(The plan of this volume demands a few words of explanatio...)
The plan of this volume demands a few words of explanation. It was originally intended to be a collection of readings illustrating the varied phases of womens work in municipalities, but an examination of the available literature failed to reveal succinct, up-to-date summaries of the several important branches of that work. It was therefore necessary to search the records of hundreds of organizations and societies in order to obtain a just view of the extent and character of the labors of women for civic improvement of all kinds.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Woman As Force in History: A Study in Traditions and Realities
(Probes the roots of sexual discrimination, the subjection...)
Probes the roots of sexual discrimination, the subjection of women throughout legal history, and the impact of women on politics, economics, culture and social and intellectual developments since ancient times.
Mary Ritter Beard was an American historian, social critic, and first‐wave feminist. She was also a proponent of women's suffrage in the US during the early decades of the twentieth century. Beard's work highlighted women's contributions to American society and cultures across the world. She was also a social reformer who fought for women's rights and organized working women in early twentieth‐century America.
Background
Mary Ritter Beard was born on the 5th of August, 1876 in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. Mary was the fourth of seven children and the first daughter. Her mother, who came from one of central Indiana's most prominent families, was a teacher. Her father was a lawyer who had served as a colonel in the Civil War. The family heritage included Methodism, temperance, and the Republican Party. Mary grew up in middle-class comfort in a suburban part of the city.
Education
Mary Beard attended public schools in Indianapolis and graduated as valedictorian of her Shortridge High School class. After that she studied at the DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where she began to study political science, languages, and literature, and graduated in 1897. In 1902 to 1904 Mary studied at Columbia University, New York, United States, but she did not finish her degree.
Graduating from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, in 1897 Mary found employment in the Greencastle public school system as a German teacher until 1900. She joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association in the 1900s and played a major role in organizing both the National Women’s Trade Union League as a secretary in 1907 and the Wage-Earners Suffrage League. She acted as editor of The Woman Voter, a suffrage newspaper, from 1910-1912. Shortly thereafter, she co-founded the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage (later the National Woman's Party). In 1917, Beard left the National Woman’s Party and focused on writing and literary activism.
Beard published two books while she was involved in activist politics. The first, “Woman's Work in Municipalities”, appearing in 1915, was a lengthy essay in the tradition of muckraking literature, demonstrating the varied and essential work of women in cities. In 1920 she published “A Short History of the American Labor Movement”, designed for readers with little knowledge of the struggle of working people in the United States. The rest of her long and active intellectual life was devoted to writing books and articles and speaking endlessly on what became the major theme of her public life that women are and have always been a central force in history and culture, that women have been active, assertive, competent contributors to their societies, but that history books do not reflect their role.
Mary and Charles Beard, her husband, published a number of books together, they shared a political commitment that carried them often into the public arena on controversial issues. The first book appeared in 1914 and was a high school textbook called “American Citizenship”. In 1934, Beard drafted a 50-page syllabus for a women's studies program, published by the American Association of University Women, called "A Changing Political Economy As It Affects Women." A truly equal education, she wrote, did not simply extend male education to females.
Most important, she wrote alone “On Understanding Women”, published in 1931, which ushered in the decade of her most creative work. In 1933 she edited a collection of writing by women called “America Through Women's Eyes”. In 1934 she edited, with Martha Bensley Bruère, “Laughing Their Way: Women's Humor in America”.
In 1935, Beard created the World Center for Women’s Archives in New York, together with Rosika Schwimmer, to generate a space where the papers of women and their organizations could be preserved and contribute to women’s history. The project failed, due to factional disputes, lack of funds, and the absence of an institutional base. Furthermore, the advent of World War II diverted much attention from the new project. Beard's materials, however, served as the matrix for such major archives as the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College.
In the spring of 1942 she was involved in a new project, a feminist critique of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, financed by the Encyclopaedia itself and carried out by a staff of three women that Beard selected. The final report, submitted after 18 months, is an intriguing 40-page document which is filled with provocative ideas for further research.
Beard's magnum opus was published in 1946 when she was 70 “Woman as Force in History: A Study of Traditions and Realities” that was the culmination of her many years of study. In 1953 she published “The Force of Women in Japanese History” a work on the role of women in the history of Japan, taking the story from the days of the Sun Goddess to those of the American occupation. Featured were various empresses, influential ladies at court, and women in the arts. Until 1955, Beard lived as a widow in New Milford.
Mary Beard became an activist in the women's suffrage movement as organizer, publicist, and fundraiser. Her particular interest in working-class women, a legacy from her years in England, led her to active participation in the Wage Earner's League, the Woman Suffrage Party's organization for working women. When a militant faction of the National Woman Suffrage Association began to form under the leadership of Alice Paul, Beard went with this group, originally known as the Congressional Union, later splitting away to form the Woman's Party. Although Beard stayed with the women's suffrage movement for years, she slowly detached herself from the role of activist and moved toward the role of analyst and social critic. A break did finally come when, after the suffrage amendment was won in 1920, the Woman's Party centered its activities on the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Beard left the organization, choosing instead to support the idea of protective legislation for working women. She was one of many feminists, especially those concerned with working women, who initially opposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).
Quotations:
"Those who sit at the feast will continue to enjoy themselves even though the veil that separates them from the world of toiling reality below has been lifted by mass revolts and critics".
"It's only very recently that women have succeeded in entering those professions which, as Muses, they typified for the Greeks".
"It is grievous to read the papers in most respects, I agree. More and more I skim the headlines only, for one can be sure what is carried beneath them quite automatically, if one has long been a reader of the press journalism".
"Wherever we go, across the Pacific or Atlantic, we meet, not similarity so much as 'the bizarre'. Things astonish us, when we travel, that surprise nobody else".
"Viewed narrowly, all life is universal hunger and an expression of energy associated with it".
"Every great creative idea, formulated as a philosophy, has a social setting - in time, in a geographical location, in a political economy, in a matrix of interests and knowledge. It is not a free-swinging phenomenon like a balloon without moorings. It is not produced in a vacuum and, being creative, it does not work in a vacuum. Nurtured on things experienced and things known, it reaches out toward the unknown like a flower on a stalk growing out of the soil".
"Action without study fatal. Study without action is futile".
Connections
Mary Ritter met Charles Austin Beard while attending DePauw, she married to him on March 8, 1900. They settled first in Oxford and later in Manchester where their first child, Miriam, was born in 1901. Deciding they wanted to raise Miriam in the United States, they moved to New York City in 1902. Their son William was born in 1907.
Making Women's History: The Essential Mary Ritter Beard
Mary Ritter Beard can be considered the “founding mother” of the field of American women’s history. A visionary thinker, Beard devoted her life to reconstructing a history that had remained largely undocumented and unacknowledged before she began her groundbreaking work. She held a firm conviction that women had a far greater impact on history than male historians had ever recognized, and that a knowledge of their own history would enable women to realize their full potential as active members of society and agents of social change.