The right to cast a ballot from a feminine hand occupied the attention and efforts of hundreds of women for more than a century in the US. In these two volumes, Campbell provides a basic understanding of two processes: the development of the rhetoric used by the women who argued for equal rights, and the constraints and sanctions applied to those women who affronted the norms of society's expectation that true women were seldom seen and never spoke in public. The first volume lays the foundation for the analysis of rhetorical style and content by its fine introduction and by a succession...

Strenuously attacked for their attempts to involve themselves in concerns outside the home, nineteenth-century women reformers soon recognized the need to work for their own rights before they could effectively champion other reformist causes. This book examines the creative response to that challenge. It offers critical analysis of the speeches and writings that set forth the platform and arguments of the early woman's rights movement and guided its development from the 1840s through the early decades of the twentieth century.

Following an introductory overview of the...

From the nation's beginnings, efforts have been made to silence U.S. women. Yet they spoke. This biographical dictionary, the first of two companion volumes, gives their voices new recognition. Selecting thirty-seven key orators, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell provides entries on a diverse group of women. All were ground breakers--suffragists, the first lawyers, ministers, physicians, labor organizers, newspaper editors and publishers, historians, educators, even soldiers.

The volume opens with Campbell's introduction and then provides extensive essays on each of the women included....

This volume, the second of two companion biographical dictionaries, provides extensive entries on 31 women orators active since 1925. It covers women with distinguished political careers, such as Clare Boothe Luce, Frances Perkins, and Ann Willis Richards; women with important scientific careers, such as Rachel Carson and Helen Broinowski Caldicott; and women with religious careers, such as Dorothy Day and Pauli Murray. It includes extraordinary women, such as Helen Keller and Eleanor Roosevelt and women who have been active in the women's movement as well as those, such as Phyllis...