Because scholars have traditionally examined the efforts of American suffragists only in relation to electoral politics, the history books have largely missed the real story of what these women achieved far outside the realm of voting reform. Though Stanton, Anthony, and Mott are the best known figures of the woman's suffrage movement, all were dead more than a decade before women actually achieved the vote. Women like Alice Paul, Louisine Havemeyer, and Mary Church Terrell carried on their work, putting their campaign experiences to work long after the 19th Amendment was ratified. This book tells the story of how these women made an indelible mark on American history in fields ranging from education to art, science, publishing, and social activism.
· 2019
The fall of 2018 saw an unprecedented number of women elected to Congress, changing estimates of how long it might take to achieve equal representation. For the first time, women candidates used techniques honed by America's political families, which have helped women enter politics since 1916. Drawing on extensive research and conversations with successful women politicians, this book offers a history of the political opportunities provided through familial connections. Family networks have a long history of enabling women to run for political office. There is much for the latest group of candidates to emulate.
Past biographies, histories, and government documents have ignored Alice Paul's contribution to the women's suffrage movement, but this groundbreaking study scrupulously fills the gap in the historical record. Masterfully framed by an analysis of Paul's nonviolent and visual rhetorical strategies, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign narrates the remarkable story of the first person to picket the White House, the first to attempt a national political boycott, the first to burn the president in effigy, and the first to lead a successful campaign of nonviolence. Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene also chronicle other dramatic techniques that Paul deftly used to gain publicity for the suffrage movement. Stunningly woven into the narrative are accounts of many instances in which women were in physical danger. Rather than avoid discussion of Paul's imprisonment, hunger strikes, and forced feeding, the authors divulge the strategies she employed in her campaign. Paul's controversial approach, the authors assert, was essential in changing American attitudes toward suffrage.
· 1999
At the beginning of the 20th century, Progressive reformers set up curricula in journalism, public relations, and creative writing to fulfill their own purposes: well-trained rhetors could convince the United States citizenry to accept Progressive thinking on monopolies and unions and to elect reform candidates. Although Progressive politicians and educators envisioned these courses and majors as forwarding their own goals, they could not control the intentions of the graduates thus trained or the employers who hired them. The period's vast panorama of rhetoric, including Theodore Roosevelt's publicity stunts, muckraker exposés, ad campaigns for patent medicines, and the selling of World War I, revealed the new national power of propaganda and the media, especially when wielded by college-trained experts imbued with the Progressive tradition of serving a cause and ensuring social betterment. In this unique volume, Adams' chronicles the creation of this advanced curriculum in speaking and writing during the Progressive era and examines the impact of that curriculum on public discourse. Unlike other studies of writing instruction, which have concentrated on freshman curriculum or on a specific genre, this book provides a historical and cultural analysis of the advanced composition curriculum and of its impact on public persuasion. Adams surveys American instruction at state and private schools across the country, with special attention given to the influential Progressive universities of the Midwest. She draws on a wide variety of primary data sources including college catalogs, course assignments, departmental minutes, speeches, and journals, and includes an extensive bibliography of research sources concerning advanced composition instruction and American rhetoric before World War II. As a resource offering remarkable historical insights on the history of writing instruction in America, this volume is of great interest to scholars and students in rhetoric, communication, and technical writing.
· 2001
A Group of Their Own is the fascinating story of the first generations of women who went to college to learn to be writers and then launched their careers writing poetry and prose. This unprecedented group included Elizabeth Bishop, Ruby Black, Pearl Buck, Emma Bugbee, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, Mildred Gilman, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Walker.
During the years 1880 to 1940, the glory days of the American circus, a third to a half of the cast members were women--a large group of very visible American workers whose story needs telling. This book, using sources such as diaries, autobiographies, newspaper accounts, films, posters, and route books, first considers the popular media's presentation of these performers as unnatural and scandalous--as well as romantic and thrilling. Next are the stories told by circus women, which contradict and complicate other versions of their lives. Across America in those years an array of acts featured women, such as tableaux, freak shows, girlie shows, tiger acts, and aerial performances, all involving special skills and all detailed here. The book offers a unique and fascinating view of not just the circus but of what it meant to be an American woman at work.
Easy Access is the only handbook organized by the types of help student writers need. Part One (red tabs) provides a guide to writing processes and products. Solutions to common writing problems and ESL troublespots are found in Part Two (blue tab). Part Three (yellow tab) offers alphabetically organized definitions and examples of grammar, mechanics, and punctuation terms.
· 1993
A chronicle of the history of college writing programs that emphasizes the common roots of courses in creative writing, journalism, technical and business writing, and advanced composition, providing an overview of the origins of American professional or advanced writing instruction, a new phenomeno
From 1880 to 1920, the first truly national visual culture developed in the United States as a result of the completion of the Pacific Railroad. Women, especially young and beautiful ones, found new lives shaped by their participation in that visual culture. This rapidly evolving age left behind the "cult of domesticity" that reigned in the nineteenth century to give rise to new "types" of women based on a single feature--a type of hair, skin, dress, or prop--including the Gibson Girl, the sob sister, the stunt girl, the hoochy-coochy dancer, and the bearded lady. Exploring both high and low culture, from the circus and film to newspapers and magazines, this work examines depictions of women at the dawn of "mass media," depictions that would remain influential throughout the twentieth century.
In 1935, the United States Congress began employing large numbers of American artists through the Works Progress Administration--fiction writers, photographers, poster artists, dramatists, painters, sculptors, muralists, wood carvers, composers and choreographers, as well as journalists, historians and researchers. Secretary of Commerce and supervisor of the WPA Harry Hopkins hailed it a "renascence of the arts, if we can call it a rebirth when it has no precedent in our history." Women were eminently involved, creating a wide variety of art and craft, interweaving their own stories with those of other women whose lives might not otherwise have received attention. This book surveys the thousands of women artists who worked for the U.S. government, the historical and social worlds they described and the collaborative depiction of womanhood they created at a pivotal moment in American history.