Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970The first comprehensive history of the role of women in the civil rights movement, Freedom's Daughters fills a startling gap in both the literature of civil rights and of women's history. Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young, John Lewis, and other well-known leaders of the civil rights movement have admitted that women often had the ideas for which men took credit. In this groundbreaking book, credit finally goes where credit is due -- to the bold women who were crucial to the movement's success and who refused to give up the fight. From the Montgomery bus boycott to the lunch counter sit-ins to the Freedom Rides, Lynne Olson's Freedom's Daughters offers a remarkable corrective to the standard history as she tells the long overlooked story of the extraordinary women, both black and white, who were among the most fearless, resourceful, and tenacious leaders of the civil rights movement. Reminding us that the story of women fighting for civil rights began much earlier than the 1950s and 1960s, Olson puts the formal civil rights movement into the context of a much larger history of women's activism. From the abolitionist and suffragist movements to women's liberation, Olson proves that the political activity of women has been the thread connecting the big reform movements from the 1830s to 1970. Into this context, then, she introduces portraits and cameos of more than sixty women -- many until now forgotten and some never before written about -- from the key figures (Pauli Murray, Ida Wells, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ella Baker, and Septima Clark, among others) whose activism spanned several different movements and decades to some of the smaller players who represent the hundredsand hundreds of women who each came forth to do her own small part and who together ultimately formed the mass movements that made the difference. As one male activist said of the movement in Mississippi: It was a woman's war. This is the story of women making difficult choices, trying to balance lives as wives and mothers with their all-consuming work, defying society's standards of proper female behavior. It's the story of indomitable black women like Diane Nash who refused to give up the civil rights fight, even as the formal movement collapsed, and of white female civil rights activists mourning the loss of their old movement while helping to launch a new one -- the battle for women's rights. Freedom's Daughters puts a human face on the civil rights struggle -- and shows that that face was often female. |
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FREEDOM'S DAUGHTERS: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970
User Review - KirkusA celebration of largely forgotten players in the African-American struggle for civil rights.Freelance journalist Olson, coauthor of The Murrow Boys (1996), profiles a score or so of the women who ... Read full review
Freedom's daughters: the unsung heroines of the civil rights movement from 1830 to 1970
User Review - Not Available - Book VerdictSeveral books have highlighted women's contributions to the Civil Rights movement, but none is as well written and extensive as this work by journalist and author Olson (The Murrow Boys). Its ... Read full review
Contents
Preface | 13 |
Far More Terrible for Women | 19 |
She Has Shaken This Country | 33 |
Getting Them Comfortable with Rebellion | 52 |
Lighting the Fuse 15 | 75 |
There Had to Be a Stopping Place | 87 |
Our Leaders Is Just We Ourself 11 o 7 She Kept Daring Us to Go Further | 132 |
The Most Daring of Our Leaders | 151 |
A Woman s War | 248 |
We Assumed We Were Equal | 264 |
We Cant Deal with Her | 278 |
Standing in the Minefield | 291 |
We Didnt Come All This Wayfor No Two Seats | 313 |
This Inevitable Horrible Greek Tragedy | 331 |
The Woman Question | 350 |
We Were Asked to Deny a Part of Ourselves | 369 |
Being White Does Not Answer Tour Problems | 163 |
She Never Listened to a Word | 182 |
We Are Not Going to Take This Anymore | 200 |
The Cobwebs A re Moving from My Brain | 213 |
I Had Never Heard That Voice Before | 225 |
Black and White Together | 239 |
We Got to Keep Moving | 382 |
Epilogue | 397 |
Abbreviations for Sources | 411 |
| 435 | |
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Common terms and phrases
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Bibliographic information
| Title | Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 |
| Author | Lynne Olson |
| Edition | illustrated, reprint |
| Publisher | Simon and Schuster, 2001 |
| ISBN | 0684850125, 9780684850122 |
| Length | 460 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |