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In the late nineteenth century, an era in which women were expanding the influence outside the home, Irish American women carved out unique opportunities to serve the needs of their communities. For many women, this began with a commitment to Irish nationalism. In Respectability and Reform, McCarthy explores the contributions of a small group of Irish American women in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era who emerged as leaders, organizers, and activists. Profiles of these women suggest not only that Irish American women had a political tradition of their own but also that the diversity of the Irish American community fostered a range of priorities and approaches to activism. McCarthy focuses on three movements—the Irish nationalist movement, the labor movement, and the suffrage movement—to trace the development of women’s political roles. Highlighting familiar activists such as Fanny and Anna Parnell, as well as many lesser-known suffragists, McCarthy sheds light on the range of economic and social backgrounds found among the activists. She also shows that Irish American women’s commitment to social justice persisted from the Land War through the World War I era. In unearthing the rich and varied stories of these Irish American women, Respectablity and Reform deepens our understanding of their intersection with and contribution to the larger context of American women’s activism.
A groundbreaking history of how Jewish women maintained their identity and influenced social activism as they wrote themselves into American history. What does it mean to be a Jewish woman in America? In a gripping historical narrative, Pamela S. Nadell weaves together the stories of a diverse group of extraordinary people—from the colonial-era matriarch Grace Nathan and her great-granddaughter, poet Emma Lazarus, to labor organizer Bessie Hillman and the great justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to scores of other activists, workers, wives, and mothers who helped carve out a Jewish American identity. The twin threads binding these women together, she argues, are a strong sense of self and a resolute commitment to making the world a better place. Nadell recounts how Jewish women have been at the forefront of causes for centuries, fighting for suffrage, trade unions, civil rights, and feminism, and hoisting banners for Jewish rights around the world. Informed by shared values of America’s founding and Jewish identity, these women’s lives have left deep footprints in the history of the nation they call home.
Soon after his inauguration in 1934, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia began appointing women into his administration. By the end of his three terms in office, he had installed almost a hundred as lawyers in his legal department, but also as board and commission members and as secretaries, deputy commissioners, and judges. No previous mayor had done anything comparable. Aware they were breaking new ground for women in American politics, the "Women of the La Guardia Administration," as they called themselves, met frequently for mutual support and political strategizing. This is the first book to tell their stories. Author Elisabeth Israels Perry begins with the city's suffrage movement, which prepared these women for political action as enfranchised citizens. After they won the vote in 1917, suffragists joined political party clubs and began to run for office, many of them hoping to use political platforms to enact feminist and progressive public policies. Circumstances unique to mid-twentieth century New York City advanced their progress. In 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized an inquiry into alleged corruption in the city's government, long dominated by the Tammany Hall political machine. The inquiry turned first to the Vice Squad's entrapment of women for sex crimes and the reported misconduct of the Women's Court. Outraged by the inquiry's disclosures and impressed by La Guardia's pledge to end Tammany's grip on city offices, many New York City women activists supported him for mayor. It was in partial recognition of this support that he went on to appoint an unprecedented number of them into official positions, furthering his plans for a modernized city government. In these new roles, La Guardia's women appointees not only contributed to the success of his administration but left a rich legacy of experience and political wisdom to oncoming generations of women in American politics.
"Eleanor Roosevelt never wanted her husband to run for president. When he won, she . . . went on a national tour to crusade on behalf of women. She wrote a regular newspaper column. She became a champion of women's rights and of civil rights. And she decided to write a book." -- Jill Lepore, from the Introduction "Women, whether subtly or vociferously, have always been a tremendous power in the destiny of the world," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in It's Up to the Women, her book of advice to women of all ages on every aspect of life. Written at the height of the Great Depression, she called on women particularly to do their part -- cutting costs where needed, spending reasonably, and taking personal responsibility for keeping the economy going. Whether it's the recommendation that working women take time for themselves in order to fully enjoy time spent with their families, recipes for cheap but wholesome home-cooked meals, or America's obligation to women as they take a leading role in the new social order, many of the opinions expressed here are as fresh as if they were written today.
Hilda Satt Polacheck's family emigrated from Poland to Chicago in 1892, bringing their old-world Jewish traditions with them into the Industrial Age. Throughout her career as a writer and activist, Polacheck (1882-1967) never forgot the immigrant neighborhoods, the markets, and the scents and sounds of Chicago's West Side. Here, in charming and colorful prose, she recounts her introduction to American life and the Hull-House community, her friendship with Jane Addams, her marriage, her support of civil rights, woman suffrage, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and her experiences as a writer for the WPA.
