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The book concludes with a production history and analysis of Julia (1977), arguably Zinnemann's most complex “Resistance” film and one of the most important films about women ever made. The chapter begins with an analysis of Lillian Hellman's notorious memoir, Alvin Sargent's development of a unique film about female antifascist resistance, Zinnemann's vision of the film's attitude toward history within the emerging debates about postmodernism, feminism, resistannce, and historiography, and contemporary political resisters Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave's impact in a seminal film released in Hollywood's advertised “Year of the Woman.”

This opening chapter sets out the aims of the book within current fields of study, identifying its original contribution. It explores the historical, cultural and political context in which the British women were working. It looks at the longer histories of Serbia and Russia examining the ambiguous position of both nations as part of the Orient, therefore different, exotic and potentially attractive to British women travelers. Against this backdrop, it introduces the various roles of British women within the field of conflict, and identifies some of the key players. It places the women central to this study in a British historical context, examining the evolution of the participation in warfare by British women and the emergence of women as a force in medicine. It defines the range of Institutional structures that enabled women to travel East and the importance of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in developing these organizations.

This chapter considers the historiography of Nest and women in medieval Wales, broadly understood, from the early eighteenth century to the emergence of formal academic historiography. It assesses the Welsh historiography, both formal and as expressed in other genres, especially travel writing, showing divergent tendencies to view Nest either with horror or embarrassment, or to make her a heroine; and this will be related to the ways in which she is made to relate to the English, and also to conceptions of the proper behaviour of a medieval princess. Comparison will be made with the developing historiography of contemporary Welsh princes.

This chapter provides an opportunity to look at role of medieval Welsh women in formal and less formal presentations of history: in the academic historiography, and also in more populist writings, at heritage sites, in museums (for example, the major celebrations of Gerald ‘of Wales’ of the past thirty years), and in historical novels. It does so by focusing upon a few case studies to analyse ways that individual women have been portrayed and consider what this can tell us about conceptions of the roles of women in the past. The analysis considers the place that Nest occupies in late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century portrayals of the Welsh medieval past and suggests ways that the significance of this for our understanding of the imagined past of twentieth-century and contemporary Wales can be discussed.

This chapter begins with Elsa Barkley Brown's vivid memory of the first Southern Conference on Women's History, sponsored by the Southern Association of Women Historians (SAWH). Brown had been on the program committee and worked alongside a group of black and white women historians committed to making sure this conference was an inclusive gathering—fully incorporating graduate students, emphasizing a wide range of women's histories, ensuring that not only SAWH members but also a wide range of historians of women were recognized and participated as presenters and commentators. Yet by the time Brown arrived in Spartanburg on the evening of the first day of the conference, tensions between black and white women were evident—a situation that only increased throughout the next several days.

History looms large in much recent writing about food, with a particular nostalgia for home cooking. But much of this wistfulness for traditional food carefully prepared at home replicates long-standing efforts to rein in women, argues Tracey Deutsch. Because women still do much of the cooking in American homes, any history of home cooking has to acknowledge the inequalities of work in the home. Deutsch encourages us to look at kitchens and home cooking through the lens of women’s history to see them as places of joy and power, authority and possibility, tradition and resistance.

This chapter explores the way that Nest was remembered in the early modern period, a process that has much to tell us about the way that Welsh writers conceptualized the past. It will consider how the critical early years of Norman incursions into Wales were portrayed by later writers. This will be achieved through a discussion of the writings of Welsh gentlemen with antiquarian interests, George Owen of Henllys, Rice Merrick, Edward Stradling, Humphrey Llwyd, David Powel and Sir John Price. These authorities turned their attention to the Welsh past as part of a project to promote their own positions and generate propaganda for nascent Welsh Protestant patriotism.

This chapter examines the early sources for Nest’s life, in particular her ‘abduction’ by Owain ap Cadwgan, placing these sources and the events they describe in the context of politics and gender relations in Wales in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This entails, in particular, examination of Brut, the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, and medieval Welsh lawcodes.

This chapter considers Gerald of Wales’s portrayal of Nest in more detail in order to consider the specific contexts in which she appears in Gerald’s narrative. This takes account of Gerald’s view of women more generally as well as focussing on specific portrayals of women in order to consider how his views about gender, conquest and war were shaped by his attitude to women.

Nest’s beauty is a central motif in interpretations of her and is key to the construction of her as the ‘Welsh Helen of Troy’. Her beauty is particularly emphasized in genres such as modern popular interpretations of her in creative fiction. Her inscription as a great beauty is a result of interpretations of the Brut, and her beauty authorizes the actions of Owain ap Cadwgan’s abduction. The chapter consider the importance of beauty in selected texts to consider how it was portrayed; the analysis examines beauty’s meanings and how it was used by authors to authorize agency and power.

This chapter considers charter evidence as a guide to women’s power in twelfth-century Wales, in order to place the analysis of Nest in a broader analytical framework. Building on the previous chapter’s observations about the portrayal of women within chronicles and the significance of kin structures within the political elite of Wales, this chapter argues that powerful women of the high elite were involved in Welsh politics during this period, and that internal and external factors were promoting this even further, in war, domestic policy, and the formation and dissolution of political alliances. A close and contextualised reading of charter evidence, sensitive to nuances of gender constructions, allows a very detailed picture to be built up as a counterweight to the misogynist assumptions of chroniclers and writers of legal texts.

A background of the life and politics of Eva Gore-Booth. Discussion regarding why women in history have been overlooked, with a specific focus on Gore-Booth and her sister the Irish republican activist and first female elected to the House of Commons, Countess Markievicz. This introduction places Lissadell House, the ancestral home of Gore-Booth, in historical context and describes how Gore-Booth’s papers were discovered. A broad overview as to why publication of these political writings provides a greater understanding of Gore-Booth’s work and greater understanding of topics which were viewed as controversial in the early twentieth century such as conscientious objectors in World War One, the death penalty in Ireland and England and the development of women’s trade unions.

This chapter charts the relationship between two prolific African American essayists, June Jordan and Alice Walker. Unlike Ellison and Baldwin, who were contemporaries but not allies, Jordan and Walker corresponded with one another, lectured together, and commented on each other’s works. It is argued that Walker and Jordan’s essays record their lifelong quest for redemptive art and politics. This project is marked by a desire for a freer, more hopeful future that comes to terms with a painful, oppressive past. As both essayists came to political consciousness during the civil rights movement, they utilized the rhetoric of rights to redefine ideas of national belonging. In doing so, they expanded the scope of the essay to includeissues of gender and sexuality. Through analyzing their essays, this chapter illustrates how Jordan and Walker in distinct, yet complementary ways, shape the art of the essay.