In this novel from a Quebecois feminist writer, a shy sixteen-year-old falls in love with a classmate while attending a Catholic boarding school for prospective schoolteachers. When the fantasized relationship fails she takes superficial refuge with a group of girls recognizing her own loneliness and that of the group.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “addictive, thoughtful” novel (Entertainment Weekly) that brings us through the thrilling, bewildering years of early adulthood while pulling us inside the circle of three friends, perfectly capturing the wild frustrations and soaring joys of modern life. Isabella, Mary, and Lauren feel like everyone they know is getting married. On Sunday after Sunday, at bridal shower after bridal shower, they coo over toasters, collect ribbons and wrapping paper, eat minuscule sandwiches and cakes. They wear pastel dresses and drink champagne by the case, but amid the celebration these women have their own lives to contend with: Isabella is working a dead-end job, Mary is dating a nice guy with an awful mother, and Lauren is waitressing at a midtown bar and wondering why she's attracted to the sleazy bartender.

A Reversion To Type by Josephine Daskam Bacon is a short story that explore the lives and struggles of women in turn-of-the-century America. Excerpt: "And yet, somebody must teach them. They could not be born with foreign idioms and historical dates and mathematical formulae in their little heads. She herself deplored the modern tendency that sent a changing drift of young teachers through the colleges, to learn at the expense of the students a soon relinquished profession. But how ridiculous the position of the women who prided themselves on the steadiness and continuity of their service! Surely they must find it an empty success at times. They must regret."

Grounded in medical, juridical, and philosophical texts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, this innovative study tells the story of how the idea of woman contributed to the emergence of modern science. Rebecca Wilkin focuses on the contradictory representations of women from roughly the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, and depicts this period as one filled with epistemological anxiety and experimentation. She shows how skeptics, including Montaigne, Marie de Gournay, and Agrippa von Nettesheim, subverted gender hierarchies and/or blurred gender difference as a means of questioning the human capacity to find truth; while "positivists" who strove to establish new standards of truth, for example Johann Weyer, Jean Bodin, and Guillaume du Vair, excluded women from the search for truth. The book constitutes a reevaluation of the legacy of Cartesianism for women, as Wilkin argues that Descartes' opening of the search for truth "even to women" was part of his appropriation of skeptical arguments. This book challenges scholars to revise deeply held notions regarding the place of women in the early modern search for truth, their role in the development of rational thought, and the way in which intellectuals of the period dealt with the emergence of an influential female public.