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Beyond Rosie
More so than any war in history, World War II was a woman's war. Women, motivated by patriotism, the opportunity for new experiences, and the desire to serve, participated widely in the global conflict. Within the Allied countries, women of all ages proved to be invaluable in the fight for victory. Rosie the Riveter became the most enduring image of women's involvement in World War II. What Rosie represented, however, is only a small portion of a complex story. As wartime production workers, enlistees in auxiliary military units, members of voluntary organizations or resistance groups, wives and mothers on the home front, journalists, and USO performers, American women found ways to challenge traditional gender roles and stereotypes. Beyond Rosie offers readers an opportunity to see the numerous contributions they made to the fight against the Axis powers and how American women's roles changed during the war. The primary documents (newspapers, propaganda posters, cartoons, excerpts from oral histories and memoirs, speeches, photographs, and editorials) collected here represent cultural, political, economic, and social perspectives on the diverse roles women played during World War II.
Documents Decoded: Women's Rights
Taking a broad view of the ongoing efforts to attain rights for women, this work provides unique insight into the context of the issues and reveals the range of factors that can influence a particular policy decision. What constitutes "women's rights" depends on whom you ask--or who is in political office at the time. Understandably, women's rights have changed across time as perceptions of women and their roles have changed. What remains consistent regardless of the historic era is that rights assumed by men often must be specifically granted to women. This book presents an overview of women's rights that also addresses specific policy decisions. Within each policy entry, the author explains the factors that can influence a particular policy decision, such as the current American political culture, prevailing views of women as mothers and caretakers, perceptions of female/male relationships, systemic governmental influences, and conflicting opinions over the role of government in decisions related specifically to women's lives. The book's conclusion examines current issues, encouraging students to consider whether or not these rights will continue to evolve along with U.S. society and women's roles in it. Carefully examines the major issues that helped frame women's rights in various key policy areas. Blends the practical explanations of the government's role in women's rights with the feminist theoretical foundations of the quest for these rights. Supplies crucial context for all women's rights policy statements, including information about the statements' authors as well as the political dynamics surrounding the issue. Presents coverage of policy statements that illustrate some of the key players in the attainment of women's rights and uniquely demonstrate the various ways women's rights have been framed across history. Clearly illustrates the relationship of women's rights issues to fields of study as disparate as business, history, healthcare, law enforcement, and political science, among others Includes coverage of some of the major political challenges to women's reproductive rights witnessed in the previous decade. Considers some of the most difficult and controversial issues related to women's rights, such as the "war on women" and the country's pervasive rape culture.
Gender Roles in American Life: A Documentary History of Political, Social, and Economic Changes [2 Volumes]
In the centuries that have passed since colonial America was first established, gender roles in American society have undergone massive transformations, with impacts that have been felt in every aspect of our culture. This evolution in gender roles has affected society in practically every conceivable manner, from family dynamics, the economy, and entertainment to business practices, how politics and military training are conducted, and childrearing roles and practices. In some places, it has sparked a tremendous backlash among Americans who see traditional gender roles as one of the country's foundational pillars. This set surveys all of these issues, making use of a wide assortment of primary documents to help readers understand the individuals, events, and ideas responsible for these changes in how American men, boys, women, and girls live, work, play, and relate to one another. These documents include speeches, testimony, and manifestos issued by prominent activists and commentators; recorded remarks of U.S. presidents and members of Congress; newspaper editorials, poems, short stories, and personal letters written by generations of American men and women; and passages from key Supreme Court decisions and legislation that have influenced gender roles--or were the result of evolving ideas regarding gender. Readers will also be able to consider first-hand the experiences of women and men who have been on the front lines of these changes, from stay-at-home dads to women in the military; government reports; and memoirs, essays, and other commentaries featuring different ideological perspectives on where men and women stand in American society in the 21st century.
