Women's Rights & Suffrage Movements

After the Vote Was Won: The Later Achievements of Fifteen Suffragists Because scholars have traditionally only examined the efforts of American suffragettes in relation to electoral politics, the history books have largely missed the real story of what these women sought to achieve--and eventually did achieve--far outside the realm of voting reform. Though Stanton, Anthony, and Mott are certainly the best known figures of the woman's suffrage movement, all were dead more than a decade before women actually achieved the vote. Women like Alice Paul, Louisine Havemeyer, and Mary Church Terrell carried on their work, putting their campaign experiences to work long after the 19th Amendment was ratified. This book tells the story of how these women made an indelible mark on American history in fields ranging from education to art, science, publishing, and social activism.

Citizens at Last: The Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas Citizens at Last is an essential resource for anyone interested in the history of the suffrage movement in Texas. Richly illustrated and featuring over thirty primary documents, it reveals what it took to win the vote.

Critical Perspectives on Feminism This text gives students insight into the fascinating history of the feminist movement and its leaders while presenting thoughtful analysis of feminist issues to help students think critically about the history and present need for feminism and women’s rights today.

A History of the American Suffragist Movement Chronicles the women's suffrage movement from its official inception at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton The first comprehensive, fully documented biography of the most important woman suffragist and feminist reformer in nineteenth-century America, In Her Own Right restores Elizabeth Cady Stanton to her true place in history. Griffith emphasizes the significance of role models and female friendships in Stanton's progress toward personal and political independence. In Her Own Right is, in the author's words, an "unabashedly 'great woman' biography."

Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic Education was decisive in recasting women's subjectivity and the lived reality of their collective experience in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Asking how and why women shaped their lives anew through education, Mary Kelley measures the significant transformation in individual and social identities fostered by female academies and seminaries. Constituted in a curriculum that matched the course of study at male colleges, women's liberal learning, Kelley argues, played a key role in one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the nation's history: the movement of women into public life. By the 1850s, the large majority of women deeply engaged in public life as educators, writers, editors, and reformers had been schooled at female academies and seminaries. Although most women did not enter these professions, many participated in networks of readers, literary societies, or voluntary associations that became the basis for benevolent societies, reform movements, and activism in the antebellum period. Kelley's analysis demonstrates that female academies and seminaries taught women crucial writing, oration, and reasoning skills that prepared them to claim the rights and obligations of citizenship.

Margaret Fuller: A New American Life Megan Marshall recounts the trailblazing life of Margaret Fuller: Thoreau’s first editor, Emerson’s close friend, daring war correspondent, tragic heroine. After her untimely death in a shipwreck off Fire Island, the sense and passion of her life’s work were eclipsed by scandal. Marshall’s inspired narrative brings her back to indelible life. Whether detailing her front-page New-York Tribune editorials against poor conditions in the city’s prisons and mental hospitals, or illuminating her late-in-life hunger for passionate experience—including a secret affair with a young officer in the Roman Guard—Marshall’s biography gives the most thorough and compassionate view of an extraordinary woman. No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.

Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic In Mere Equals, Lucia McMahon narrates a story about how a generation of young women who enjoyed access to new educational opportunities made sense of their individual and social identities in an American nation marked by stark political inequality between the sexes. McMahon's archival research into the private documents of middling and well-to-do Americans in northern states illuminates educated women's experiences with particular life stages and relationship arcs: friendship, family, courtship, marriage, and motherhood. In their personal and social relationships, educated women attempted to live as the "mere equals" of men. Their often frustrated efforts reveal how early national Americans grappled with the competing issues of women's intellectual equality and sexual difference. In the new nation, a pioneering society, pushing westward and unmooring itself from established institutions, often enlisted women's labor outside the home and in areas that we would deem public. Yet, as a matter of law, women lacked most rights of citizenship and this subordination was authorized by an ideology of sexual difference. What women and men said about education, how they valued it, and how they used it to place themselves and others within social hierarchies is a highly useful way to understand the ongoing negotiation between equality and difference. In public documents, difference overwhelmed equality, because the formal exclusion of women from political activity and from economic parity required justification. McMahon tracks the ways in which this public disparity took hold in private communications. By the 1830s, separate and gendered spheres were firmly in place. This was the social and political heritage with which women's rights activists would contend for the rest of the century.

One Woman One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement This anthology is the most comprehensive collection of writings - contemporary and historical - on the woman suffrage movement in America. It includes essays by the most prominent contemporary historians, many who challenge widely accepted theories and illustrate the diversity and complexity of the fight for the 19th Amendment.

