This masterful biography by one of America's foremost historians of women tells the story of Florence Kelley, a leading reformer in the Progressive Era. The book also serves as a political history of the United States during a period of transforming change when women worked to end the abuses of unregulated industrial capitalism. Kelley's story shows how changes in women's public culture combined with changes in men's public culture to produce results that neither could have achieved alone.

In this volume, the first of two, Kathryn Kish Sklar explores the decades between 1830 and 1900, an...

Two epochal developments profoundly influenced the history of the Atlantic world between 1770 and 1870-the rise of women's rights activism and the drive to eliminate chattel slavery. The contributors to this volume, eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines, investigate the intertwining histories of abolitionism and feminism on both sides of the Atlantic during this dynamic century of change. They illuminate the many ways that the two movements developed together and influenced one another. Approaching a wide range of transnational topics, the authors ask how conceptions of slavery and...

Although she is often remembered only as the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, there was a time in Catharine Beecher s life when she was more widely known than any member of her eminent family. A pioneering teacher, a writer on moral and religious topics, and an avid publicist for women s education, her name became a household word in the 1840s because of the enormous success of her Treatise on Domestic Economy. This comprehensive guide to all aspects of domestic self-management was part of her effort to create a female domain from which cultural power could be...

Women reformers in the United States and Germany maintained a brisk dialogue between 1885 and 1933. Drawing on one another's expertise, they sought to alleviate a wide array of social injustices generated by industrial capitalism, such as child labor and the exploitation of women in the workplace. This book presents and interprets documents from that exchange, most previously unknown to historians, which show how these interactions reflected the political cultures of the two nations. On both sides of the Atlantic, women reformers pursued social justice strategies. The documents discussed here...

This outstanding collection of fifteen original essays represents innovative work by some of the most influential scholars in the field of women's history. Covering a broad sweep of history from colonial to contemporary times and ranging over the fields of legal, social, political, and cultural history, this book, according to its editors, 'intrudes into regions of the American historical narrative from which women have been excluded or in which gender relations were not thought to play a part.' State formation, power, and knowledge have not traditionally been understood as the subjects of...

First-hand accounts of one woman's fight to improve working conditions for Americans in the early twentieth century

Competing Kingdoms rethinks the importance of women and religion within U.S. imperial culture from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In an era when the United States was emerging as a world power to challenge the hegemony of European imperial powers, American women missionaries strove to create a new Kingdom of God. They did much to shape a Protestant empire based on American values and institutions. This book examines American women s activism in a broad transnational context. It offers a complex array of engagements with their efforts to provide rich intercultural...

Competing Kingdoms rethinks the importance of women and religion within U.S. imperial culture from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In an era when the United States was emerging as a world power to challenge the hegemony of European imperial powers, American women missionaries strove to create a new Kingdom of God. They did much to shape a Protestant empire based on American values and institutions. This book examines American women s activism in a broad transnational context. It offers a complex array of engagements with their efforts to provide rich intercultural...

For the past hundred years, the social survey has been a major tool of social investigation, and its use has also been linked to social reform. Starting with the landmark surveys of Charles Booth in London and Jane Addams in Chicago, social surveys in both Britain and the Unites States investigated poverty, unemployment and other difficult social conditions. While in Britain there was marked continuity between the early studies of Booth and others, in the US the social survey movement exercised curiously little impact upon empirical social science. This 2001 book traces the history of the...