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.