Opinions Throughout History: Gender Roles & Rights Issues discussed include historic patterns of gender balance, religion's role in community organization, feminism's impact on defining gender roles for men and women at home and in the workplace, family-centered social policy, the backlash against progressive gender politics, the gender pay parity movement, and the passionate activism of #MeToo as a response to corporate and government workplace sexual harassment. Gender: Roles & Rights provides an essential resource for history and social studies research and an accessible commentary on the ways in which the idea of gender roles have evolved. This exciting new series offers a wide range of insights into long-standing issues that Americans are most concerned about, and those that have encouraged vigorous debate among politicians and citizens at large. Starting with a 12-page Introduction that discusses the complex issues of gender roles and gender rights throughout history, the front matter is followed by a timeline of significant events related to gender roles and rights, from 1533 to 2018. The first two titles in this series were arranged chronologically. Gender: Roles & Rights differs in that it is arranged by subject, with topics falling chronologically within each. The time period covered is sweeping, with content beginning with excerpts from the 1777 New York Constitution and ending with 2018 documents significant to the #MeToo Movement. Sections cover Citizenship & Constitutional Rights, Sexual Nonconformity & Changing Policy, In the Workplace, LGBTQ+ Rights, Birth Control & Reproduction, and Marriage & Parenting.

Origins of Women's Activism: New York and Boston, 1797-1840 Tracing the deep roots of women's activism in America, Anne Boylan explores the flourishing of women's volunteer associations in the decades following the Revolution. She examines the entire spectrum of early nineteenth-century women's groups--Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish; African American and white; middle and working class--to illuminate the ways in which race, religion, and class could bring women together in pursuit of common goals or drive them apart. Boylan interweaves analyses of more than seventy organizations in New York and Boston with the stories of the women who founded and led them. In so doing, she provides a new understanding of how these groups actually worked and how women's associations, especially those with evangelical Protestant leanings, helped define the gender system of the new republic. She also demonstrates as never before how women in leadership positions combined volunteer work with their family responsibilities, how they raised and invested the money their organizations needed, and how they gained and used political influence in an era when women's citizenship rights were tightly circumscribed.

Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull From the author of Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last, a stunning combination of history and biography that interweaves the stories of some of the most important social, political, and religious figures of America's Victorian era with the courageous and notorious life of Victoria Woodhull, to tell the story of her astonishing rise and fall and rise again. This is history at its most vivid, set amid the battle for woman suffrage, the Spiritualist movement that swept across the nation (10 million strong by midcentury) in the age of Radical Reconstruction following the Civil War, and the bitter fight that pitted black men against white women in the struggle to win the right to vote.

The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman's Rights Convention Feminists from 1848 to the present have rightly viewed the Seneca Falls convention as the birth of the women's rights movement in the United States and beyond. In The Road To Seneca Falls, Judith Wellman offers the first well documented, full-length account of this historic meeting in its contemporary context. The convention succeeded by uniting powerful elements of the antislavery movement, radical Quakers, and the campaign for legal reform under a common cause. Wellman shows that these three strands converged not only in Seneca Falls, but also in the life of women's rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It is this convergence, she argues, that foments one of the greatest rebellions of modern times. Rather than working heavy-handedly downward from their official "Declaration of Sentiments," Wellman works upward from richly detailed documentary evidence to construct a complex tapestry of causes that lay behind the convention, bringing the struggle to life. Her approach results in a satisfying combination of social, community, and reform history with individual and collective biographical elements. The Road to Seneca Falls challenges all of us to reflect on what it means to be an American trying to implement the belief that "all men and women are created equal," both then and now. A fascinating story in its own right, it is also a seminal piece of scholarship for anyone interested in history, politics, or gender.

Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity In this comprehensive history of women's antislavery petitions addressed to Congress, Susan Zaeske argues that by petitioning, women not only contributed significantly to the movement to abolish slavery but also made important strides toward securing their own rights and transforming their own political identity. By analyzing the language of women's antislavery petitions, speeches calling women to petition, congressional debates, and public reaction to women's petitions from 1831 to 1865, Zaeske reconstructs and interprets debates over the meaning of female citizenship. At the beginning of their political campaign in 1835 women tended to disavow the political nature of their petitioning, but by the 1840s they routinely asserted women's right to make political demands of their representatives. This rhetorical change, from a tone of humility to one of insistence, reflected an ongoing transformation in the political identity of petition signers, as they came to view themselves not as subjects but as citizens. Having encouraged women's involvement in national politics, women's antislavery petitioning created an appetite for further political participation that spurred countless women after the Civil War and during the first decades of the twentieth century to promote causes such as temperance, anti-lynching laws, and woman suffrage.

Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question The biographies of more than 800 women form the basis for Elna Green's study of the suffrage and the anti-suffrage movements in the South. Green's comprehensive analysis highlights the effects that factors such as class background, marital status, educational level, and attitudes about race and gender roles had in inspiring the region's women to work in favor of, or in opposition to, their own enfranchisement. Green sketches the ranks of both movements--which included women and men, black and white--and identifies the ways in which issues of class, race, and gender determined the composition of each side. Coming from a wide array of beliefs and backgrounds, Green argues, southern women approached enfranchisement with an equally varied set of strategies and ideologies. Each camp defined and redefined itself in opposition to the other. But neither was entirely homogeneous: issues such as states' rights and the enfranchisement of black women were so divisive as to give rise to competing organizations within each group. By focusing on the grassroots constituency of each side, Green provides insight into the whole of the suffrage debate.

Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights Though Susan B. Anthony is best remembered for leading the campaign for women's suffrage, she worked in multiple movements for equality beyond women's right to vote, including antislavery, Native American rights, temperance, and labor reform. In doing so she forged alliances with other activists to forward a broad social justice agenda, but she also faced opposition from these reformers on how best to achieve this goal. Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights explores the diversity of women's activism in nineteenth-century American reform movements, focusing on how Anthony and other women reformers shaped those movements and our memories of them. The essays here chart the long career of Anthony in this rich historical context of women's activism and display the efforts of a wide variety of women, and the challenges they faced, in the continued struggle for equality.

The Time Has Come: Why Men Must Join the Gender Equality Revolution The Time Has Come explores how a patriarchal culture that has given power to men comes at a huge cost to women, children, and, surprisingly, to men as well. It details how very achievable changes in our workplaces, in the ways we raise boys to be men, and in the movement to end men's violence will bring significant rewards to communities all around the world. Michael Kaufman is the cofounder of the White Ribbon Campaign--the largest international network of men working to end violence against women--and for decades has been an advisor on gender equality to the United Nations, governments, NGOs, schools, and workplaces around the world. With honest storytelling, compassion, and hard-hitting analysis, The Time Has Come is a compelling look at why men must take a stand in the fight for general equality.

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.

The Woman Who Dared to Vote: The Trial of Susan B. Anthony Just as the polls opened on November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony arrived and filled out her "ticket" for the various candidates. But before it could be placed in the ballot box, a poll watcher objected, claiming her action violated the laws of New York and the state constitution. Anthony vehemently protested that as a citizen of the United States and the state of New York she was entitled to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment. The poll watchers gave in and allowed Anthony to deposit her ballots. Anthony was arrested, charged with a federal crime, and tried in court. Primarily represented within document collections and broader accounts of the fight for woman suffrage, Anthony's controversial trial--as a landmark narrative in the annals of American law--remains a relatively neglected subject. N. E. H. Hull provides the first book-length engagement with the legal dimensions of that narrative and in the process illuminates the laws, politics, and personalities at the heart of the trial and its outcome. Hull summarizes the woman suffrage movement in the post-Civil War era, reveals its betrayal by former allies in the abolitionist movement, and describes its fall into disarray. She then chronicles Anthony's vote, arrest, and preliminary hearings, as well as the legal and public relations maneuvering in the run-up to the trial. She captures the drama created by Anthony, her attorneys, the politically ambitious prosecutor, and presiding judge--and Supreme Court justice--Ward Hunt, who argued emphatically against Anthony's interpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments as the source of her voting rights. She then tracks further relevant developments in the trial's aftermath--including Minor v. Happersett, another key case for the voting rights of women--and follows the major players through the eventual passage of the Nineteenth (or "Susan B. Anthony") Amendment. Hull's concise and readable guide reveals a story of courage and despair, of sisterhood and rivalry, of high purpose and low politics. It also underscores for all of us how Anthony's act of civil disobedience remains essential to our understanding of both constitutional and women's history--and why it all matters.

Women's Rights: People and Perspectives Explores the history of the struggle for women's rights in the United States from the colonial period to the present.

Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880-1920 A study of nationwide anti-women's suffrage movements, analyzing the "antis'" ideology and strategies, and offering theories on the contradictory positions women took in regard to formal political power. Includes a profile of noted anti-suffragist, Ida Tarbell, whose emancipated lifestyle belied her anti-suffragist rhetoric.