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Women’s History

On Tour: The Husband Criteria #NewRelease #RegencyRomance #GuestPost #Excerpt #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub @CKullmmannauthor @cathiedunn

September 5, 2023 by Adriana Kraft

A light-hearted, entertaining look behind the scenes of a Season that takes a different course with unexpected consequences for all concerned.

BOOK INFORMATION

Book Title: The Husband Criteria
Series: The Lorings, Book #3
Author: Catherine Kullmann
Publication Date: 24 August 2023
Publisher: Willow Books
Page Length: 297
Genre: Historical Romance / Regency Romance

BLURB

London 1817

The primary aim of every young lady embarking on the Spring frenzy that is the Season must be to make a good match. Or must it? And what is a good match? For cousins Cynthia, Chloe and Ann, well aware that the society preux chevalier may prove to be a domestic tyrant, these are vital questions. How can they discover their suitors’ true character when all their encounters must be confined to the highly ritualised round of balls, parties and drives in the park?

As they define and refine their Husband Criteria, Cynthia finds herself unwillingly attracted to aloof Rafe Marfield, heir to an earldom, while Chloe is pleased to find that Thomas Musgrave, the vicar’s son from home, is also in London. And Ann must decide what is more important to her, music or marriage.

And what of the gentlemen who consider the marriage mart to be their hunting grounds? How will they react if they realise how rigorously they are being assessed?

A light-hearted, entertaining look behind the scenes of a Season that takes a different course with unexpected consequences for all concerned.

When I first saw the blurb for The Husband Criteria, it struck me that within the constraints of the Regency era, the author’s heroines are seizing their power to make decisions for themselves, so I invited her to comment about this issue:

GUEST POST BY CATHERINE KULLMANN

Until well into the nineteenth century, on marrying, a woman gave up her own legal persona which was subsumed into that of her husband. This was known as coverture.

Under English common law, an adult unmarried or widowed woman was a feme sole, while a married woman was a feme covert. These are English spellings of medieval Anglo-Norman phrases (the modern standard French spellings would be femme seule “single woman” and femme couverte, literally “covered woman”). A feme sole had the right to own property and make contracts in her own name. A feme covert did not; she had very few recognized individual rights of her own. Husband and wife were one person as far as the law was concerned, and that person was the husband. A married woman could also not obtain an education against her husband’s wishes.. If he allowed her to work, he was entitled to claim her income for himself. He could decide where she lived and whether she saw her children, forbid her access to the marital home or compel her to return there, under threat of imprisonment if she failed to do so. She, on the other hand, could not resort to the courts to force a deserter  husband to return to her.

By today’s standards, Regency couples married hardly knowing each other. Think of Darcy and Elizabeth, and Jane and Bingley. In a modern relationship, they would just about have reached the point of exclusivity, or ‘going steady’ as we said fifty years ago, i.e. agreeing that they would not date anyone else. There would follow a longer courtship period; perhaps they would live together before marrying. These were not options during the Regency, Furthermore, it was almost impossible for a woman to get a divorce, while if her husband managed to divorce her—also a costly and long-drawn out procedure—she was socially ruined.

The patriarchal society also made it difficult if not impossible for a single woman to earn a living respectably, and the higher her social status, the more difficult this became. A lady could become a governess or companion without losing her status. These were generally live-in positions. She would be guaranteed bed and board, and receive a modest enough salary on top of it.

Marriage was the socially acceptable route to ensure a woman’s livelihood and social status. But how to choose the right man?

Intelligent women were all too aware of the dangers of marriage. They would have seen examples of good and bad relationships within their families and acquaintanceship. Jane Austen, who chose to remain single, is subtly subversive in her descriptions of courtship and marriage. She describes the situations of women whose husbands and fathers do not make proper provision for them (Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice), the importance that your prospective husband is of good character (Mansfield Park), and the dangers of marrying for the wrong reason.  She also insists on that certain, indefinable quality that, in The Husband Criteria, Cynthia describes as attraction. Charlotte Lucas, who  is not attracted to Mr Collins, but schemes to marry him so as to have a comfortable home, has little hope, Elizabeth Bennet thinks, of being even tolerably happy.

Image of a Regency Wedding.  From The Matrimonial Ladder, Author’s private collection.

EXCERPT

Chapter Four

“You and Marfield got on famously yesterday,” Chloe said to Cynthia. The three girls had gathered in Chloe’s sitting-room at Swanmere House to review the previous evening’s entertainment.

“Yes, he is not as haughty as he appears. We were talking about the horrors of bad dancing partners.” The others laughed as she explained their idea of dancing badges. “We should add them to our Husband Criteria.”

“Husband Criteria?” Ann looked from one to the other.

“I’d forgotten that,” Chloe said. “When we were in Weymouth two years ago, before either of us had come out, we talked about what we would look for in a husband, and how artificial an environment the Season is—the worst place to find the man one would wish to spend one’s life with.” She went to the little writing-desk and began to flick through the pages of a notebook. “Yes, here it is. The points are not ranked but in a mingle-mangle as they came to us.” She took a breath. “He should be good-looking, but not an Adonis, well-dressed, but not a dandy, and definitely not slovenly. A good rider who also respects your riding abilities.”

