Letters have long been an outlet for political expression, whether they articulate the personal politics of the daily routine or the political views of individuals who witness or participate in dramatic events. In addition, letters can be unusually revealing records of the relations between men and women. Though letters have frequently been studied as a privileged space for literary, social, and cultural expression, the three-dimensional relationship of politics, gender, and letters has not been the focus of an entire volume. The nineteen essays in this collection examine how the gendered nature of political literacy is revealed over a 250-year period through letter writing, whether the writer is famous or unknown, the wife of a prominent politician or activist, a political prisoner or political militant. Ranging wide in terms of subject matter and geography, the contributors examine correspondence that ponders familial concerns, as well as letters providing political commentary on the effects of war or revolution on everyday life. Among the impressive group of international scholars are Jim Allen, Clare Brant, Edith Gelles, Jane Rendall, and SiAn Reynolds.

Contents: Part I 1750-1850: Epistolary connections in Enlightenment and Revolution: Gender politics: breathing new life into old letters, Máire Cross and Caroline Bland; 'The tribunal of the public': 18th-century letters and the politics of vindication, Clare Brant; Parenthood and gender roles as seen in Diderot's Correspondance, Ursula Yvonne Roberts; Deconstructing gender: Henriette's correspondence with Rousseau, Anne-FranÃ
oise Gilbert; Third person singular: the liberation of the Marquise de Sade, 1789-90, David McCallam; 'Remember the ladies': politics in the letters of Abigail Adams, Edith B.Gelles; 'Friends of liberty & virtue': women radicals and transatlantic correspondence, 1789-1848, Jane Rendall; The correspondence of a 'sister in humanity', Máire Cross. Part II 1850-2000: Correspondence in times of trial: Requests, complaints, demands. Preliminary thoughts on the petitioning letters of lower-class Austrian women, 1865-1918, Christa Hÿmmerle; A history in letters: the Allemane family's letters during and after the Paris Commune, 1871-80, Siân Reynolds; Across the divide: a correspondence during the Dreyfus Affair, David H. Walker; The gendered politics of correspondence: the curious case of Céline Renooz, 1840-1928, James Smith Allen; Reading between the lines. Letters to Eleanor Keeling Edwards, 1890-1900, Krista Cowman; More than just 'a sporting couple': the letters of a militant marriage, June Balshaw; Slinging the ink about: Ellen Terry and women's suffrage agitation, Katharine Cockin; 'In great haste': the personal and political in the letters of F.W. Stella Browne (1880-1955), feminist socialist sex radical, Lesley A. Hall; 'In case the worst comes to the worst': letters home from Berlin, 1942-45, Caroline Bland; Constructing identities and remembering Fascism: the published letters of Elisabeth Langgÿsser, Joanne Sayner; Corresponding in the sex and gender revolution: desire, education and feminist letters, 1970-200