A short life of the author
Stanley Lemons is an American historian whose scholarship focuses on social reform, women’s history, and the history of Rhode Island.
His major work, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (1973, University of Illinois Press), examines the trajectory of the women’s rights movement after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Lemons argues that feminism did not disappear in the 1920s — as the conventional narrative held — but continued through “social feminism,” a movement focused on protective legislation, welfare reform, and social justice rather than equal rights.
Retracing Baptists in Rhode Island documents the Baptist denomination’s history in the state Roger Williams founded on the radical principle of separation of church and state.
Collecting Lemons
The Woman Citizen (1973, University of Illinois Press) is collected by scholars of women’s history and Progressive Era social reform. It remains an important corrective to the narrative that feminism lay dormant between suffrage and the second wave.