LibGuides: Women's Suffrage Around the World: Books & eBooks

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From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Volume I Marilyn French spent over fifteen years with a team of researchers and prominent historians examining women's lives and activities in civilizations and societies spanning the ages. Beginning in prehistory, Origins moves on to examine women's lives in ancient Egypt, China, India, Peru, Mexico, Greece, and Rome. In her reconstruction of wars, laws, and other activities affecting both women and men, French also traces the worldviews underpinning them. She also depicts how women's relationship to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam changed for good and bad over the centuries.
Great Events from History: Women's History The latest addition to the Great Events series chronicles significant moments in the history of American women, including legal, political, and cultural milestones. Beginning with citizenship and access to education, the timeline continues through women's suffrage, the ERA, changing sexual and reproductive mores, equality in the workplace, and the #meToo movement. Often intersecting with the civil rights movement, the story of women's journey to equality includes such landmark events as the Seneca Falls Convention, civil rights activism by Rosa Parks, first birth control clinic, passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Equal Pay Act, Title VII, Title IX, Roe v. Wade, Violence Against Women Act, and the removal of the ban against women in combat.
Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860-1930 The image of middle-class women chaining themselves to the rails of 10 Downing Street, smashing windows of public buildings, and going on hunger strikes in the cause of "votes for women" have become visually synonymous with the British suffragette movement over the past century. Their story has become a defining moment in feminist history, in effect separating women's fight for voting rights from contemporary issues in British political history and disconnecting their militancy from other forms of political activism in Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing upon private papers, pamphlets, newspapers, and the records of a range of suffrage and political organizations, Laura E. Nym Mayhall examines militancy as both a political idea and a set of practices that suffragettes employed to challenge their exclusion from the political nation. She traces the development of the suffragettes' concept of resistance from its origins within radical liberal discourse in the 1860s, to its emergence as political practice during Britain's involvement in the South African War, its reliance on dramatic spectacle by suffragette organizations, and its memorialization following enfranchisement. She reads closely the language and tactics militants used, analyzing their challenges in the courtroom, on the street, and through legislation as reasoned actions of female citizens. The differences in strategy among militants are highlighted, not just in the use of violence, but also in their acceptance and rejection of the authority of the law and their definitions of the ideal relationship between individuals and the state. Variations in the nature of protest continued even during World War I, when most suffragettes suspended their activities to serve the nation's war effort, while others joined peace movements, opposed the state's reduction of civil liberties in wartime, and continued the struggle for suffrage. Mayhall's revealing account of the militant suffrage movement sheds new light upon the social history of gender but, more importantly, it connects this movement to the political and intellectual history of Britain. Not only did militancy play an essential role in the achievement of women's political rights but it also contributed to the practice of engaged citizenship and the growth of liberal democracy.
The Struggle for Female Suffrage in Europe By comparing women's access to suffrage in the countries that make up the European Union, The Struggle for Female Suffrage in Europe provides a retelling of the story of how citizenship was gradually coined in Europe from the perspective of women.
Suffrage and Power: The Women's Movement 1918-1928 This text shows how the Women's movement, through its network of organization and its powerful and widespread campaigning, was transformed and developed into a formidable fighting force. It continued its assault on entrenched positions to secure women's full and equal participation in society - in politics, commerce, industry and the professions, education, welfare, politics and for franchise extension.
Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement This is a history of the suffrage movement in Britain from the beginnings of the first sustained campaign in the 1860s to the winning of the vote for women in 1918. The book focuses on a number of figures whose role in this agitation has been ignored or neglected. These include the free-thinker Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy; the founder of the women's movement in the United States, Elizabeth Cady Stanton; the working class orator, Jessie Craigen; and the socialist suffragists, Hannah Mitchell and Mary Gawthorpe. Through the lives of these figures Holton uncovers the complex origins of the movement and associated issues of gender.
