Text consists of biographical entries for California women and women's clubs; essays on women in specific occupations; a state-wide register of approximately 60,000 representative women of California with names and addresses alphabetically and geographically arranged; a list of more than 790 women's organizations with an explanatory key indicating each woman's membership affiliation; and indexes to text, illustrations, and advertisers. Includes portraits of biographees and photographs of many of the buildings in which the clubs met.

In this groundbreaking work, Claude Calame argues that the songs sung by choruses of young girls in ancient Greek poetry are more than literary texts; rather, they functioned as initiatory rituals in Greek cult practices. Using semiotic and anthropologic theory, Calame reconstructs the religious and social institutions surrounding the songs, demonstrating their function in an aesthetic education that permitted the young girls to achieve the stature of womanhood and to be integrated into the adult civic community. This first English edition includes an updated bibliography.