An intricate network of contacts developed among women in Europe and North America over the course of the nineteenth century. These women created virtual communities through communication, support, and a shared ideology. Forged across boundaries of nationality, language, ethnic origin, and even class, these connections laid the foundation for the 1888 International Council of Women and formed the beginnings of an international women's movement. This matrix extended throughout England and the Continent and included Scandinavia and Finland. In a remarkable display of investigative research, Margaret McFadden describes the burgeoning avenues of communication in the nineteenth century that led to an explosion in the number of international contacts among women. This network blossomed because of increased travel opportunities; advances in women's literacy and education; increased activity in the temperance, abolitionist, and peace reform movements; and the emergence of female evangelicals, political revolutionaries, and expatriates. Particular attention is paid to five women whose decades of work helped give birth to the women's movement by century's end. These ""mothers of the matrix"" include Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of the United States, Anna Doyle Wheeler of Ireland, Fredrika Bremer of Sweden, and Frances Power Cobbe of England. Despite their philosophic differences, these leaders recognized the value of friendship and advocacy among women and shared an affinity for bringing together people from different cultural settings. McFadden demonstrates without question that the traditions of transatlantic female communication are far older than most historians realize and that the women's movement was inherently international. No other scholar has painted so complete a picture of the golden cables that linked the women who saw the Atlantic and the borders within Europe as bridges rather than barriers to improving their status.

Challenging previous studies that claim anxiety and antagonism between transatlantic Victorian authors, Jennifer Cognard-Black uncovers a model of reciprocal influence among three of the most popular women writers of the era. Combining analyses of personal correspondence and print culture with close readings of key narratives, this study presents an original history of transatlantic authorship that examines how these writers invented a collaborative aesthetics both within and against the dominant discourse of professionalism.

The Worlds of American Intellectual History follows American thinkers and their ideas as they have crossed national, institutional, and intellectual boundaries. The volume explores ways in which American ideas have circulated in different cultures. It also examines the multiple sites--from social movements, museums, and courtrooms to popular and scholarly books and periodicals--in which people have articulated and deployed ideas within and beyond the borders of the United States.

As economic citizenship was a pre-condition of full citizenship, the lack of economic autonomy was an important motivation during the early stages of the women’s movement. Independent of their class background, women had less access to not only financial resources but also social and cultural capital, i.e., member’s commitment. Resources are therefore of particular interest from a gender perspective, and this book sheds light on the importance of resources for women’s struggles for political rights. Highlighting the financial strategies of the first wave of Swedish middle-class and socialist women’s movements and comparing them with similar organizations in Germany, England, and Canada, the authors show the importance of class, gender, age, and the national context, offering a valuable contribution to the discussion of resource mobilization theories in the context of social movements.

This book explores women’s editorial and salon activities in Southern Europe and provides a comparative view of their practices. It argues that women in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece used their double role as editors and salonnières to engage with foreign cultures, launch the careers of promising young authors and advocate for modernization and social change. By examining a neglected body of periodicals edited between 1860 and 1920, this book sets out to explore women’s editorial agendas and their interest in creating a connection between salon life and the print press. What purpose did this connection serve? How did women editors use their periodicals and their salons to create opportunities for cross-cultural exchange? In what ways did women use their double role as editors and salonnières to promote modernization and social progress in Southern Europe? By addressing these questions, this monograph contributes to the recent expansion of scholarship on nineteenth and twentieth-century periodicals and opens new avenues for theoretical reflection on European modernity. It also invites scholars and non-specialist readers to question the center vs. periphery model and to consider Southern European counties as cultural hubs in their own right.

