An Unfinished Battle: American Women 1848-1865 (Young Oxford History of Women in the United States) - Hardcover

Sigerman, Harriet

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9780195081107: An Unfinished Battle: American Women 1848-1865 (Young Oxford History of Women in the United States)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195081102 ISBN 13: 9780195081107

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1994

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The year 1848 was a year of revolution. In Europe, the German philosopher of communism Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto, the British philosopher of liberalism John Stuart Mill published The Principles of Political Economy, and a small number of communitarian socialist women in France demanded their own political rights in the midst of an uprising that overthrew the French monarchy. In the United States, several determined women in upstate New York called a convention, attended by almost three hundred women and men, which drew up a declaration modeled on the 1776 Declaration of Independence. Just as that Declaration cited the injustice of the British crown, the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls detailed the wrongs of gender inequality in this country. The convention and the Declaration marked the formal beginning of the women's rights movement in the United States.
The tumultuous middle years of the 19th century were times of increasing political activism by women's groups, and both antislavery agitators and supporters of slavery. These years also saw the geographical expansion of white settlement across the continent. Formerly Spanish and Mexican territory was annexed, gold was discovered in California, cities and industries grew in the Northeast, and "king cotton" and the grip of racial slavery extended from the deep South to the near Southwest. It was a time of momentous change and upheaval as sectional interest became so bitterly incompatible that it led to the catastrophe of Civil War.
How women participated in these events forms the story of this book. The voices of women--pioneers and displaced Native Americans, slaves and slaveholders, industrial wage earners and the wives and daughters of capitalist entrepreneurs, political radicals and demure conservatives, women who served the Union and those who aided the Confederacy--resonate through these pages. Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton--their stories and others tell of the setbacks and the triumphs as women continued to fight An Unfinished Battle for equal rights for all.

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About the Author:

Harriet Sigerman is a historian and freelance writer who has contributed to European Immigrant Women in the United States: A Biographical Dictionary and The Young Reader's Companion to American History. She has been a research assistant to Henry Steele Commager at Amherst College and for the Stanton-Anthony Papers at the University of Massachusetts.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 7 Up?An Unfinished Battle discusses the lives of slaves, women on the frontier, and early factory workers as well as the rise of educated females breaking ground in fields such as medicine and literature. Sigerman shows how the women's movement grew and its connections to both the abolition and temperance movements. The last chapter discusses women and the Civil War. In New Paths to Power, Smith discusses the effect of emerging technologies and the study of domestic science on women in the home. She contrasts the role of middle-class women with that of immigrants and other poor people who did domestic, factory, and other manual work. Discussing how opportunities for education and employment widened after the turn of the century, she highlights several figures such as Jane Addams and Isadora Duncan. She also focuses on the suffrage movement, ending with the passage of the 19th amendment. Both authors lay out the story of women's lives and accomplishments within the context of political and social history. The books are clearly written and cover a breadth of material in an interesting and understandable style. Black-and-white historical drawings and photographs significantly enrich the texts. While there have been a number of other titles on women in America, none includes the detail provided here. Very useful for students, but interesting reading for personal study as well.?Jane Gardner Connor, South Carolina State Library, Columbia
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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