Historians of the Civil War often speak of 'wars within a war' - the military fight, wartime struggles on the home front, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. In this broadly conceived book, Thavolia Glymph provides a comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War - North and South, white and black, slave and free - showing how women were essentially and fully engaged in all three arenas. Glymph focuses on the ideas and ideologies that drove women's actions, allegiances, and politics.
Daughters of the Union casts a spotlight on some of the most overlooked and least understood participants in the American Civil War: the women of the North. Unlike their Confederate counterparts, who were often caught in the midst of the conflict, most Northern women remained far from the dangers of battle. Nonetheless, they enlisted in the Union cause on their home ground, and the experience transformed their lives. Nina Silber traces the emergence of a new sense of self and citizenship among the women left behind by Union soldiers. She offers a complex account, bolstered by women's own words from diaries and letters, of the changes in activity and attitude wrought by the war. Women became wage-earners, participants in partisan politics, and active contributors to the war effort. But even as their political and civic identities expanded, they were expected to subordinate themselves to male-dominated government and military bureaucracies. Silber's arresting tale fills an important gap in women's history. She shows the women of the North--many for the first time--discovering their patriotism as well as their ability to confront new economic and political challenges, even as they encountered the obstacles of wartime rule. The Civil War required many women to act with greater independence in running their households and in expressing their political views. It brought women more firmly into the civic sphere and ultimately gave them new public roles, which would prove crucial starting points for the late-nineteenth-century feminist struggle for social and political equality.
August 18, 2020, marked the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibited states and the US government from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex. See how the 70-year-long fight for women's suffrage was hard won by leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Carrie Chapman Catt and others. Learn how their success led into the civil rights and feminist movements of the mid- and late twentieth century, as well as today's #MeToo, #YesAllWomen, and Black Lives Matter movements. In the face of voter ID laws, voter purges, gerrymandering, and other restrictions, Americans continue to fight for equality in voting rights.
Even the Women Must Fight "Karen Turner and Phan Thanh Hao have brought scholarship and compassion to a long-neglected aspect of the Vietnam War--the contributions of Vietnamese women to the independence struggle of their nation and the terrible price they paid for their courage and patriotism."--Neil Sheehan, author of A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. A searing chronicle of wartime experiences, Even the Women Must Fight probes the cultural legacy of North Vietnam's American War. Unflinching in its portrayal of hardship, valor, and personal sacrifice, this wrenching account is nothing short of a revelation, banishing in one bold stroke the familiar image of Vietnamese women as passive onlookers, war brides, prostitutes, or helpless refugees. "Karen Turner has given us a book that will change our understanding of the Vietnam War--and of Vietnam today. I found it enthralling." --Cynthia Enloe, author of The Morning After: * Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War. "A first-rate book that will add substantially to our understanding of the human tragedy associated with one of the most bloody conflicts in recent history."--Robert Brigham, Professor of History, Vassar College.
This exciting collaboration with the New York Times will reveal the untold stories of the diverse heroines who fought for the 19th amendment. On the 100th anniversary of the historic win for women's rights, it's time to celebrate the names and stories of the women whose courage helped change the fabric of America.
Perfect for Women's History Month, here is the story of the extraordinary Alice Paul, a leader in the long struggle for votes for women. Alice Paul made a significant impact on both the woman's suffrage movement—the long struggle for votes for women—to the "second wave," when women demanded full equality with men. After women won the vote in 1920, Paul wrote the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would make all the laws that discriminated against women unconstitutional. Passage of the ERA became the rallying cry of a new movement of young women in the 1960s and '70s. Paul saw another chance to advance women's rights when the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 began moving through Congress. She set in motion the "sex amendment," which remains a crucial legal tool for helping women fight discrimination in the workplace. A true "girl power" book for today's young women, the title includes archival images, an author's note, a bibliography, and source notes.
