Wisconsin is known as the home of the Progressive party.  But, in the words of a suffragist as late as 1912, “the last thing a man becomes progressive about is the activities of his wife.”
    In On Wisconsin Women, Genevieve McBride traces women’s work in reform movements in the state’s politics and especially in its press.  Even before Wisconsin became a state in 1848, women’s news and opinions appeared in abolitionist journals and “temperance sheets,” if often anonymously.  But the first paper in Wisconsin published under a woman’s name, however, was boycotted by Milwaukee printers and failed in 1853.
    From the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866 to the state’s historic ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919, Wisconsin women were never at a loss for words nor a newspaper to print them.  Among women who would be heard were Mathilde Fransziska Anneke, Emma Brown, Lavinia Goodell, Emma Bascom, Olympia Brown, Belle Case La Follette, Ada L. James, and Theodora Winton Youmans.  McBride brings their voices vividly to life, in their own words on their lifelong work for woman’s rights.
    Nowhere was “the struggle” fought for so long and so hard as in Wisconsin.  While women elsewhere sang suffrage hymns, women in the Badger State marched to a “fight song” with a familiar tune but sung in their own words—lyrics too long forgotten until now.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, print-centered organizations spread rapidly across the United States, providing more women than ever before with opportunities to participate in public life. While most organizations at the time were run by and for white men, women—both Black and white—were able to reshape their lives and their social worlds through their participation in these institutions.

Organizing Women traces the histories of middle-class women—rural and urban, white and Black, married and unmarried—who used public and private institutions of print to tell their stories, expand their horizons, and further their ambitions. Drawing from a diverse range of examples, Christine Pawley introduces readers to women who ran branch libraries and library schools in Chicago and Madison, built radio empires from their midwestern farms, formed reading clubs, and published newsletters. In the process, we learn about the organizations themselves, from libraries and universities to the USDA extension service and the YWCA, and the ways in which women confronted gender discrimination and racial segregation in the course of their work.