Nine Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition

by Judith Nies

In an expanded edition of her history of American women activists, Judith Nies has added biographical essays on feminist Bella Abzug and civil rights visionary Fannie Lou Hamer and a new chapter on women environmental activists. Included are portraits of Sarah Moore Grimké, who rejected her life as a Southern aristocrat and slaveholder to promote women's rights and the abolition of slavery; Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who led more than three hundred slaves to freedom on the Underground Railway; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the first woman to run for Congress, who advocated for women's rights to own property, to vote, and to divorce; Mother Jones, "the Joan of Arc of the coalfields," one of the most inspiring voices of the American labor movement; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who worked for the reform of two of America's most cherished institutions, the home and motherhood; Anna Louise Strong, an intrepid journalist who covered revolutions in Russia and China; and Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, who fed and sheltered the hungry and homeless in New York's Bowery for more than forty years.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Womens, Feminism

310 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2002

About the author

Judith Nies is the award-winning author of three nonfiction books—The Girl I Left Behind, Nine Women, and Native American History, which won the Phi Alpha Theta prize in international history. Her journalism, book reviews, and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Orion, Harvard Review, Women’s Review of Books, and American Voice. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.