Wendy L. Rouse is Associate Professor of History at San Jose State University and the author of Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women's Self-Defense Movement and Public Faces, Private Lives: A Queer History of the Suffrage Movement.
"The individual triumphs described in Her Own Hero are the sort of
satisfying stories that would go hugely viral today. . . . a
thorough and fascinating examination of the eruption of one
important insight into public American life: Women can successfully
use force against those who are assumed to be more powerful."
*The New Republic*
"Rouses insightful history examines the nexus of these seemingly
disparate yet converging moments that serve as the birthplace of
the womens self-defense movement in the United States."
*American Historical Review*
"Wendy L. Rouse examines the self-defense movement through an
intersectional feminist lens. . . .Rouse explores boxing, jujitsu,
street harassment, the suffrage movement, and domestic violence to
provide historical context to the 20th-century womens movement . .
.a compelling read."
*Bitch Magazine*
"Here is a story that seems to have been hiding in plain sight,
requiring an innovative historian to tease it out of the records...
Rouse's work not only expands the scholarship on gender, culture,
and the empowerment of women in the early twentieth century, it
also offers many lessons for our own day."
*Western Historical Quarterly*
"There are many pleasant surprises to be found in Her Own Hero.
Rouse offers both a nuanced and intersectional assessment of
self-defense within the broader social and political realities of
early twentieth-century America and the explicit agendas of
first-wave feminism and Progressive Era reformers… Rouse’s
arguments for the inherently radical challenge raised by the bodily
empowerment of women remains compelling and, especially when it
comes to women facing violence in their own homes, relevant."
*Pacific Historical Review*
"In the cultural imagination, women's self-defense training is
often traced back to the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and
'70s, in which self-defense classes doubled as
consciousness-raising sessions. InHer Own Hero, historian and
martial artist Wendy Rouse digs deeper, locating the movement's
birth in the 1910s and '20s. In this era, women across the
countrymostly white and urban-dwellingtook up boxing and jiu-jitsu,
with the specific purpose of warding off male attackers. White men
tended to be suspicious of these lessons, and sought to frame them
as needed only in response to deviants andnon-white threats . . .
but the training helped kick-start conversations about genuine
threatshusbands, for examplethat would resurface with force decades
later."
*Pacific Standard*
"Martial arts turn out to be a great lens for examining increasing
freedoms in a time of industrialization, urbanization, and
immigration, though the book also gives a clear overview of
Americas prejudices and limitations.Ahighly readable study whose
historical accounts of sexism and xenophobia bear repeated
discussion."
*Foreword Reviews*
"Her Own Hero is interesting, engaging, and makes important
contributions to the scholarly literatures on the history of
gender, the history of feminism, and early twentieth-century U. S.
history. Wendy Rouse insightfully reconstructs the strategies that
proponents of womens self-defense employed to counter assertions
that self-reliant women were masculine and deviant. A terrific,
influential book!"
*Jeffrey S. Adler,author of First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt:
Homicide in Chicago, 1875-1920*
"Hatpins, yes, but also boxing gloves. Who knew that around 1900
women were signing up for lessons in jiu-jitsu and taking boxing
classes? Wendy Rouse catalogues a grab bag of Progressive era
thought and anxieties in favor of womens self defense training from
new women rhetoric about womens physical and political emancipation
to fears of white slavers, menacing male strangers, and rising
Japanese cultural and political power."
*Elizabeth Pleck,Professor Emerita of History, University of
Illinois, Urbana*
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