My Life on the Road
Gloria Steinem--writer, activist, organizer, and inspiring leader--tells a story she has never told before, a candid account of her life as a traveler, a listener, and a catalyst for change. When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel. Taking to the road--by which I mean letting the road take you--changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories--in short, out of our heads and into our hearts. Gloria Steinem had an itinerant childhood. When she was a young girl, her father would pack the family in the car every fall and drive across country searching for adventure and trying to make a living. The seeds were planted: Gloria realized that growing up didn't have to mean settling down. And so began a lifetime of travel, of activism and leadership, of listening to people whose voices and ideas would inspire change and revolution. My Life on the Road is the moving, funny, and profound story of Gloria's growth and also the growth of a revolutionary movement for equality--and the story of how surprising encounters on the road shaped both. From her first experience of social activism among women in India to her work as a journalist in the 1960s; from the whirlwind of political campaigns to the founding of Ms. magazine; from the historic 1977 National Women's Conference to her travels through Indian Country--a lifetime spent on the road allowed Gloria to listen and connect deeply with people, to understand that context is everything, and to become part of a movement that would change the world. In prose that is revealing and rich, Gloria reminds us that living in an open, observant, and "on the road" state of mind can make a difference in how we learn, what we do, and how we understand each other.
The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: An Awful Hush, 1895 To 1906
The "hush" of the title comes suddenly, when first Elizabeth Cady Stanton dies on October 26, 1902, and three years later Susan B. Anthony dies on March 13, 1906. It is sudden because Stanton, despite near blindness and immobility, wrote so intently right to the end that editors had supplies of her articles on hand to publish several months after her death. It is sudden because Anthony, at the age of eighty-five, set off for one more transcontinental trip, telling a friend on the Pacific Coast, "it will be just as well if I come to the end on the cars, or anywhere, as to be at home." Volume VI of this extraordinary series of selected papers is inescapably about endings, death, and silence. But death happens here to women still in the fight. An Awful Hush is about reformers trained "in the school of anti-slavery" trying to practice their craft in the age of Jim Crow and a new American Empire. It recounts new challenges to "an aristocracy of sex," whether among the bishops of the Episcopal church, the voters of California, or the trustees of the University of Rochester. And it sends last messages about woman suffrage. As Stanton wrote to Theodore Roosevelt on the day before she died, "Surely there is no greater monopoly than that of all men, in denying to all women a voice in the laws they are compelled to obey." With the publication of Volume VI, this series is now complete.
The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: Their Place Inside the Body-Politic, 1887 To 1895
Their Place Inside the Body-Politic is a phrase Susan B. Anthony used to express her aspiration for something women had not achieved, but it also describes the woman suffrage movement's transformation into a political body between 1887 and 1895. This fifth volume opens in February 1887, just after the U.S. Senate had rejected woman suffrage, and closes in November 1895 with Stanton's grand birthday party at the Metropolitan Opera House. At the beginning, Stanton and Anthony focus their attention on organizing the International Council of Women in 1888. Late in 1887, Lucy Stone's American Woman Suffrage Association announced its desire to merge with the national association led by Stanton and Anthony. Two years of fractious negotiations preceded the 1890 merger, and years of sharp disagreements followed.
Stanton made her last trip to Washington in 1892 to deliver her famous speech "Solitude of Self." Two states enfranchised women--Wyoming in 1890 and Colorado in 1893--but failures were numerous. Anthony returned to grueling fieldwork in South Dakota in 1890 and Kansas and New York in 1894. From the campaigns of 1894, Stanton emerged as an advocate of educated suffrage and staunchly defended her new position.
