Routh is a professor at San Jose State University, where she teaches social science teacher preparation and United States history. Although their individual motivations may have varied, their collective action echoed through the twentieth century, demanding emancipation from the constrictions that prevented women from exercising their full rights as citizens and human beings. Whether or not women consciously pursued self-defense for these reasons, their actions embodied feminist politics.

Through self-defense training, women debunked patriarchal myths about inherent feminine weakness, creating a new image of women as powerful and self-reliant. As Routh describes it in an excerpt from the publisher’s website: Routh’s broader thesis in Her Own Hero places women’s fights-both with their fists and for the vote-in the larger historical context of women’s changing social and political roles during the Progressive Era. But the 288-page work’s fourth chapter, “Self-Defense in the Era of Suffrage and the New Woman,” does explicitly explore, as Rouse puts it, “how women studying jiu-jitsu and boxing in the early 1900s associated their bodily empowerment with their political empowerment” through the suffrage movement. Rouse’s 2017 book Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement, which chronicles the emergence of the women’s self-defense movement early in the 20th century. The fight for women’s voting rights is not the sole topic of Wendy L. 116-150.)Įra: Post-Suffrage Era | Media: Book Chapter, Book-Non-Fiction New York: New York University Press, 2017.

Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement. Secondary Source “Self-Defense in the Era of Suffrage and the New Woman,” in Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement Wendy L.

Her Own Hero by Wendy L. Rouse