A compelling biography of an important but long-neglected figure in the history of American feminism

Fiction writer, Journalist, and essayist, Lillie Devereux Blake (1833-1913) published seven novels, two collections of stories and essays, and hundreds of other pieces during her lifetime. She also played a major role in the struggle for women's rights, eventually becoming Elizabeth Cady Stanton's candidate to succeed Susan B. Anthony as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Yet for all her remarkable accomplishments, Lillie Blake's story has been all but forgotten. As Grace Farrell reveals in this richly textured biography, Blake's creative writings did not survive the canonical purges of women authors at the turn of the twentieth century, and her contributions to the suffrage movement were simply ignored in the official histories sanctioned by Susan B. Anthony. From the traces that remain, Farrell reconstructs an extraordinary life of passion and purpose. She chronicles Blake's literary career from Civil War correspondent to novelist and provides an inside view of suffrage politics, correcting some longheld misconceptions perpetuated by Anthony and her supporters. At the same time, Farrell expands the generic boundaries of biography by recounting not only

This remarkable story begins in the years following the Civil War, when reformers—emboldened by the egalitarian rhetoric of the post–Civil War era—pressed New York City's oldest institution of higher learning to admit women in the 1870s. Their effort failed, but within twenty years Barnard College was founded, creating a refuge for women scholars at Columbia, as well as an academic beachhead "from which women would make incursions into the larger university." By 1950, Columbia was granting more advanced degrees to women and hiring more female faculty than any other university in the country. In Changing the Subject, Rosalind Rosenberg shows how this century-long struggle transcended its local origins and contributed to the rise of modern feminism, furthered the cause of political reform, and enlivened the intellectual life of America's most cosmopolitan city. Surmounting a series of social and institutional obstacles to gain access to Columbia University, women played a key role in its evolution from a small, Protestant, male-dominated school into a renowned research university. At the same time, their struggles challenged prevailing ideas about masculinity, femininity, and sexual identity; questioned accepted views about ethnicity, race, and rights; and thereby laid the foundation for what we now know as gender. From Lillie Devereux Blake, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve in the first generation, through Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Zora Neale Hurston in the second, to Kate Millett, Gerda Lerner, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the third, the women of Columbia shook the world.

An obsession with individual identity pervaded Western thinking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This critical study examines the concept of identity in the works of nineteenth century American and British authors, focusing especially on psychologically mad, vague, shifting and dualistic characterization. Authors examined include Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Chesnutt, Lillie Devereux Blake, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The text discusses how each author was influenced by contemporary events (such as the American Civil War, slavery, the Second Great Awakening, and the beginnings of modern psychology), how those experiences shaped contemporary intellectual thought regarding identity, and how the resulting concern with personal identity was manifested in literary characters who were either in search of or running from themselves.