The Grounding of Modern Feminism

The Grounding of Modern Feminism
Author: Nancy F. Cott
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 1987-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780300042283

"The time has come to define feminism; it is no longer possible to ignore it." The Century Magazine, 1914 In this landmark addition to scholarship, Nancy F. Cott, author of The Bonds of Womanhood, offers a new interpretation of American feminism during the early decades of this century--a period traditionally viewed as on in which women won the right to vote and then lost interest in feminist issues. Cott argues instead that his period was a time of crisis and transition from the nineteenth-century "woman movement' to the beginning of modern feminism. Many of the issues that are central to women today, says Cott, were firmly articulated in the early decades of this century. For example, the problem of defining sexual equality so as to recognize sexual difference between men and women, the ambiguous potential of a movement seeking individual freedoms for women by mobilizing sex solidarity, and the tensions involved in attaining full expression in work and love are all enduring elements of feminism seized upon by women of the 1910s and 1920s. First discussing how feminism was indebted to its predecessors, Cott shows that increasing heterogeneity and diverse loyalties among women in the early twentieth century contradicted the premise of the nineteenth-century "cause of woman" (the singular noun symbolizing the unity of the female sex). From this crisis emerged feminism, championing individual variability and refuting the premise that a singular "woman" existed. Cott focuses on the suffrage-campaign milieu in which feminism arose, giving particular attention to the character and role of the National Woman's Party from its militant suffrage days to its advocacy of the equal right amendment in the 1920s. Against prevailing interpretations of the decline of women's political activities after 1920, Cott counterposes the swelling numbers in women's voluntary associations and their political efforts. She also analyzes the pitfalls that awaited women who tried for effectiveness in the male-dominated political parties. She sets the controversy over the equal rights amendment in new context, discussing the full dimensions of the conflict as not merely over personalities, tactics, or class loyalties, but as a signal example of the modern problem of capturing sexual equality and sexual difference in law. The book explores the irony-strewn path of women who as aspiring professionals and political actors attempted to put into practice the feminist intent to replace the abstraction "woman" with, instead, "the human sex." This history--the story of women who first claimed the name feminists--builds an essential bridge between the presuffrage period and today.

Chicana Feminist Thought

Chicana Feminist Thought
Author: Alma M. Garcia
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2014-04-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134719744

Chicana Feminist Thought brings together the voices of Chicana poets, writers, and activists who reflect upon the Chicana Feminist Movement that began in the late 1960s. With energy and passion, this anthology of writings documents the personal and collective political struggles of Chicana feminists.

A Companion to American Women's History

A Companion to American Women's History
Author: Nancy A. Hewitt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 047099858X

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.

Radical Feminism

Radical Feminism
Author: Barbara A. Crow
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2000-02
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0814715540

This text permits the original work of radical feminists to speak for itself. Comprised of pivotal documents written by US radical feminists, the book contains both unpublished and previously published material.

Dispatches

Dispatches
Author: Michael Herr
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2011-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307814165

"The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War" (The New York Times Book Review); an instant classic straight from the front lines. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time. Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.

The American Women's Movement

The American Women's Movement
Author: Nancy MacLean
Publisher: Macmillan Higher Education
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2018-12-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1319242820

The American women’s movement was one of the most influential social movements of the twentieth century. Beginning with small numbers, the women’s movement eventually involved tens of thousands of women and men. Longstanding ideas and habits came under scrutiny as activists questioned and changed the nation’s basic institutions, including all branches of government, the workplace, and the family. Nancy MacLean’s introduction and collection of primary sources engage students with the most up-to-date scholarship in U.S. women’s history. The introduction traces the deep roots of the women’s movement and demonstrates the continuity from women’s activism in the labor movement and New Deal networks, the black civil rights movement, and the peace movement to the height of Second Wave feminism and into the Third Wave. The primary sources reflect the social breadth and depth of the movement. Dispelling the misconception that the American women’s movement was solely a white, middle-class cause, the documents include the voices of women of all ages, classes, and ethnicities. Topics addressed range from wage discrimination, peace activism, housework and childcare, sexuality, and reproductive rights to welfare, education, socialism, violence against women, and more. Document headnotes, a chronology of the women’s movement, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, and index support student learning, classroom discussion, and further research.

From Out of the Shadows

From Out of the Shadows
Author: Vicki Ruíz
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2008-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195374770

An anniversary edition of the first full study of Mexican American women in the twentieth century, with new preface

The Politics of Women's Studies

The Politics of Women's Studies
Author: Florence Howe
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2000-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1558617868

The true stories of those bold women who espoused feminism in the world of academia and forever changed our educational system and culture. In the patriarchal halls of 1970s academe, women who spoke their minds risked their careers. Yet intrepid women—students, faculty, administrators, members of the community—persisted in collaborating on women’s studies programs. In doing so, they created a movement that altered paradigms, curricula, teaching styles, and content across disciplines. In these original essays “we hear the voices of feminists exhilarated by the opportunities and challenges of creating women’s studies programs in American colleges and universities, nurtured by the women’s movement of the 1970s,” from young graduate students and newly hired faculty to tenured professors in search of ways to improve their students’ capacities to learn, veteran academics at last witnessing change, and even a few administrators (Library Journal). In all of these programs, these “founding mothers” grappled not only with issues of gender, but with those of class, race, and sexuality in a decade infused with political unrest and questioning, when civil rights and anti-war activism, as well as feminism, shaped academic worlds.

First Generations

First Generations
Author: Carol Berkin
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 283
Release: 1997-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1466806117

Indian, European, and African women of seventeenth and eighteenth-century America were defenders of their native land, pioneers on the frontier, willing immigrants, and courageous slaves. They were also - as traditional scholarship tends to omit - as important as men in shaping American culture and history. This remarkable work is a gripping portrait that gives early-American women their proper place in history.