Though the first decades of the twentieth century witnessed extensive U.S. intervention in Latin American affairs, the United States started to back away from overtly flexing its military muscle to gain power and control, instead using a type of "soft power" more in tune with the spirit of cooperation and collaboration. This new policy, often viewed as female attributes of Pan Americanism, opened the door for women to gain a foothold on the inter-American stage. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these Pan American women's movements emerged with the founding of a variety of international organizations that began a worldwide campaign to improve women's lives. In A Hemisphere of Women E. Sue Wamsley analyzes the history of the Inter-American Commission of Women: the first all-female, government-affiliated body to deal specifically with women's civil and political rights in a transnational arena. She examines how women who had semi-official government roles worked within a neocolonial, male-dominated diplomatic setting to bring about change. U.S. women assumed that they would be the "natural" leaders, stereotyping their Latin American colleagues as unsophisticated and inexperienced. Party members quickly learned, however, that they had underestimated their Latin American sisters, who also had ideas about women's rights and how the campaign should be run. Utilizing the policy of "soft power," the women, with the help of Latin American officials, managed to work around cultural differences and define common goals rooted in the advancement of women's civil and political rights, giving hemispheric women a recognized position in shaping transnational gender law. Wamsley's innovative analysis at once addresses a void in scholarship and interweaves the history of Pan Americanism, foreign relations, and imperialism with that of women.

Over fifty years ago sociologist T. H. Marshall first opened the modern debate about the evolution of full citizenship in modern nation-states, arguing that it proceeded in three stages: from civil rights, to political rights, and finally to social rights. The shortcomings of this model were clear to feminist scholars. As political theorist Carol Pateman argued, the modern social contract undergirding nation-states was from the start premised on an implicit "sexual contract." According to Pateman, the birth of modern democracy necessarily resulted in the political erasure of women. Since the 1990s feminist historians have realized that Marshall's typology failed to describe adequately developments that affected women in France. An examination of the role of women and gender in welfare-state development suggested that social rights rooted in republican notions of womanhood came early and fast for women in France even while political and economic rights would continue to lag behind. While their considerable access to social citizenship privileges shaped their prospects, the absence of women's formal rights still dominates the conversation. Practiced Citizenship offers a significant rereading of that narrative. Through an analysis of how citizenship was lived, practiced, and deployed by women in France in the modern period, Practiced Citizenship demonstrates how gender normativity and the resulting constraints placed on women nevertheless created opportunities for a renegotiation of the social and sexual contract.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian’s "breathtakingly original" (Junot Diaz) reinterpretation of the eight decades surrounding the Civil War. "Capatious [and] buzzing with ideas." --The Boston Globe Volume 3 in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner In this ambitious story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Steven Hahn takes on the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and offers a perspective that promises to be as enduring as it is controversial. It begins and ends in Mexico and, throughout, is internationalist in orientation. It challenges the political narrative of “sectionalism,” emphasizing the national footing of slavery and the struggle between the northeast and Mississippi Valley for continental supremacy. It places the Civil War in the context of many domestic rebellions against state authority, including those of Native Americans. It fully incorporates the trans-Mississippi west, suggesting the importance of the Pacific to the imperial vision of political leaders and of the west as a proving ground for later imperial projects overseas. It reconfigures the history of capitalism, insisting on the centrality of state formation and slave emancipation to its consolidation. And it identifies a sweeping era of “reconstructions” in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that simultaneously laid the foundations for corporate liberalism and social democracy. The era from 1830 to 1910 witnessed massive transformations in how people lived, worked, thought about themselves, and struggled to thrive. It also witnessed the birth of economic and political institutions that still shape our world. From an agricultural society with a weak central government, the United States became an urban and industrial society in which government assumed a greater and greater role in the framing of social and economic life. As the book ends, the United States, now a global economic and political power, encounters massive warfare between imperial powers in Europe and a massive revolution on its southern border―the remarkable Mexican Revolution―which together brought the nineteenth century to a close while marking the important themes of the twentieth.

Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America

Recent debates have used the concept of “transnational history” to broaden research on historical subjects that transcend national boundaries and encourage a shift away from official inter-state interactions to institutions, groups, and actors that have been obscured. This approach proves particularly fruitful for the dynamic field of global gender and women’s history. By looking at the restless lives and work of women’s activists in informal border-crossings, ephemeral NGOs, the lower management of established international organizations, and other global networks, this volume reflects the potential of a new perspective that allows for a more adequate analysis of transnational activities. By pointing out cultural hierarchies, the vicissitudes of translation and re-interpretation, and the ambiguity of intercultural exchange, this volume demonstrates the critical potential of transnational history. It allows us to see the limits of universalist and cosmopolitan claims so dear to many historical actors and historians.