An Unfinished Battle: American Women 1848-1865 (Young Oxford History of Women in the United States) - Softcover

Harriet Sigerman is the author of Laborers for Liberty: American Women 1865-1890 and Land of Many Hands: Women in the American West. She holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was a researcher there for the Stanton Anthony Papers. She lives in New Jersey.

Grade 7 Up?An Unfinished Battle discusses the lives of slaves, women on the frontier, and early factory workers as well as the rise of educated females breaking ground in fields such as medicine and literature. Sigerman shows how the women's movement grew and its connections to both the abolition and temperance movements. The last chapter discusses women and the Civil War. In New Paths to Power, Smith discusses the effect of emerging technologies and the study of domestic science on women in the home. She contrasts the role of middle-class women with that of immigrants and other poor people who did domestic, factory, and other manual work. Discussing how opportunities for education and employment widened after the turn of the century, she highlights several figures such as Jane Addams and Isadora Duncan. She also focuses on the suffrage movement, ending with the passage of the 19th amendment. Both authors lay out the story of women's lives and accomplishments within the context of political and social history. The books are clearly written and cover a breadth of material in an interesting and understandable style. Black-and-white historical drawings and photographs significantly enrich the texts. While there have been a number of other titles on women in America, none includes the detail provided here. Very useful for students, but interesting reading for personal study as well.?Jane Gardner Connor, South Carolina State Library, Columbia
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.