Women's History Month

100 Years of Women’s Suffrage commemorates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment by bringing together essential scholarship on the women's suffrage movement and women's voting previously published by the University of Illinois Press. With an original introduction by Nancy A. Hewitt, the volume illuminates the lives and work of key figures while uncovering the endeavors of all women—across lines of gender, race, class, religion, and ethnicity—to gain, and use, the vote. Beginning with works that focus on cultural and political suffrage battles, the chapters then look past 1920 at how women won, wielded, and continue to fight for access to the ballot. A curation of important scholarship on a pivotal historical moment, 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage captures the complex and enduring struggle for fair and equal voting rights.

Impressive, enlightening, and fascinating to read, this easy-to-use narrative chronology records the triumphs, obstacles, and conditions of women's lives from prehistory to the present and profiles the achievements of nearly 5,000 women from practically every corner of the globe.

This extensive collection of public and private sources illuminates a pivotal period of change, resistance, progress, and backlash for American women. From the Hoover vacuum cleaner to the fax machine, from the pill to reproductive rights, and from Rosie the Riveter to Martha Stewart and Hillary Rodham Clinton, American women have grappled with a dizzying array of social and economic developments and shifting conceptions of gender.

During the First and Second World Wars, food shortages reached critical levels in the Allied nations. The situation in England, which relied heavily on imports and faced German naval blockades, was particularly dire. Government campaigns were introduced in both Britain and the United States to recruit individuals to work on rural farms and to raise gardens in urban areas. These recruits were primarily women, who readily volunteered in what came to be known as Women's Land Armies. Stirred by national propaganda campaigns and a sense of adventure, these women, eager to help in any way possible, worked tirelessly to help their nations grow "victory gardens" to win the war against hunger and fascism.

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.

The advocates of woman suffrage and black suffrage came to a bitter falling-out in the midst of Reconstruction, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment for granting black men the right to vote but not women. How did these two causes, so long allied, come to this? In a lively narrative of insider politics, betrayal, deception, and personal conflict, Fighting Chance offers fresh answers to this question and reveals that racism was not the only cause, but that the outcome also depended heavily on money and political maneuver.

When Billie Jean King trounced Bobby Riggs in tennis's "Battle of the Sexes" in 1973, she placed sports squarely at the center of a national debate about gender equity. In this winning combination of biography and history, Susan Ware argues that King's challenge to sexism, the supportive climate of second-wave feminism, and the legislative clout of Title IX sparked a women's sports revolution in the 1970s that fundamentally reshaped American society.

Her Story is a vivid documentation of the breadth and diversity of American women's achievements throughout U.S. history. This one-of-a-kind illustrated timeline highlights the awesome, varied, and often unrecognized contributions of American women since the 1500s.

Featuring sixteen contributions from recognized authorities in their respective fields, this superb new mapping of women's writing ranges from feminine middlebrow novels to Virginia Woolf's modernist aesthetics, from women's literary journalism to crime fiction, and from West End drama to the literature of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

The storybook history of the American West is a male-dominated narrative of drifters, dreamers, hucksters, and heroes--a tale that relegates women, assuming they appear at all, to the distant background. Home Lands: How Women Made the West upends this view to remember the West as a place of homes and habitations brought into being by the women who lived there.

There once was a time when the concept of equal pay for equal work did not exist, when women of all ages were "girls," when abortion was a back-alley procedure, when there was no such thing as a rape crisis center or a shelter for battered women, when "sexual harassment" had not yet been named and defined. "If conditions are right," Susan Brownmiller says in this stunning memoir, "if the anger of enough people has reached the boiling point, the exploding passion can ignite a societal transformation."

Few historians have contributed more to our understanding of the history of women, and women's effect on history, than Alice Kessler-Harris. Author of the classic Out to Work, she is one of the country's leading scholars of gender, the economy, and public policy.In this volume, Kessler-Harris pierces the skin of arguments and legislation to grasp the preconceptions that have shaped the experience of women: a "gendered imagination" that has defined what men and women alike think of as fair and desirable.

Few historians have contributed more to our understanding of the history of women, and women's effect on history, than Alice Kessler-Harris. Author of the classic Out to Work, she is one of the country's leading scholars of gender, the economy, and public policy.In this volume, Kessler-Harris pierces the skin of arguments and legislation to grasp the preconceptions that have shaped the experience of women: a "gendered imagination" that has defined what men and women alike think of as fair and desirable. In this brilliant account that traces social policy from the New Deal to the 1970s, she shows how a deeply embedded set of beliefs has distorted seemingly neutral social legislation to further limit the freedom and equality of women.

John Stuart Mill in 1869 wrote that women would never be emancipated until some men within the citadel of privilege joined them in the struggle. This book describes how they did so on many fronts.

