A Working Woman's Life: An Autobiography

A Working Woman's Life: An Autobiography

Author: Marianne Farningham

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2013-04-04

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1447496418

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This early work is both expensive and hard to find in its first edition. It is an autobiographical work and details the life of a working woman and her experiences. This fascinating work is thoroughly recommended for inclusion on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the history of working women. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.


A Daughter of Han; the Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman

A Daughter of Han; the Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman

Author: Ning Lao T'ai-t'ai

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1967

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9780804706063

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Within the common destiny is the individual destiny. So it is that through the telling of one Chinese peasant woman's life, a vivid vision of Chinese history and culture is illuminated. Over the course of two years, Ida Pruitt--a bicultural social worker, writer, and contributor to Sino-American understanding--visited with Ning Lao T'ai-ta'i, three times a week for breakfast. These meetings, originally intended to elucidate for Pruitt traditional Chinese family customs of which Lao T'ai-t'ai possessed some insight, became the foundation for an enduring friendship. As Lao T'ai-t'ai described the cultural customs of her family, and of the broader community of which they were a part, she invoked episodes from her own personal history to illustrate these customs, until eventually the whole of her life lay open before her new confidante. Pruitt documented this story, casting light not only onto Lao T'ai-t'ai's own biography, but onto the character of life for the common man of China, writ large. The final product is a portrayal of China that is "vividly and humanly revealed."


Recollections of My Life as a Woman

Recollections of My Life as a Woman

Author: Diane di Prima

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2002-03-26

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0140231587

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In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school. Immersing herself in Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, di Prima quickly emerged as a renowned poet, an influential editor, and a single mother at a time when this was unheard of. Vividly chronicling the intense, creative cauldron of those years, she recounts her revolutionary relationships and sexuality, and how her experimentation led her to define herself as a woman. What emerges is a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumph of the imagination, and how one woman discovered her role in the world.


Art for the Ladylike

Art for the Ladylike

Author: Whitney Otto

Publisher: Mad Creek Books

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780814257821

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Explores the lives of eight pioneering women photographers to consider the struggles, perils, and rewards of being a woman artist.


About My Life and the Kept Woman

About My Life and the Kept Woman

Author: John Rechy

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2009-03-17

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1555848117

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The long-awaited memoir by “one of the few original American writers of the last century” is a testament to the power of self-acceptance (Gore Vidal). John Rechy, author of City of Night and The Sexual Outlaw, has always known discrimination. Raised Mexican-American in El Paso, Texas, at a time when Latino children were routinely segregated, Rechy was often assumed to be Anglo because of his light skin, and had his name “changed” for him by a teacher, from Juan to John. As he grew older—and as his fascination with the memory of a notorious kept woman in his childhood deepened—Rechy became aware that his differences lay not just in his heritage, but in his sexuality. While he performed the roles expected of him by others—the authoritarians in the US Army during the Korean War, the bigoted relatives of his Anglo college classmates, or the men and women who wanted him to be something he was not—he never allowed them to define him. The “riveting” story of a life that bears witness to some of the most riotous changes of the past century, About My Life and the Kept Woman is as much a portrait of intolerance as of an individual who defied it to forge his own path (The Advocate). “Rechy might be called the first bard of West Hollywood.” —The New York Times “A skillfully paced story . . . As a memoirist, Rechy is both participant and observer, and he segues as easily between narrative and exegesis as his younger self did between the lure of the wild streets and the embrace of his traditional family.” —Los Angeles Magazine


Women's Work

Women's Work

Author: Megan K. Stack

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2020-03-03

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0525431950

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A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 From National Book Award finalist Megan K. Stack, a stunning memoir of raising her children abroad with the help of Chinese and Indian women who are also working mothers When Megan Stack was living in Beijing, she left her prestigious job as a foreign correspondent to have her first child and work from home writing a book. She quickly realized that caring for a baby and keeping up with the housework while her husband went to the office each day was consuming the time she needed to write. This dilemma was resolved in the manner of many upper-class families and large corporations: she availed herself of cheap Chinese labor. The housekeeper Stack hired was a migrant from the countryside, a mother who had left her daughter in a precarious situation to earn desperately needed cash in the capital. As Stack's family grew and her husband's job took them to Dehli, a series of Chinese and Indian women cooked, cleaned, and babysat in her home. Stack grew increasingly aware of the brutal realities of their lives: domestic abuse, alcoholism, unplanned pregnancies. Hiring poor women had given her the ability to work while raising her children, but what ethical compromise had she made? Determined to confront the truth, Stack traveled to her employees' homes, met their parents and children, and turned a journalistic eye on the tradeoffs they'd been forced to make as working mothers seeking upward mobility—and on the cost to the children who were left behind. Women's Work is an unforgettable story of four women as well as an electrifying meditation on the evasions of marriage, motherhood, feminism, and privilege.


The Cost of Living

The Cost of Living

Author: Deborah Levy

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2018-07-10

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 1635571928

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The bestselling exploration of the dimensions of love, marriage, mourning, and kinship from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy. A New York Times Notable Book A New York Public Library Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage? This vibrant memoir, a portrait of contemporary womanhood in flux, is an urgent quest to find an unwritten major female character who can exist more easily in the world. Levy considers what it means to live with meaning, value, and pleasure, to seize the ultimate freedom of writing our own lives, and reflects on the work of such artists and thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Marguerite Duras, David Lynch, and Emily Dickinson. The Cost of Living, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction, is crucial testimony, as distinctive, witty, complex, and original as Levy's acclaimed novels.