A new book by UD's Anne Boylan documents the full history of women's rights in America.

Documenting women's rights

New book examines issue of women's rights throughout American history

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12:52 p.m., Sept. 14, 2015--A new book by Anne M. Boylan, professor of history and of women and gender studies at the University of Delaware, uses a diverse assortment of documents to cover the topic of women’s rights in the United States from the beginning of European colonization through the early 21st century.

Women’s Rights in the United States: A History in Documents was published in paperback in July by Oxford University Press.

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The book includes such documents as manifestoes, letters, diaries, cartoons, broadsides, legal and court records, poems, satires, advertisements, petitions, photographs, leaflets, maps, posters, autobiographies and newspapers. 

Boylan uses these materials 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.

The book’s first chapter deals with laws and customs in Colonial America, and later chapters focus on such topics as the Civil War era, the suffrage movement and its aftermath, feminism and the women’s liberation movement, and women’s rights after 1970. 

Boylan, a member of the UD faculty since 1986, is also the author of The Origins of Women's Activism: New York and Boston, 1797-1840 and Sunday School: The Formation of An American Institution, 1790-1880.

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