Introduction

The introduction of American Women Activists and Autobiography: Rhetorical Lives presents the book’s major themes, which focus on the use of the autobiographical genre by American women activists as a means to support their arguments for social change. This brief, early chapter presents the six texts that form the focus of this study and the commonality among their rhetorical approaches: Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1928), Emma Goldman’s Living My Life (1931), Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness (1952), Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes’s Lakota Woman (1990), and Betty Friedan’s Life So Far (2000).