The ’people’s Joan of Arc’: Mary Elizabeth Lease, Gendered Politics and Populist Party Politics in Gilded-Age America

This book is the first comprehensive biography tracing the captivating life of renowned activist Mary Elizabeth Lease. While Lease is most remembered in American history textbooks as the radical leader of the Populist Party, her influence and involvement in the late-nineteenth-century women’s suffrage movement and early-twentieth-century feminist movement place her on par with luminaries such as Susan B. Anthony.

Brooke Speer Orr is Associate Professor of U.S. History at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. She won the Edgar Langsdorf Award for Excellence in Writing for her article on Mary Elizabeth Lease published in the prestigious Kansas History journal.