Matilda Joslyn Gage

Matilda Joslyn Gage was a woman's rights activist during the 19th century, committed to the woman suffrage movement. This book brigns needed attention to Gage's life and work and explores her impact on women's rights. Using an advanced and distincitve form of feminist thought that encompassed an incisive analysis of patriarchy, Gage even criticized the church as patriarchy's prime sponsor. In fact, Gage connected all of women'ts oppression, including prostitution, marriage customs, divorce, rape, and custody rights to patriarchy. It is perhaps for her radical theory that Gage's arguments remain salient and controvesial today. An overdue addition to the scholarship on the role feminists like Matilda Joslyn Gage have played in history, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of United States history, women's history, and women's studies.

"The right to cast a ballot from a feminine hand occupied the attention and efforts of hundreds of women for more than a century in the U.S. In these two volumes Campbell (University of Minnesota) provides a basic understanding of two processes: the development of the rhetoric used by the women who argued for equal rights, and the constraints and sanctions applied to those women who affronted the norms of society's expectation that true women were seldom seen and never spoke in public. The first volume lays the foundation for the analysis of rhetorical style and content by its fine introduction and by a succession of chapters organized chronologically, with biographical sketches and excerpts from speeches. It includes a chapter specifically addressed to issues of sex, race, and class faced by African American women. Volume 2 is not a continuation of the first, but contains the texts on which the first volume is based. The biographical and historical sections are gracefully written and well organized, but the greatest value of the set lies in the actual words of the feminist leaders and Campbell's skillfull analyses. Every women's studies program must have this available. Upper-division undergraduates and above." Choice

This biographical dictionary, the first of two companion volumes, gives new recognition to early women orators--those who spoke despite efforts to silence them. Following Campbell's introductory chapter, the volume provides extensive entries on 37 key orators. Subjects include suffragists, the first lawyers, ministers, physicians, labor organizers, newspaper editors and publishers, historians, educators, even soldiers. Each entry provides brief biographical information, then focuses on the woman's public life in discourse. Each entry includes an analysis of the subject's rhetoric and information on primary sources, critical works, key rhetorical documents, and selected sources of historical and biographical information. The work is fully indexed.

Women's periodicals have a long history of treating social, political, and economic issues. Through alphabetically arranged entries on individual publications, this reference traces the rich diversity of approaches that these periodicals have taken. Included are entries on more than 70 different periodicals published in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some are radical, some are reactionary, but most fall somewhere in between. Each entry provides a critical narrative history of the periodical, circulation figures, related publication information, and a selected bibliography. The volume closes with a chronology and a bibliography.

The experience of women in the nineteenth century has generated a wealth of interdisciplinary research in recent decades. The Columbia Guide to American Women in the Nineteenth Century presents the best of the recent scholarship available in a concise, "one-stop" resource, providing students of women's history and nineteenth-century American culture with an authoritative source of information and interpretation. The authors emphasize areas in which scholars have identified important changes (such as suffrage and reform), topics in which researchers are now making great strides (such as racial, ethnic, religious, and regional diversity), and innovative and relatively recent explorations (for example, work on female sexuality). Accessible overview articles and alphabetical encyclopedia-like entries are combined in a comprehensive, easy-to-use volume. Part 1 contains a historiographical essay followed by a ten-chapter narrative overview. These chapters include discussions of families and households, labor and the workforce, religion and morality, feminism and equal rights, reform and voluntarism, and more. Part 2 is an A-to-Z listing of concise entries on key terms, notable figures, political movements, social and religious organizations, and legislation. Part 3 is an annotated chronology placing events in historical context. Part 4 is a topically organized selection of the best resources for further research, including general historical works, biographies and autobiographies, journals, archives, web sites, novels, and films.