An Army of Women: Gender and Politics in Gilded Age Kansas

like the first reviewer I also had this assigned for a class and it was the book I enjoyed the most. I've done a lot of political organizing and am interested in what makes a social movement tick and why it succeeds or fails, and this book does a great job of getting into the heads of political activists. The story is also very interesting, there's a real drama to the way the author tells the story. It reminds me of another book on the Populists, The Populist Moment, by Lawrence Goodwyn, only this book is more concerned with how women and men related (or not) to each other, and how this affected the movement. The book also does a good job of covering women's politics, especially the woman suffrage movement. The author's argument is that women tried to be both committed to their gender and their political party, and couldn't balance the two, which I think in part is a problem feminists have today. I enjoyed it very much, and learned a lot.

This book was assigned in a course on American political history, and I have to admit I didn't expect it to be so interesting--I mean, Kansas??!! Turns out Kansas was a pretty amazing place in the 1890s, and there were a lot of very strong, interesting women involved in politics for the first time. The book is often pretty funny, especially when it looks at how freaked out men were about women getting the vote. I've recommended it to a couple of friends as a book to read outside of class (although it helps to like history, like I do), and though they thought I was crazy at first, they really like it to. I'm now looking for more books like it. Maybe I should start a list!