The Progressive Era, a few brief decades around the turn of the last century, still burns in American memory for its outsized personalities: Theodore Roosevelt, whose energy glinted through his pince-nez; Carry Nation, who smashed saloons with her axe and helped stop an entire nation from drinking; women suffragists, who marched in the streets until they finally achieved the vote; Andrew Carnegie and the super-rich, who spent unheard-of sums of money and became the wealthiest class of Americans since the Revolution. Yet the full story of those decades is far more than the sum of its characters. In Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent America's great political upheaval is brilliantly explored as the root cause of our modern political malaise. The Progressive Era witnessed the nation's most convulsive upheaval, a time of radicalism far beyond the Revolution or anything since. In response to the birth of modern America, with its first large-scale businesses, newly dominant cities, and an explosion of wealth, one small group of middle-class Americans seized control of the nation and attempted to remake society from bottom to top. Everything was open to question -- family life, sex roles, race relations, morals, leisure pursuits, and politics. For a time, it seemed as if the middle-class utopians would cause a revolution. They accomplished an astonishing range of triumphs. From the 1890s to the 1910s, as American soldiers fought a war to make the world safe for democracy, reformers managed to outlaw alcohol, close down vice districts, win the right to vote for women, launch the income tax, take over the railroads, and raise feverish hopes of making new men and women for a new century. Yet the progressive movement collapsed even more spectacularly as the war came to an end amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red scare. It is an astonishing and moving story. McGerr argues convincingly that the expectations raised by the progressives' utopian hopes have nagged at us ever since. Our current, less-than-epic politics must inevitably disappoint a nation that once thought in epic terms. The New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and now the war on terrorism have each entailed ambitious plans for America; and each has had dramatic impacts on policy and society. But the failure of the progressive movement set boundaries around the aspirations of all of these efforts. None of them was as ambitious, as openly determined to transform people and create utopia, as the progressive movement. We have been forced to think modestly ever since that age of bold reform. For all of us, right, center, and left, the age of "fierce discontent" is long over.
Shedding new light on contemporary campaigns to encourage marriage among welfare recipients and to prosecute "deadbeat dads," Wives without Husbands traces the efforts of Progressive reformers to make "runaway husbands" support their families. Anna
The dawn of the twentieth century saw the birth of the New Woman, a cultural and literary ideal that replaced Victorian expectations of domesticity with visions of social, political, and economic autonomy. Although such writers as Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin treated these ideals in well-known literature of that era, marginalized women also explored changing gender roles in works that deserve more attention today. This book is the first study to focus solely on multiethnic women writers' responses to the ideal of the New Woman in America, opening up a world of literary texts that provide new insight into the phenomenon. Charlotte Rich reveals how these authors uniquely articulated the contradictions of the American New Woman, and how social class, race, or ethnicity impacted women's experiences of both public and private life in the Progressive era. Rich focuses on the work of writers representing five distinct ethnicities: Native Americans S. Alice Callahan and Mourning Dove, African American Pauline Hopkins, Chinese American Sui Sin Far, Mexican American María Cristina Mena, and Jewish American Anzia Yezierska. She shows that some oftheir works contain both affirmative and critical portraits of white New Women; in other cases, while these authorsalign their multiethnic heroines with the new ideals, those ideals are sometimes subordinated to more urgent dialogues about inequality and racial violence. Here are views of women not usually encountered in fiction of this era. Callahan's and Mourning Dove's novels allude to women's rights but ultimately privilege critiques of violence against Native Americans. Hopkins's novels trace an increasingly pessimistic trajectory, drawing cynical conclusions about black women's ability to thrive in a prejudiced society. Mena's magazine portraits of Mexican life present complex critiques of this independent ideal of womanhood. Yezierska's stories question the philanthropy of socially privileged Progressive female reformers with whom immigrant women interact. These writers' works sometimes affirm emerging ideals but in other cases illuminate the iconic New Woman's blindness to her own racial and economic privilege. Through her insightful analysis, Rich presents alternative versions of female autonomy, with characters living outside the mainstream or moving between cultures. Transcending the New Woman offers multiple ways of transcending an ideal that was problematic in its exclusivity, as well as an entrée to forgotten works. It shows how the concept of the New Woman can be seen in newly complex ways when viewed through the writings of authors whose lives often embody the New Woman's emancipatory goals-and whose fictions both affirm and complicateher aspirations.
In a compelling approach structured as theme and variations, Barbara Sicherman offers insightful profiles of a number of accomplished women born in America's Gilded Age who lost--and found--themselves in books, and worked out a new life purpose around them. Some women, like Edith and Alice Hamilton, M. Carey Thomas, and Jane Addams, grew up in households filled with books, while less privileged women found alternative routes to expressive literacy. Jewish immigrants Hilda Satt Polacheck, Rose Cohen, and Mary Antin acquired new identities in the English-language books they found in settlement houses and libraries, while African Americans like Ida B. Wells relied mainly on institutions of their own creation, even as they sought to develop a literature of their own. It is Sicherman's masterful contribution to show that however the skill of reading was acquired, under the right circumstances, adolescent reading was truly transformative in constructing female identity, stirring imaginations, and fostering ambition. With Little Women's Jo March often serving as a youthful model of independence, girls and young women created communities of learning, imagination, and emotional connection around literary activities in ways that helped them imagine, and later attain, public identities. Reading themselves into quest plots and into male as well as female roles, these young women went on to create an unparalleled record of achievement as intellectuals, educators, and social reformers. Sicherman's graceful study reveals the centrality of the era's culture of reading and sheds new light on these women's Progressive-Era careers.
In this collection of informative essays, Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye bring together work by such notable scholars as Ellen Carol DuBois, Alice Kessler-Harris, Barbara Sicherman, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn to illuminate the lives and labor of American women from the late nineteenth century to the early 1920s. Revealing the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and social class, the authors explore women's accomplishments in changing welfare and labor legislation; early twentieth century feminism and women's suffrage; women in industry and the work force; the relationship between family and community in early twentieth-century America; and the ways in which African American, immigrant, and working-class women contributed to progressive reform. This challenging collection not only displays the dramatic transformations women of all classes experienced, but also helps construct a new scaffolding for progressivism in general.