Early feminist pioneers contributed much to the functioning and reform of society, including making women’s status and privileges equal to those of men. However, we still do not know enough about their efforts, strategies, sacrifices, and attainments. As such, through a focus on the lives and contributions of eight early female pioneers of England and America from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, this book helps to fill this gap. Among these women were religious and educational reformers, political activists, social advocates, abolitionists, feminists, community organizers, pacifists, internationalists, and historians. These women noticed many injustices done to their kind by men and society over the centuries and took brave actions at great personal costs to provide remedies. Their respective backgrounds and interests were different, but all of them desired more protection and the welfare of vulnerable populations nationally and internationally. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in many fields, and can also be adopted as a textbook in colleges and universities.

This book focuses on the contributions of William Penn (a Quaker) in sowing some seeds of liberty, justice, peace, and democracy in early America, which later became the basis of the 13 English colonies seeking freedom from English rule and the writing of the US constitution. The work explores Europe and America during the Enlightenment in the late sixteenth century and the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These were times, however, when discrimination and persecution were common due to prevalent religious and political bigotries. Under those circumstances, Penn dared to bring relief to the suffering people by providing them with a safe and secure haven where liberty, justice, peace, and democracy ruled, and he was the first to do that. The book will be useful to those reformers, practitioners, administrators, and scholars engaged in the areas of political studies, sociological studies, ethics, moral studies, religious and justice studies, peace studies, historical and development studies, social welfare and social work studies, and reform movements.

In this study of British middle-class feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Antoinette Burton explores an important but neglected historical dimension of the relationship between feminism and imperialism. Demonstrating how feminists in the United Kingdom appropriated imperialistic ideology and rhetoric to justify their own right to equality, she reveals a variety of feminisms grounded in notions of moral and racial superiority. According to Burton, Victorian and Edwardian feminists such as Josephine Butler, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Mary Carpenter believed that the native women of colonial India constituted a special 'white woman's burden.' Although there were a number of prominent Indian women in Britain as well as in India working toward some of the same goals of equality, British feminists relied on images of an enslaved and primitive 'Oriental womanhood' in need of liberation at the hands of their emancipated British 'sisters.' Burton argues that this unquestioning acceptance of Britain's imperial status and of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority created a set of imperial feminist ideologies, the legacy of which must be recognized and understood by contemporary feminists.

For twenty-five years, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World has been an essential primer on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of women's movements in Asia and the Middle East. In this engaging and well-researched survey, Kumari Jayawardena presents feminism as it originated in the Third World, erupting from the specific struggles of women fighting against colonial power, for education or the vote, for safety, and against poverty and inequality. Journalist and human rights activist Rafia Zakaria's foreword to this new edition is an impassioned letter in two parts: the first to Western feminists; the second to feminists in the Global South, entreating them to use this "compendium of female courage" as a bridge between women of different nations. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World was chosen as one of the top twenty Feminist Classics of this Wave, 1970-1990, by Ms. magazine, and won the Feminist Fortnight Award in the UK.

This novel was the major inspiration for the Women's Movement and continues to be a powerful and illuminating analysis of the position of women in Western society___

This collection of essays honours Rosemary Auchmuty, Professor of Law at the University of Reading, UK. She has fostered the study of women's academic careers and, more politically, advanced progress on gender and equality issues including same-sex marriage and property law. Her research promotes the case of feminist legal history as a way of revealing the place of women and challenging dominant historical narratives that cast them aside. Just as Rosemary's work does, the book seeks to end the marginalisation and exclusion of women in the legal world, by including them. The book begins fittingly with a discussion of Miss Bebb, the woman whose biography Auchmuty deployed to push feminist legal history into the mainstream. It turns then to a discussion of women known and unknown and their struggles within the legal profession offering within those chapters a critical appraisal of the role of history and biography as a methodology. From there it moves to consider feminist perspectives and critiques of the dominant structures of private law. This is followed by chapters that explore those who educate the legal profession within the academy. The chapters, and the collection as a whole, examine areas of law that have a deep significance for women's lives.

"This is a collection of biographies and composite essays of Texas women, contextualized over the course of history to include subjects that reflect the enormous racial, class, and religious diversity of the state. Offering insights into the complex ways that Texas' position on the margins of the United States has shaped a particular kind of gendered experience there, the volume also demonstrates how the larger questions in United States women's history are answered or reconceived in the state. Beginning with Juliana Barr's essay, which asserts that 'women marked the lines of dominion among Spanish and Indian nations in Texas' and explodes the myth of Spanish domination in colonial Texas, the essays examine the ways that women were able to use their borderland status to stretch the boundaries of their own lives. Eric Walther demonstrates that the constant changing of governments in Texas (Spanish, Mexican, Texan, and U.S.) gave slaves the opportunities to resist their oppression because of the differences in the laws of slavery under Spanish or English or American law. Gabriela Gonzalez examines the activism of Jovita Idar on behalf of civil rights for Mexicans and Mexican Americans on both sides of the border. Renee Laegreid argues that female rodeo contestants employed a "unique regional interplay of masculine and feminine behaviors" to shape their identities as cowgirls"--