View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

"In this densely written and tightly argued work, Mead (Northern Michigan Univ.) presents answers to the often asked question of why woman suffrage was accomplished in the US West well before it was in the East."
--"Choice"

"In this superb study . . . Rebecca J. Mead convincingly demonstrates the importance of the region to understanding the success of the national suffrage movement."
--"American Historical Review"

"This concise book is the most complete overview to date of the woman suffrage movement in the American West."
--"The Journal of Arizona History"

"Mead has produced a strong case for western women's well-reasoned, winning plan and has provided a superb foundation for renewed engagement with an important question. My thanks to you, Professor Mead."
--"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society"

"Thanks to Mead's extensive research and careful weighing of evidence, no future scholar will be able to work from the assumption that the East represents the nation in the history of women's enfranchisement. She has laid the critical foundation for a genuinely national history of one of the most important developments in modern America."
--"Reviews in American History"

"Moving beyond the traditional emphasis on the work of radical women to include the larger political and social context, Mead's book makes a strong contribution to our understanding of our history of nineteenth century women, western United States politics, and issues of gender and law."
--"Utah Historical Quarterly"

"Mead...deserves respect for embarking on an ambitious undertaking that necessitated very extensiveresearch which she covered meticulously. She has revisited this significant political transformation with the tools of recent historical scholarship to the fore and contributed constructively to a complex area of modern political history."
--"Australasian Journal of American Studies"

"In this comprehensive estimation, Mead not only answers the question of why western states were ahead of the curve in granting women the vote, but also examines the relationships, often tense, between the local, state, and national suffrage associations as well as with farm, labor and progressive coalitions."
--"Montana: The Magazine of Western History"

"Rebecca Mead has crafted a detailed history of suffrage campaigns in the western states."
-- Karen E. Campbell of Vanderbilt University

"This book should challenge historians of woman suffrage to look more closely at other regions and states. . . . But it is Mead's treatment of a political culture among women with its own history, burdens, crosscurrents, and innovators that should have the wider impact."
--"Journal of American History"

"Rebecca Mead's new synthesis finally de-mystifies the West's 'radical and fundamental challenge to the exisitng political status of women'."
--"Western Historical Quarterly"

By the end of 1914, almost every Western state and territory had enfranchised its female citizens in the greatest innovation in participatory democracy since Reconstruction. These Western successes stand in profound contrast to the East, where few women voted until after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and the South, where African-American men were systematically disenfranchised. How did thefrontier West leap ahead of the rest of the nation in the enfranchisement of the majority of its citizens?

In this provocative new study, Rebecca J. Mead shows that Western suffrage came about as the result of the unsettled state of regional politics, the complex nature of Western race relations, broad alliances between suffragists and farmer-labor-progressive reformers, and sophisticated activism by Western women. She highlights suffrage racism and elitism as major problems for the movement, and places special emphasis on the political adaptability of Western suffragists whose improvisational tactics earned them progress.

A fascinating story, previously ignored, How the Vote was Won reintegrates this important region into national suffrage history and helps explain the ultimate success of this radical reform.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

"In this densely written and tightly argued work, Mead (Northern Michigan Univ.) presents answers to the often asked question of why woman suffrage was accomplished in the US West well before it was in the East."
--"Choice"

"In this superb study . . . Rebecca J. Mead convincingly demonstrates the importance of the region to understanding the success of the national suffrage movement."
--"American Historical Review"

"This concise book is the most complete overview to date of the woman suffrage movement in the American West."
--"The Journal of Arizona History"

"Mead has produced a strong case for western women's well-reasoned, winning plan and has provided a superb foundation for renewed engagement with an important question. My thanks to you, Professor Mead."
--"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society"

"Thanks to Mead's extensive research and careful weighing of evidence, no future scholar will be able to work from the assumption that the East represents the nation in the history of women's enfranchisement. She has laid the critical foundation for a genuinely national history of one of the most important developments in modern America."
--"Reviews in American History"

"Moving beyond the traditional emphasis on the work of radical women to include the larger political and social context, Mead's book makes a strong contribution to our understanding of our history of nineteenth century women, western United States politics, and issues of gender and law."
--"Utah Historical Quarterly"

"Mead...deserves respect for embarking on an ambitious undertaking that necessitated very extensiveresearch which she covered meticulously. She has revisited this significant political transformation with the tools of recent historical scholarship to the fore and contributed constructively to a complex area of modern political history."
--"Australasian Journal of American Studies"

"In this comprehensive estimation, Mead not only answers the question of why western states were ahead of the curve in granting women the vote, but also examines the relationships, often tense, between the local, state, and national suffrage associations as well as with farm, labor and progressive coalitions."
--"Montana: The Magazine of Western History"

"Rebecca Mead has crafted a detailed history of suffrage campaigns in the western states."
-- Karen E. Campbell of Vanderbilt University

"This book should challenge historians of woman suffrage to look more closely at other regions and states. . . . But it is Mead's treatment of a political culture among women with its own history, burdens, crosscurrents, and innovators that should have the wider impact."
--"Journal of American History"

"Rebecca Mead's new synthesis finally de-mystifies the West's 'radical and fundamental challenge to the exisitng political status of women'."
--"Western Historical Quarterly"

By the end of 1914, almost every Western state and territory had enfranchised its female citizens in the greatest innovation in participatory democracy since Reconstruction. These Western successes stand in profound contrast to the East, where few women voted until after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and the South, where African-American men were systematically disenfranchised. How did thefrontier West leap ahead of the rest of the nation in the enfranchisement of the majority of its citizens?

