AMERICA THROUGH WOMEN'S EYES Edited by Mary R. Beard Numerous
books of fascinating interest have been made in recent years out of selections .from the personal records of American life, especially in the early colonial period. M.S. Beard, joint author with her husband of The Rise of American Civilization, has had the excellent-idea of going over the-docu- ments which reflect the life and experience of women since the pioneer stage. She has laid :almost every kind of record under contribution. Here are the Stocies of the first- women in the American colonies to manage large plantations of their own—Mary and Margaret Brett, who started in Maryland within twenty years of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, and Eliza Pinckney, who began in Carolina only a few months later. We have extracts from the diaries and letters of women in the Revolutionary War, and indignant arguments from women during the Civil War on both sides of the slavery issue. There is a vivid description of the pioneer hardships endured by Grandmother Brown in Ohio, another of life in the raw woods of Michigan a hundred years ago by Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the eloquent suffrage leader, and extracts from the Texas Journal of Mary Austin Holley a hundred years ago. Here, too, are glimpses of Anna Dickinson, the girl orator of the Civil War, and Lucy Stone, the tutelary saint of all married women who insist upon being called by their father's surname and not their husband's.' From Mrs. O'Shaugnessy 'we get a picture of Mexico in erisis as seen by the wife of an American diplomat, and front Mrs. Borden Harriman, an active political woman of yesterday, a brisk account of two national party conventions nominating. the presidential can- didates. The volume (Lovat :Dickson, 15s.) ends . with a speech by Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt and an eloquent statement of the faith I hold" by Miss Ellen Glasgow, the accom- plished novelist of Virginia.
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