Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights - by Ellen Carol DuBois (Paperback)

About the Book

In recent decades, the woman suffrage movement has taken on new significance for women's history. This collection traces the suffrage story against the backdrop of changing attitudes to politics, citizenship and gender, and the resultant tensions over sociological issues. Author Ellen Carol DuBois has been a central figure in spurring renewed interest in woman suffrage.

Book Synopsis

An essential examination of the woman suffrage movement

In recent decades, the woman suffrage movement has taken on new significance for women's history. Ellen Carol DuBois has been a central figure in spurring renewed interest in woman suffrage and in realigning the debates which surround it.

This volume gathers DuBois' most influential articles on woman suffrage and includes two new essays. The collection traces the trajectory of the suffrage story against the backdrop of changing attitudes to politics, citizenship and gender, and the resultant tensions over such issues as slavery and abolitionism, sexuality and religion, and class and politics. Connecting the essays is DuBois' belief in the continuing importance of political and reform movements as an object of historical inquiry and a force in shaping gender.

The book, which includes a highly original reconceptualization of women's rights from Mary Wollstonecraft to contemporary abortion and gay rights activists and a historiographical overview of suffrage scholarship, provides an excellent overview of the movement, including international as well as U.S. suffragism, in the context of women's broader concerns for social and political justice.

Review Quotes

"DuBois has written a powerful testament to the importance of being radical--of igniting revolutionary change with the social dynamite of claims to race and gender justice."-- "In These Times"

"The anthology is an excellent reader... stimulating, for together {the essays} become more than the sum of their parts...offering the reader an overview of the subject and a chronicle of the development of the field of U.S. women's history over the past twenty years."-- "Women's Review of Books"

About the Author

Ellen Carol DuBois is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author and editor of numerous books, including Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage.