Sources: Women’s Rights in the United States: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Issues, Events, and People

Women’s Rights in the United States: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Issues, Events, and People. Edited by Tiffany K. Wayne. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2015. 4 vols. Acid free $415 (ISBN: 978-1-61069-214-4). Ebook available (978-1-61069-215-1), call for pricing.

I have found Women’s Rights in the United States: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Issues, Events, and People to be a well-organized, comprehensive, and useful resource. Since Ursuline College is a women-focused institution, the library tends to keep an eye trained on titles on topics like women’s rights. Our reference collection includes multiple resources on women’s rights; however, we own nothing quite as sweeping in scope while still being focused on women in the United States. Ursuline recently acquired Women’s Rights: Documents Decoded, also published by ABC-CLIO (2014). While at first I was concerned that there might be excessive overlap in content between the two, I happily discovered that these two resources will be a nearly perfect complement to one another. For example, while Women’s Rights in the United States provides much information on Margaret Sanger and her birth control activism as well as primary documents including some treatises she wrote, Women’s Rights: Documents Decoded provides her original statement on birth control to the US Senate subcommittee in 1932 along with commentary and discussion.

Each of the four volumes covers a time period: 1776–1870, 1870–1950, 1950–90, and 1990–present. Each volume includes an introduction that highlights important events, controversies, and changes, including those encompassing political, social, and popular culture spheres, occurring during the period. I anticipate that the introductions will prove useful to students who are looking to situate a particular incident or figure into the historical period that shaped it. Necessarily, feminism takes center stage in volumes 3 and 4. When I first began surveying this resource, I must admit that I was concerned that this may not be accessible for undergraduates. I discovered that the introductions provide enough information about the “waves” of feminist thought and the theories and theorists that exemplify each yet they never cross the line into unnecessary specificity that would only serve to confuse a student only just becoming familiar with feminist thought.

Individual entries range from one to five pages, depending on the complexity of the topic. At the beginning of each volume, readers will find a list of the alphabetically organized entries labeled by page number, and a list of primary documents labeled by date. This will make the set particularly easy to use, even for students with little to no library experience. Each volume’s introduction and each individual entry also includes a generous further reading section that will prove useful for outside research. I find this set so useful, easy to use, and surprisingly thorough that I believe that it will become popular with any and all students doing research on women’s rights in the United States. This set would be a good addition to libraries serving high school, undergraduate, and possibly even graduate populations.—Anita J. Slack, Reference and Instruction Librarian, Ursuline College, Pepper Pike, Ohio