The Transfiguring Sword: The Just War of the Women's Social and Political Union Jorgensen-Earp provides a new understanding of the recurrent rhetorical need to employ conservative rhetoric in support of a radical cause. The Women's Social and Political Union, the militant branch of the English women's suffrage movement, turned to arson, bombing, and widespread property destruction as a strategy to achieve suffrage for women. Because of its comparative rarity, terrorist violence by reform (as opposed to revolutionary) movements is underexplored, as is the discursive rhetoric that accompanies this violence. Largely because of the moral stance that drives such movements, the need to justify violence is greater for the reformist than for the revolutionary terrorist. The burden of rhetorical justification falls even more heavily on women utilizing violence, an option generally perceived as open only to men. The militant suffragettes justified their turn to limited terrorism by arguing that their violence was part of a "just war." Appropriating the rhetoric of a just war in defense of reformist violence allowed the suffragettes to exercise a traditional rhetorical vision for the sake of radical action. The concept of a just war allowed a spinning out of a fantasy of heroes, of a gallant band fighting against the odds. It challenged the imagination of the public to extend to women a heroic vision usually reserved for men and to accept the new expectations inherent in that vision. By incorporating the concept of a just war into their rhetoric, the WSPU leaders took the most conventional justification that Western tradition provides for the use of violence and adapted it to meet their unique circumstance as women using violence for political reform. This study challenges the common view that the suffragettes' use of military metaphors, their vilification of the government, and their violent attacks on property were signs of hysteria and self-destruction. Instead, what emerges is a picture of a deliberate, if controversial, strategy of violence supported by a rhetorical defense of unusual power and consistency.
Votes for Women This work provides a re-examination of the suffrage movement, presenting perspectives which challenge the existing literature on this subject. It charts the history of the movement in Britain from the 19th century to the postwar period, assessing important figures such as: Emmeline Pankhurst and the militant wing; Millicent Garrett Fawcett, leader of the constitutional wing; and Jennie Baines and her link with the international suffrage movements.
Women's Movements and Countermovements: The Quest for Gender Equality in Southeast Asia and the Middle East The relationship between social movements and their counter movements is an underrepresented research topic, given the bulk of social movement studies that have been published to date. Moreover, empirical research on this topic primarily covers certain geographic areas of the world, specifically what is commonly called the global North. The mobilization of religious and women's movements against social change, which strive for a preservation of the status quo and can be held responsible for a delayed expansion of reform-oriented interest articulation, is a rare topic of social movement literature, too. The authors of this volume address the issue of women's movements and counter movements in countries of Southeast Asia and the Middle East MENA region. They arrive at interesting constellations of coalition and competition between state and non-state actors, and religious and secular movements, as well as within women's movements. Covering case studies from Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco and Tunisia, the pattern of Islamist movements countering the goals of (Muslim) women's movements emerges as dominant.
Women's Suffrage in Asia Including chapters on Indonesia, India, Thailand, China, the Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, Korea, Vietnam and international suffrage connections, Women's Suffrage in Asia engages in debates on suffrage in the region by raising issues unique to the country's case studies presented. It explains why the history of suffrage is neglected in the nationalist historiography and untangles the connections between culture, nationalism and colonialism in the context of women's struggles for suffrage.
Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights In recent decades, the woman suffrage movement has taken on new significance for women's history. Ellen Carol DuBois has been a central figure in spurring renewed interest in woman suffrage and in realigning the debates which surround it. This volume gathers DuBois' most influential articles on woman suffrage and includes two new essays. The collection traces the trajectory of the suffrage story against the backdrop of changing attitudes to politics, citizenship and gender, and the resultant tensions over such issues as slavery and abolitionism, sexuality and religion, and class and politics. Connecting the essays is DuBois' belief in the continuing importance of political and reform movements as an object of historical inquiry and a force in shaping gender. The book, which includes a highly original reconceptualization of women's rights from Mary Wollstonecraft to contemporary abortion and gay rights activists and a historiographical overview of suffrage scholarship, provides an excellent overview of the movement, including international as well as U.S. suffragism, in the context of women's broader concerns for social and political justice.