Hiding in plain sight throughout America are historic, highly private women's self-education groups. These clubs are fascinating survivors from an era following the Civil War when women couldn't apply to most colleges and were told they shouldn't leave the home. In their earliest days, the study groups also contributed to the welfare of their towns - often by helping to found their town's first library-and served to get women out of the house and into the world. Today's all-women study clubs have no civic component but still fashion their meetings as their founding great-grandmothers did, with members taking turns giving original papers. In Smart Women, author Ann Dodds Costello discusses her four-year quest to locate, often visit, and describe today's 100-year-old, all-women study clubs, all over America, even though they do not publicize and have no central organization or knowledge of each other. Included: an invaluable, first-ever directory of most of the book's ninety-plus clubs.

This volume focuses on the literary and artistic exploration of female friendship in various geographical contexts, spanning the centuries from the medieval period until the present. The essays address the intense female bonding in world literature as a universal human need for intimacy, sense of belonging, and purpose. The main focus is on the reevaluation of friendships between women, which have been traditionally less epitomized than those between men. The authors of this volume demonstrate how the emotional unions of women offer compelling insights to various historical and contemporary societies, helping us understand gender relations, traditions, family life, and community values.

The only collection of Rattray's prose: essays that offer a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition. In order to become one of the invisible, it is necessary to throw oneself into the arms of God... Some of us stayed for weeks, some for months, some forever. —from How I Became One of the Invisible Since its first publication in 1992, David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible has functioned as a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition running through Western civilization from Pythagoras to In Nomine music to Hölderlin and Antonin Artaud. Rattray not only excavated this tradition, he embodied and lived it. He studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne but remained a poet, outside the academy. His stories “Van” and “The Angel” chronicle his travels in southern Mexico with his friend, the poet Van Buskirk, and his adventures after graduating from Dartmouth in the mid-1950s. Eclipsed by the more mediagenic Beat writers during his lifetime, Rattray has become a powerful influence on contemporary artists and writers. Living in Paris, Rattray became the first English translator of Antonin Artaud, and he understood Artaud's incisive scholarship and technological prophecies as few others would. As he writes of his translations in How I Became One of the Invisible, “You have to identify with the man or the woman. If you don't, then you shouldn't be translating it. Why would you translate something that you didn't think had an important message for other people? I translated Artaud because I wanted to turn my friends on and pass a message that had relevance to our lives. Not to get a grant, or be hired by an English department.” Compiled in the months before his untimely death at age 57, How I Became One of the Invisible is the only volume of Rattray's prose. This new edition, edited by Robert Dewhurst, includes five additional pieces, two of them previously unpublished.

Hiding in plain sight throughout America are historic, highly private women's self-education groups. These clubs are fascinating survivors from an era following the Civil War when women couldn't apply to most colleges and were told they shouldn't leave the home. In their earliest days, the study groups also contributed to the welfare of their towns - often by helping to found their town's first library-and served to get women out of the house and into the world. Today's all-women study clubs have no civic component but still fashion their meetings as their founding great-grandmothers did, with members taking turns giving original papers. In Smart Women, author Ann Dodds Costello discusses her four-year quest to locate, often visit, and describe today's 100-year-old, all-women study clubs, all over America, even though they do not publicize and have no central organization or knowledge of each other. Included: an invaluable, first-ever directory of most of the book's ninety-plus clubs.

This book is the third installment in a series of volumes looking at episodes in American economic history from a public choice perspective. Each chapter discusses citizens, special interests, and government officials responding to economic incentives in both markets and politics. In doing so, the book provides fresh insights into important periods of American history, from the Rhode Island’s 1788 Referendum on the U.S. Constitution and the political influence of women’s clubs in the United States. The volume features economic historians such as Ruth Wallis Herndon, junior public choice scholars such as Jayme Lemke and Leo Krasnozhon, and political scientists such as Michael Faber. This volume will be useful for researchers and students interested in economics, history, political science, economic history, public choice, and political economy.