100 Books Like Mistress Of Herself

Before I stumbled across this book, I had never heard of Caroline Healey Dall, a prickly but vulnerable and fiercely intelligent Bostonian who knew almost everyone in the various reform movements that swept across the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.

On one day, Dall is recording the details of a pregnancy that went horribly wrong; on another, passing along salacious gossip about a lady who propositioned Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May). All the while, she champions the cause of women’s rights while clashing with some of the many strong personalities in the movement.

In 1853, hardware store owner Henry Blackwell proposed marriage to a woman he barely knew: Lucy Stone, who had become prominent as a speaker for the abolitionist and women’s rights movements. Not surprisingly, Lucy refused, but she allowed her younger suitor to write to her, and this collection of letters, spanning the idealistic pair’s courtship and eventual marriage, is the result.

I found it to be a moving portrait of a couple falling in love and managing to stay in love despite the usual ups and downs of wedlock and their quite different personalities. And did you know that Lucy was one of the first American women to keep her own surname upon marriage?

How did Lucretia Mott—the courageous Quaker who was active in so many good causes—find the time to write so many long, intimate letters? I like to dip into this collection; there’s always something of historical or simply human interest.

And given Mott’s small handwriting and her thrifty but maddening habit of “crossing”—saving paper by turning a letter sideways and writing across the existing handwriting on the page—I’m eternally grateful that someone else did the transcription of these letters so we don’t have to struggle with the originals.

What list of nineteenth-century feminists would be complete without the movement’s grand dames, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton? This book, the first of a six-volume series, takes us to the early days of their friendship and alliance. Not only is this collection a testimony to the enormous amount of energy and organization expended by these two reformers, but it also reminds us of their human side.

Some of my favorite moments include Stanton bragging about the birth of her first daughter (and fifth child): “I laid on a lounge about 15 minutes, and alone with my nurse & one female friend, brought forth this noble girl,” and Anthony grumbling about her decision to give up the “Bloomer” outfit adopted by a number of women reformers, “I have let down some of my dresses and am dragging around with long skirts.”

I am recommending this as the most personal of Steinem’s books. No list of books on the history of women’s rights would be complete without something about and by the most courageous, most consistent spokeswoman for feminism over the last half-century. Here Steinem tells the tale of her family, focused – surprisingly – on her eclectic and wandering father. The reader will be left with even great appreciation for Steinem and for the many and various routes women take to find their way to feminism and their full, true selves.

I knew nothing of the history of Seneca Falls, or the 1848 convention, or really the struggle for women’s rights. When I first proposed the simple idea of “a new park about women’s history,” I had never heard of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a forceful leader in the struggle for women’s rights for decades.

Judy Wellman was researching her book when I opened the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in 1982. I hired Judy as the park historian in the opening year and was graced with her wisdom as we developed the first exhibits and programs. I and the park benefitted greatly from her research through my six years as the founding superintendent of the park.

Claudia Jones was a Black Trinidadian woman who moved with her family to Harlem during its Renaissance. Her experiences seeking work radicalized her, and she joined the Communist Party. In 1952, the United States government deported her, and because the colonial government of Trinidad wouldn’t accept her due to her political commitments, they sent her to Britain.

There, she became the editor of the West Indian Gazette, which brought together global and local news. Jones was one of the first people I chose for my book because her life experience and writing show us that solidarity is never a flattening of identity. Instead, it is reaching beyond ourselves to find a connection in shared struggle.

When I taught, I hoped to engage students by making historical figures as human as possible. At the time I wish I had known the writing of Jean Fritz who brings the people of history to life. Magnificently.  

Peppering her books with oddball information about her subjects, she allows them to become more human. And in Jean Fritz books, people talk and act. These features are present in Fritz’s wonderful biography of the women’s rights activist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

The reader comes to know Ms. Stanton intimately, her warm friendships with fellow activists, her tensions with her father, her overall independent spirit. And we get a wonderful history of the early American women’s movement. 

Jean Fritz delivers for younger readers and makes history engaging, human, and, yes, exciting.

This book convinced me that any book on modern conservatism that doesn’t identify women as central figures in that movement is missing much of the picture. Phyllis Schlafly is the most often mentioned female conservative leader in the US, but there are so many more that deserve the attention provided in this book.

The fight for and eventual demise of the Equal Rights Amendment is dramatized in unparallelled fashion and explains the durability of the so-called family values movement, but also the hyperbolic and caustic tenor of today’s politics. Every time I return to this book, I marvel at how relevant it is to contemporary political debates and the post-2016 iteration of the Republican Party.

I love this book’s two freedom fighters: the historical Sarah Grimké and the fictional enslaved woman Handful.

It’s the early 1800s in Charleston, SC. Privileged white girl Sarah bucks cultural expectations for women, while Handful fights the cruel slavery system. Sarah repudiates her upbringing in order to support abolition, and Handful stakes everything in pursuit of freedom, “to leave or die trying.”

I loved learning about the Grimké sisters, giants in the abolition movement, and the West African story-quilt tradition, whereby women tell their lives through the art of needlework. This book was transformative for me; Sarah’s and Handful’s transgressive courage has helped me through difficult times of my own. If they could face their obstacles, then by golly, I can face mine.