Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Women's Suffrage
at the Newseum
The book launch for The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson took place at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. , on June 24, 2019. Lori participated in a lively discussion about women and journalism to mark the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave American women the right to vote.
Photo by Malek Naz Freidouni, courtesy of the Newseum in Washington, D.C.
New Book!
West of the Ghetto:
Jewish Women, Old San Francisco, and American Literary Culture
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"Harrison-Kahan's pioneering study is a significant corrective and exciting intervention into several intersecting areas of literary study focused on religion, ethnicity, race, gender, and class. Harrison-Kahan at once provides an alternative geography of Jewish literary production, focused on the far west and San Francisco in particular, and at the same time introduces a cluster of overlooked and obscured women writers whose fascinating and diverse work provides a window into the complex reformist and progressive politics of the turn of the nineteenth century."
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– Rachel Rubinstein, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Springfield College
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"A fascinating study of Californian Jewish women who smash every stereotype. Radicals, institution builders, snappy reporters, and socialist shapeshifters, the writers that Lori Harrison-Kahan has rediscovered—Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Harriet Lane Levy, Miriam Michelson, and Anna Strunsky—lead us to a more expansive American Jewish literary landscape."
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– Josh Lambert, Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and English, Wellesley College
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"The romance of the American West is rarely associated with Jews—much less Jewish women—but West of the Ghetto provides an important corrective through an all-star cast of cosmopolitan, Californian, Jewish women writers whose lives and writings expand our understanding of the Gilded Age, antisemitism, and Jewish experience in America."
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– Rachel Gordan, Shorstein Professor of American Jewish Culture and Society, University of Florida
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The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings
co-edited with an introduction by Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan
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The first and only comprehensive collection of writings by Elizabeth Garver Jordan, the groundbreaking journalist, suffragist, and editor whose fearless reporting on women preceded the #MeToo movement and popularized the true crime genre.
The Superwoman and Other Writings
by Miriam Michelson​
Winner of the 2021 Best Book Edition Award
from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers​
"Miriam Michelson’s voice comes roaring back from the Progressive Era, full of rollicking stories about Amazons, girl thieves, and feminist radicals. Whether she was covering news or writing fiction, Michelson modeled the kind of public engagement our own era desperately needs. Lori Harrison-Kahan has reintroduced a fierce, funny writer we should never have forgotten."
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– Jean M. Lutes, author of Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Literature and Culture, 1880–1930
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"This is a strong reminder that women worked hard for the right to tell the stories of our nation in their own voice. I am humbled by the women who came before me as I read about their struggles and perseverance. Especially today, as so many women fight for recognition and respect, it is important to look back at the long road we have already traveled and gain strength."
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– Soledad O’Brien, journalist
"Thanks to Harrison-Kahan for bringing to light in this extraordinary book a body of work that honors the one-hundredth anniversary of women getting the vote, and introduces all of us today to a journalist whose writing helped make suffrage possible. A marquee byline in her time, this collection of Miriam Michelson’s work includes her newspaper coverage of a Women’s Congress in 1895 and her 1912 novella, Superwoman, which served as source material for ‘Wonder Woman.’ As an independent, single, professional woman, Michelson was ahead of her time in imagining what women can do."
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– Eleanor Clift, Daily Beast columnist
"I’m grateful to Harrison-Kahan for bringing Miriam Michelson’s writings back to life. Michelson’s unusual perspective as a Jewish woman writer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century gives us new and timely insight into work, politics, and culture in that era."
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– Judith Rosenbaum, executive director of the Jewish Women’s Archive
"Miriam Michelson’s journalism about women, ethnic minorities, and the West and her prescient speculative fiction make for fascinating reading for anyone interested in American studies, print cultural studies, journalism, or gender studies. Harrison-Kahan has performed a monumental service to these fields by recovering—with such attentiveness and care—the works of this popular, now forgotten Progressive Era frontier feminist author."
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– Mary Chapman, professor of English, University of British Columbia, and author of Becoming Sui Sin Far and Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism