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On a summer day in 1846--two years before the Seneca Falls convention that launched the movement for woman's rights in the United States--six women in rural upstate New York sat down to write a petition to their state's constitutional convention, demanding "equal, and civil and political rights with men." Refusing to invoke the traditional language of deference, motherhood, or Christianity as they made their claim, the women even declined to defend their position, asserting that "a self evident truth is sufficiently plain without argument." Who were these women, Lori Ginzberg asks, and how might their story change the collective memory of the struggle for woman's rights? Very few clues remai...
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a brilliant activist-intellectual. That nearly all of her ideas—that women are entitled to seek an education, to own property, to get a divorce, and to vote—are now commonplace is in large part because she worked tirelessly to extend the nation's promise of radical individualism to women. In this subtly crafted biography, the historian Lori D. Ginzberg narrates the life of a woman of great charm, enormous appetite, and extraordinary intellectual gifts who turned the limitations placed on women like herself into a universal philosophy of equal rights. Few could match Stanton's self-confidence; loving an argument, she rarely wavered in her assumption that she had...
Nineteenth-century middle-class Protestant women were fervent in their efforts to "do good." Rhetoric--especially in the antebellum years--proclaimed that virtue was more pronounced in women than in men and praised women for their benevolent influence, moral excellence, and religious faith. In this book, Lori D. Ginzberg examines a broad spectrum of benevolent work performed by middle- and upper-middle-class women from the 1820s to 185 and offers a new interpretation of the shifting political contexts and meanings of this long tradition of women's reform activism. During the antebellum period, says Ginzberg, the idea of female moral superiority and the benevolent work it supported contained ...
A thoroughly revised edition of the classic text in American women's social history
This is a soul-stirring era," remarked the Reverend William Mitchell in 1835, "and will be so recorded in the annals of time." Countless antebellum reformers agreed. The United States was awash in efforts to change itself, a "sisterhood of reforms" emerging to characterize the efforts of hundreds of thousands of Americans. In all of this, women played an important role. In her latest publication, Professor Ginzberg offers a view of women and antebellum reform through two lenses: one focused on the ideas about women, religion, class, and race that shaped reform movements; and another that observes actual women as they participated in the work of social change. For women, a commitment to reform offered a broader sense of their place in the world-and of their responsibility to set it aright. By considering the efforts of these women-distributing bibles, tracts, and charity, fighting intemperance, opposing slavery, or demanding their rights as women-the reader gains a richer understanding of the antebellum era itself.
Approaching a wide range of transnational topics, the editors ask how conceptions of slavery & gendered society differed in the United States, France, Germany, & Britain.
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 mod...
This collection of twenty-four original essays by leading scholars in American women's history highlights the most recent important scholarship on the key debates and future directions of this popular and contemporary field. Covers the breadth of American Women's history, including the colonial family, marriage, health, sexuality, education, immigration, work, consumer culture, and feminism. Surveys and evaluates the best scholarship on every important era and topic. Includes expanded bibliography of titles to guide further research.
Known as "the queen of the platform," Ernestine Rose was more famous than her women's rights co-workers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. By the 1850s, Rose had become an outstanding orator for feminism, free thought, and anti-slavery. Yet, she would gradually be erased from history for being too much of an outlier: an immigrant, a radical, and an atheist. In The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter, Bonnie S. Anderson recovers the unique life and career of Ernestine Rose. The only child of a Polish rabbi, Ernestine Rose rejected religion at an early age, successfully sued for the return of her dowry after rejecting an arranged betrothal, and left her family, Judaism, and Poland forever. In ...
Lucretia Mott was a central figure in the interconnected struggles for racial and sexual equality in nineteenth-century America. This biography, the first in thirty years, focuses on Mott's long and controversial public career as an abolitionist, women's rights activist, and Quaker minister.