Women's Rights in the United States

Women's Rights in the United States: A History in Documents uses a diverse collection of documents--including manifestoes, letters, diaries, cartoons, broadsides, legal and court records, poems, satires, advertisements, petitions, photographs, leaflets, maps, posters, autobiographies, and newspapers--to examine major themes in the history of women's rights and women's rights movements in the U.S. The documents encompass the experiences of women from a wide range of racial, ethnic, class, economic, sexual, marital, and social groups. The book covers such topics as organized social movements; changing definitions of rights and different women's access to rights; divisions among women within women's rights movements; global contexts for women's rights activism; and the question of what it means for women and men to be "equal." Each chapter includes an introductory essay, and each document has a headnote or long caption. A picture essay illuminates how both suffragists and anti-suffragists employed cartooning to articulate their political positions.