Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
This was first published in 1959 and was one of the first books I read on the history of women. She looked at all varieties of women’s activism including trade unionism, African-American women’s struggle, the middle-class club woman movement, and so on.
Tell me about Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States.
This was first published in 1959 and was one of the first books I read on the history of women. Her approach went far beyond a narrow consideration of how women got the vote at local or federal level. Instead she looked at all varieties of women’s activism including trade unionism, African-American women’s struggle, the middle-class club woman movement, and so on. In so doing she showed how to connect the economic, social, political and cultural dynamics that finally resulted in women obtaining Federal suffrage.
This book was critical because she opened up all these topics and it took about ten years before women began really researching some of the topics that she covered in general, but it was a real eye-opener of a book. She was very much one of the forerunners in that field.
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Jay Kleinberg, author of History of Women in the Americas, shares her book choices on her specialist subject for World History Week and says that abortion will always remain a flashpoint in American politics because so many powerful groups focus on it as a political, rather than a medical issue. She herself worked at a free clinic giving pregnancy and birth control counselling because the Women’s Liberation Movement was very much involved around the issue of abortion. ‘I think that is partially a result of our own age group at the time and the Summer of Love,’ she says.
