Rethinking American Women's Activism traces intersecting streams of feminist activism from the nineteenth century to the present.
This enthralling narrative brings to life an array of women activists from the abolition, suffrage, labor, consumer, civil rights, welfare rights, farm workers’, and low-wage workers’ movements, and from campus fights against sexual violence, #MeToo, the Red for Ed teacher’s strikes, and Black Lives Matter. Multi-cultural, multi-racial and cross-class in its framing, the text enables readers to understand the impact of women's activism. It highlights how feminism has flourished through much of the past century within social movements that have too often been treated as completely separate.Weaving the personal with the political, Annelise Orleck vividly evokes the events and people who participated in our era's most far-reaching social revolutions. This new edition has been updated to include recent scholarship and developments in women’s activism from 2011 into the 2020s.
This book is a perfect introduction to the subject for anyone interested in women’s history and social movements.
Prologue: Reflecting on the Wave Metaphor and the Myth of Monolithic Feminism
Chapter 1: Rethinking the So-Called First Wave - An Extremely Brief History of Women's Rights Activism in the U.S. Before 1920
Chapter 2: Civil Rights, Labor Feminism, and Mother Activism from 1920 through the 1940s
Chapter 3: Varieties of Feminism in a Conservative Age
Chapter 4: Equality NOW! - Feminism and the Law
Chapter 5: Raising Consciousness, Venting Anger, Finding Sisterhood: "The Revolution is WHat is Happening in Every Woman's Mind"
Chapter 6: Women's Movements for Redistributive and Social Justice: Other Faces of Radical Feminism
Chapter 7: Lesbian Lives, Lesbian Rights, Lesbian Feminism
Chapter 8: Anti-Feminist Backlash and Feminism Reborn: The 1970s through 2013
Biography
Annelise Orleck is Professor of History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States (1995, 2017); Soviet Jewish Americans (2001); Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (2005, 2023); and We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages (2018).
