Synopses & Reviews
Indian, European, and African women of seventeenth and eighteenth-century America were defenders of their native land, pioneers on the frontier, willing immigrants, and courageous slaves. They were also - as traditional scholarship tends to omit - as important as men in shaping American culture and history. This remarkable work is a gripping portrait that gives early-American women their proper place in history.
Review
"A revision, amplification, and synthesis of a rich succession of studies about every aspect of colonial society and culture. [Berkin] brings her subject down to earth . . . and shows sensitivity to the experiences of individual women . . . [First Generations] offers what Mary Beth Norton [author of Founding Mothers and Fathers] rightly calls 'the best available introduction to the lives of women in colonial and revolutionary America.'"--Edmund S. Morgan,
The New York Review of Books
Synopsis
Carol Berkin's multicultural history reconstructs the lives of American women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-women from European, African, and Native backgrounds-and examines their varied roles as wives, mothers, household managers, laborers, rebels, and, ultimately, critical forces in shaping the new nation's culture and history.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [207]-227) and index.
About the Author
Carol Berkin is Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is the author of
A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution,
Women's Voices/Women's Lives: Documents in Early American History, and coeditor, with Mary Beth Norton, of
Women of America: A History.