In this provocative new study, Rebecca J. Mead shows that Western suffrage came about as the result of the unsettled state of regional politics, the complex nature of Western race relations, broad alliances between suffragists and farmer-labor-progressive reformers, and sophisticated activism by Western women. She highlights suffrage racism and elitism as major problems for the movement, and places special emphasis on the political adaptability of Western suffragists whose improvisational tactics earned them progress.

A fascinating story, previously ignored, How the Vote was Won reintegrates this important region into national suffrage history and helps explain the ultimate success of this radical reform.

At the age of seventeen, Rebecca Mead read Middlemarch for the first time, and has read it again every five years since, each time interpreting and discovering it anew. In The Road to Middlemarch she writes passionately about her relationship to this remarkable, much-loved Victorian novel, and shows how we can live richer and more fulfilling lives through our profound engagement with great literary works. Published when George Eliot was fifty-one, Middlemarch has at its centre one of literature's most compelling and ill-fated marriages, and some of the most tenderly drawn characters. Its vast canvas incorporates the lives of ordinary people and their most intimate struggles. Virginia Woolf famously described it as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people', and Mead explores how the ambitions, dreams and attachments of its characters teach us to value the limitations of our everyday lives. Interweaving readings of Middlemarch with an investigation of George Eliot's unconventional, inspiring life and Mead's reflections on her own youth, relationships and marriage, this is a sensitive work of deep reading and biography, for every lover of literature who cares about why we read books and how they read us.

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors-D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet-and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors-D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet-and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

A "New Yorker" writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--"Middlemarch"--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories.
Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's "Middlemarch," regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread "Middlemarch." The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.
In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, "My Life in Middlemarch" takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, "My Life in Middlemarch" is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.

"From the Hardcover edition."

When the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead relocated to her birth city, London, with her family in the summer of 2018, she was both fleeing the political situation in America and seeking to expose her son to a wider world. With a keen sense of what she'd given up as she left New York, her home of thirty years, she tried to knit herself into the fabric of a changed London. The move raised poignant questions about place: What does it mean to leave the place you have adopted as home and country? And what is the value and cost of uprooting yourself? In a deft mix of memoir and reportage, drawing on literature and art, recent and ancient history, and the experience of encounters with individuals, environments and landscapes in New York City and in England, Mead artfully explores themes of identity, nationality and inheritance. She recounts her time in the coastal town of Weymouth, where she grew up; her dizzying first years in New York where she broke into journalism; the rich process of establishing a new home for her dual-national son in London. Along the way, she gradually reckons with the complex legacy of her parents. Home/Land is a stirring inquiry into how to be present where we are, while never forgetting where we have been.

When the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead relocated to her birth city, London, with her family in the summer of 2018, she was both fleeing the political situation in America and seeking to expose her son to a wider world. With a keen sense of what she'd given up as she left New York, her home of thirty years, she tried to knit herself into the fabric of a changed London. The move raised poignant questions about place: What does it mean to leave the place you have adopted as home and country? And what is the value and cost of uprooting yourself? In a deft mix of memoir and reportage, drawing on literature and art, recent and ancient history, and the experience of encounters with individuals, environments and landscapes in New York City and in England, Mead artfully explores themes of identity, nationality and inheritance. She recounts her time in the coastal town of Weymouth, where she grew up; her dizzying first years in New York where she broke into journalism; the rich process of establishing a new home for her dual-national son in London. Along the way, she gradually reckons with the complex legacy of her parents. Home/Land is a stirring inquiry into how to be present where we are, while never forgetting where we have been.

Astutely observed and deftly witty, One Perfect Day masterfully mixes investigative journalism and social commentary to explore the workings of the wedding industry-an industry that claims to be worth $160 billion to the U.S. economy and which has every interest in ensuring that the American wedding becomes ever more lavish and complex. Taking us inside the workings of the wedding industry-including the swelling ranks of professional event planners, department stores with their online registries, the retailers and manufacturers of bridal gowns, and the Walt Disney Company and its Fairy Tale Weddings program-New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead skillfully holds the mirror up to the bride's deepest hopes and fears about her wedding day, revealing that for better or worse, the way we marry is who we are.