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This volume completes Keith McMahon’s acclaimed history of imperial wives and royal polygamy in China. Avoiding the stereotype of the emperor’s plural wives as mere victims or playthings, the book considers empresses and concubines as full-fledged participants in palace life, whether as mothers, wives, or go-betweens in the emperor’s relations with others in the palace. Although restrictions on women’s participation in politics increased dramatically after Empress Wu in the Tang, the author follows the strong and active women, of both high and low rank, who continued to appear. They counseled emperors, ghostwrote for them, oversaw succession when they died, and dominated them when they were weak. They influenced the emperor’s relationships with other women and enhanced their aura and that of the royal house with their acts of artistic and religious patronage. Dynastic history ended in China when the prohibition that women should not rule was defied for the final time by Dowager Cixi, the last great monarch before China’s transformation into a republic.
As Lucy Muchelney watches her ex-lover’s sham of a wedding, she wishes herself anywhere else. It isn’t until she finds a letter from the Countess of Moth, looking for someone to translate a groundbreaking French astronomy text, that she knows where to go. Showing up at the Countess’ London home, she hoped to find a challenge, not a woman who takes her breath away. Catherine St Day looks forward to a quiet widowhood once her late husband’s scientific legacy is fulfilled. She expected to hand off the translation and wash her hands of the project—instead, she is intrigued by the young woman who turns up at her door, begging to be allowed to do the work, and she agrees to let Lucy stay. But as Catherine finds herself longing for Lucy, everything she believes about herself and her life is tested. While Lucy spends her days interpreting the complicated French text, she spends her nights falling in love with the alluring Catherine. But sabotage and old wounds threaten to sever the threads that bind them. Can Lucy and Catherine find the strength to stay together or are they doomed to be star-crossed lovers?
This winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize and national bestseller is “an innovative reimagining of the family saga . . . Celestial Bodies is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets" (The New York Times Book Review). In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present. Through the sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth. The first novel originally written in Arabic to ever win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, Celestial Bodies marks the arrival in the United States of a major international writer.
From the beautiful apsaras of Hindu myth to the swan maidens of European fairy tales, stories of flying women-some carried by wings, others by clouds, rainbows, floating scarves, and flying horses-reveal the perennial fascination with and ambivalence about female power and sexuality. In Women Who Fly, Serinity Young examines the motif of the flying woman as it appears in a wide variety of cultures and historical periods, in legends, myths, rituals, sacred narratives, and artistic productions. She considers supernatural women like the Valkyries of Norse legend, who transport men to immortality; winged deities like the Greek goddesses Iris and Nike; figures of terror like the Furies, witches, and succubi; airborne Christian mystics; and wayward, dangerous women like Lilith and Morgan le Fay. Looking beyond the supernatural, Young examines the modern mythology surrounding twentieth-century female aviators like Amelia Earhart and Hanna Reitsch. Throughout, Young demonstrates that female power has always been inextricably linked with female sexuality and that the desire to control it is a pervasive theme in these stories. This is vividly depicted, for example, in the twelfth-century Niebelungenlied, in which the proud warrior-queen Brünnhilde loses her great physical strength when she is tricked into surrendering her virginity. Even in the twentieth-century the same idea is reflected in the exploits of the comic book and film character Wonder Woman who, Young suggests, retains her physical strength only because her love for fellow aviator Steve Trevor goes unrequited. The first book to systematically chronicle the figure of the flying woman in myth, literature, art, and pop culture, Women Who Fly offers a fresh look at the ways in which women have both influenced and been understood by society and religious traditions throughout the ages and around the world.
Explores the complex history and legacy of elite wives, concubines, and daughters of warlords in twentieth-century China. In Women and Their Warlords, historian Kate Merkel-Hess examines the lives and personalities of the female relatives of the military rulers who governed regions of China from 1916 to 1949. Posing for candid photographs and sitting for interviews, these women did not merely advance male rulers’ agendas. They advocated for social and political changes, gave voice to feminist ideas, and shaped how the public perceived them. As the first publicly political partners in modern China, the wives and concubines of Republican-era warlords changed how people viewed elite women’s engagement in politics. Drawing on popular media sources, including magazine profiles and gossip column items, Merkel-Hess draws unexpected connections between militarism, domestic life, and state power in this insightful new account of gender and authority in twentieth-century China.
Chinese emperors guaranteed male successors by taking multiple wives, in some cases hundreds and even thousands. Women Shall Not Rule offers a fascinating history of imperial wives and concubines, especially in light of the greatest challenges to polygamous harmony—rivalry between women and their attempts to engage in politics. Besides ambitious empresses and concubines, these vivid stories of the imperial polygamous family are also populated with prolific emperors, wanton women, libertine men, cunning eunuchs, and bizarre cases of intrigue and scandal among rival wives. Keith McMahon, a leading expert on the history of gender in China, draws upon decades of research to describe the values and ideals of imperial polygamy and the ways in which it worked and did not work in real life. His rich sources are both historical and fictional, including poetic accounts and sensational stories told in pornographic detail. Displaying rare historical breadth, his lively and fascinating study will be invaluable as a comprehensive and authoritative resource for all readers interested in the domestic life of royal palaces across the world.
Offering a heaping helping of comfort food with a side of good old-fashioned values, the Church Ladies' latest contribution to the cook's essential library features over 200 recipes plus a collection of timeless words of wisdom.
It is interesting that women who campaign for womenâ (TM)s rights and interests in Iran have not considered engaging with women who are neither conventional Muslims nor strongly secular, but instead explore other aspects of religion and spirituality. The women examined in this study identify themselves as believers in God, but have different views of religion; some wish to be called religious but do not follow the official Islamic Shia and have their own interpretation of what it means to be a good Muslim, while some think of spirituality as their religion and refer to themselves as â oespiritualâ . Scholarship on women in Iran has not yet taken such an approach, and has not considered womenâ (TM)s interests in spirituality with regard to religion. As such, this book differs greatly from existing work on Iranian womenâ (TM)s lives after the Islamic revolution. It examines the potential feminist implications of womenâ (TM)s involvement in one of the most popular spiritual movements, â oeInter-universal Mysticismâ and its emancipatory potential for women. The central argument here is that feminist spirituality is an expression of womenâ (TM)s power to identify, explore, and assess their own spiritual experiences in order to construct their own sense of self and transform their lives. As such, this book broadens discourses about women in Iran by examining the link between spirituality, coping, and meaning-making in the lives of women involved with Inter-universal Mysticism. The studyâ (TM)s unique contribution is not simply that it extends the range of contexts in which gender can be analysed, but rather that it, through the lens of feminism, demonstrates the significance of womenâ (TM)s choice of spirituality as an investigative issue which can elucidate womenâ (TM)s wider social, cultural and political processes in contemporary Iran.