Tina Stewart Brakebill - Barbara Egger Lennon: Teacher, Mother, Activist

Praise for Lives of American Women

Finally! The majority of studentsby which I mean womenwill have the opportunity to read biographies of women from our nations past. (Men can read them too, of course!) The Lives of American Women series features an eclectic collection of books, readily accessible to students who will be able to see the contributions of women in many fields over the course of our history. Long overdue, these books will be a valuable resource for teachers, students, and the public at large.

COKIE ROBERTS, author of Founding Mothers and Ladies of Liberty

Just what any professor wants: books that will intrigue, inform, and fascinate students! These short, readable biographies of American womenspecifically designed for classroom usegive instructors an appealing new option to assign to their history students.

MARY BETH NORTON, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, Cornell University

For educators keen to include women in the American story, but hampered by the lack of thoughtful, concise scholarship, here comes Lives of American Women, embracing Abigail Adamss counsel to Johnremember the ladies. And high time, too!

LESLEY S. HERRMANN, Executive Director, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

Students both in the general survey course and in specialized offerings like my course on U.S. womens history can get a great understanding of an era from a short biography. Learning a lot about a single but complex character really helps to deepen appreciation of what womens lives were like in the past.

PATRICIA CLINE COHEN, University of California, Santa Barbara

Biographies are, indeed, back. Not only will students read them, biographies provide an easy way to demonstrate particularly important historical themes or ideas.... Undergraduate readers will be challenged to think more deeply about what it means to be a woman, citizen, and political actor.... I am eager to use this in my undergraduate survey and specialty course.

JENNIFER THIGPEN, Washington State University, Pullman

These books are, above all, fascinating stories that will engage and inspire readers. They offer a glimpse into the lives of key women in history who either defied tradition or who successfully maneuvered in a mans world to make an impact. The stories of these vital contributors to American history deliver just the right formula for instructors looking to provide a more complicated and nuanced view of history.

ROSANNE LICHATIN, 2005 Gilder Lehrman Preserve American History Teacher of the Year

The Lives of American Women authors raise all of the big issues I want my classes to confrontand deftly fold their arguments into riveting narratives that maintain students excitement.

WOODY HOLTON, author of Abigail Adams

WESTVIEW PRESS was founded in 1975 in Boulder, Colorado, by notable publisher and intellectual Fred Praeger. Westview Press continues to publish scholarly titles and high-quality undergraduate- and graduate-level textbooks in core social science disciplines. With books developed, written, and edited with the needs of serious nonfiction readers, professors, and students in mind, Westview Press honors its long history of publishing books that matter.

Copyright 2014 by Westview Press

Published by Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Westview Press, 2465 Central Avenue, Boulder, CO 80301.

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Series design by Brent Wilcox

A CIP catalog record for the print version of this book is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8133-4772-1 (e-book)

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F or the past half century, American historians have focused much of their work on writing ordinary people into the national story. History from the bottom up was a recognition that our past is shaped not simply by the famous and powerful; it is created by the choices made by the majority of women and men. Often, their lives help us understand the major changes, the critical events, and the conflicts of their era. This is true of the long life of Barbara Egger Lennon, which began in the 1880s, as industrialization and urbanization, along with a great wave of immigration, created the modern era, and which ended almost one hundred years later, in what many call postmodern America. As Tina Stewart Brakebill shows us in Barbara Egger Lennon: Teacher, Mother, Activist, Lennons personal evolution coincided with dramatic changes in assumptions about gender roles, work conditions, and education. Lennon was not a passive observer of these changes; she embodied them. As Brakebill explains, this Swiss immigrant from a traditional farming family took full advantage of new opportunities that presented themselves to young women. She pursued a college education when this was rare for women; she became a school principal when few women were promoted from the classroom; she became an outspoken and effective union organizer, a full-time working mother, and a social and political activist in reform causes. Brakebills observation is true: Barbara Egger Lennon was multitasking before this term became a commonplace description of the challenge of womens lives.

Lennons long and active life provides a window onto a broad sweep of American history: from Reconstruction to labor organization, to the Great Depression, through two world wars, through progressive moments such as the New Deal and anxious moments of the Red Scare and the Cold War. Sometimes these historical events seem too abstract, but their complexities and their stark realities come alive when we can see them played out in an individual life.

Brakebill offers us a beautifully drawn portrait of a remarkable woman of achievement. Not every reform battle Lennon engaged in met with success, of course, and not every personal relationship turned out as she might have hoped. But Lennon refused to be a passive observer of history. Instead, she chose to shape her world whenever the opportunity arose. The legacy of women like Barbara Egger Lennon is the wealth of opportunity enjoyed by American women today.

In examining and narrating the lives of women both famous and obscure, Westview Presss Lives of American Women series populates our national past more fully and more richly. Each story told is that not simply of an individual but of the era in which she lived, the events in which she participated, and the experiences she shared with her contemporaries. Some of these women will be familiar to the reader; others may not appear at all in the history books that often focus on the powerful, the brilliant, or the privileged. But each of these women is worth knowing. American history comes alive through their personal odysseys.