Historical Memoirs Women

In 1982, Sally Morgan travelled back to her grandmother's birthplace. What started as a tentative search for information about her family, turned into an overwhelming emotional and spiritual pilgrimage. My Place is a moving account of a search for truth into which a whole family is gradually drawn, finally freeing the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.

Acclaimed author Andrea di Robilant sweeps listeners back to 18th-century Venice for a spellbinding tale of forbidden love. Originally serialized in The New Yorker, this dazzling story is based on actual family letters. The letters describe a searing and illicit affair between the author’s ancestor, a great Venetian statesman, and a beautiful half-English girl. The couple pursued their passion with reckless abandon, offending nearly everyone, and even getting some help along the way from the infamous Casanova.

Tillie Pierce was 15 years old when the Battle of Gettysburg raged around her. The three-day battle fought in July 1863 proved to be the deadliest of the Civil War and the turning point of the conflict. Go behind the scenes and follow the bloody battle in Tillie’s own words.

Mary McLeod Bethune was a phenomenal Black woman who rose from poverty, established a school, became a strong leader for voting and women's rights, and was an advisor to four presidents. Based on over 35 interviews with those who knew Mary personally, this biography gives insight to this wonderful leader who will be the first Black woman to have her statue placed in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, DC. Mary comes alive through the narrative and personal stories.

Born into upper-class America in the same year, 1854, Sara Delano (later to become the mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Jennie Jerome (later to become the mother of Winston Churchill) refused to settle into predictable, sheltered lives as little-known wives to prominent men. Instead, both women concentrated their energies on enabling their sons to reach the epicenter of political power on two continents. Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons is a captivating dual biography of two famous women whose sons would change the course of the 20th century.

The history of the Yan family is inseparable from the history of China over the last century. One of the most influential businesswomen of China today, Lan Yan grew up in the company of the country's powerful elite, including Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and other top leaders. In recounting her family history, Lan Yan brings to life a century of Chinese history from the last emperor to present day, including the Cultural Revolution which tore her childhood apart. The little girl who was crushed by the Cultural Revolution has become one of the most active businesswomen in her country.

Dr. Ernst Gräfenberg was among the most sought-after gynecologists in pre-World War II Germany. The creator of the first IUD, known as the Gräfenberg ring, he was posthumously credited with identifying the eponymous "Gräfenberg spot" or G-spot. He was also a Jew in Nazi Germany, and by 1938 he had been stripped of his practice, his possessions, and his freedom and was languishing in a Nazi prison.

Indiana-born Vivian Gordon fluttered to New York in 1920 looking for fame and fortune. Before long, the flame-haired chorus girl parlayed her youth, beauty, and ambition into more profitable means as a tough and glamorous symbol of Prohibition-era excess. She was a speakeasy owner, blackmailer, high-end escort, extortionist, racketeer, and con woman. But given her dangerously intimate associations, Vivian was also a woman who knew too much and who rightfully feared for her life.

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) is the most famous female Classicist in history, the author of books that revolutionized our understanding of Greek culture and religion. A star in the British academic world, she became the quintessential Cambridge woman—as Virginia Woolf suggested when, in A Room of One's Own, she claims to have glimpsed Harrison's ghost in the college gardens. This lively and innovative portrayal of a fascinating woman raises the question of who wins (and how) in the competition for academic fame. Mary Beard captures Harrison's ability to create her own image.

Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen’s heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The Porters were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published 26 books and achieved global fame. But history hasn’t been kind to the Porters. Credit for their literary invention was given to their childhood friend, Sir Walter Scott, who never publicly acknowledged the sisters’ works as his inspiration.

Almost 200 years after her death, Austen remains a hot topic, and the current flare in the cultural zeitgeist echoes the continuous revival of her works, from the time of original publication through the 20th century. In Jane's Fame, Claire Harman gives us the complete biography of the author and analyzes her lasting cultural influence, making this essential listening for anyone interested in Austen's life, works, and remarkably potent fame.

Robert Coles first met Dorothy Day over 35 years ago when, as a medical student, he worked in one of her Catholic Worker soup kitchens. He remained close to this inspiring and controversial woman until her death in 1980. His book, an intellectual and psychological portrait, confronts candidly the central puzzles of her life.

As the second installment in the acclaimed Shadows of the Past series, The Silent Witness combines meticulous research with a captivating narrative style. Listeners will gain new insights into Mary’s life, the public’s obsession with her death, and how her story influenced the literary world, including Poe’s classic The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.

For generations the Burdens were one of the wealthiest families in New York, thanks to the inherited fortune of Cornelius "The Commodore" Vanderbilt. By 1955, the year of Wendy Burden's birth, the Burdens had become a clan of overfunded, quirky and brainy, steadfastly chauvinistic, and ultimately doomed bluebloods on the verge of financial and moral decline---and were rarely seen not holding a drink.

The Three Graces of Val-Kill changes the way we think about Eleanor Roosevelt. Emily Wilson examines what she calls the most formative period in Roosevelt's life, from 1922 to 1936, when she cultivated an intimate friendship with Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, who helped her build a cottage on the Val-Kill Creek in Hyde Park on the Roosevelt family land. In the early years, the three women - the "three graces", as Franklin Delano Roosevelt called them - were nearly inseparable.

This book restores a little-known advocate of Indian rights to her place in history. In June 1889 a widowed Brooklyn artist named Catherine Weldon traveled to the Standing Rock Reservation in Dakota Territory to help Sitting Bull hold on to land that the government was trying to wrest from his people. Her efforts were counterproductive; she was ordered to leave the reservation, and the Standing Rock Sioux were bullied into signing away their land. But she returned with her teenage son, settling at Sitting Bull's camp on the Grand River.

Imagine being born into a world where everything about you—the shape of your nose, the look of your hair, the place of your birth—designates you as an undesirable, an inferior, a menace, no better than a cockroach, something to be driven away and ultimately exterminated. Imagine being thousands of miles away while your family and friends are brutally and methodically slaughtered. Imagine being entrusted by your parents with the mission of leaving everything you know and finding some way to survive, in the name of your family and your people.

The remarkable double life of an American-turned-British spy, Virginia Hall, a 'bolshie' woman from Maryland who, determined to overcome a physical disability that threatened to define her life, successfully infiltrated Vichy France for England's SOE before America's entry into WWII and then, three years later, for the SOS, providing crucial intelligence and logistics for the mounting French Resistance and, later, Allied troops.

Clara Barton: The Life and Legacy of the Civil War Nurse Who Founded the American Red Cross chronicles her remarkable life, and the manner in which she changed nursing in America forever. You will learn about Clara Barton like never before.

Eyewitness accounts from over 50 diaries of southern women facing the hardships of the Civil War. Includes voices of slave women. As Yankee soldiers plundered, and starvation stalked the land, they hid food and heirlooms in wells and swamps. They watched Atlanta and Georgia burn and fed hungry children. Vivid accounts of women who witnessed the battles. Turned into food scavengers at the brink of starvation, southern women devised ways to feed their children.