This pamphlet addresses a variety of different problems facing women in the nineteenth century, including equal access to education and employment, reform of laws governing marriage and divorce, and concerns about prostitution and temperance. One issue discussed at this convention was women's right to vote.

"[When Hens Crow] looks in an original way at the ideas of the first feminists . . . a pioneering work, written in a clear style and firmly grounded in recent scholarship. . . ." —Journal of American History In 1852 the New York Daily Herald described leaders of the woman's rights movement as "hens that crow." Using speeches, pamphlets, newspaper reports, editorials, and personal papers, Sylvia Hoffert discusses how ideology, language, and strategies of early woman's rights advocates influenced a new political culture grudgingly inclusive of women. She shows the impact of philosophies of republicanism, natural rights, utilitarianism, and the Scottish Common Sense School in helping activists move beyond the limits of Republican Motherhood and the ideals of domesticity and benevolence. When Hens Crow also illustrates the work of the penny press in spreading the demands of woman's rights advocates to a wide audience, establishing the competence of women to contribute to public discourse and public life.

Only the Clothes on Her Back illuminates the ways in which women, men of color, and poor people used textiles as a form of property that enabled them to gain access to the legal system and to exercise political power.

With this book, Nancy Isenberg illuminates the origins of the women's rights movement. Rather than herald the singular achievements of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, she examines the confluence of events and ideas--before and after 1848--that, in her view, marked the real birth of feminism. Drawing on a wide range of sources, she demonstrates that women's rights activists of the antebellum era crafted a coherent feminist critique of church, state, and family. In addition, Isenberg shows, they developed a rich theoretical tradition that influenced not only subsequent strains of feminist thought but also ideas about the nature of citizenship and rights more generally. By focusing on rights discourse and political theory, Isenberg moves beyond a narrow focus on suffrage. Democracy was in the process of being redefined in antebellum America by controversies over such volatile topics as fugitive slave laws, temperance, Sabbath laws, capital punishment, prostitution, the Mexican War, married women's property rights, and labor reform--all of which raised significant legal and constitutional questions. These pressing concerns, debated in women's rights conventions and the popular press, were inseparable from the gendered meaning of nineteenth-century citizenship.

Did the history of human rights begin decades, centuries or even millennia ago? What constitutes this history? And what can we really learn from 'the textbook narrative' - the unilinear, forward-looking tale of progress and inevitable triumph authored primarily by Western philosophers, politicians and activists? Does such a distinguishable entity as 'the history of human rights' even exist, or are efforts to read evidence in past events of the later 'evolution' of human rights mere ideology? This book explores these questions through a collective effort by scholars of history, law, theology and anthropology. Rather than entities with an absolute, predefined 'essence', this book conceptualizes human rights as open-ended and ambiguous. It taps into recent 'revisionist' debates and asks: what do we really know of the history of human rights?

The Dictionary of Early American Philosophers, which contains over 400 entries by nearly 300 authors, provides an account of philosophical thought in the United States and Canada between 1600 and 1860. The label of "philosopher" has been broadly applied in this Dictionary to intellectuals who have made philosophical contributions regardless of academic career or professional title. Most figures were not academic philosophers, as few such positions existed then, but they did work on philosophical issues and explored philosophical questions involved in such fields as pedagogy, rhetoric, the arts, history, politics, economics, sociology, psychology, medicine, anthropology, religion, metaphysics, and the natural sciences. Each entry begins with biographical and career information, and continues with a discussion of the subject's writings, teaching, and thought. A cross-referencing system refers the reader to other entries. The concluding bibliography lists significant publications by the subject, posthumous editions and collected works, and further reading about the subject.