"Tis woman's strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice," wrote Anna Julia Cooper, a nineteenth-century African American abolitionist, teacher, and novelist. Argu-ing that the voices of women still need to be heard, the editors of this comprehensive collection have assembled a diverse selection of writings to illustrate the daily lives of ordinary and extraordinary women and the historical significance of their thoughts and deeds.

Here are women who are shapers of history, as well as its victims. In diaries, letters, speeches, songs, petitions, essays, photographs, and cartoons they describe, rejoice, exhort, complain, advertise, and joke, revealing women's role as community builders in every time and locale and registering their emergence into the public spheres of political, social, and economic life. The documents also demonstrate the value of gender analysis, for women's differences--in age, race, sexual orientation, class, geographical or ethnic origin, abilities or disabilities, and values--are shown to be as important as their commonalities.

Volume 1, which comprises 153 selections, opens with a Navajo origin myth and presents Native American, Hispanic, African, and Euro-American women from the sixteenth century through the Civil War. Both volumes include section introductions that set the historical stage and comment on the significance of the selections.

At the beginning of the twentieth century it was still necessary for women to ask lawmakers, "Are women persons?" The rights and treatment of women in their homes, workplaces, and government were issues that men in power often preferred to ignore. But women refused to remain silent. This volume of Second to None, like volume 1, presents a multiplicity of voices, demonstrating that there is not a representative American woman, but many women worth remembering.

Here are women who are shapers of history, as well as its victims. In diaries, letters, speeches, songs, petitions, essays, photographs, and cartoons they describe, rejoice, exhort, complain, advertise, and joke, revealing women's role as community builders in every time and locale and registering their emergence into the public spheres of political, social, and economic life. The documents also demonstrate the value of gender analysis, for women's differences--in age, race, sexual orientation, class, geographical or ethnic origin, abilities or disabilities, and values--are shown to be as important as their commonalities.

Volume 2 contains 122 selections, ranging from a tract by Elizabeth Cady Stanton to the testimony of Anita Hill. Both volumes include section introductions that set the historical stage and comment on the significance of the selections.