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Finalist of the 2023 SHARP History of the Book Prize

Between 1932 and 1958, thousands of children read volumes in the book series Childhood of Famous Americans. With colorful cover art and compelling—and often highly fictionalized—narrative storylines, these biographies celebrated the national virtues and achievements of famous women like Betsy Ross, Louisa May Alcott, and Amelia Earhart. Employing deep archival research, Gregory M. Pfitzer examines the editorial and production choices of the publisher and considers the influence of the series on readers and American culture more broadly.

In telling the story of how female subjects were chosen and what went into writing these histories for young female readers of the time, Pfitzer illustrates how these books shaped children’s thinking and historical imaginations around girlhood using tales from the past. Utilizing documented conversations and disagreements among authors, editors, readers, reviewers, and sales agents at Bobbs-Merrill, “Fame Is Not Just for the Fellas” places the series in the context of national debates around fame, gender, historical memory, and portrayals of children and childhood for a young reading public—charged debates that continue to this day.

Educated, white collar professional women carried the most visible banners of feminism. But working class women were a powerful force in the campaign for gender equality. Dennis A. Deslippe explores how unionized wage-earning women led the struggle to place women's employment rights on the national agenda, decisively influencing both the contemporary labor movement and second-wave feminism. 

Deslippe's account unravels a complex history of how labor leaders accommodated and resisted working women's demands for change. Through case studies of unions representing packinghouse and electrical workers, Deslippe explains why gender equality emerged as an issue in the 1960s and how the activities of wage-earning women in and outside of their unions shaped the content of the debate. He also traces the fault lines separating working-class women--who sought gender equality within the parameters of unionist principles such as seniority--from middle-class women--who sought an equal rights amendment that would guarantee an abstract equality for all women. 

Thoughtful and detailed, "Rights, Not Roses" offers a new look at the complexities of working-class feminism.

Christine de Pizan was born in Italy and moved to the French court of Charles V when she was four years old. She led a life of learning, stimulated by her reading and by her drive to engage with the cultural and political issues of her day. As a young widow she sought to support her family through writing, and she broke new ground by pursuing a life as an author and self-publisher, producing an astonishingly large and varied body of work. Her books, owned and read by some of the most important figures of her day, addressed politics, philosophy, government, ethics, the conduct of war, autobiography and biography, and religious subjects.

The God of Love’s Letter (1399), Christine de Pizan’s first defense of women, is arguably her most succinct statement about gender. It also rebukes the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose and anticipates Christine’s City of Ladies. The Tale of the Rose (1402) responds to the growth in chivalric orders for the defense of women by arguing that women, not men, should choose members of the “Order of the Rose.” Both poems are freshly edited here from their earliest manuscripts and each is newly translated into English.
 

Commemorating the centennial of women receiving the right to vote in the United States in 1920, "We Must Be Fearless": The Woman Suffrage Movement in Indiana by historian Anita Morgan examines the struggles and triumphs of a myriad of Hoosier women-black and white, rich and poor, urban and rural-who banded together to seek equal rights with men at the ballot box. The story of the Indiana women's suffrage movement can be divided into three stages. The first began with the first woman's rights association meeting in 1851 and ended in 1869. Hoosier women held yearly meetings and agreed upon basic goals that included not only suffrage, but also equal pay for equal work, changes to married women's property laws, and greater employment opportunities and access to the professions. Most members of this early group put their efforts aside during the Civil War to devote their time to nursing and other war work. The exception to this was Lizzie Bunnell, who published The Mayflower from her home in Peru, Indiana. Bunnell's bi-monthly newspaper supported both the Union and woman's rights and is believed to be the only woman's rights newspaper published during the war. Following the Civil War, the fight for woman's rights resumed, but with a new, almost singular focus on suffrage. This second phase of woman's suffrage work in Indiana began in 1869 when the Indiana Woman's Rights Association reformed with a new name-the Indiana Woman's Suffrage Association. The association aligned itself with Lucy Stone's American Woman Suffrage Association, a national group that focused more on gaining the vote and less on social issues than the National Woman Suffrage Association led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The Indianapolis-based Equal Suffrage Society joined the fight in 1878. The combined power of these groups pushed the Indiana General Assembly to the brink of woman suffrage in 1881-83, but in the end the fear that women would vote as one in favor of temperance legislation got in the way of the passage of the state woman's suffrage amendment. The final phase of the suffrage movement in Indiana started with the 1890s as many Hoosier women worked with national women's groups or worked on local and state progressive reforms aside from or in addition to their work on suffrage. After sporadic failed attempts to push through suffrage in this era, the joint efforts of the Woman's Franchise League and the nonpartisan Legislative Council of Indiana Women, combined with a strong and growing acceptance of woman's suffrage at the national level (in part as a result of women's work during World War I), once again pushed Indiana to the brink of woman's suffrage. The Indiana legislature passed the Woman's Suffrage Act of 1917, which gave women partial suffrage in the November elections that year and passed the first reading of the Beardsley Full Suffrage Amendment. This meant that Indiana women would achieve full suffrage in 1919 if the amendment also passed that legislative session. As women across the state registered to vote, William Knight filed suit against women voting and he won. Hoosier women did not get to vote in the elections that November and had to wait for passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to gain full voting rights.

“What the women I write about have in common is that they are all rebels with a cause, and I see myself represented in their mirror,” asserts Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Looking back across a career in which she has written novels, poems, and scholarly works about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, la Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, the murdered women of Juárez, the Salem witches, and Chicana lesbian feminists, Gaspar de Alba realized that what links these historically and socially diverse figures is that they all fall into the category of “bad women,” as defined by their place, culture, and time, and all have been punished as well as remembered for rebelling against the “frames” imposed on them by capitalist patriarchal discourses.

In [Un]Framing the “Bad Woman,” Gaspar de Alba revisits and expands several of her published articles and presents three new essays to analyze how specific brown/female bodies have been framed by racial, social, cultural, sexual, national/regional, historical, and religious discourses of identity—as well as how Chicanas can be liberated from these frames. Employing interdisciplinary methodologies of activist scholarship that draw from art, literature, history, politics, popular culture, and feminist theory, she shows how the “bad women” who interest her are transgressive bodies that refuse to cooperate with patriarchal dictates about what constitutes a “good woman” and that queer/alter the male-centric and heteronormative history, politics, and consciousness of Chicano/Mexicano culture. By “unframing” these bad women and rewriting their stories within a revolutionary frame, Gaspar de Alba offers her compañeras and fellow luchadoras empowering models of struggle, resistance, and rebirth.