Lucretia Coffin Mott was one of the most famous and controversial women in nineteenth-century America. Now overshadowed by abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mott was viewed in her time as a dominant figure in the dual struggles for racial and sexual equality. History has often depicted her as a gentle Quaker lady and a mother figure, but her outspoken challenges to authority riled ministers, journalists, politicians, urban mobs, and her fellow Quakers.

In the late nineteenth century, as Americans debated the "woman question," a battle over the meaning of biology arose in the medical profession.

The story of how the women's rights movement began at the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 is a cherished American myth. The standard account credits founders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott with defining and then leading the campaign for women's suffrage. In her provocative new history, Lisa Tetrault demonstrates that Stanton, Anthony, and their peers gradually created and popularized this origins story during the second half of the nineteenth century in response to internal movement dynamics as well as the racial politics of memory after the Civil War.

This volume tracks the changing national views on gender roles. Historian at-large Micah Issitt traces the path of gender politics in American society, with each chapter providing insightful commentary on a selected primary source. Drawing from the popular press, key court and legislative battles, speeches, social activism and opinion polls, Opinions Throughout History: Gender Roles offers readers mixed sources of information woven together to highlight the overall momentum of developing public opinion. As forces compete to move the needle of popular thought on this issue, readers will see the push and pull tension between traditional and modern definitions of prescribed gender roles.

Traces the history of the National Woman's Party, a feminist lobby group organized to make Congress aware of sex discrimination during the twenties and thirties.

In this enthralling narrative, Annelise Orleck chronicles the history of the American women's movement from the nineteenth century to the present. Starting with an incisive introduction that calls for a reconceptualization of American feminist history to encompass multiple streams of women's activism, she weaves the personal with the political, vividly evoking the events and people who participated in our era's most far-reaching social revolutions.

Survival in the Doldrums is the first book to explore the persistence of the American women's rights movement in a period generally considered devoid of feminist activism and to show the ways in which the more radical movement of the 1960s was influenced by the successes and failures of the 1950s activities.

Survival in the Doldrums is the first book to explore the persistence of the American women's rights movement in a period generally considered devoid of feminist activism and to show the ways in which the more radical movement of the 1960s was influenced by the successes and failures of the 1950s activities.

The first biography of a pioneering women's rights activist; A very dangerous woman is what Martha Coffin Wright's conservative neighbors considered her, because of her work in the women's rights and abolition movements.

Winning the Vote captures the color and excitement of a central, inspiring but nearly forgotten chapter in American history. This beautifully designed hardback presents the American woman suffrage movement clearly and chronologically with emphasis on the fascinating personalities and turbulent political campaigns of the early 20th century.

Winning the Vote captures the color and excitement of a central, inspiring but nearly forgotten chapter in American history. This beautifully designed hardback presents the American woman suffrage movement clearly and chronologically with emphasis on the fascinating personalities and turbulent political campaigns of the early 20th century.

A comprehensive historical review of the debates surrounding women's contributions and roles in science, with emphasis on women's access to education, training, and professional careers.

A lively, accessible collection of essays exploring the history of the struggle for women's rights in the United States from the colonial period to the present.

Women's rights issues have been a part of the political and social fabric of the United States since the Declaration of Independence. In fact, women's rights activists have often wielded principles enunciated in the Declaration as they struggled to secure equality. This reference source examines 15 controversial issues concerning women's rights in the United States. A historical overview introduces each issue, followed by the presentation of primary documents that illustrate the various positions women and men have taken in support of or opposition to the issue at hand.

This book offers a look at how the lives of women changed in the era when the United States emerged.

Examines the history of the women's suffrage movement and its impact on American life and society. Features include narrative overview, biographical profiles, primary source documents, detailed chronology, and annotated sources for further study

At the turn of the 19th century, women had limited rights. They had no control of their earnings, could not divorce a husband, had no claim to property, could not speak in public meetings and could not vote. Barely 100 years ago, women were the only adult group that was disenfranchised. The women's suffrage movement, a political campaign that sought to address these problems, began about 1800 and culminated in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

This powerful book narrates the lives and evokes the voices of the women who traveled the 2,000-mile trail to Oregon 150 years ago. The author then retraces the trail as it is today, showing where to find markers, signposts, landmarks and historical sites.

Despite what most people may think, American women have always worn pants. Featuring an unusual collection of vintage photographs from the 1850s to the 1920s, Women in Pants documents an almost forgotten revolution in clothing. Defying convention, Victorian dress reformers as well as farmers, labourers, miners, cowgirls and sportswomen openly wore trousers, while other women disguised themselves in men's attire to get good jobs, go to combat, engage in relationships with other women, or experiment with gender identity. Candid quotes from contemporary newspapers and magazines complement the photographs and enhance our understanding of the culture and time in which these women lived.