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Sophonisba Breckinridge (1866-1948) was involved in virtually every reform--including legal aid for immigrants, civil rights for blacks, labor legislation for workers, juvenile courts for youth, and citizenship rights for women--of both the Progressive and New Deal eras. She also played an important role in the development of the welfare state. As a social scientist, a social worker, and a public policy consultant, she played a key role in the development and the implementation of the 1935 Social Security Act. Breckinridge’s influence extended beyond national boundaries. As a founding member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the first American woman to represent the United States at an international diplomatic conference, she promoted international cooperation and exemplified feminist pacifism. Nationally and internationally renowned in her own lifetime, since her death Breckinridge has been largely forgotten. By foregrounding the life and work of this forgotten feminist, this biography of Breckinridge provides a fresh interpretation of women’s activism in modern America. A close look at Breckinridge’s lifelong commitment to social justice reveals previously unappreciated connections between women’s work on behalf of racial justice, civil liberties, world peace, social services, international relations, labor organizing, immigration policy, public health, child welfare, and women’s rights. Spanning the decades from the Civil War to the Cold War and covering a broad range of topics, this book demonstrates both the continuity and the diversity of women’s activism in modern America.

Reshaping Women’s History: Voices of Nontraditional Women Historians is a collection of eighteen essays written by “nontraditional” women historians, all of whom have won the prestigious Catherine Prelinger Award. The contributors reflect on connections among their lived experiences, their scholarship, the field of women’s and gender history, and women’s professional lives. Key themes include the significance of mentorship; the fragility of financial stability; the persistence of gendered family demands, biases, and expectations; the anxiety of having to explain gaps in CVs as women endeavor to advance from one career stage to the next. Contributors offer vital lessons into challenges as well as rewards that women encounter as they pursue a life of the mind. They also have much to say about the commitment not only to writing histories of women but also preserving their voices in archives and the importance of financial support that the Prelinger Award provided. Motivated by life experiences and their personal philosophies to be change agents in their families, their workplaces, and in society, all of the contributors have written about and engaged in feminist and social justice activism. Finally, these diverse essays point to instructive and essential realities about women’s lives, the field of women.

From the late nineteenth century until the 1920s, authorities instructed San Francisco's Pesthouse to segregate the diseased from the rest of the city. This book places this forgotten institution within an emotional climate dominated by widespread public dread and disgust. The book analyzes the unique form of stigma generated by San Franciscans. Emotional states like xenophobia and racism played a part. Yet the phenomenon also included competing medical paradigms and unique economic needs that encouraged authorities to protect the city's reputation as a haven of health restoration. As the book argues, public health history requires an understanding of irrational as well as rational motives. To that end the book delves into the spectrum of emotions that drove extreme measures like segregation and isolation. It also shows how these feelings fed psychological, ideological, and pragmatic urges to scapegoat and stereotype victims—particularly Chinese victims—of smallpox, leprosy, plague, and syphilis. The book looks at the past to offer critical lessons for our age of bioterror threats and emerging infectious diseases.

In recent decades, scholars have explored much of the history of mob violence in the American South, especially in the years after Reconstruction. However, the lynching violence that occurred in American regions outside the South, where hundreds of persons, including Hispanics, whites, African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans died at the hands of lynch mobs, has received less attention. This book fills this gap by illuminating the factors that distinguished lynching in the West, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic. The chapters compare the episodes and patterns of lynching in these regions with those that occurred in the South, placing the violence within a broader context of the development of American criminal justice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It adds to a more comprehensive history of American lynching and will appeal to all readers interested in the history of violence across the varied regions of the United States.

This innovative study examines the development of institutional child care from 1878 to 1929, based on a comparison of two “sister” orphanages in Pittsburgh: the all-white United Presbyterian Orphan's Home and the all-black Home for Colored Children. Drawing on quantitative analysis of the records of more than 1,500 children living at the two orphanages, as well as census data, city logs, and contemporary social science surveys, this study raises new questions about the role of child care in constructing and perpetrating social inequality in the United States.The book explores how working families shaped institutional child care. The term “child care” is used to mean assistance with the daily labor of caring for children; and specifically in the case of orphanages, parents' tactic of placing their children temporarily in institutions with the intention of retrieving them after a relatively short time. The book argues that the development of institutional child care was premised upon and rife with gender, race, and class inequities—these persistent ideologies had consequences for the evolution of social welfare and modern child care.