Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings is an anthology edited with an introduction and commentaries by Miriam Schneir. It was originally published in 1972 and re-published in 1994 by Vintage Books. It comprises essays, fiction, memoirs, and letters by what Schneir labels the major feminist writers. The content included ranges from 1776 to 1929 and focuses on topics of civil rights and emancipation. The book has had an influence on education, being used as a resource in women's studies classes. Various scholars have given both positive and negative reviews of this book. It remains in print to this day.
Miriam Schneir
Personal life
Miriam Schneir was born in 1933 and grew up in New York City. She comes from a middle-class family that was not politically engaged or involved in scholarship. Her background is Jewish. Her husband was Walter Schneir, who was born in 1927 and died in 2009. Together they had two sons and one daughter.
Education
Schneir graduated from Queens College in 1955, being the first person in her family to graduate from college. Before graduating from Queens College, Schneir also attended Antioch College for two years. At Antioch College, she majored in creative writing. However, she earned her BA at Queens College where she studied early childhood education in order to get her teaching license. The switch was prompted by the higher financial security of being a teacher.
Career
Schneir initially worked as an early childhood educator after graduating from college. In the 1960s, she became a full-time writer. She served as research historian on the bicentennial museum exhibit and catalogue-book “Remember the Ladies”: Women in America, 1750-1815. She also held a position as a research associate with the Columbia University Center for Social Sciences Program in Sex Roles and Social Change.
Views and politics
During her time at Antioch College, Schneir began to identify with leftist politics and ideas. Her thinking has been influenced by her time at Antioch College and the communist colleagues she encountered in her career as an educator. She opposes systems of inequality and has strived to take action against them. She has also been active in rallies, petitions, and campaigning. She was involved with the Adlai Stevenson and Henry A. Wallace campaigns.
Work on Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings
In the late 1960s, Schneir was exposed to the concept of feminism for the first time. Shortly after, because of her interest in the topic, she began to collect works and search for publishers for an anthology, which would later become Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. Her feminist thought was influenced by Eleanor Flexner, Gerda Lerner, Aileen S. Kraditor, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and the works she was reading for the anthology. She worked on the book vigorously, and it was published in January of 1972.
Other works
Co-author of Invitation to Inquest (1965) Editor of Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present (1994) Editor of The Vintage Book of Historical Feminism (1996) Writer of preface and afterword for Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case (2010) Writer of Before Feminism (2021)
Her work has also appeared in various publications such as Ms., The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, and many others.
Introduction and commentaries
Schneir wrote the introduction and commentaries for this book. In the book's introduction, she discusses the purpose of the book as uncovering feminist writings of the past, how the content included focuses on "unsolved feminist problems," and the past and future of the feminist movement. For each work included in the book, she wrote a brief introduction to the work and its author.