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This is the story of the Rankins, a family that embodied the risk
and ambition that transformed America. John Rankin arrived in the
West chasing the adventure of gold mining but soon turned to
ranching and building in the new town of Missoula. There he met
Olive Pickering, who had left New Hampshire in 1878 to become a
teacher and seek a husband on the American frontier. John and
Olive's children continued to demonstrate their parent's ambition
and nerve. Their son became one of the biggest landowners in the
country, one of the first personal injury lawyers, and a crusader
against railroads and mining. Jeannette became the first woman in a
national legislature, voted against two world wars and led marches
protesting the Vietnam War. As a dean, Harriet helped develop the
modern co-educational university. Edna traveled the world
advocating for birth control. The Rankins faced both national
adulation and condemnation for the choices they made. Their family
story concerns independence and education, activism, the boundaries
created by gender, religious choices, and the changing meaning of
the West.
In 1935, the United States Congress began employing large numbers
of American artists through the Works Progress
Administration-fiction writers, dramatists, photographers, poster
artists, painters, sculptors, muralists, wood carvers, composers
and choreographers, as well as journalists, historians and
researchers. Secretary of Commerce and supervisor of the WPA Harry
Hopkins hailed it a ""renascence of the arts, if we can call it a
rebirth when it has no precedent in our history."" Women were
eminently involved, creating a wide variety of art and craft,
interweaving their own stories with those of other women whose
lives might not otherwise have been the subject of artistic
attention. This book takes a look at the thousands of women artists
who worked for the U.S. government, the historical and social
worlds they described and the collaborative depiction of womanhood
they created at a pivotal moment in American history.
Winifred Black worked in journalism from 1888 to 1936, often
writing under the pseudonym Annie Laurie. Her work appeared in the
Hearst papers - especially the San Francisco Examiner - and in
fifty additional newspapers weekly through syndication. Black wrote
10,000 short pieces, as well as three books, a nonfiction oeuvre
that combined quasi-autobiographical details with characters and
scenes to provide cultural analysis for a nationwide audience. She
wrote about the realities facing modern women - their work, their
marriages and divorces, the violence they endured, their need for
independence. Contemporary praise for Black named her ""the world's
most famous feature writer"" and ""one of the world's most
successful reporters,"" while her critics affixed the pejorative
labels ""stunt girl"" and ""sob sister."" This study covers her
influential career and gives the first serious attention to her
journalism and nonfiction.
From 1880 to 1920, the first truly national visual culture
developed in the United States as a result of the completion of the
Pacific Railroad. At that time, a new level of invention,
reproduction, and distribution of all kinds of images was taking
shape. Women, especially young and beautiful ones, found new lives
shaped by their participation in that visual culture. This rapidly
evolving age left behind the cult of domesticity that reigned in
the nineteenth century to give rise to new types of women based on
a single feature--a type of hair, skin, dress, or prop--including
the Gibson Girl, the sob sister, the stunt girl, the hoochy-coochy
dancer, and the bearded lady. Exploring both high and low culture,
from the circus and film to newspapers and magazines, this
intriguing volume examines depictions of women at the dawn of mass
media, depictions that would remain influential throughout the
twentieth century.
The fall of 2018 saw an unprecedented number of women enter
Congress, changing estimates of how long it might take to achieve
equal representation. For the first time, women candidates employed
techniques honed by America's political families, which have helped
women enter the sphere of politics since as early as 1916. Drawing
on extensive research and conversations with successful women
politicians, this book offers a history and investigation of the
political opportunities provided to women through familial
connections. Family networks have a long history of enabling women
to run for political office, and have provided much for the latest
group of candidates to emulate.
In the years from 1880 to 1940, considered the glory days of the
American circus, between a third and a half of the cast members
were women, a large group of very visible American workers whose
story has never been told. In this book, drawing on diverse sources
such as diaries, autobiographies, newspaper accounts, films,
posters, and route books, the authors first consider the popular
media's presentation of these performers as unnatural and
scandalous--as well as romantic and thrilling. The book next moves
to the stories told by circus women, which contradict and
complicate other versions of their lives. Across America in those
years an array of acts featured women, such as tableaux, freak
shows, girlie shows, tiger acts, and aerial performance, all
involving special skills and means of communication with an
audience. By beginning with representations of women as circus
performers and then moving to the performances themselves, this
book offers a unique and fascinating view of what it meant to be an
American woman at work.
Past biographies, histories, and government documents have ignored
Alice Paul's contribution to the women's suffrage movement, but
this groundbreaking study scrupulously fills the gap in the
historical record. Masterfully framed by an analysis of Paul's
non-violent and visual rhetorical strategies, Alice Paul and the
American Suffrage Campaign narrates the remarkable story of the
first person to picket the White House, the first to attempt a
national political boycott, the first to burn the president in
effigy, and the first to lead a successful campaign of
non-violence. Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene also
chronicle other dramatic techniques that Paul deftly used to gain
publicity for the suffrage movement. Stunningly woven into the
narrative are accounts of many instances in which women were in
physical danger. Rather than avoid discussion of Paul's
imprisonment, hunger strikes, and forced feeding, the authors
divulge the strategies she employed in her campaign. Paul's
controversial approach, the authors assert, was essential in
changing American attitudes toward women's suffrage.
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