Top Ten Books on the History of Women's Citizenship

Emily Prifogle at Legal History Blog has a posted an outstanding booklist on the History of Women's Citizenship.  A number of these books (especially the books written by Barbara Young Welke, Lizabeth Cohen, and Margot Canaday) are also favorites of DailyHistory.org and will undoubtably appear on some of our own future Top Ten Booklists.  Check this out as well as other posts by Prifogle at Legal History Blog.

As per usual, if you disagree with any selection on this list, please leave a comment explaining why we (or in this case, Emily Prifogle) are wrong.  Suggest a new book and tell us which book should be removed from the list.  If you make a strong case and convince us, we will happily revise it.

1.  Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Basic, 2000)

2.  Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equality: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (University of Oxford Press, 2001)

3.  Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

4.  Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

5.  Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: A Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (The Free Press, 1994)

6.  Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (Hill & Wang, 1999)

7.  Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (Vintage, 2003)

8.  Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America  (Princeton University Press, 2009)

9.  Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2004)

10.  Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation  (Harvard University Press, 2000)

11.  Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (Yale University Press, 1989)

12.  Sharon E. Wood, The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (University of North Carolina Press, 2005)