"A riveting, inspiring memoir of one woman's escape from an extremist religious sect and an extraordinary rise from housewife to shoe designer, to CEO and co-owner of the modeling agency Elite World Group. Ever since she was a child, every aspect of Julia Haart's life-what she wore, what she ate, what she thought-was controlled by the dictates of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. At nineteen, after a lifetime spent caring for her seven younger siblings, she was married off to a man she barely knew. For the next twenty-three years, he would rule her life. Eventually, when Haart's younger daughter, Miriam, started to question why she wasn't allowed to sing, run, or ride a bike, Haart reached a breaking point. She knew that if she didn't find a way to leave, her daughters would be forced into the same unending servitude that had imprisoned her. So Haart created a double life. In the ultra-Orthodox world, clothing has one purpose-to cover the body, head to toe-and giving any thought to one's appearance beyond that is considered sinful, an affront to God. But when no one was looking, Haart would pore over fashion magazines and sketch designs for the clothes she dreamed about wearing in the world beyond her Orthodox suburb. She started clandestinely selling life insurance in order to save her "freedom" money. At the age of forty-two, she finally mustered the courage to flee the fundamentalist life that was strangling her soul. Within a week of her escape, Haart founded a shoe brand, and within nine months, she was at Paris Fashion Week. Just a few years later, she was named creative director of La Perla, where she met the man who would become her husband, Silvio Scaglia. Soon she would become co-owner and CEO of Elite World Group, and one of the most powerful people in the fashion industry. Along the way, her four children-Batsheva, Shlomo, Miriam, and Aron-have not only accepted but embraced her transformation. Propulsive and unforgettable, Haart's story is the journey from a world of no to a world of yes, and an inspiration for women everywhere to find their freedom, their purpose, and their voice"--

"The first of Aletta Jacobs's major works available in English, Memories introduces American readers to a remarkable woman-a key Dutch feminist who herself broke new ground, and who worked alongside world-renowned leaders in the progressive movements of the early twentieth century. Aletta Jacobs learned to lvoe the medical profession from her physician father, who took her on his rounds. Despite a sex-segregated education system, she became the nations's first woman to earn a medical degree. Jacobs's experiences as a doctor led her to pioneering health care reforms for prostitutes and saleswomen, as well as campaigns for the acceptance and availability of reliable birth control. Aletta Jacob's career included equally remarkable achievements in the international woman's suffrage and peace movements, where she worked closely with U.S. activists Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt. Jacobs and Catt made frequent lecture tours together, culminating in a tour of Africa and Asia that combined avid sightseeing with speaking engagements in every country they visited. In Memories, Jacobs recounts all of these experiences, and spiritedly imparts her opinions-such as her disdain for the customs that restricted women to theater balcony seats and chastised them for walking alone at night. By turns witty, impassioned, and poignant, Memories brings to life a time of enormous changes for women-and one of the women who helped bring about the changes."--Book desc. via amazon.ca.

"Her parents moved her from Austria to Tokyo, Japan before she started school. They were all rendered stateless when Nazi Germany and Austria stripped Jews of their citizenship. She graduated high school fluent in Japanese plus four other languages and went to college in America at age 15. Cut off from her parents by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and America's entry into World War II, she went years not knowing if they were alive. She returned to post-war Japan as an interpreter, found her parents, and wrote the fateful words that make her a storied feminist hero in that nation even today. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor said about Beate Sirota Gordon, 'It is a rare life treat for a Supreme Court Justice to get to meet a framer of a Constitution. It is rarer indeed for that framer to have been a woman'"--