“Yes. There is nothing worse than being treated as a helpless Miss,” Cynthia put in, “or having him ride too close to you, as if he must be ready to seize your reins.”

“An interesting and interested conversationalist,” Chloe continued. “He doesn’t hold forth interminably, and expect you just to say ‘yes and amen’ but listens to what you have to say.”

“That’s really important,” Ann agreed. “He should also share some of your interests. I could not marry a man who detested music, for example.”

“Yes. He must be kind-hearted, care about his family and be on good terms with them. If he is a widower, he should be a loving father, not just looking for a wife to whom he can abdicate all responsibility for his children.”

“How are you to discover that?” Ann asked.

“That is difficult,” Chloe said. “One can observe his behaviour towards others, listen to how he speaks of his family, but ideally one would have to spend some time with him, say at a house-party—long enough for him to let the company mask fall.”

“Easier said than done,” Cynthia said gloomily. “What about family and fortune?”

“A gentleman, of course. He need not be wealthy, but able to support a wife and family,” Chloe said at once.

“Not a fortune-hunter,” Cynthia said.

“Nor a gambler or a rake,” Ann added. “I suppose we are dependent on our men-folk to ascertain those aspects of his character.”

“We must keep our eyes and ears open,” Chloe said.

“This is all very well,” Cynthia said suddenly, “but what about attraction?”

“Attraction?”

“You know, that indefinable quality that draws you to one gentleman rather than another, has you all aflutter in the ball-room, hoping he will invite you to stand up with him?”

The three girls looked at one another.

“Do you mean love?” Ann asked.

“Not exactly. I think this comes before love. You know what I mean, don’t you? The tremulous feeling when he smiles at you, or the way you dance in perfect harmony?”

“It has to be there too,” Chloe said, “but it can’t be the be-all and end-all, can it? What was that phrase of your old nurse?”

“‘There’s more to marriage than four bare legs in a bed’?” Cynthia recited. “But at the end of the day, that is what it will come down to, will it not? So it is essential that we do not find him distasteful in any way.”

A more solemn silence fell. If pressed, they might admit to having dreamt of a lover’s kisses, and were aware that, in the old phrase, a bedding followed a wedding, that this year’s bride was next year’s young mother. But they had never considered the realities of this natural progression in terms of that shadowy figure to whom ‘one day’ they would cede complete control of their person, becoming, as the law insisted, a femme couverte, subordinate to him in all things.

© Catherine Kullmann 2023

Author Bio:

Catherine Kullmann was born and educated in Dublin. Following a three-year courtship conducted mostly by letter, she moved to Germany where she lived for twenty-five years before returning to Ireland. She has worked in the Irish and New Zealand public services and in the private sector. Widowed, she has three adult sons and two grandchildren.

Catherine has always been interested in the extended Regency period, a time when the foundations of our modern world were laid. She loves writing and is particularly interested in what happens after the first happy end—how life goes on for the protagonists and sometimes catches up with them. Her books are set against a background of the offstage Napoleonic wars and consider in particular the situation of women trapped in a patriarchal society.

She is the author of The Murmur of Masks, Perception & Illusion, A Suggestion of Scandal, The Duke’s Regret, The Potential for Love, A Comfortable Alliance and Lady Loring’s Dilemma.

Catherine also blogs about historical facts and trivia related to this era. You can find out more about her books and read her blog (My Scrap Album) at her website. You can contact her via her Facebook page or on Twitter.

Author Links:

Website:

http://www.catherinekullmann.com

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/CKullmannAuthor

Facebook:           https://www.facebook.com/catherinekullmannauthor

Book Bub:

https://www.bookbub.com/authors/catherine-kullmann

Amazon Author Page: http://viewauthor.at/ckullmannamazonpage

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15549457.Catherine_Kullmann

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Filed Under: Blog, Excerpts, Guest Bloggers Tagged With: Blog Tour, Coffee Pot Book Club, historical romance, Regency Romance, Women’s History

My Review: Code Girls, by Liza Mundy @lizamundy #WWII #WomensHistory #Review #KU

November 19, 2022 by Adriana Kraft

Code Girls, by Liza Mundy, is the third book in my current series of book reviews featuring the role of women in the WWII Allied victory. The first two books – The Atomic City Girls, and Daughters of the Night Sky – are historical fiction based very closely on actual events and characters.

Code Girls is not fiction, even though through most of its pages it reads as smoothly and dramatically as any novel. Following interviews with more than twenty participants and years of meticulous research, much of the data having spent decades as classified and unavailable, Liza Mundy has crafted the story of over 10,000 American women, most freshly out of college, who secretly worked during the war to break the German and Japanese military codes. These women saved thousands of lives and in no small part helped to bring down first Germany, and then Japan.

They – and their superiors – could tell no one about it for decades.

