Winner of the 1994 Eudora Welty Prize

Ellen S. Woodward (1887-1971) was touted as Roosevelt's second most powerful woman appointee. Among American women only Eleanor Roosevelt and Labor Department Secretary ...

Celebrated author Ellen Gilchrist played many roles—writer and speaker, wife and lover, mother and grandmother. But she had never tackled the role of teacher.

Offered the opportunity to teach creative ...

From the smiling, sentimental mothers portrayed in 1930s radio barn dance posters, to the sexual shockwaves generated by Elvis Presley, to the female superstars redefining contemporary country music, ...

Her father and her uncle were U.S. congressmen. Her grandfather was a U.S. senator. Although born to privilege in Alabama and groomed in a convent school, Tallulah Bankhead resolved not to be just another ...

The Beat movement nurtured many female dissidents and artists who contributed to Beat culture and connected the Beats with the second wave of the women’s movement. Although they have often been eclipsed b ...

Winner of the 2004 Eudora Welty Prize

Each year, thousands of pilgrims visit the celebrated New Orleans tomb where Marie Laveau is said to lie. They seek her favors or fear her lingering influence. Voodoo ...

Beginning in 1963 with the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and reaching a high pitch ten years later with the televised mega-event of the “Battle of the Sexes”—the tennis match between Billi ...

In 1993, Rita Dove (b. 1952) became the nation’s youngest and first female African American Poet Laureate. This collection of interviews offers a fascinating portrait of her.

Having published over a half-dozen ...

In Conversations with Erica Jong one of the most popular and controversial contemporary writers has her say. She was already an established poet when she published Fear of Flying (1973), but the novel’s ...

Writer, teacher, and public intellectual, Betty Friedan has been in the spotlight almost continuously since the publication of The Feminine Mystique, her landmark book, in 1963.

Transforming Friedan into ...