Rethinking American Women's Activism - Paperback

by Annelise Orleck (Author)

Rethinking American Women's Activism traces intersecting streams of feminist activism from the nineteenth century to the present.

This enthralling narrative brings to life an array of women activists from the abolition, suffrage, labor, consumer, civil rights, welfare rights, farm workers', and low-wage workers' movements, and from campus fights against sexual violence, #MeToo, the Red for Ed teacher's strikes, and Black Lives Matter. Multi-cultural, multi-racial and cross-class in its framing, the text enables readers to understand the impact of women's activism. It highlights how feminism has flourished through much of the past century within social movements that have too often been treated as completely separate.Weaving the personal with the political, Annelise Orleck vividly evokes the events and people who participated in our era's most far-reaching social revolutions. This new edition has been updated to include recent scholarship and developments in women's activism from 2011 into the 2020s.

This book is a perfect introduction to the subject for anyone interested in women's history and social movements.

Author Biography

Annelise Orleck is Professor of History and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States (1995, 2017); Soviet Jewish Americans (2001); Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (2005, 2023); and We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages (2018).