Women, Race, & Class


Book Description

From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women. “Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be heard.”—The New York Times Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women’s rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger’s racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.




Women's Rights Emerges Within the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1830-1870


Book Description

Combining documents with an interpretive essay, this book is the first to offer a much-needed guide to the emergence of the women's rights movement within the anti-slavery activism of the 1830s. A 60-page introductory essay traces the cause of women's rights from Angelina and Sarah Grimké's campaign against slavery through the development of a full-fledged women's rights movement in the 1840s and 1850s. A rich collection of over 50 documents includes diary entries, letters, and speeches from the Grimkés, Maria Stewart, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Theodore Weld, Frances Harper, Sojourner Truth, and others.




Women's Rights Emerges within the Anti-Slavery Movement


Book Description

Combining documents with an interpretive essay, this book is the first to offer a much-needed guide to the emergence of the womens rights movement within the anti-slavery activism of the 1830s. The introductory essay places a new focus on the relationship among campaigns against racial prejudice and the emergence of the women’s rights movement, tracing the cause of women’s rights from Angelina and Sarah Grimkés campaign against slavery and the emergence of race as a divisive issue that finally split that movement in 1869. A rich collection of nearly 60 documents—10 of them new--includes a range of voices, from free black women activists such as Francis Watkins Harper and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to Quaker abolitionists and their opponents. Document headnotes, maps and illustrations, a chronology, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, and an index have been updated and enrich students understanding of this period.







As If She Were Free


Book Description

A groundbreaking collective biography narrating the history of emancipation through the life stories of women of African descent in the Americas.




Women Making History


Book Description

"The National Park Service is excited to commemorate the 100th year anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that abolished sex as a basis for voting and to tell the diverse history of women's suffrage-the right to vote-more broadly. The U.S. Congress passed the 19th Amendment on June 4, 1919. The states ratified the amendment on August 18, 1920, officially recognizing women's right to vote. This handbook demonstrates the expansiveness of the stories the NPS is telling to preserve and protect women's history for this and future generations. The essays included within tell a broad history of various women advocating for their rights. Sprinkled throughout are short biographies of notable ladies who devoted their time to the women's suffrage movement along with summaries of events important to the cause"--




Hendrik Petrus Berlage


Book Description

Hendrik Petrus Berlage, the Dutch architect and architectural philosopher, created a series of buildings and a body of writings from 1886 to 1909 that were among the first efforts to probe the problems and possibilities of modernism. Although his Amsterdam Stock Exchange, with its rational mastery of materials and space, has long been celebrated for its seminal influence on the architecture of the 20th century, Berlage's writings are highlighted here. Bringing together Berlage's most important texts, among them "Thoughts on Style in Architecture", "Architecture's Place in Modern Aesthetics", and "Art and Society", this volume presents a chapter in the history of European modernism. In his introduction, Iain Boyd Whyte demonstrates that the substantial contribution of Berlage's designs to modern architecture cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of the aesthetic principles first laid out in his writings.




Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America


Book Description

The groundbreaking debut by the award-winning author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, revised and updated. Saidiya Hartman has been praised as “one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers” (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review) and “a lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy” (Alexis Okeowo, The New Yorker). In Scenes of Subjection—Hartman’s first book, now revised and expanded—her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the “terrible spectacle” and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement. By attending to the withheld and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman radically reshapes our understanding of history, in a work as resonant today as it was on first publication, now for a new generation of readers. This 25th anniversary edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an afterword by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley, notations with Cameron Rowland, and compositions by Torkwase Dyson.




When Abortion Was a Crime


Book Description

The definitive history of abortion in the United States, with a new preface that equips readers for what’s to come. When Abortion Was a Crime is the must-read book on abortion history. Originally published ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this award-winning study was the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with that monumental case in 1973. When Abortion Was a Crime is filled with intimate stories and nuanced analysis, demonstrating how abortion was criminalized and policed—and how millions of women sought abortions regardless of the law. With this edition, Leslie J. Reagan provides a new preface that addresses the dangerous and ongoing threats to abortion access across the country, and the precarity of our current moment. While abortions have typically been portrayed as grim "back alley" operations, this deeply researched history confirms that many abortion providers—including physicians—practiced openly and safely, despite prohibitions by the state and the American Medical Association. Women could find cooperative and reliable practitioners; but prosecution, public humiliation, loss of privacy, and inferior medical care were a constant threat. Reagan's analysis of previously untapped sources, including inquest records and trial transcripts, shows the fragility of patient rights and raises provocative questions about the relationship between medicine and law. With the right to abortion increasingly under attack, this book remains the definitive history of abortion in the United States, offering vital lessons for every American concerned with health care, civil liberties, and personal and sexual freedom.