Table of Contents
PART ONE: MODERN WOMEN IN THE MAKING, 1890-1920
1 Visions of the New Woman
“Girl Reporter Derring-Do (Nellie Bly);
The Fair Women, Chicago, 1893 (Bertha Palmer);
Black Women Plan to Lead Their Race (Anna J. Cooper);
Ida B. Wells Speaks Out Against Lynching;
Frances Willard Equates Learning to Ride a Bicycle with Opening
New Frontiers for Women;
An Immigrant Daughter Awakens to the Possibilities of the
New World (Anzia Yezierska);
A Woman Homesteader (Edith Eudora Ammons)
2. Expanding Horizons for Educated Women
Jane Addams Struggles with the Problem of “After College, What?”;
Alice Hamilton Explores the Dangerous Trades;
African- American Women Enter the Teaching Profession
(Mamie Garvin Fields);
Molly Dewson’s Letters Home from Wellesley;
Women and Progressive Politics (Mary Ritter Beard)
3. Women at Work
The Burdens of Rural Women’s Lives;
Buffalobird Woman’s Story;
The Harsh Conditions of Domestic Service;
Female Perspectives on the Great Migration;
The Story of a Glove Maker (Agnes Nestor);
Working Women Write the Jewish Daily Forward
Photo Essay
4 Feminists, Anarchists, and Other Rebel Girls
Mother Jones Supports Striking Coalminers in Colorado;
A Feminist Challenge to the Privatized Home
(Charlotte Perkins Gilman);
Wages for Housework (Josephine Conger-Kaneko);
Margaret Sanger’s Epiphany Over Birth Control;
A Radical View of Women’s Emancipation (Emma Goldman)
5 The Final Push for Suffrage
A Western Suffragist Talks to Her Eastern Sisters
(Abigail Scott Duniway);
Open-Air Meetings: A New Suffrage Tactic (Florence Luscomb);
An Anti-Suffrage Monologue (Marie Jenny Howe);
A Labor Organizer Speaks Out for Suffrage
(Leonora O’Reilly);
“Front Door Lobbying” for Suffrage (Maud Wood Park);
Suffrage Militant Alice Paul Goes to Jail
Suggestions for Further Reading
Part Two: Individual Choices, Collective Progress, 1920-1963
6 New Dilemmas for Modern Women
New Voters (Carrie Chapman Catt);
Feminist Debate the Equal Rights Amendment
(Doris Stevens and Alice Hamilton);
Generational Conflicts (Dorothy Dunbar Bromley);
Anxious Mothers Write the Children’s Bureau;
Women of the Ku Klux Klan;
The Harlem Renaissance (Nella Larsen)
7 Women Face the Depression
The Despair of Unemployed Women (Meridel Lesueur);
American Women Ask Eleanor Roosevelt for Help
The Dust Bowl (Ann Marie Low);
The Life Cycle of a White Southern Farm Women
(Margaret Jarman Hagood);
A Mexican-American Childhood During the Depression
(Carlotta Silvas Martin);
Women and Labor Militancy (Genora Johnson Dollinger);
“I Want You Women Up North to Know” (Tillie Olsen)
Photo Essay
8 Rosie the Riveter and Other Wartime Women
Rosie the Riveter (Fanny Christina Hill);
Women in the Armed Forces (Marion Stegeman);
Wartime Migration (Harriette Arnow);
Japanese Relocation (Monica Sone);
Women of Wartime Los Alamos (Ruth Marshak)
9 The Fifties: The Way We Were?
Balancing Work and Family (Betty Jean Boggs);
Indian Relocation (Wilma Mankiller);
An Unplanned Pregnancy (Joanna Rubin);
Women Strike for Peace (Ethel Barol Taylor);
Civil Rights Activists (Rosa parks and Virginia Foster Durr);
Rachel Carson Answers Her Critics
Suggestions for Further Reading
Part Three: The Personal Becomes Political, 1963 to the Present
10 The Revival of Feminism
Founding the National Organization for Women, 1966;
Feminist Guerilla Theater, 1968 (Robin Morgan);
The Politics of Housework (Pat Mainardi);
Thoughts on Indian Feminism (Kate Shanley);
Black Feminism (Combahee River Collective);
A More Personal View of Black Feminism (Michele Wallace);
Houston, 1977: A Different View of Women’s Nature
(Phyllis Schlafly)
11 Women, Work, and Social Change
Clerical Workers Unite (Cathy Tuley);
The Real “Norma Rae” Tells Her Story
(Crystal Lee Sutton);
Hard-Hatted Women (Susan Eisenberg);
Organizing the Farm Workers (Jessie Lopez De La Cruz);
Women on Welfare (Johnnie Tillmon)
Photo Essay
12 Sexuality and the Body
Sex and the Single Girl (Helen Gurley Brown);
Coming Out (Margaret Cruikshank);
Sex and Sports (Mariah Burton Nelson);
Becoming La Mujer (Marissa Navarro);
Women and Disabilities (Nancy Mairs);
The Voice of an Anorexic (Abra Fortune Chernik);
The Vagina Monologues (Eve Ensler)
13 Backlash and Progress
The Backlash Against Feminism (Susan Faludi);
A Women of Conscience (Anita Hill);
Date Rape: Hysteria or Epidemic? (Katie Roiphe);
Who Stole Feminism? (Christina Hoff Sommers);
Equal Protection Under the Law: United States v. Virginia;
A Third Wave Feminist Manifesta (Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards);
Global Feminism (Charlotte Bunch);
The Borderlands (Gloria Anzaldua)
Suggestions for Further Reading