This issue launches in March, which is “Women’s History Month.” For suggestions for activities during March, go to the National Women’s History Project site:
In addition, The History Channel has a special feature listing its March programming on women:
http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/womenhist/
Here’s a Website that I just discovered – I’m sure that many of you are ahead of me. It’s “FREE”, Federal Resources for Educational Excellence, a working group formed in 1997 by 30 Federal agencies to make hundreds of Federally supported teaching and learning resources easier to find. New teaching and learning resources are added each month. For Women’s History Month, they have an especially valuable page:
http://www.ed.gov/free/w-history.html
Heck – even Census Bureau has a special “Facts and Figures” page for Women’s History Month:
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2003/cb03ff03.html
Now I’ll get down to listing some additional resources that may provide background for this issue.
Books: Surveys and Broader Studies:
Balser, Diane. Sisterhood and Solidarity: Feminism and Labor in Modern Times. Boston: South End Press, 1987. A lively collection of essays studying women as activities in American from the 18th century to the present.
Berkin, Carol Ruth, and Mary Beth Norton. Women of America: A History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1979.
Cott, Nancy F., ed. No Small Courage: A History Of Women In The United States. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. With chapters provided by several distinguished scholars.
Evans, Sara M. Born For Liberty: A History Of Women In America. New York: Free Press; Toronto: Collier Macmillan, 1991.
Flexner, Eleanor. Century Of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement In The United States. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975. This pioneering work is now available in a Belknap paperback (1996).
Kerber, Linda K., and Jane Sherron De Hart. Women's America: Refocusing The Past. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. This is now in its 6th edition (originally published in 1995) – a rewarding compendium of essays, source documents, and illustrations.
Lucey, Donna M. I Dwell In Possibility: Women Build A Nation, 1600-1920. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2001. A good pictorial work.
Scott, Anne Firor. Natural Allies: Women's Associations In American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, c1991.
_____, and Andrew MacKay Scott. One Half The People: The Fight For Woman Suffrage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, c1982.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. History of Woman Suffrage. 6 vols. Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1985. A reprint of the monumental work begun by Stanton and Anthony, with the first volume published in 1887. Ida Harper prepared the last two volumes, which bring the series through events in 1920.
Wald, Carol. Myth America: Picturing Women, 1865-1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975.
Printed Collections of Documents and Documentary Histories:
Beer, Janet, Anne-Marie Ford, and Katherine Joslin. American Feminism: Key Source Documents, 1848-1920. London; New York: Routledge, 2003.
Cott, Nancy F., ed. Root Of Bitterness : Documents Of The Social History Of American Women. Boston : Northeastern University Press, 1996.
Cullen-DuPont, Kathryn. American Women Activists' Writings: An Anthology,
1637-2002. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002.
Frost-Knappman, Elizabeth, and Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, eds. Women's
Suffrage in America: An Eyewitness History. New York: Facts on File,
1992
Keetley, Dawn, and John Pettegrew, eds. Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism. Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1997-
Langley, Winston E., and Vivian C. Fox. Women's Rights in the United States: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998. Good source book of documents and commentaries spanning three centuries.
Moynihan, Ruth Barnes, Cynthia Russett, and Laurie Crumpacker. Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993
Norton, Mary Beth, and Ruth M. Major Problems in American Women's History: Documents and Essays. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1996.
Skinner, Ellen, ed. Women and the National Experience: Primary Sources in American History. New York: Longman, 2003.
Woloch, Nancy, comp. Early American Women: A Documentary History,
1600-1900. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002.
Printed Reference works:
Encyclopedia of Women in American History. Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference, 2002.
Cullen-DuPont, Kathryn. The Encyclopedia of Women's History in
America. New York: Facts on File, 1996.
Hewitt, Nancy A., ed. A Companion to American Women's History. Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.
Mankiller, Wilma, et al., eds. The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998.
Notable American Women, 1607-1950; A Biographical Dictionary. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 5 vols. 1971- 2004. This wonderful series began publication in 1981 with three volumes edited by Edward and Janet Wilson. Since then, there have been two supplementary volumes, Notable American Women : The Modern Period (1980) and Notable American Women : A Biographical Dictionary Completing The Twentieth Century (2004. Try to find a library where this is available – trust me, you won’t believe that something from your library’s reference shelves can be so much fun.
Opdycke, Sandra. The Routledge Historical Atlas of Women in America. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Strom, Sharon Hartman. Women's Rights. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood Press, 2003. A good guide with historical introductions, documents, and bibliographies.
Websites:
There’s so much good material on the Web (together with a lot of junk, as we all know) for the study of American women that I know I’ll omit some worthy candidates. My apologies if I leave out any of your favorites.
You might want to start with the “Woman-related Websites” for the study of history, part of the broader Women's Studies / Women's Issues Resource Sites, which is just great:
http://research.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/links_arts.html#hist
Or you can return to our old friend, American Memory at the Library of
Congress Website. “American Women” is one of the Library of
Congress’s “Gateway” pages leading to collections relating
to various subjects. Includes Webcasts by Library curators and other scholars:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/index.php
Be sure to look at “One Hundred Years Toward Suffrage: An Overview” which looks at efforts toward suffrage divided into three historical time periods: 1776-1850, 1851-1899, and 1900-1920.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfwhtml/vfwtl.html
And "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920, contains
portraits, cartoons, photographs, and a time line.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfwhtml/vfwhome.html
Thomson Gale’s free Women’s History Website provides useful
segments from various Gale reference tools as well as aids to classroom
teaching of the subject: You’ll find the “biographies”
section especially useful
http://www.gale.com/free_resources/whm/
University of Pennsylvania’s “Celebration of Women” Website provides an ever-growing collection of fulltext versions of important women’s writings. Check out this site – and keep it bookmarked to see what they add: You can search by specific or generate lists by period or country. It also contains links to biographical sketches and texts at other sites:
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/
Houghton Mifflin’s online Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History will also come in handy:
http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/women/ html/wh_000106_entries.htm
Jone Johnson Lewis’s guide to Women’s History for about.com is well worth looking at. Be sure to take a look at all of the links and sub-links – but be warned that you’ll have to tunnel through pop-up ads, and you’ll find that many of the links don’t yet lead to anything::
http://womenshistory.about.com/
Wikipedia has a brief but solid entry on American women’s history that may be helpful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_the_United_States
PBS’s Website for the Not For Ourselves Alone series on Stanton and Anthony has links to a wide variety of sites and sources and educational materials:
http://www.pbs.org/stantonanthony/
Lesson Plans you might have missed:
It’s no great surprise that American Memory will provide rich resources for you. In their “Learning Pages” section, you may want to scroll through the page of lesson plans grouped by topic (with indications of grade level) – there’s material on women’s history almost everywhere:
http://learning.loc.gov/learn/lessons/theme.html
Be sure to look at the list of lesson plans for “The Court and Gender” at the History of the Supreme Court Website– some really good ideas there:
http://www.historyofsupremecourt.org/resources/overview.htm
