Insightful and provocative, Women's Activist Organizing in US History draws on both classic texts and recent bestsellers to reveal the breadth of activism by women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Contributors: Daina Ramey Berry, Melinda Chateauvert, Tiffany M. Gill, Nancy A. Hewitt, Treva B. Lindsey, Anne Firor Scott, Charissa J. Threat, Anne M. Valk, Lara Vapnek, and Deborah Gray White
|Preface ix
Introduction: The Difference that Difference Makes 1
Deborah Gray White
1 "To Cast Our Mite on the Altar of Benevolence: Women Begin to Organize" (Excerpt) 13
Anne Firor Scott
2 "'There Sho' Was a Sight of Us': Enslaved Family and Community Rituals" 33
Daina Ramey Berry
3 "The Daily Labor of Our Own Hands" 60
Lara Vapnek
4 "Latin Women from Exiles to Immigrants" 86
Nancy A. Hewitt
5 "Performing and Politicizing 'Ladyhood': Black Washington Women and New Negro Suffrage Activism" 111
Treva B. Lindsey
6 "'It Was the Women Who Made the Union': Organizing the Brotherhood" 138
Melinda Chateauvert
7 "Nurse or Soldier? White Male Nurses and World War II" (Excerpt) 158
Charissa J. Threat
8 "'Black Beauticians Were Very Important': Southern Beauty Activists and the Modern Black Freedom Struggle" 180
Tiffany M. Gill
9 "Organizing for Reproductive Control" 205
Anne M. Valk
10 "Things Fall Apart; the LGBT Center Holds" (Excerpt) 235
Deborah Gray White
List of Original Publications 251
Contributors 253
Index 255
|"This anthology represents the distance that scholarship has come since the last quarter century of the twentieth century. White middle-class women are no longer the starting point of all feminist scholarship and we now consider how various variables intersect and overlap to influence identity. And for all kinds of reasons, this is something to celebrate."—Deborah Gray White, from the Introduction"Social work educators will find . . . an opportunity to expose students to nuances of the historical realities of social change that were not covered in traditional public education history courses. . . . Durante and all authors from the text provide us with an intriguing starting point for deep discussions with our students, colleagues, mentees/mentors, and ourselves as we look to the future of the work of women activists." —Affilia
|Dawn Durante is the editor in chief at the University of Texas Press and the compiler of 100 Years of Suffrage: A University of Illinois Press Anthology.