Delinquent Daughters explores the gender, class, and racial tensions that fueled campaigns to control female sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Mary Odem looks at these moral reform movements from a national perspective, but she also undertakes a detailed analysis of court records to explore the local enforcement of regulatory legislation in Alameda and Los Angeles Counties in California. From these legal proceedings...

The advent of modern agribusiness irrevocably changed the patterns of life and labor on the American family farm. In Entitled to Power, Katherine Jellison examines midwestern farm women's unexpected response to new labor-saving devices. Federal farm policy at mid-century treated farm women as consumers, not producers. New technologies, as promoted by agricultural extension agents and by home appliance manufacturers, were expected to create separate...

'Provides a compelling argument for Plath's revision of the painful parts of her life--the failed marriage, her anxiety for success, and her ambivalence towards her mother. . . . The reader will feel the tension in the poetry and the life.'Choice '[Examines] Plath's twin goals of becoming a famous poet and a perfect mother. . . . This book's main points are clearly and forcefully argued: that both poems and babies require 'struggle, pain, endless...

Margaret Meuse Clay, who barely escaped a public whipping in the 1760's for preaching without a license; Old Elizabeth, an ex-slave who courageously traveled to the South to preach against slavery in the early nineteenth century; Harriet Livermore, who spoke in front of Congress four times between 1827 and 1844--these are just a few of the extraordinary women profiled in this, the first comprehensive history of female preaching in early America. Drawing...

Over the past two decades, historians have successfully disputedthe notion that American women remained wholly outside the realm of politics until the early twentieth century. Still, a consensus has prevailed that, unlike their Northern counterparts, women of the antebellum South were largely excluded from public life. With this book, Elizabeth Varon effectively challenges such historical assumptions. Using a wide array of sources, she demonstrates...

In The Work of Self-Representation Ivy Schweitzer examines early American poetry through the critical lens of gender. Her concern is not the inclusion of female writers into the canon; rather, she analyzes how the metaphors of "woman" and "feminine" function in Puritan religious and literary discourse to represent both the "otherness" of spiritual experience and the ways in which race and class function to keep the "other" in marginalized positions. Schwetizer...

In the winter of 1972, the first issue of Ms. magazine hit the newsstands. For some activists in the women's movement, the birth of this new publication heralded feminism's coming of age; for others, it signaled the capitulation of the women's movement to crass commercialism. But whatever its critical reception, Ms. quickly gained national success, selling out its first issue in only eight days and becoming a popular icon of the women's movement almost...

Offering fresh insights into the history of labor policy, the New Deal, feminism, and southern politics, Landon Storrs examines the New Deal era of the National Consumers' League, one of the most influential reform organizations of the early twentieth century.Founded in 1899 by affluent women concerned about the exploitation of women wage earners, the National Consumers' League used a strategy of "ethical consumption" to spark a successful movement...

By exploring the intersection of gender and politics in the antebellum North, Michael Pierson examines how antislavery political parties capitalized on the emerging family practices and ideologies that accompanied the market revolution.From the birth of the Liberty party in 1840 through the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, antislavery parties celebrated the social practices of modernizing northern families. In an era of social transformations,...