This book is highly illustrated and features women from Great Britain, the USA, and from the old commonwealth countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.

This book is highly illustrated and features women from Great Britain, the USA, and from the old commonwealth countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.

Comprehensive and riveting, this important volume on women's history surveys the revolutionary changes in the social, economic, and political status of women during the twentieth century. From the battles of suffragists and labor activists such as Carrie Chapman Catt and Rose Schneiderman to the provocative ideas of Betty Friedan, here are the women of vision and courage who fought for equality and freedom. But here too are the unexpected medical and technological discoveries that removed a woman's destiny from the restrictions of biology -- the electric washing machine, anesthesia for childbirth, sulfa drugs to stop post-partum deaths, the birth control pill, and more. This lively and provocative history covers groundbreaking legislation and Supreme Court rulings, yet it doesn't neglect the often conflicting cultural forces -- from Emily Post and Barbie to the founding of the La Leche League and Ellen DeGeneres's sitcom -- that have shaped women's lives in today's world. Book jacket.

A Woman of the 20th Century is the story of a life in the most advanced century ever, one that offered greater technology and knowledge and freedom, as well as more riches to be able to enjoy it. The big challenge, though, was figuring out how to handle the freedom and use it to have access to all the new wonderful things. The author, Aline, was born into a family whose financial security and class status had been ruined by the sudden unexpected deaths from pneumonia, when her parents were children, of both of her successful grandfathers. Very soon, she began receiving the message that she was somehow supposed to regain what had been lost, since her parents had been trying very hard to do so but somehow not quite succeeding. The road to success turned out to be through new territory and offered important insights about the emotional needs of humans and the good and bad sides of gender expectations for both men and women. Two permanent detours made it end in an entirely different place than it would have if she had listened to her family or traveled in earlier centuries.

A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.