Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940 - Hardcover

Klapper, Melissa R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814748945 ISBN 13: 9780814748947

Publisher: NYU Press, 2013

Synopsis

Winner of the 2013 National Jewish Book Award, Women's Studies    Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace explores the social and political activism of American Jewish women from approximately 1890 to the beginnings of World War II.   Written in an engaging style, the book demonstrates that no history of the birth control, suffrage, or peace movements in the United States is complete without analyzing the impact of Jewish women's presence. The volume is based on years of extensive primary source research in more than a dozen archives and among hundreds of primary sources, many of which have previously never been seen. Voluminous personal papers and institutional records paint a vivid picture of a world in which both middle-class and working-class American Jewish women were consistently and publicly engaged in all the major issues of their day and worked closely with their non-Jewish counterparts on behalf of activist causes.   This extraordinarily well researched volume makes a unique contribution to the study of modern women's history, modern Jewish history, and the history of American social movements.  

About this title

Review:

"In this illuminating account of campaigns for social justice, Melissa Klapper takes an important cohort of Jewish women and shows us how Jewishness mattered to their activism as well as how their activism influenced the world they lived in. This book provides the best explanation I have yet encountered for the more recent involvement of Jews in the social movements of the 1960s. It is a wonderful and inspiring read." --Alice Kessler-Harris, author of A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman

"Melissa Klapper has made an outstanding contribution to a history that we thought we knew well, of some of the great women's struggles of the early twentieth century - suffrage, peace, and birth control. However, she has changed that history by focusing on Jewish women's important participation in them. We learn not only of their contribution, but the anti-semitism they encountered. Her analysis is nuanced and represents the very best of what women's history does, to understand the complexity of identity as women struggled to become citizens and political actors in the United States. This is a remarkable book." --Riv-Ellen Prell, Professor of American Studies, University of Minnesota

About the Author:

Melissa R. Klapper is a professor of history, Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0814748945
• ISBN 13: 9780814748947
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 301