Letter to the World: Seven Women Who Shaped the American Century Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Letter to the World: Seven Women Who Shaped the American Century Book

Anyone awake during the most rudimentary U.S. history lesson has at least a foggy notion about most of the seven American women biographer Susan Ware selected for Letter to the World. Social activist and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt is included along with globetrotting journalist Dorothy Thompson, who sent hundreds of dispatches from foreign war zones, and anthropologist Margaret Mead, most famed for the sexual Eden she painted in Coming of Age in Samoa. Rounding out the field are the pithy androgynous actress Katharine Hepburn, outrageously gifted athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias, volatile modern-dance pioneer Martha Graham, and opera star Marian Anderson. Ware debunks certain widely touted conceits about her subjects: Dorothy Thompson, for example, never ran off to cover a war dressed in a shimmering evening gown; she stopped off at home to change and pack first. Ware has a zest for these women and has culled many choice quotes by and about them. When asked by reporters if there was anything she didn't play, Didrikson answered succinctly: "Yeah, dolls." Readers who find these thumbnail biographies tantalizing, but too brief to be deeply satisfying, would do well to pick up books such as No Ordinary Time, Blackberry Winter, and My Lord, What a Morning. --Francesca ColtreraRead More

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  • Product Description

    In the tradition of Composing a Life and Writing a Woman's Life, a look at the intimate and public lives of seven strong and vibrant women who had a lasting impact on American popular culture and on women's lives. In wanting to think through modern women's history, Susan Ware found herself drawn to seven larger-than-life women who influenced not only their professions--politics, journalism, anthropology, acting, sports, dance, and music--but also the way women saw themselves and their options in life. Ware recovers the people behind the legends of Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Thompson, Margaret Mead, Katharine Hepburn, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Martha Graham, and Marian Anderson in compelling life stories. She looks at how they created their persona, how they kept themselves in the public eye, and how they did so for so long. She also speaks to how these women balanced their personal lives--choosing lovers and mates and deciding whether to have children. In the choices they made and the success of those choices are lessons relevant to contemporary working women. As part of living exceptional and unconventional lives, they gave other women the ability to desire beyond the limits imposed on women and allowed them to dream and strive for lives of independence and fulfillment.

  • 0393046524
  • 9780393046526
  • Susan Ware
  • 21 October 1998
  • W. W. Norton & Co.
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 368
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