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University of California Press

About the Book

In an expanded edition of her history of American women activists, Judith Nies has added biographical essays on feminist Bella Abzug and civil rights visionary Fannie Lou Hamer and a new chapter on women environmental activists. Included are portraits of Sarah Moore Grimké, who rejected her life as a Southern aristocrat and slaveholder to promote women's rights and the abolition of slavery; Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who led more than three hundred slaves to freedom on the Underground Railway; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the first woman to run for Congress, who advocated for women's rights to own property, to vote, and to divorce; Mother Jones, "the Joan of Arc of the coalfields," one of the most inspiring voices of the American labor movement; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who worked for the reform of two of America's most cherished institutions, the home and motherhood; Anna Louise Strong, an intrepid journalist who covered revolutions in Russia and China; and Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, who fed and sheltered the hungry and homeless in New York's Bowery for more than forty years.

About the Author

Judith Nies is an author, essayist, and teacher. In addition to this book (first published as Seven Women), she is the author of Native American History (1996). Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The Progressive, American Voice, Orion, and Harvard Review.

From Our Blog

Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendement on August 18, 1920, UC Press is spotlighting Nine Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition by Judith Nies, which includes a chapter on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organizer of the first Women's Rights Co
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface to the 2002 Edition

Introduction
Sarah Moore Grimke
Harriet Tubman
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Mother Jones
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Anna Louise Strong
Dorothy Day
Fanny Lou Hamer
Bella Savitsky Abzug
Women and the Environmental Movement
Epilogue: The Legacy of the Radical Tradition

Further Readings and Individual Bibliographies
Selected Bibliography on Women, Radicals, and Historiography
Updated Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"Buy Nies's book and read it aloud faithfully, until all of you, young and old, have shared and incorporated into your vision of America the heroic, unique, and visionary contribution women have made to the history of the United States."
Los Angeles Times
"Judith Nies [writes] about those courageous, visionary women in our history who were driven to write for and live for wider audiences. . . . It is about women who chose confrontation with the formidable forces of society rather than quiet communication with their diaries."
Christian Science Monitor
"Judith Nies begins here to restore the great women radicals to their tradition, knowing that to think of these heroic women simply as fighters for women's suffrage and women's rights is to impoverish . . . the larger political tradition."
In These Times
"Readers will be remembering a long time the vivid Mary Harris Jones, 'Mother Jones,' organizing coal miners . . . remarkable for insight are Nies's essays on Dorothy Day and Charlotte Perkins Gilman."
New York Review of Books