How great a debt we owe to valiant women of the past, who strained against conventional rules to expand a woman’s ability to be independent and direct her own life! In honor of the recent trend to offer valentines to our BFFs, this month we look at stories about three real and one fictional woman who pushed the boundaries of their eras. We begin chronologically with MONTICELLO by Sally Cabot Gunning.  Gunning’s story focuses on the relationship between Jefferson and his eldest daughter, Martha. After her mother’s death, young Martha accompanied the father she idolizes on his diplomatic posting in France. Returning to Monticello at age seventeen, she is married a year later to Thomas Randolph, a charming but difficult man. Though both Martha and her father have anti-slavery leanings, Jefferson ultimately decides emancipation is not politically possible and Martha, charged with running both her husband’s properties and Monticello while her father pursues his political career, finds she cannot make a plantation function without slave labor. Even with her best efforts, the Jeffersons and Randolphs fall farther into debt.  Often working almost independently to manage family property while giving birth to eleven children, intelligent, competent Martha, like most women of…

History was one of my least favorite classes in school. Don’t get me wrong–I had some great teachers and I enjoyed a lot of the South Carolina history we were taught, but a lot of what we learned seemed far off and not relevant to my life. I knew that wasn’t true because one of my awesome teachers quoted us time and again about not forgetting the past or being doomed to repeat it, but I didn’t see it reflected through the history books we studied. Very little was taught about the various individual lives of people, in particular the women in history. Anne Frank’s story brought to life what the Jewish people suffered under Hitler, but I learned about her mainly through my literature classes. In fact, it was through literature classes that I learned about how women were treated as property or outcasted from society for exhibiting behaviors identical to the men of their times. Now here I sit, many, many years later, and I am still learning through literature. Whether it’s a graphic novel, such as PERSEPOLIS by Marjane Satrapi, or a novel such as BRIGID OF KILDARE by Heather Terrell, there is so much history to…