Good wives

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Carol Berkin and Leslie Horowitz

Women's Voices, Women's Lives offers a wealth of primary sources on women's experiences in colonial America. Carol Berkin and Leslie Horowitz gather together a broad spectrum of documents that crossents race, class, and region, presenting the voices of African American, European, and Native American women, the rich and the poor, and women in the south, the middle colonies, and New England. The editors draw on diaries, letters, essays, court documents, sermons, wills, plantation records, newspapers, fiction, and advice manuals to reconstruct women's lives and roles during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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Cornelia Hughes Dayton

Women before the Bar is the first study to investigate changing patterns of women's participation in early American courts across a broad range of legal actions - including proceedings related to debt, divorce, illicit sex, rape, and slander. Weaving the stories of individual women together with systematic analysis of gendered litigation patterns, Cornelia Dayton argues that women's relation to the courtroom scene in early New England shifted from one of integration in the mid-seventeenth century to one of marginality by the eve of the Revolution.

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Carola Dunn

"When a claimant to the title of Lord Dalrymple comes to an unexpected sticky end, the cry goes up: 'Was it murder?' The Honourable Daisy Dalrymple is recruited by her cousin Edgar - the current Lord Dalrymple - to help him find the next heir to the viscountcy. With the involvement of the family lawyer, they come up with four claimants who, along with Daisy, are invited to Fairacres, the family estate, to celebrate Edgar's fiftieth birthday. And they're a mixed bunch. A hotelier from Scarborough, a diamond merchant from South Africa, a mixed-race boy from Trinidad and a sailor from Jamaica. But then the sailor goes missing...and so begins a series of inexplicable and troubling accidents, resulting in the death of one of the would-be heirs. Daisy and her husband, DCI Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard, are left wondering who might be behind all of this and, more importantly...who's next?" - Publisher's description.

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William Boyd

"What happens to your life when everything you thought you knew about your mother turns out to be an elaborate lie? During the long, hot summer of 1976, Ruth Gilmartin discovers that her very English mother Sally is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigree and one-time spy." "In 1939 Eva is a beautiful 28-year-old living in Paris. As war breaks out, she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious, patrician Englishman. Under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one. Even those she loves most." "Since then Eva has carefully rebuilt her life - but once a spy, always a spy. And now she must complete one final assignment. This time, though, Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help."--BOOK JACKET.