In November, 1941, letters began going out to select women who were seniors at several of the nation’s elite colleges. The letters invited the women to an interview, where the questions simply were whether they liked crossword puzzles and if they were engaged to be married. If they answered appropriately, they were invited to further meetings where they learned about “cryptanalysis” and were told never to utter that word to anyone else. They entered on-campus training in code breaking – again, about which they could tell no one, not even family members. Those who passed the rigorous training were the earliest recruits to facilities being readied for them in Washington, D.C., by both the Navy and the Army.

Over the ensuing years, recruitment criteria broadened, but secrecy, the ability to identify patterns, and having a bright mind remained paramount. Mundy’s account traces the initial American codebreaking developments between the wars, then proceeds through the war years chronologically. By weaving together historical data and material from her interviews, she provides a window into the mundane as well as the dramatic. We learn what interaction was like in the cramped working quarters; how the women were treated by outsiders – who could never know how technical and important their work was – how they spent their relatively few free hours; and, for many of them, how their lives unfolded after the war.

Most of them remained unacknowledged and unsung for the rest of their lives. Some family members never learned what a mother – an aunt – a grandmother – had accomplished, how many ships were sunk because the Navy “happened” to be in the right place at the right time, due to intelligence provided by the codebreakers.

I found this book to be both informative and very engaging, and I highly recommend it.

BUY LINK

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316439894/

Code Girls is available exclusively at Amazon
and is currently on Kindle Unlimited

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Filed Under: Adriana's Library, Blog Tagged With: American history, Book Review, Codebreakers, codebreaking, codebreaking machine, codes, enigma, Her Story, history, KU, review, Women’s History, WWII

My Review: The Atomic City Girls, by Janet Beard #WWII #WomensHistory #HerStory #ManhattanProject

November 12, 2022 by Adriana Kraft

This review is the second book in my three review series (so far!) on women who won the war – women without whose contribution we could so easily have lost.

Daughters of the Night Sky, by Aimee K. Runyan Goodreads Review
The Atomic City Girls, by Janet Beard Goodreads Review
Code Girls, by Liza Mundy (review coming 11/19)

Growing up as a baby boomer, I naturally learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the first atomic bomb tests at Alamogordo, NM. Later, while I was studying at the University of Chicago, a Henry Moore sculpture commemorating the first atomic fusion was unveiled. It is situated on the university’s former football field, the site of Fermi’s laboratory in the 1940s. The sculpture’s shape vaguely resembles a mushroom cloud, which caused considerable controversy, as there was no explosion in Fermi’s successful experiment. But everyone involved in Fermi’s labs knew where the work was headed.

In spite of this awareness, until I picked up The Atomic City Girls, I was only familiar with “Oak Ridge” as the name of a famous country band, whose song “Elvira” I often dance to in line dance classes. Though I knew the term “Manhattan Project,” I had never heard of the massive calutrons that were secretly built in Oak Ridge, TN during World War II to enrich uranium for the atomic bomb. I was also unaware of the enormous and crucial role of so many women in the Manhattan Project.

The Atomic City Girls, written by a granddaughter and grand niece of two women who worked for the Manhattan Project in Tennessee, succeeds brilliantly in remedying this gap in my knowledge. Though the main characters are fictional, their experiences mirror the life and reality of the actual participants in the project.

The city of Oak Ridge was built nearly overnight in a remote Tennessee valley selected for the potential of its surrounding ridges to possibly contain an explosion, should there be a disaster in the project. Out of nothing, in very short order, grew a city of over 75,000, complete with housing, buses, movie theaters, bowling alleys, and other recreational venues. All who worked there were sworn to secrecy, and violations were not tolerated.

The project recruited recent female high school graduates chiefly from the surrounding region. For most of them, it was both their first paying job and their first time living away from their families. The ”girls,” most of them under 20, were trained to sit at a display of dials and keep them within a very narrow range of settings. In eight hour shifts, they did nothing but watch the displays and turn the dials when required. They were never told what the dials meant or what their work was producing.

Beard has created fictional characters both black and white, male and female, line workers and highly trained scientists and engineers. Thus she succeeds in conveying not only the daily experience of the young women, but also the inevitable tensions and cross currents of racial and status differences within the milieu. Within her story lies a microcosm of the changes that emerged in our society following the war in the roles of women and African Americans.

It turns out that the secrecy surrounding this project also impacted me personally. Shortly after reading the book, I was going through some family history accounts my mother passed along to me before her death. There I learned for the first time that her older brother, a chemical engineer at DuPont in Delaware, worked on the Manhattan project. DuPont was the US firm that designed and built the calutrons in Oak Ridge. My mother’s notes gave no further details about his role, so I do not know if his work was on site in Tennessee, or in Delaware during the planning and design stages.

In short, I found this book to be well written, thoroughly researched, highly informative, and very engaging, and I highly recommend it.

Buy Link https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062666711/

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Filed Under: Adriana's Library, Blog Tagged With: Book Review, Calutron, Her Story, Historical Fiction, Janet Beard, Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Women’s History, WWII

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