twentieth century. Mary Roberts Rinehart was a bestselling 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.