The fight for women's suffrage between women's rights leader Alice Paul and President Woodrow Wilson is creatively presented as a four-round boxing match in this energetic nonfiction picture book. When Woodrow Wilson was elected President, he didn't know that he would be participating in one of the greatest fights of the century: the battle for women's right to vote. The formidable Alice Paul led the women's suffrage movement, and saw President Wilson's election as an opportunity to win the vote to women. She battered her opponent with endless strategic arguments and carefully coordinated protests, calling for a new amendment granting women the right to vote. With a spirit and determination that never quit--even when peaceful protests were met with violence and even when many women were thrown in jail--Paul eventually convinced President Wilson to support her cause, changing the country forever. Cleverly framed as a boxing match, this book provides a fascinating and compelling look at an important moment in American history. Sarah Green's bright, detailed illustrations perfectly accompany award-winning author Barb Rosenstock's captivating narrative.
"From the intimate perspective of three friends and neighbors in mid-nineteenth century Auburn, New York-the "agitators" of the title-acclaimed author Dorothy Wickenden tells the fascinating and crucially American stories of abolition, the Underground Railroad, the early women's rights movement, and the Civil War. Harriet Tubman-no-nonsense, funny, uncannily prescient, and strategically brilliant-was one of the most important conductors on the underground railroad and hid the enslaved men, women and children she rescued in the basement kitchens of Martha Wright, Quaker mother of seven, and Frances Seward, wife of Governor, then Senator, then Secretary of State William H. Seward. Harriet worked for the Union Army in South Carolina as a nurse and spy, and took part in a river raid in which 750 enslaved people were freed from rice plantations. Martha, a "dangerous woman" in the eyes of her neighbors and a harsh critic of Lincoln's policy on slavery, organized women's rights and abolitionist conventions with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Frances gave freedom seekers money and referrals and aided in their education. The most conventional of the three friends, she hid her radicalism in public; behind the scenes, she argued strenuously with her husband about the urgency of immediate abolition. Many of the most prominent figures in the history books-Lincoln, Seward, Daniel Webster, Frederick Douglass, Charles Sumner, John Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison-are seen through the discerning eyes of the protagonists. So are the most explosive political debates: about women's roles and rights during the abolition crusade, emancipation, and the arming of Black troops; and about the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Beginning two decades before the Civil War, when Harriet Tubman was still enslaved and Martha and Frances were young women bound by law and tradition, The Agitators ends two decades after the war, in a radically changed United States. Wickenden brings this extraordinary period of our history to life through the richly detailed letters her characters wrote several times a week. Like Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals and David McCullough's John Adams, Wickenden's The Agitators is revelatory, riveting, and profoundly relevant to our own time"--
Today, the "fight to write"—the struggle to become the legitimate chronicler of one’s own story—is being waged and won by women across mediums and borders. But such battles of authorship extend well beyond a single cultural moment. In her gripping study of unsung female narratives of the Algerian War, Mildred Mortimer excavates and explores the role of women’s individual and collective memory in recording events of the violent anticolonial conflict. Presenting close readings of published works spanning five decades—from Assia Djebar’s 1962 Children of the New World to Zohra Drif’s 2014 Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter— Women Fight, Women Write traces stylistic and material transformations in Algerian women’s writings as it reveals evolving attitudes toward memory, trauma, historical objectivity, and women’s political empowerment. Refuting the stale binary of men in battle, women at home, these testimonial texts let women lay claim to the Algerian War story as participants and also as chroniclers through fiction, historical studies, and memoir. Algeria’s patriarchal norms long kept women from speaking publicly about private matters, silencing their experiences of the war. Still, the conflict has ceaselessly sparked creative work. The country’s dark decade of violent struggle between the Algerian army and Islamist fundamentalists in the 1990s brought the liberation struggle back into focus, inspiring and emboldening many more women to defiantly write. Women Fight, Women Write advances the broken silence, illuminating its vital historical revisions and literary innovations.
