#jo-march

#jo-march

Gilman's essay Women and Economics, written in 1898, combined her feminist and socialist ideas with evolutionary theory, arguing that the seclusion of women to the domestic sphere is unjust and unprogressive.

My earliest independent reading memory is The Story of Ferdinand by Leaf and Lawson. I loved that bull! My favourite book growing up Big books gave me the whirlies so it took a while for them to start landing.

To be a clever, bookish teenage girl is to spend a certain amount of time standing on the sidelines, feeling invisible to boys. There seemed to be a natural division: you could be smart or pretty, but you could not be both.

Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) was a religious reformer, Puritan dissident, midwife, and alleged prophetess whose beliefs and influence brought her into conflict with the magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, especially its governor, John Winthrop (1588-1649), in 1636-1638. She was the central voice of the so-called Antinomian Controversy, which divided the colony and, to the magistrates, threatened its mission and continued existence.

Many editors languish in the margins of history, their contributions largely invisible despite how much they shape whom and how we read. But in recent years, amid a wave of books unearthing overlooked figures, biographers have turned their sights to pioneering book and magazine editors-including Malcolm Cowley of Viking, Judith Jones of Knopf, Bennett Cerf of Random House, and Katharine S. White of The New Yorker -anointing them as the unsung architects of the American literary canon.

For those unfamiliar with the beloved heroine, Samantha is one of the first three historical characters introduced by American Girl in 1986. Samantha, Swedish immigrant Kirsten and WWII homefront heroine Molly demonstrated courage, compassion and resilience. Along with an 18-inch doll, each 9-year-old character was featured in a series of easy chapter books; kids could follow each fictional story as well as the historical context surrounding it.

Charles Dickens's novels are often criticised for their idealised passive female characters, but as the Dickens Museum now shows, he was, in life and in death, surrounded by formidable, intelligent and independent women. A new exhibition at the museum shifts attention away from Dickens as a solitary genius and instead places women at the centre of his creative world and cultural afterlife.