In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, cultural, economic, and political changes, as well as increased geographic mobility, placed strains upon British society. But by cultivating friendships and alliances, women worked to socially cohere Britain and its colonies. In the first book-length historical study of female friendship and alliance for the early modern period, Amanda Herbert draws on a series of interlocking microhistorical studies to demonstrate the vitality and importance of bonds formed between British women in the long eighteenth century. She shows that while these alliances were central to women’s lives, they were also instrumental in building the British Atlantic world.

2018 Best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women In the last thirty years scholarship has increasingly engaged the topic of women’s alliances in early modern Europe. The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England expands our knowledge of yet another facet of female alliance: the political. Archival discoveries as well as new work on politics and law help shape this work as a timely reevaluation of the nature and extent of women’s political alliances. Grouped into three sections—domestic, court, and kinship alliances—these essays investigate historical documents, drama, and poetry, insisting that female alliances, much like male friendship discourse, had political meaning in early modern England. Offering new perspectives on female authors such as the Cavendish sisters, Anne Clifford, Aemilia Lanyer, and Katherine Philips, as well as on male-authored texts such as Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, Swetnam the Woman-Hater, and The Maid’s Tragedy, the essays bring both familiar and unfamiliar texts into conversation about the political potential of female alliances. Some contributors are skeptical about allied women’s political power, while others suggest that such female communities had considerable potential to contain, maintain, or subvert political hierarchies. A wide variety of approaches to the political are represented in the volume and the scope will make it appealing to a broad audience.

Introduction -- The politics of women's "domestic" alliances. Distaff power: plebeian female alliances in early modern England / Bernard Capp -- Between women: slanderous speech and neighborly bonds in Henry Porter's The two angry women of Abington / Ronda Arab -- The political role of the gossip in Swetnam the woman-hater, arraigned by women / Megan Inbody -- Virtual and actual female alliance in The maid's tragedy and The tamer tamed / Niamh J. O'Leary -- Failed alliances and miserable marriages in Katherine Philips's letters / Elizabeth Hodgson -- Women's alliances and the politics of the court. Performing patronage, crafting alliances: ladies' lotteries in English pageantry / Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich -- Tyrants, love, and ladies' eyes: the politics of female-boy alliance on the Jacobean stage Roberta Barker -- Her advocate to the loudest: Arbella Stuart and female courtly alliance in The winter's tale / Alicia Tomasian -- Not sparing kings: Aemilia Lanyer and the religious politics of female alliance / Christina Luckyj -- The politics of female kinship. Shakespeare revises Juliet, the nurse, and Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet / Steven Urkowitz -- Crossing generations: female alliances and dynastic power in Anne Clifford's great books of record / Jessica l. Malay -- Exilic inspiration and the captive life: the literary/political alliances of the Cavendish sisters / Jennifer Higginbotham -- Afterword / Susan Frye and Karen Robertson

Critical Alliances argues that late-Victorian and modernist feminist authors saw in literary representations of female collaboration an opportunity to produce new gender and economic roles for women. It is not often that one thinks of female allegiances – such as kinship networks, cultural inheritance, or lesbian marriage – as influencing the marketplace; nor does one often think of economic models when theorizing feminist cooperation. S. Brooke Cameron suggest that, through their representations of female partnership, feminist authors such as Virginia Woolf, Olive Schreiner, George Egerton, Amy Levy, and Michael Field redefined the gendered marketplace and, with it, women’s professional opportunities. Interdisciplinary at its core and using a contextual approach, Critical Alliances selects cultural texts and theories relevant to each writer’s particular intervention in the marketplace. Chapters look at how different forms of feminist collaboration enabled women to stake their claim to one of the many, emergent professions at the turn of the century.

Like the complex systems of man-made power lines that transmit electricity and connect people and places, feminist alliances are elaborate networks that have the potential to provide access to institutional power and to transform relations. In Power Lines, Aimee Carrillo Rowe explores the formation and transformative possibilities of transracial feminist alliances. She draws on her conversations with twenty-eight self-defined academic feminists, who reflect on their academic careers, alliances, feminist struggles, and identifications. Based on those conversations and her own experiences as an Anglo-Chicana queer feminist researcher, Carrillo Rowe investigates when and under what conditions transracial feminist alliances in academia work or fail, and how close attention to their formation provides the theoretical and political groundwork for a collective vision of subjectivity. Combining theory, criticism, and narrative nonfiction, Carrillo Rowe develops a politics of relation that encourages the formation of feminist alliances across racial and other boundaries within academia. Such a politics of relation is founded on her belief that our subjectivities emerge in community; our affective investments inform and even create our political investments. Thus experience, consciousness, and agency must be understood as coalitional rather than individual endeavors. Carrillo Rowe’s conversations with academic feminists reveal that women who restrict their primary allies to women of their same race tend to have limited notions of feminism, whereas women who build transracial alliances cultivate more nuanced, intersectional, and politically transformative feminisms. For Carrillo Rowe, the institutionalization of feminism is not so much an achievement as an ongoing relational process. In Power Lines, she offers a set of critical, practical, and theoretical tools for building and maintaining transracial feminist alliances.

Women comprise at least half the world, and usually more than half the church, but so often Christian teaching to women either fails to move beyond a discussion of roles or assumes a particular economic situation or stage of life. This all but shuts women out from contributing to God’s kingdom as they were designed to do. Furthermore, the plight of women in the Majority World demands a Christian response, a holistic embrace of all that God calls women and men to be in his world. The loudest voices speaking into women’s lives in the twenty-first century thus far come from either fundamentalist Islam or radical feminism. And neither can be allowed to carry the day. The Bible contains the highest possible view of women and invests women’s lives with cosmic significance regardless of their age, stage of life, social status, or culture. Carolyn Custis James unpacks three transformative themes the Bible presents to women that raise the bar for women and calls them to join their brothers in advancing God’s gracious kingdom on earth. These new images of what can be in Christ free women to embrace the life God gives them, no matter what happens. Carolyn encourages readers with a positive, kingdom approach to the changes, challenges, and opportunities facing women throughout the world today.

Alliance politics is a regular headline grabber. When a possible military crisis involving Russia, North Korea, or China rears its head, leaders and citizens alike raise concerns over the willingness of US allies to stand together. As rival powers have tightened their security cooperation, the United States has stepped up demands that its allies increase their defense spending and contribute more to military operations in the Middle East and elsewhere. The prospect of former President Donald Trump unilaterally ending alliances alarmed longstanding partners, even as NATO was welcoming new members into its ranks. Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century is the first book to explore fully the politics that shape these security arrangements – from their initial formation through the various challenges that test them and, sometimes, lead to their demise. Across six thematic chapters, Alexander Lanoszka challenges conventional wisdom that has dominated our understanding of how military alliances have operated historically and into the present. Although military alliances today may seem uniquely hobbled by their internal difficulties, Lanoszka argues that they are in fact, by their very nature, prone to dysfunction.