At the opening of this novel, a mid-19th-century tomboy named Pell Ridley faces an important decision: marry a man she doesn't love to exchange her life of freedom for a life of household drudgery, or strike out on horseback for the unknown.

Using letters, diaries and articles of sources ranging from Betty Friedan to Marilyn Monroe, award-winning novelist Appignanesi reveals how women's ability to live creative lives has been controlled by culture, and how their unsuccessful attempts have lead to mental illness, another evolving cultural concept.

In the 19th century, two high-society sisters take their inheritance on a journey to explore the Holy Land in Janet Soskice's The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels.

Stephanie Covington Armstrong narrates her life as a young black woman with a stereotypically white disease, bulimia, in Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat.

The mikveh, a ritual bath for women the Orthodox Jewish faith, goes under the feminist microscope with liberating and limiting conclusions in Varda Polak-Sahm's The House of Secrets: The Hidden World of the Mikveh.