A portion of the next issue is devoted to notable American women—and to looking at the changes that have overtaken the lives of all American women. The stories include:

Let them all be damned—I’ll do as I please…”

So said Georgia O’Keeffe, and what she pleased was to produce a body of coolly ardent paintings that put her in the vanguard of this century’s American artists. Up until her death last year, at the age of ninety-eight, she played the invincible loner with increasing authority and conviction. But the truth was more interesting, as Edward Abrahams reveals in a portrait of O’Keeffe’s early years.

The Peabody sisters…

These three New England women led very different lives—one was a reformer, one was deeply in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne, one waited ten years for Horace Mann to get over his grief for his first wife. Each was fascinating in her own right, and taken together their lives reveal a great deal about the choices women have always faced.

Less work for mother? …

During the first half of this century, households were transformed by an influx of new machines that came to be known as appliances. Each looked like a powerful engine of liberation, but somehow housewives kept on working just as much. Ruth Cowan tells why.

When Presidents err …

In the light of the Iran-Contra imbroglio, an examination of earlier scandals under Grant, Harding, and Nixon suggests how familiar the pattern of folly really is.

Plus …

College football in hot water three-quarters of a century ago (it makes SMU look like pretty small potatoes: people were dying ) … a fond profile of the morose and hilarious radio comedian Fred Allen, who saw his work as a “treadmill to oblivion” … an intimate memoir by one of the men who sat on the court-martial of the only American soldier shot for desertion in World War II … the Paris Herald Tribune turns one hundred, and Richard Reeves pays a birthday tribute to the singular journal that has always been the hometown paper for every American in Paris … the three men who wouldn’t sign the Constitution … gorgeous gifts from Tiffany’s past … and, although it would hardly seem possible in the compass of a single issue, more.