Treacherous Texts: An Anthology of U. S. Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946
Treacherous Texts collects more than sixty literary texts written by smart, savvy writers who experimented with genre, aesthetics, humor, and sex appeal in an effort to persuade American readers to support woman suffrage. Although the suffrage campaign is often associated in popular memory with oratory, this anthology affirms that suffragists recognized early on that literature could also exert a power to move readers to imagine new roles for women in the public sphere. Uncovering startling affinities between popular literature and propaganda, Treacherous Texts samples a rich, decades-long tradition of suffrage literature created by writers from diverse racial, class, and regional backgrounds. Beginning with sentimental fiction and polemic, progressing through modernist and middlebrow experiments, and concluding with post-ratification memoirs and tributes, this anthology showcases lost and neglected fiction, poetry, drama, literary journalism, and autobiography; it also samples innovative print cultural forms devised for the campaign, such as valentines, banners, and cartoons. Featured writers include canonical figures as well as writers popular in their day but, until now, lost to ours. Includes writings by: * Sojourner Truth * Elizabeth Cady Stanton * Frederick Douglass * Fanny Fern * Harriet Beecher Stowe * Djuna Barnes * Charlotte Perkins Gilman * Marianne Moore * Sui Sin Far * Edna St. Vincent Millay * Gertrude Stein And many others.
Women's Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present
Historical events of the last three centuries come alive through these women’s singular correspondences—often their only form of public expression. In 1775, Rachel Revere tries to send financial aid to her husband, Paul, in a note that is confiscated by the British; First Lady Dolley Madison tells her sister about rescuing George Washington’s portrait during the War of 1812; one week after JFK’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy pens a heartfelt letter to Nikita Khrushchev; and on September 12, 2001, a schoolgirl writes a note of thanks to a
New York City firefighter, asking him, “Were you afraid?”
The letters gathered here also offer fresh insight into the personal milestones in women’s lives. Here is a mid-nineteenth-century missionary describing a mastectomy performed without anesthesia; Marilyn Monroe asking her doctor to spare her ovaries in a handwritten note she taped to her stomach before appendix surgery; an eighteen-year-old telling her mother about her decision to have an abortion the year after Roe v. Wade; and a woman writing to her parents and in-laws about adopting a Chinese baby.
With more than 400 letters and over 100 stunning photographs, Women’s Letters is a work of astonishing breadth and scope, and a remarkable testament to the women who lived–and made–history.
Working Americans, 1880-2015: Women at Work
This second edition of Working Americans 1810-2015, Volume 6: Women at Work updates the sixth volume in the Working Americans series through 2015, profiling the lives of American women-how they lived, how they worked, how they thought-decade by decade from the 1810s to today. Like the other titles in the series, Working Americans: Women at Work observes the lives of various Americans, decade by decade. This new edition profiles women young and old, from a wide range of geographical and social backgrounds, and from a vast variety of professions. Some profiles focus on fortune, some on fame, some on a regular paycheck, and some on no paycheck at all, but all demonstrate the continuous challenge faced by working women in America-whether they pushed papers, pitched baseballs, played the piano, changed public opinion, or joined the Navy. Arranged in 13 chapters, this newest update to the Working Americans series features 42 historical and current Profiles of women from across the country, at home and abroad. Each profile offers detailed insight into the life of the featured individual, dividing focus into three categories: Life at Home, Life at Work, and Life in the Community. The Americans profiled in this volume represent all regions of the country, as well as a variety of ages and ethnic backgrounds, including: An Estate Matron in 1810; An Educational Reformer in 1881; An Anti-Corset Advocate in 1896; An Irish Servant in 1905; A Jazz Singer & Dancer in 1927; An Olympic Swimmer in 1936; A U.S. Navy Lieutenant in 1945; A Baseball Player in 1948; A Hospital Workers' Strike Organizer in 1959; An Anti-Nuclear Weapons Advocate in 1983; A Nursery School Founder in 2012; ...and many, many more. Every chapter begins with an Introduction to the featured decade, highlighting important events, people, and places from the period. Chapters also contain Historical Snapshots that chronicle major milestones of a particular year; excerpts of News Features that place each profiled individual's life and work in the context of the time; and Selected Prices that illustrate the economy of the era and act as statistical comparisons between decades. Numerous Illustrations also add insight and depth to each chapter and include photographs, news clippings, advertisements, postcards, posters, quotations, political cartoons, and more.
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