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

Brooke Speer Orr, PhD ’02, traces the captivating life of renowned activist Mary Elizabeth Lease in this comprehensive biography. While Lease is most remembered in American history textbooks as the radical leader of the Populist Party who directed desperate farmers “to raise less corn and more hell,” her influence and involvement in the late 19th-century women’s suffrage movement and early 20th-century feminist movement place her on par with luminaries such as Susan B. Anthony.