"The twenty-four women discussed in these chapters constitute a collective biography that narrates the history of emancipation as experienced by women of African descent in the western hemisphere. As If She Were Free articulates this individual and collective struggle - in which African descended women spoke and acted in ways that declared that they had a right to determine the course of their lives. African descended women sought out freedom from the moment they arrived on the shores of the Americas in the sixteenth century. For the next four centuries, enslaved women measured freedom in degrees, claimed it in stages, and experienced it multidimensional ways. For some women, freedom meant legal protection from slavery, while, for others, something akin to freedom was experienced in the context of a family, a community, or a political association. More than simply deliverance from slavery; emancipation was liberation from civil or other restraints; and it included efforts to gain economic, personal, political, and social rights. On all of these fronts, women emancipated themselves. In telling their stories, As If She Were Free articulates a new feminist history of freedom"--
Most histories of the Civil War era portray the struggle over slavery as a conflict that exclusively pitted North against South, free labor against slave labor, and black against white. In Freedom's Frontier, Stacey L. Smith examines the battle over slavery as it unfolded on the multiracial Pacific Coast. Despite its antislavery constitution, California was home to a dizzying array of bound and semibound labor systems: African American slavery, American Indian indenture, Latino and Chinese contract labor, and a brutal sex traffic in bound Indian and Chinese women. Using untapped legislative and court records, Smith reconstructs the lives of California's unfree workers and documents the political and legal struggles over their destiny as the nation moved through the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Smith reveals that the state's anti-Chinese movement, forged in its struggle over unfree labor, reached eastward to transform federal Reconstruction policy and national race relations for decades to come. Throughout, she illuminates the startling ways in which the contest over slavery's fate included a western struggle that encompassed diverse labor systems and workers not easily classified as free or slave, black or white.
First published in 1893, this book offers an early and influential feminist critique of society and the gender roles that constrain women. With lucid arguments and incisive analysis, the book remains relevant today as a contribution to ongoing debates about gender inequality and the struggle for women's rights. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
Lauded for its contribution to the theory and conceptualization of the field of women's history and for its sensitivity to the differences of class, ethnicity, race, and culture among women, "The Majority Finds Its Past" became a classic volume in women's history after its original publication in 1979. This edition includes a foreword by Linda K. Kerber, introducing a new generation of readers to Gerda Lerner's body of work and highlighting the importance of the essays in this collection to the development of the field that Lerner helped establish.
There are some wonderful monographs which deal with the issues of women at the national and global level, but no work of their equivalent has been produced so far with the exclusive purpose of analyzing and reviewing the position and predicaments of women limited to the district of Dakshina Kannada. In this book, Dr. Hegde and Dr. Gowda make attempts to describe the subject of women empowerment in the district, the hurdles in the way of materializing it, and to suggest the general lines on which the various problems that confront women should be tackled in order to get a fairly satisfactory solution. Based on the detailed analysis of the working of women organizations towards realizing the goal of empowerment, the book draws on the districts’ literary sources to explain it in a distinctive way. The work will enable the reader to understand the subject in true perspective, as it is based on impartial survey of all the available data. Carefully researched and analyzed, this book will form an essential reading for all those interested on the issues of women empowerment and the contributions of the women organisations towards it in general and the DK district of Karnataka in particular. Traditional approaches to the empowerment of women, particularly in developing countries, tend to stress the primacy of poverty alleviation; this book attempts to explain, along with poverty issue, how other factors such as illiteracy, poor health, lack of opportunity to participate politically etc. fail the goal of women empowerment set in various programmes of the governmental and non-governmental agencies.
"This essay was written at the height of the civil rights movement in 1965 and was part of a broad political analysis of that period. 'The emancipation of women' was adopted by Radical Women as a position paper in 1973. The larger work has been published by Red Letter Press under the title 'Crisis and leadership'."--P.3.