Containing 1,500 biographies and more than 1,400 photographs or portraits, this extraordinary encyclopedia, originally published in 1897, documents the lives and achievements of remarkable American women who lived during the nineteenth century. Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, two extraordinary women in their own right, compiled this massive work toward the end of their own very accomplished lives to demonstrate that women were a rising cultural and intellectual force to be reckoned with. Providing a window into the 19th-century world of white middle-class women over three generations, the encyclopedia reveals the range of women's career paths and vocations at this time, and provides a benchmark of the growth in women's consciousness of themselves as a gender class. Among the occupations listed those falling into the literary category are the most numerous: authors, editors, journalists, lecturers, literary contributors, novelists, poets, and publishers. Other sizable categories are actors, artists, educators, philanthropists, physicians, temperance workers, and woman suffragists. Also included are profiles of all of the First Ladies of the 19th century, and a number of less highly placed women who are still well-known today: Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women; famed nurse and humanitarian Clara Barton; America's best-known female composer, Mrs. H. H. A. Beach; theosophist Helene Petrovna Blavatsky; America's first woman lawyer, Myra Bradwell; mental health pioneer Dorothea Dix; Harriet Beecher Stowe, widely read author of Uncle Tom's Cabin; and suffragists and women's rights advocates Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. An insightful introduction by feminist sociologists Patricia Lengermann and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley synopsizes the lives of Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, evaluates their contributions, and analyzes the sociological implications of this monumental project.

A landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century. Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2017. The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind: an extraordinary range of voices offering the expressions of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this collection comprises work from forty-nine writers arranged into sections of memoir, poetry, and essays on feminism, education, and the legacy of African American women writers. Many of these pieces engage with social movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and civil rights, but the thematic center is the intellect and personal ambition of African American women. The diverse selection includes well-known writers like Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Sheppard, who offers a firsthand account of life in the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Taken together, these incredible works insist that the writing of African American women writers be read, remembered, and addressed. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

From the Publisher: A new mother longing to write is judged "hysterical" and confined to her bedroom where she slowly loses herself in horrific fantasy. A young girl stirred by two beings--a handsome young man and an ethereal white heron--is forced to make a choice between them. A love affair quashed by convention ignites during a sudden storm. These tales of remarkable and ordinary lives in nineteenth-century America are told throughout women's voices that call out from the kitchen hearth, the solitary room, the prison cell. Stories by Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton, as well as by others less familiar, reveal a universe of emotions hidden beneath parochial scenes. American writers claimed the short story as their national genre in the nineteenth century, and women writers made it the most important outlet for their particular experiences. A unique selection, with an introduction, notes, selected criticism, and a chronology of the authors' lives and times.

Contains 1000 oral interviews with American black women who lived between 1800 and the 1880s.

In the nineteenth century, New York City underwent a tremendous demographic transformation driven by European immigration, the growth of a native-born population, and the expansion of one of the largest African American communities in the North. New York's free blacks were extremely politically active, lobbying for equal rights at home and an end to Southern slavery. As their activism increased, so did discrimination against them, most brutally illustrated by bloody attacks during the 1863 New York City Draft Riots. The struggle for civil rights did not extend to equal gender roles, and black male leaders encouraged women to remain in the domestic sphere, serving as caretakers, moral educators, and nurses to their families and community. Yet as Jane E. Dabel demonstrates, separate spheres were not a reality for New York City's black people, who faced dire poverty, a lopsided sex ratio, racialized violence, and a high mortality rate, all of which conspired to prevent men from gaining respectable employment and political clout. Consequently, many black women came out of the home and into the streets to work, build networks with other women, and fight against racial injustice. A Respectable Woman reveals the varied and powerful lives led by black women, who, despite the exhortations of male reformers, occupied public roles as gender and race reformers.

The third edition of Gender and Elections offers a systematic, lively, and multifaceted account of the role of gender in the electoral process through the 2012 elections. This timely yet enduring volume strikes a balance between highlighting the most important developments for women as voters and candidates in the 2012 elections and providing a more long-term, in-depth analysis of the ways that gender has helped shape the contours and outcomes of electoral politics in the United States. Individual chapters demonstrate the importance of gender in understanding and interpreting presidential elections, presidential and vice-presidential candidacies, voter participation and turnout, voting choices, congressional elections, the political involvement of Latinas, the participation of African American women, the support of political parties and women's organizations, candidate communications with voters, and state elections. Without question, Gender and Elections is the most comprehensive, reliable, and trustworthy resource on the role of gender in US electoral politics.

Brief biographies of seven women whose philosophies and actions have had great impact on American society. Included are Sarah Moore Grimke, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mother Jones, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Louise Strong, and Dorothy Day.

This collection is unique. Judith Fetterley has recovered for us the work of sixteen women who wrote during the years when America writers were developing their distinctive styles and voices. In re-viewing the literature of 19th century America, she fives us the whole picture, setting the literary and historical contexts and allowing us to see the development of prose content and form from 1830 to 1865.