In the first half of the twentieth century, a pioneering generation of young women exited their homes and entered public space, marking a new era for women's civic participation in northern Sudan. A provocative new public presence, women's civic engagement was at its core a bodily experience. Amid the socio-political upheavals of imperial rule, female students, medical workers, and activists used a careful choreography of body movements and fashion to adapt to imperial mores, claim opportunities for political agency, and shape a new standard of modern, mobile womanhood. Khartoum at Night is the first English-language history of these women's lives, examining how their experiences of the British Empire from 1900-1956 were expressed on and through their bodies. Central to this story is the tobe: a popular, modest form of dress that wrapped around a woman's head and body. Marie Grace Brown shows how northern Sudanese women manipulated the tucks, folds, and social messages of the tobe to deftly negotiate the competing pulls of modernization and cultural authenticity that defined much of the imperial experience. Her analysis weaves together the threads of women's education and activism, medical midwifery, urban life, consumption, and new behaviors of dress and beauty to reconstruct the worlds of politics and pleasure in which early-twentieth-century Sudanese women lived.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a pioneering generation of young women exited their homes and entered public space, marking a new era for women's civic participation in northern Sudan. A provocative new public presence, women's civic engagement was at its core a bodily experience. Amid the socio-political upheavals of imperial rule, female students, medical workers, and activists used a careful choreography of body movements and fashion to adapt to imperial mores, claim opportunities for political agency, and shape a new standard of modern, mobile womanhood. Khartoum at Night is the first English-language history of these women's lives, examining how their experiences of the British Empire from 1900-1956 were expressed on and through their bodies. Central to this story is the tobe: a popular, modest form of dress that wrapped around a woman's head and body. Marie Grace Brown shows how northern Sudanese women manipulated the tucks, folds, and social messages of the tobe to deftly negotiate the competing pulls of modernization and cultural authenticity that defined much of the imperial experience. Her analysis weaves together the threads of women's education and activism, medical midwifery, urban life, consumption, and new behaviors of dress and beauty to reconstruct the worlds of politics and pleasure in which early-twentieth-century Sudanese women lived.

The true story of a woman's journey from a childhood of abuse to being a successful adult. She grew up in a dysfunctional family and was abused physically, emotionally and sexually by her father. The story depicts how God has consistently worked in her life throughout the years to bring her to knowledge of Him and learn how to forgive her parents. This story is one of faith and the ability one has to move beyond their circumstances. It is a story of strength, persistence and optimism. My hope is this book will be encouragement to others and strengthen their faith in God.

With Introductory Notes And Comments. University Of Chicago Social Service Series.

This diary chronicles the defining years in the life of Grace Brown Elmore, one of eight children in a wealthy and influential Columbia, South Carolina, family. Begun just five months into the Civil War, when Elmore was twenty-two, it is a rich and observant personal account of a society in the midst of chaotic change. At her diary's opening, Elmore had every reason to believe that she would someday marry, bear children, and have a life filled with music, church, visits - all of the amenities and activities customary to her comparably privileged network of relatives and friends. Like them, Elmore would also have servants, as many owners preferred to call their slaves. Despite her early optimism and enduring devotion to the Confederacy, Elmore, who never did marry, found that the war eroded all stability and certainty from her life. Even before the South's fall, Elmore, like other elite young southern white women, had seen the old verities destroyed and had been forced to re-assess all that she had been taken for granted before poverty, uncertainty, and loneliness became her daily companions. Elmore's descriptions of wartime life tell of the Confederate army's retreat from Columbia, the burning of the town, and the consequences of Sherman's occupation. Hearing, near the war's end, that "arms were waiting but men were wanting", she cursed her male protectors' lack of resolve, but not surprisingly transferred her anger to their "faithless, avericious, cruel and wicked" northern aggressors. Elmore's details of the transition to peace and the harsh economic realities of Reconstruction relate her work as a teacher and, whether fondly recalling her mammy, Mauma Binah, or bemoaning the "impertinence" of newly freed slaves, she also provides a wealth of material on southern racial attitudes. The diary is also filled with unusually candid glimpses into the dynamics of her family, which Elmore described as "a confederacy of hard headed, strong minded, self willed women". In her younger years Elmore wrote of feeling "hemmed in ... by other people's ideas" and often chafed at her society's notions about women's domesticity. Although she rose to every challenge before her, Elmore's diary nonetheless suggests that the autonomy and independence she had longed for early in her life came under circumstances that made them a penalty, not a prize.