"Women's Rights in the USA is a rigorous examination of the intersection of gender roles and public policy and a survey of the feminist debates that complicate and frame U.S. law, statutes, and court decision. The third edition includes updated and expanded information pertaining to recent debates, legislation, and court decisions on affirmative action, equal protection, welfare reform, and sexuality, especially lesbian politics and violence against women."--BOOK JACKET.

Erika Bachiochi offers an original look at the development of feminism in the United States, advancing a vision of rights that rests upon our responsibilities to others. In The Rights of Women, Erika Bachiochi explores the development of feminist thought in the United States. Inspired by the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Bachiochi presents the intellectual history of a lost vision of women’s rights, seamlessly weaving philosophical insight, biographical portraits, and constitutional law to showcase the once predominant view that our rights properly rest upon our concrete responsibilities to God, self, family, and community. Bachiochi proposes a philosophical and legal framework for rights that builds on the communitarian tradition of feminist thought as seen in the work of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Drawing on the insight of prominent figures such as Sarah Grimké, Frances Willard, Florence Kelley, Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Mary Ann Glendon, this book is unique in its treatment of the moral roots of women’s rights in America and its critique of the movement’s current trajectory. The Rights of Women provides a synthesis of ancient wisdom and modern political insight that locates the family’s vital work at the very center of personal and political self-government. Bachiochi demonstrates that when rights are properly understood as a civil and political apparatus born of the natural duties we owe to one another, they make more visible our personal responsibilities and more viable our common life together. This smart and sophisticated application of Wollstonecraft’s thought will serve as a guide for how we might better value the culturally essential work of the home and thereby promote authentic personal and political freedom. The Rights of Women will interest students and scholars of political theory, gender and women’s studies, constitutional law, and all readers interested in women’s rights.

Buecheler explains why women's movements arise, the forms of organization they adopt, the diversity of ideologies they espouse, and the class and racial composition of women's movements. He also helps us to understand the roots of countermovements, as well as the mixture of successes and failures that has characterized both past and present women's movements. While recognizing both the setbacks and the victories of the contemporary movement, Buecheler identifies grounds for relative optimism about the lasting consequences of this ongoing mobilization.

In Women’s Rights in the USA, Fourth Edition, Dorothy E. McBride again examines the policy debates critical to women in politics. Tracing the development of these debates over time in order to illustrate their historical context, McBride shows how these issues have evolved and how they have led to the policies and laws of today. She also examines the evolving attitudes of the feminists and advocacy groups behind these debates as they grapple with the tensions between the themes of equality and sex difference as they relate to women’s rights. The book also looks at women’s place in shaping the policies, statutes, and laws—from "liberal" activists to policy insiders—and how those roles shape the debates and issues that move forward today. In a broader context, by following these debates as they move through government institutions to become policies and laws, this book shows students the law-making process through issues that directly affect their lives. Of crucial significance is the acknowledgement that these debates do not end when court decisions, policies, and laws are made, but continue on to foster further movements, viewpoints, and political change. This fourth edition features updates on the most vital issues concerning women’s rights today: constitutional equality, reproduction, education, family, work, work & family, regulation and intimidation of sexuality, and economic status.

Historical Documents detailing women's struggle for equal rights in America.

Women's Rights in the United States: A History in Documents uses a diverse collection of documents - including manifestoes, letters, diaries, cartoons, broadsides, legal and court records, poems, satires, advertisements, petitions, photographs, leaflets, maps, posters, autobiographies, andnewspapers - to examine major themes in the history of women's rights and women's rights movements in the U.S. The documents encompass the experiences of women from a wide range of racial, ethnic, class, economic, sexual, marital, and social groups. The book covers such topics as organized social movements; changing definitions of rights and different women's access to rights; divisions among women within women's rights movements; global contexts for women's rights activism; and the question of what it means for women and men to be "equal."Each chapter includes an introductory essay, and each document has a headnote or long caption. A picture essay illuminates how both suffragists and anti-suffragists employed cartooning to articulate their political positions.