Emily E. VanDette – författare

Trixy is a 1904 novel by the best-selling but largely forgotten American author and women's rights activist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911). The book decries the then-common practice of vivisection, or scientic experiments on live animals.Though not well known today, Phelps's 1868 spiritualist novel, The Gates Ajar, which offered a comforting view of the afterlife to readers traumatized by the Civil War, was the century's second best-selling American novel, surpassed only by Uncle Tom's Cabin. Recently scholars and readers have begun to reexamine Phelps's significance. In Trixy, contemporary readers can trace the roots of the early animal rights movement in Phelps' influential campaign to introduce legislation to regulate or end vivisection. Phelps not only presents a narrative polemic against the cruelty of vivisection but argues that training young doctors in vivisection makes them bad physicians.Emily E. VanDette's introduction illuminates that Phelps' protest writing, which included fiction, pamphlets, essays, and speeches, was well ahead of its time. As contemporary authors like Peter Singer, Jonathan Safran Foer, Donna Haraway, Gary Francione, and Carol J. Adams have extended her vision, they have also created new audiences for her work.

The most complete collection of works by the nineteenth century's most famous and groundbreaking woman journalist.In the middle of the nineteenth century, the highest paid and most famous newspaper writer in the US was a woman known to the world as Fanny Fern, the nom de plume of Sara Payson Willis. A Fanny Fern Reader features a selection of Fern's columns, mostly from her years as a weekly columnist for the New York Ledger, along with an introduction that shares the remarkable story of Fern's perseverance and success as a woman in a male-dominated profession. For readers in her own time, Fern's frank and unbridled social commentary and boldly satirical voice made her a household name. Fern's subversive and witty commentary about social mores, gender roles, childhood, authorship, and family life transcend time and continue to resonate with and entertain readers today. A Fanny Fern Reader is the most extensive collection of Fern's newspaper writings to date and includes several works that have been out of print for over a century, making this author's writing on a wide range of issues accessible for readers within and outside of classrooms and academic settings.