To those of you I haven't replied to personally, thanks for your response to my query on texts for a course on women and social and political change. The large number of sources suggested by members of the list certainly confirmed my premise for the course: that women have indeed been the primary agents and agitants in movements for social and political change in U.S. history. When I have reviewed all your suggestions I will post my syllabus on the women's studies list at the U. of Maryland. Until then (and it will surely take me awhile) here is a list of the texts you collectively recommended, posted in the order I received them:
Ida B. Wells-Barnett,A Red Record
Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power
Sally Belfrage, Freedom Summer
Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes
Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat
Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine (a bio of Fannie Lou Hamer)
JoAnn Robinson, The Montgomery Bu Boycott and the Women Who Started It
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham Righteous Discontent
Joanne Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver
Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public
Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter
Caroline Kirkland the Helping Hand (1853)
Paula Baker, The Moral Frameworks of Public Life
Judith Gardiner,Provoking Agents
Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
Kathleen Blee, Women of the Klan (To Nancy Marie Roberton, who sent this title with the suggestion that I include "unpopular" women: I have used Blee's book in an oral history class. My students were fascinated with it, esp. since it deals with Klan women in Indiana and I teach in Oxford, OH, which is less than 10 miles from the Indiana border!)
Anne Scott,Natural Allies
Estelle Freedman, Their Sisters' Keepers
Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence
Shirely Yee, Black Women Abolitionists
Kerber, Kessler-Harris and Sklar, U.S. History as Women's History
Amy Swerdlow, "Ladies Day at the Capitol" Femisnist Studies8(1982)
Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace As a Women's Issue
Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream
Nancy Shoemaker, Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women
Dolores Janiewski, "Learning to Live Just Like White Folks" in Gendered Domains
Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman (I'm using this now in a Women's Hst survey)
Darlene Clark Hine, ed. Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands
Bettina Aptheker,Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex and Class. .
KK Campbell, ed.,Man Cannot Speak for Her
" Anything by Voltairine de Cleyre"
Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class
Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South
Ruiz, Unequal Sisters
DeHart and Mathews, Sex, Gender and the ERA?
Harriet Jacobs,Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Frances Harper, A Brighter Day Coming
Assata Shakur, Assata
As for films, suggestions included: "Hester Street," "Rebel Hearts," "The Naked "Some American Feminists," "A Place of Rage," "Crusader for Justice
Again, thanks for your help. I'm sure both my students and I will benefit from your collective wisdom. I always remind them that "what we can't do alone we will surely accomplish together!"
Susan A. Eacker
Dept. of History
Miami University of Ohio
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