Wild Women: Crusaders, Curmudgeons, and Completely Corsetless Ladies in the Otherwise Virtuous Victorian Era (Feminist gift)

"Wild Women is a delightful collection of riveting stories about our independent, iconoclastic, and utterly outrageous foremothers." - Vicki Leon, author of Uppity Women of Ancient Times.

#1 New Release in Politics & Social Sciences, Reference

Enjoy a fascinating and sometimes humorous glimpse into the lives of over one hundred, 19th-century Victorian era American women who refused to whittle themselves down to the Victorian model of proper womanhood. Included in Wild Women are 50-black-and-white photos from the era.

During the Victorian era a woman's pedestal was her prison.

"Women should not be expected to write, or fight, or build, or compose scores. She does all by inspiring man to do all." ─ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is nothing more dangerous for a young woman than to rely chiefly upon her intellectual powers, her wit, her imagination, her fancy." ─ Godey's Lady's Book magazine

But, scores of nineteenth-century American women chose to live life on their terms. In this book you will meet women who refused to remain on a Victorian pedestal. In San Francisco a courtesan appeared as a plaintiff in court, suing her clients for fraud. In Montana a laundress in her seventies decked a gentleman who refused to pay his bill. A forty-three-year-old schoolteacher plunged down Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel. A frail lighthouse keeper pulled twenty-two sinking sailors out of the ocean off Rhode Island. A pair of Colorado madams fought a public pistol duel over their mutual beau. Two lady lovebirds were legally wed in Michigan. An ad hoc abolitionist spirited away scores of slaves on the Underground Railroad. A Secessionist spy swallowed a secret message as she was arrested, claiming that no one could capture her soul.

Readers of books for women such as Women Who Run with the Wolves or Badass Affirmations will love this book about Victorian women who refused to accept the gender roles of their day.

Autumn Stephens was born in a New Mexico mining community whose population began to dwindle shortly after her arrival (though she swears this was mere coincidence) and finally faded from the map altogether. She spent the rest of her childhood in Eugene, Oregon. Initially, she intended to become a psychologist, but when she noticed that her introductory psych classes at Stanford University tended to focus on the behavior of rats rather than that of human beings, she signed up as a Creative Writing major instead. During several subsequent years as an afterhours creative writer; daytime wage slave, Stephens worked as a medical coder, a phone sex script writer, a composer of fraudulent Tarot prognostications, and something called a special investigator for the State Bar of California. More than any other experience, however, her stint as an old fashioned legal secretary (among other absurdities, the job involved the daily composition of a heart-healthy salad for a high maintenance male boss) honed the deliciously snide feminist sensibility which informs Stephens' writing today. (Well, okay, growing up more or less concurrently with the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s helped too.) Stephens is the author of the popular Wild Women books published by Conari Press, including Wild Women, Wild Women in the White House, Wild Words from Wild Women, Loose Cannons, Drama Queens, and Out of the Mouths of Babes. Stephens also freelances for magazines, reviews women's writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, and enjoys an entirely attorney free lifestyle. Currently, she lives in Berkeley, California, a city that she would like better were it not for an uncharacteristically restrictive ordinance against raising miniature pigs in one's backyard. Her hobbies are sleeping and reading trashy celebrity magazines.